Supreme Fiction

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.

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.

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.

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
Go to the top of the document.

 

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.

Brought to You by the Letter S

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
December 28, 2008

Brought to you by the Letter S
By JAMES PANERO

a review of
STREET GANG: The Complete History of “Sesame Street.”
By Michael Davis (Viking. $27.95)

In 1981, when I was 6, about 10 million American children daily tuned in to the PBS show “Sesame Street.” That same year, one of the writers for “Sesame Street,” my real-life neighbor, asked if I’d like to appear on the show. It was my golden ticket, but crossing over to the other side of the television screen can be a demystifying journey. The “Sesame Street” soundstage looked like a facsimile of the televised world — small and (surprisingly) indoors. The Muppets were controlled by operators; we were told not to look down at them. And there was Big Bird, stored in the middle of the set on a massive hook. When I reached out to pet him, a voice came from the sky: “Don’t touch those feathers!” admonished one of Big Bird’s creators, the remarkably named Kermit Love.

The address of 123 Sesame Street was never quite the same. Yet to be cast out of the garden of television-land can be a learning experience. “Street Gang: The Complete History of ‘Sesame Street,’ ” by Michael Davis, a former columnist for TV Guide, now offers the behind-the-lens story, the first comprehensive account, of this 39-year-old show.

The book details the awesome lengths that “Sesame Street,” undoubtedly the most workshopped and vetted program in the history of children’s television, went through to captivate its young audience. The show’s music and quick cuts concealed its educational ambitions. “Commercial breaks” advertised numbers and the alphabet through Jim Henson’s Muppet pitchmen: the Count, Grover and Cookie Monster. Kermit the Frog, wearing a trench coat, told fairy tales through news flashes from Rapunzel’s tower. Meanwhile, the urban street scenes at the center of the show communicated the social values of a progressive culture. Here was TV at its most sublime, but also an entrancing product of a liberal age, something Mom was happy for us to watch.

The “Sesame Street” story begins on a Sunday in December 1965. At 6:30 in the morning, 3-year-old Sarah Morrisett tuned in to the test patterns while awaiting her cartoons to begin a half-hour later. Her father, Lloyd Morrisett, an experimental psychologist and a vice president of the Carnegie Corporation, took note. “It struck me there was something fascinating to Sarah about television,” he says.

“Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles,” Davis writes. “It is not too far a stretch to say that Sarah’s mastery of jingles led to a central hypothesis of the great experiment that we know as ‘Sesame Street’: if television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn’t it teach children more substantive material by co-opting the very elements that made ads so effective?”

The thought of using the trappings of television for progressive ends seemed anathema to most intellectuals, who were wholly skeptical of this mass-culture medium, but Morrisett brought up his observation at dinner with Joan Ganz Cooney, the future creator of “Sesame Street.”

In the mid-1960s, as one of his grand social initiatives, Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause of National Educational Television (later known as the Public Broadcasting Service), a lackluster confederation of chalk-dusted channels. Like the show she developed for PBS that would define the network, Cooney was steeped in the ideals of Johnson’s Great Society. In New York, while working in publicity for commercial television, she was introduced to William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review, the small but vastly influential journal of highbrow leftist opinion. In her spare time, Cooney did publicity for Partisan Review and produced a fund-raiser at Columbia that was attended by Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Lionel Trilling.

Cooney’s ability to transcend the divisions between high and low culture defined her success at “Sesame Street,” which brought Madison Avenue advertisers and game show creators together with New York intellectuals and the education department of Harvard. Lloyd Morrisett, through his connections at the Carnegie Foundation, helped Cooney line up the millions in grants to cover the research, writing and production needed to create a show that could compete with the commercial networks. McGeorge Bundy, one of “the best and the brightest” in the Kennedy administration and by then president of the Ford Foundation, sharpened the show’s political edge by homing in on the children of the urban underclass. “Sesame Street” would be the television equivalent of Head Start, the federal child-welfare program founded by Johnson in the belief, Davis writes, that “the tyranny of America’s poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs of poor children could be met.”

In its high ideals and comprehensive approach, “ ‘Sesame Street’ came along and rewrote the book,” Davis says. “Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisers to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children’s show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social science researchers.”

“Sesame Street” turned the entertainment of children’s television into a science, as the program was extensively tested with nursery school audiences through a “distracter” machine that gauged children’s eye focus second by second during the run of each show. It is no coincidence that the program proved to be so popular. When early studies determined that its street scenes were faltering, Jim Henson brought about a final breakthrough. At the time, his Muppets were relegated to the “commercial” segments as cut-aways from the street-based story line. For this, Henson drew on his own experience. He had originally developed Kermit and the Muppets for commercial work; his 1950s show “Sam and Friends,” with its zany ads for Wilkins coffee, has now found a second life on YouTube. Over the objections of researchers, who had advised against mixing the fantasy of the Muppets with the reality of the street, Henson developed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to be central characters on the main stage, both driving and subverting the program’s self-seriousness.

Davis tracks down every “Sesame” anec dote and every “Sesame” personality in his book, and the result is more an oral history than a tightly organized narrative. The development of the show’s characters, as well as the performers’ own lives, can be illuminating. Bob McGrath, who has played Bob from the start, once enjoyed a pop singing career in Japan. Gordon, the neighborhood’s black role model, played by Matt Robinson and then Roscoe Orman, was named for the photographer Gordon Parks. The character Susan, Gordon’s stay-at-home wife, was once denounced by feminists. Emilio Delgado and Sonia Manzano joined the cast in the ’70s as Luis and Maria after protests against the show’s lack of Hispanic characters. Will Lee, who played the store owner Mr. Hooper, came through the Yiddish theater and the radical Group Thea ter, and was blacklisted in the ’50s; Lee’s death in 1982 became a defining moment when “Sesame Street” chose to address the news directly on the air. Northern Calloway, who played Mr. Hooper’s young assistant, David, proved to be an even more tragic case: by the time I appeared on camera with him, according to Davis, Calloway was medicated with lithium after a violent psychotic breakdown; a manic-depressive in and out of treatment, he remained on the show through the late ’80s, but died in 1990 after suffering a seizure in a psychiatric hospital.

Davis lingers on such gossip. I could do without dwelling on the drinking habits of Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan, forever jealous of the acclaim for “Sesame Street”) or several of the book’s other trivial details. Do we really need to know that Cooney served boeuf bourguignon, “a traditional French country recipe . . . on Page 315 of the first volume of ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’ ” to Lloyd Morrisett at their 1966 dinner?

Far more interesting are the failings and criticisms of the lavishly praised show. Terrence O’Flaherty, a television critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, accused “Sesame Street” of being “deeply larded with ungrammatical Madison Avenue jargon.” Carl Bereiter, a preschool authority, said, “It’s based entirely on audience appeal and is not really teaching anything in particular.” And Neil Postman complained that it relieved parents “of their responsibility to teach their children to read.”

The real challenge to the show came in the 1990s, around the time Joan Cooney retired as chairwoman of the Children’s Television Workshop, the program’s nonprofit governing body. Once revolutionary, “Sesame Street” came to be seen as a dated reminder of urban decay, while the purple dinosaur Barney took children’s television out to the clean suburban schoolyard. “None of Barney’s friends lives in a garbage can, and none grunts hip-hop,” National Review cheered. In response, “Sesame Street” made an ill-fated attempt at urban renewal, developing an extension to the set called “Around the Corner” that seemed “less like Harlem and more like any gentrified up-and-coming neighborhood in America,” Davis writes. Professional child actors were regularly employed for the first time.

The broken-window theory may have worked to clean up New York, but not so for “Sesame Street” — as its empire expanded abroad, ratings eroded at home, and the gentrified set was abandoned. “Sesame Street” ceased to be a reflection of its surroundings. Early on, the writer-producer Jon Stone rejected the traditional trappings of children’s television: “Sesame Street” would have “no Treasure House, no toy maker’s workshop, no enchanted castle, no dude ranch, no circus,” Davis says. But this is what “Sesame Street” had become, and perhaps what it really always was: an urban fantasy world born of ’60s idealism. Davis has written a tireless if not altogether artful history of this unique place. Here, finally, we get to touch Big Bird’s feathers.

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
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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.

'Nature and Nuture'

ART & ANTIQUES
September 2008

Nature and Nurture
By James Panero

Fresh from success in Venice, Arte Povera sculptor Giuseppe Penone is poised to gain wider recognition.

You would never expect a movement called Arte Povera to produce rich art. But Giuseppe Penone, a standardbearer of the “poor” Italian school that came of age in the 1960s, has always thrived on contradiction. This soft-spoken, unassuming sculptor has become one of Italy’s best living artists by producing sensuous work that explores the relationship between nature and man. Arte Povera has already achieved recognition in its native country as one of the great modernist movements, with a sensibility that cuts against the Futurism of the prewar years. Now it’s time for the art world beyond Italy, and particularly in the United States, to turn its attention to this artist and the enduring movement he represents.

In the opening lines of the Georgics, the Roman poet Virgil wondered, “What makes the cornfields smile?” Penone has been asking the same question since he first manipulated the trees and vines around his home into his earliest work. Born in 1947 on a farm in Garessio Borgo Ponte—an ancient village in the Vall’ Organa region, near Turin in the Ligurian Alps—Penone has systematically transformed his agricultural inheritance into an artistic legacy. His farm, which was purchased by his family in 1881 and began as a vineyard with potatoes and wheat sown between rows of grape vines, was his primary inspiration.

Penone’s principles and dedication to his materials have only deepened over 40 years of work. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, his installations in Italy’s new national pavilion came as a revelation to those who made the pilgrimage to the show on the far reaches of the Arsenale. Penone’s sculptures stood out as the most visceral objects in the sprawling international exhibition. He molded cowhide into the texture of tree bark and suspended the results from the walls. He applied marble to the floors and carved the stone in such a way that the veins showed in high relief. He took milled beams and chipped away at the wood grain, revealing the former trees and branches contained within. He carved out a trough from the oldest growth of a wood block and filled the void with sap, the pool of liquid giving the entire room an aromatic fragrance. “I think people were really surprised by Venice,” says New York dealer Marian Goodman, who is mounting an exhibition by Penone at her gallery this month. “He got an enormous response. They had never seen a really big piece of Penone’s before.”

“Leather is like skin,” Penone says from his home in San Raffaele Cimena, a town outside Turin, explaining one aspect of the Venice installation. “The tree becomes like an animal when it is covered by the leather. In a way, the work suggests there is no reality that is completely definite— human, mineral and vegetal. But human can become vegetal, vegetal can become mineral, mineral can become human.” According to Goodman, the artist “always has this idea that things in nature exist in many forms.”

Penone’s understanding of natural materials is informed by rural Italian life. “Perhaps 40 years ago they produced wine,” he says of the village where he lives and works. “Now it is wild because people leave the land to work in the city. It is quite interesting to live there because we are in contact with nature, but it is also very close to the town.”

His practice of reviving the natural properties of processed materials— the grain of a tree from milled wood or the veins of marble from dressed stone— expresses the anti-industrial bent of Arte Povera. In the “Italian miracle” of the 1950s and early 1960s, the northern part of the country witnessed a rapid industrialization that contrasted sharply with its traditional land-based culture. A recession during the mid-1960s cast these differences in sharper relief. In 1967, writer Germano Celant coined the term “Arte Povera” to describe the young artists who were starting to look back to Italy’s preindustrial past. Feeling impoverished by science and progress, they took up poor materials. In her recent survey Arte Povera (Phaidon Press, 2005), curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev attributes the movement’s “references to a preindustrial agrarian civilization and a harmonious, Arcadian world of craft-based economy” to “the contradictions of a perhaps too rapid postwar industrialization.”

During the same time period in the United States, Earth artists, conceptualists and minimalists found themselves responding to similar cultural and economic circumstances, but they developed a more dystopian vision underscored by their use of industrial materials. The Italian Povera artists—notably Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Mario and Marisa Merz—shared Penone’s desire to work directly with nature. Mario Merz created sculptures by using the branches of a tree as a mold for wax; Pino Pascali’s Canali di irrigazione, a sculpture made of earth and water, made reference to primitive agricultural constructions.

“Arte Povera is one of the most enduring groups of sculptures of the last half of the 20th century,” says Goodman. “American museums have been slow to give credit to bodies of work that come from other countries, and Americans are very partial to painting. It’s our loss that sculpture isn’t perceived on the same level.” American museums should take notice. Beginning in 2001, an exhibition of early Arte Povera, originating at Tate Modern in London, traveled to Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., but the last major New York exhibition took place more than 20 years ago, at P.S.1. Rumors have circulated ever since that the Museum of Modern Art would organize a retrospective show. As the work of its most energetic artist ripens to perfection, the achievements of Arte Povera should not be allowed to wither on the vine.

'The critical moment'

 

Humanities, July/August 2008
Volume 29, Number 4

The Critical Moment: Abstract Expressionism’s Dueling Duo
BY JAMES PANERO

On the critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg

What is art criticism today if not a muddied profession? How can we agree what criticism is if we cannot agree what art is? So the critic today contends with an unruly field. Art makes unusual demands on the viewer, and art criticism makes unusual demands on the writer, who must now fill several roles: that of a stock analyst at the art fairs and auction houses; a gossip columnist at the openings; a sports announcer at the museums and galleries; and a lifestyle guru in the popular press.

Compare this with sixty years ago. Modernism has an uncanny ability to break things down and isolate ingredients. Matisse with color, Picasso with form and line—the best modern art is radically fundamental before it is ever fundamentally radical, a distilled purification of art’s first principles. So it comes as little surprise that as American modern art reached its apex in the 1950s through the flowering of Abstract Expressionism, art criticism achieved a glittering purity of its own—a beautiful high criticism perfectly matched to the period of high art.

The writers who defined the parameters of this criticism were Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) and Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). Greenberg & Rosenberg were like Ali & Frazier. They made up the protagonists in art criticism’s fight of the century—a Grapple in the Big Apple between personal and professional adversaries. It was also, undoubtedly, one of the few fights in art criticism to make it into the record books. Yet as the passions of their engagement have dissipated, and the art world has moved on to largely financial concerns, the Greenberg-Rosenberg rivalry has, in hindsight, come to seem of a piece. I say this as someone who has always been more in the Greenberg camp.

Greenberg and Rosenberg were diametrically opposed in their interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, but each interpretation was correct in its way. Their theories were not mutually exclusive, but instead opposite ends of a kind of dialectic. Through two forceful positions argued before the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism, in opposing language, together they laid out the full definition of modern art.

In The Birth of Tragedy, his youthful interpretation of Greek drama, written in 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that great classic art was predicated on the balance of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—“Apollonian” after the sun god Apollo, with his “measured restraint, the freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor god”; and “Dionysian” after Apollo’s brother Dionysus, the god of wine, with “the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature . . . brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication.”

“Wherever the Dionysian prevailed,” Nietzsche wrote, “the Apollonian was checked and destroyed. . . . Wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god Apollo exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever.”

Greenberg and Rosenberg were the checks and balances of American abstract art in this Nietzschean definition—Greenberg the Apollonian, Rosenberg the Dionysian. In 1947, Greenberg called for “the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art . . . in which an intense detachment informs all. Only such an art, resting on rationality . . . can adequately answer contemporary life, found our sensibilities, and, by continuing and vicariously relieving them, remunerate us for those particular and necessary frustrations that ensue from living at the present moment in the history of western civilization.”

And here was the Dionysian Rosenberg, writing in “The American Action Painters,” his most famous essay, in 1952: “At a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, or ’express’ an object. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” And more: “The big moment came when it was decided to paint . . . just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value-political, esthetic, moral.”

“Action” versus “detachment,” “liberation from value” versus an art “resting on rationality”—an exhibition now at The Jewish Museum in New York called “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” organized by Norman Kleeblatt, tracks these two critics and the ideals they represented through the artists they endorsed and the ephemera they left behind.

“Their initial theoretical outlooks were not that dissimilar,” Kleeblatt argues—persuasively, I might add—even though “many observers half a century ago viewed the opposed perspectives of Rosenberg and Greenberg as the only approaches to contemporary art. The two men’s impassioned writings often reduced the issues to either a formalist or an existentialist view, and each thought that his own view would prevail.” Kleeblatt calls this disagreement “the foundational dialectic of the era.” Morris Dickstein, the literary and cultural critic, maintains that Greenberg and Rosenberg “demonstrated the antithetical ways that Modernism would be assimilated to American cultural discussion in the years after World War II.”

In terms of differences, you could see it in their faces. In photographs Rosenberg wears his expression like a mask—a primitive totem neither frowning nor smiling, an angular profile punctuated by a small mustache. In a picture of him looking to the side and up to the sky, we imagine the private reverie of a critic who privileged the subjective, the mythical, and the existential over the material. In his theories Rosenberg was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Compare this with Greenberg, who in most photographs pokes and squints and pinches his face. Greenberg, a positivist like Ludwig Wittgenstein, was concerned with materials and purity of form. Influenced by Roger Fry, Walter Pater, and Benedetto Croce, he advocated an “art for art’s sake” of internal laws and formal logic that operated outside of subjective concern. Engaged with the here and now of art, unlike Rosenberg who looked to the beyond, in photographs Greenberg radiates the worries and joys of the real world, his hooded eyes piercing rather than transcendent. “For Greenberg,” writes Kleeblatt, “the true work of art was one that exploited the uniqueness of each medium to express sensation as the essence of experience. The result was the evocation of emotion.” While for Rosenberg, “action painting was the psychic expression of the artist’s being and identity; the artist's creative process operated in the space between art and life. For Rosenberg this intimate and bold means of self-expression encouraged mythical interpretations of the artist’s ambitions.”

In the art of the era, their advocacy split right down the middle. Rosenberg’s man was Willem de Kooning, the classically trained Dutchman who delighted in making a mess in the kitchen of art. Greenberg backed Jackson Pollock. “Greenberg hadn’t created Pollock’s reputation,” Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1975 send-up of modern art, The Painted Word, “but he was its curator, custodian, brass polisher, and repairman, and he was terrific at it.”

Greenberg favored Pollock for the grand scale of his work, which brought painting down from the easel. The innovation of the drip technique furthermore detached Pollock from the canvas and flattened the image into a scrim, removing any sense of illusion and acknowledging the properties of the painting’s internal logic. Rosenberg, however, saw de Kooning as the ultimate psychic actor on canvas, an artist who would paint and scrape and repaint and whose work was a dynamic recording of artistic action. The two artists formed something of their own dialectic. In the early 1950s, with the drip, Pollock used drawing to create a painting. De Kooning, meanwhile, used painting to arrive at drawing-like cartoons.

See these artists together today and you probably notice the similarities before you see the differences. In fact, before he introduced subject matter into his paintings in the 1950s, de Kooning was an abstractionist admired by Greenberg. When photographs and movies of Pollock’s drip dance emerged in the 1950s, observers took him to be the ultimate Rosenberg action painter. (The critics themselves were not so clear-cut in their advocacy either. Both admired Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky, for example.)

The similarities between Greenberg and Rosenberg outweigh the differences. The critic Max Kozloff has written that “a good deal of the underlying agreement between them has been obscured,” and he is right. They were born to immigrant Jewish families in New York just years apart. They rose up through the political world of the 1930s to arrive at a Marxist-influenced aesthetic position that was ardently anti-Stalinist and pro-Trotskyist in the belief that “art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself.” In their early years they both wrote for “little magazines” such as Partisan Review, Encounter, and Commentary. They hoped to insulate the high arts from popular culture with similarly influential essays: Greenberg wrote “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for Partisan Review in 1939. Rosenberg wrote “The Herd of Independent Minds” for Commentary in 1948. And, of course, they both came to Modernism at a particular moment after 1940 to focus on the rise of American abstract painting. They tracked their disagreements through countering essays published over the next twenty years.

Their disputes played out in print through the early 1960s. In “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name,” Greenberg called Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” a “misinterpretation that was also a fatality of nonsense.” In 1963, Rosenberg responded with “The Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion,” arguing that Greenberg’s formalism was an “academic concept” to “normalize” art by focusing on “line, color, form” rather than “politics, sociology, psychology, metaphysics.” Rosenberg accused Greenberg of distorting “fantastically the reality of postwar American art. This distortion is being practiced daily by all who may enjoy its fruits in comfort.” Greenberg assailed Rosenberg for “perversions and abortions of discourse: pseudo-description, pseudo-narrative, pseudo-exposition, pseudo-history, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and—worst of all—pseudo-poetry.” Rosenberg countered: “Formal criticism has consistently buried the emotional, moral, social and metaphysical content of modern art under blueprints of ’achievements’ in handling line, color, and form.” And so on. They even published countering anthologies just years apart: Rosenberg The Tradition of the New in 1959, and Greenberg Art and Culture in 1961.

“One indelible point,” says Kleeblatt, “that emerges from an examination of Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s writings is that the two men saw clearly and at times even fiercely how much was at stake in their aesthetic and political views.” They were also both Jewish intellectuals who were “outsiders who faced discrimination in American society and in the ’established’ art world,” writes the critic Irving Sandler, “centered as it was in institutionally anti-Semitic museums and universities, they yearned for a brave new socialist world in which ethnic prejudice would disappear. They embraced Modernism, a marginal culture whose world was more open to them as Jews than were ’official’ milieus.”

Each critic published a single essay on the subject of Judaism. Greenberg wrote on “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism” in 1950, while Rosenberg asked, “Is There a Jewish Art?” in 1966. Greenberg voiced “a Jewish bias toward the abstract, the tendency to conceptualize as much as possible,” while Rosenberg advocated a “self-determined Jew” whose connection with the past “occurs not through his revival of forms which they [the ancestors] created—their doctrines, rituals, institutions—but through his own creative act which they inspire.”

Is there a Jewish art criticism? The art critic Donald Kuspit summed up the answer in this way: “For Rosenberg the American artist always faces a choice between being a true or false self. For Greenberg it is between being an avant-garde or kitsch artist. The essence of the choice is the same: to maintain one’s sacred integrity or to comply with society’s profane demands. The American artist is always in a Jewish situation, trapped between autonomy and assimilation.”

What eventually happened to the Greenberg-Rosenberg “family row” is indicative of the fate of culture in the latter half of the past century. It wasn't that one side won out; it was rather that art moved on. The Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic that at one point established the outer limits of art proved ill-equipped at containing and contending with the art of the 1960s and beyond. Both Greenberg and Rosenberg were flummoxed by neo-Dadaism, Pop art, and Minimalism. So art criticism lost its own internal logic. If culture could not agree on a definition of art, it could not disagree on the meanings contained within.

Greenberg went in for a particular drubbing beginning in the 1960s, as his Trotskyism and anti-Stalinism evolved into a codified form of Modernism and pro-Americanism. In 1966, just by example, a performance artist named John Latham organized a monthlong event called “Still and Chew,” in which participants bit off, masticated, and spat out pages of a copy of Art and Culture, which Latham had borrowed from his college library.

“Despite reams of politically savvy writings that condemn Greenberg,” says Kleeblatt, “his formalist theory of Modernism remains a point of departure (and contention) even in postmodern discourse. This is a foundation for some, a brick wall that needs breaking down for others.” Yet while “Greenbergianism” and “Clem” became epithets in the university art history programs in the 1970s (and remain so today), Rosenberg did not receive what might have been an expected boost to his own reputation. At a certain point, the reputations of Greenberg and Rosenberg were only serviceable in the negative—pillars to topple over. Rosenberg, whose criticism was less trenchant than Greenberg's, simply proved to be an easier challenge to overcome.

“A heroic phase of Modernist innovation . . . was soon to come to an end,” writes Morris Dickstein, “once the new became a marketing strategy rather than a life-altering encounter that mattered in its own terms.” What is art criticism today? I can tell you what it's not: Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Some might call this progress. I call it a shame.

'Off the walls'

Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” (1849), oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches. The Hudson River School masterwork was deaccessioned by the New York Public Library for $35 million.

ART & ANTIQUES
August 2008

Off The Walls
by James Panero

By selling art from their collections, some museums are stirring up controversy and making donors nervous.

“You’re hitting me where it hurt,” says Tom Freudenheim, former assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution. The Buffalo, N.Y., native still smarts over what went down at his hometown museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In November 2006, the Albright- Knox, a small institution in a cash-strapped city with a noted modernist collection, issued an excited press release. It announced that the museum was about to “deaccession”—or sell off from its permanent collection—“antiquities and other historical works.”

The statement included extensive quotes from agents of Sotheby’s, who would be acting on the museum’s behalf by auctioning off more than 200 lots in public sales over the following year. One expert praised an Indian figure of the dancing god, Shiva, as “arguably the best example of its kind.” A set of Chinese ceramics was “certain to spark competitive bidding, particularly from Asian collectors and mainland Chinese institutions.” Then there was the bronze Roman statue “Artemis and the Stag,” the highest-profile lot of all. Richard Keresey, worldwide head of antiquities at Sotheby’s, called it “among the very finest large classical bronze sculptures in America and the most splendid to appear on the market in memory. It would be a star in any of the great collections of the world, whether in a museum or private hands.”

A star, that is, except at the Albright- Knox. Half a century after acquiring “Artemis and the Stag,” the museum had decided to sell the masterpiece, along with dozens of other exceptional works, in order to raise money for its acquisition fund for modern and contemporary art— “a tradition that has been in place since the museum’s inception in 1862,” according to the press release. “I went ballistic,” Freudenheim recalls, “so I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal.”

He took the Albright-Knox to task for “devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history—supposedly what museums are all about—is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for work in the present.” The article fired the first salvo in what turned out to be a losing battle to stop the Albright-Knox sales.

In the end, the criticism may have helped the auctions, which saw windfall profits. These days, Louis Grachos, the director of the Albright-Knox who oversaw the deaccessioning, chuckles when asked about the irony of the situation, though he declines to comment on it. The final take for the auctions came to $68 million, more than four times the $15 million estimate. The Artemis alone went for $28 million to an anonymous European collector, who has now temporarily loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I took my son to see it there last week,” Grachos says. His acquisition endowment has swelled to $91 million, drawing $4 million annually, up from $1.1 million annually. He says he has already used some of the money to purchase work by Fred Sandback and Olafur Eliasson. He has previously said that he would like to use the funds to acquire works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

“I was surprised by the intensity of the response,” Grachos says of the vocal criticism from Freudenheim and others. “What was interesting is that so many people did not comprehend what the true mission of the gallery was. This was an institution to support and collect living artists.” As for the long-term effect of the public debate over the auctions, he says, “Our membership was in decline before the deaccessioning; now we’re on the way up.” However, he adds, such controversies “are not healthy for museums.”

Just how unhealthy they are is up for debate. Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator-in-charge at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco, maintains that the Albright-Knox “traded old lamps for new, but they have also caused a sense of distress amongst potential donors, who don’t even tell the museum, ‘We were going to give our paintings to you, and now we’re not.’ They don’t know what they lost, because nobody informed them.”

With the art economy booming, it is very tempting for institutions to sell off parts of their permanent collections to fund acquisitions or to cover expenses. In 2005, the New York Public Library sold “Kindred Spirits” (1849), a Hudson River School masterpiece by Asher B. Durand, for $35 million to Wal- Mart heiress Alice Walton, who acquired it for her forthcoming Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Ark. The revenue went to the library’s operating expenses.

Two years later, in order to fund a campus expansion, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced plans to sell one of the most recognizable paintings in the United States, Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic” (1875), for $68 million, again to Walton, unless a local institution could match the price within 45 days. (Like the New York Public Library, the college justified its decision on the grounds that it is not an art museum.) The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with help from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and a bank loan, came up with the funds, but only though deaccessioning an Eakins painting and two oil sketches from its own collection. A public explanation for the sales quoted the instructions of Susan Macdowell Eakins, the artist’s widow and the donor of the works in 1929, who gave the go-ahead for the museum to exchange certain works for others so long as it was “favorable to the memory and reputation of Thomas Eakins.”

Lee Rosenbaum, a blogger and journalist who frequently writes for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, nevertheless questions the ethics of such a deal. “Trading up is not an appropriate collections management strategy,” she writes. “In my view, the ‘permanent collection’ is called that for a reason: Past acquisitions of museum-quality works should not be exploited as assets to bankroll high stakes plays by today’s curators who want a piece of the market action.”

Of course, museums have always quietly disposed of lesser pieces from their collections. By selling work otherwise halfforgotten down in storage rooms, they return art to the public and private domains. “This is a healthy process for the community at large,” says Marco Grassi, an Old Master restorer and dealer based in New York, who sees an upside to public work returning to private hands. “It keeps the juices flowing. Museums are far too acquisitive and retentive. I feel very strongly that works of art need to have a life outside of museums. When the stuff is in a vitrine it no longer has a life of its own.”

Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” in regard to museums was in 1972, when the New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.” Hoving was the first museum custodian to conceive of his permanent collection as a source of capital. In 1970, he purchased a Velazquez portrait for $5.5 million but lacked the funds to cover it. He began looking for works to sell, and the bequest of the late Adelaide de Groot was his principal target. Against the heiress’s wishes that her collection remains in a public institution, Hoving sold off masterpieces from her donation—most notably “The Tropics” by Henri Rousseau— through Marlborough Gallery. The sale was so controversial at the time that the Met’s curator of European painting refused to sign the deaccession form. Hoving signed it for him.

Today’s museum directors have followed in Hoving's footsteps. “They have Champagne taste and a beer budget,” says Johnson, “and one of the ways they bring up the difference is to cannibalize the collection they are responsible for. They sell works of art that do not seem valuable or fashionable at the time. In my mind that is the worst thing a trustee or curator could do.” But don’t expect a change anytime soon. There will be an outcry whenever a non-profit, tax-exempt institution sells off work. It will remain controversial when trustees and directors raid collections for funds rather than rely on patrons. But so long as the art market stays bullish, deaccessioning shows no sign of letting up.

Donors of art to museums, meanwhile, are quietly taking note. While major collectors recognize deaccession as an important topic, they are reluctant to discuss the particular practices of museums, in which they often have an interest. One donor, off the record, says she only gives work to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which never deaccessions. Johnson says that if he were a collector making a donation to a museum, he would stipulate that “you cannot go and sell my Chinese porcelain to buy a Jeff Koons.” But such stipulations are notoriously easy to overrule in the courts, especially after a donor has died. Freudenheim’s advice to his collector friends is, “If you really care about it, sell it while you are alive. If you think it will stay in the museum forever, then you are fooling yourself.”

'Brother, Who Art Thou?'

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 29, 2008

Brother, Who Art Thou?
By JAMES PANERO

A review of 'APPLES AND ORANGES: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found,' by Marie Brenner. (Illustrated. 268 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.)

If Marie Brenner and her brother, Carl, can learn to love each other, there might be hope for our divided America after all. She’s a hot-shot writer at large for Vanity Fair, an investigative journalist known for taking down corporations; her exposé of the tobacco industry became the 1999 movie “The Insider.” He is an apple farmer in Washington State with the N.R.A. sticker on his truck who complains about his sister’s “A.C.L.U. friends in New York.” Illness turns out to be this family’s cure. Carl is discovered to have cancer, and Marie flies to apple country to try to save him.

In less capable hands, a memoir of such reconciliation might become a tired on-the-road travelogue or, worse, a bedside tear-jerker. But in “Apples and Oranges,” Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate.

“Our relationship is like tangled fishing line. We are defined by each other and against each other, a red state and a blue state, yin and yang.” The history of sibling warfare between these Brenners goes back to childhood. When she was 3, Carl pushed Marie out a window, sending her to the hospital. In high school, Carl filled his room with “manuals of alleged Communists published by the John Birch Society” while Marie played Joan Baez records. One day Marie came home to find the records smashed. “She’s a subversive,” Carl told her. “I have it right here on my list.”

“Is anything in life an accident?” Marie asks. They both came from the same secular Jewish household, heirs to a chain of Texas discount stores called Solo Serve. So how could she become a liberal journalist in New York while her brother turned out to be a Bush-loving, Wagner-listening, evangelical “right-wing nut” growing apples on the other coast?

Marie Brenner brings the same journalistic arsenal to this question that she would normally reserve for an investigation of Big Tobacco. When her brother gets sick, research becomes her coping mechanism. “I am treating my brother as if he is a source,” she writes, “someone I have been assigned to interview.”

Brenner looks for answers in the relatively new science of sibling psychology. Questionable terrain, perhaps. “I want to investigate if sibling problems are passed down in families like blue eyes and brown hair,” she writes. She uncovers letters that reveal a rift between her father, Milton, and his sister Anita. “Did my father’s rage at his sister impact my relationship with Carl?” Anita went to Mexico to become an associate of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco; she posed for Edward Weston and knew Trotsky. Milton stayed in San Antonio to build up the company founded by their father, Isidor.

When Isidor left their mother for a much younger woman, Anita backed her father. Milton did not. “Don’t you see that you are laying the fuse for a tremendous bomb,” Anita asked Milton in 1932, “the results of which no one can foresee, and which will involve all of us?”

Marie hopes that understanding her father’s family can help her make sense of her own. “The term ‘coherent story’ keeps popping into my mind,” she writes. “Family therapists call this the genogram, the laying on of family theory.”

How do we end up the way we do? Marie is the compulsive rationalist looking for the missing piece in her brother’s story, the key to the mystery. Her faith, like Anita’s, is in enlightened salvation. “I was stitching facts out of what I learned, trying to come up with a grid to lock together all of the following events,” she writes. “Where was the pattern? How did it link?”

Like his father, Carl is ever the skeptic. “It doesn’t connect,” Carl responds. As soon as Marie develops a leitmotif, Carl undermines it. We are led to believe that Carl was in the Marines, where “officers are trained to run through smoke and fires.” Ah, we say, maybe that caused Carl’s adenocarcinoma. But this cannot be the case. “After all that tough-guy posturing in college,” Brenner writes, Carl “never got to the Marines.”

In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. “Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,” she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb “through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’” Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.

'Art's Willing Executioner'

THE NEW YORK SUN
June 4, 2008

'Art's Willing Executioner'
by James Panero

A review of 'Let's See' by Peter Schjeldahl

Art critics are like thoroughbred horses: They risk breaking down after a short period on the track. It came as a surprise, then, when the New Yorker appointed Peter Schjeldahl as its critic in residence 10 years ago: By 1998, Mr. Schjeldahl had already been around the course more than once. Born in Fargo, N.D., in 1942, he had been writing for the Village Voice since 1980, and before that for ARTnews, Seven Days, and the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Back in the late 1960s, the New Yorker's hiring of the Abstract Expressionist critic Harold Rosenberg came as a temporary reprieve from the slaughterhouse. For Mr. Schjeldahl, one wondered if the job would be a similarly green pasture in which to natter on into oblivion.

But Mr. Schjeldahl found his second wind at the New Yorker. He has regularly filed tuneful columns of readable stories with tight structure and interesting twists of phrase informed by his years as both a journalist and a poet. (By the 1960s, Mr. Schjeldahl was already a published poet in the New York School; he abandoned poetry around 1980 to pursue criticism.) Mr. Schjeldahl's latest volume of selected writing, 75 essays from a decade at the New Yorker running through 2007, has now been published as "Let's See" (Thames & Hudson, 256 pages, $29.95).

Those 10 years make for an interesting case study of art, one framed by the unprecedented rise in the market value of postwar and contemporary work — now a global infatuation — and an art-world giddiness that seems untouched, or is perhaps even encouraged, by crises in the economy and the war on terror. The art critic of today must function as a gossip columnist, a stock analyst, and a lifestyle guru. Mr. Schjeldahl plays these roles with brio: At the New Yorker, he has kept up with the art of his times all too well.

At its best, Mr. Schjeldahl's craft produces one-liners that are pleasing and illustrative: "[Gauguin] had the kind of petty run-ins with local authorities that dog arrogant misfits in resort towns everywhere." "One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine." Lucian Freud "is less a painter than 'the Painter,' performing the rites of his medium in the sacristy of his studio." "All Picasso's pictures are dirty." Such zingers are ready for Bartlett's.

But the anthology left me wondering how Mr. Schjeldahl's achievements, many but minor, stack up against his shortcomings as a responsible critic. It is not so much that Mr. Schjeldahl has bad taste. As a libertarian sensualist, he is rather preconditioned not to have taste at all, or at least to have sublimated his taste for the purposes of having his readers "engage with art of every kind," no matter how terrible or reprehensible the art might be. In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl belittles taste here as only a "sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's." It is interesting to note, however, that in disregarding taste, he heads right for the tasteless — leading me to suspect that Mr. Schjeldahl knows what good taste is all along but chooses to ignore it.

At times, this tastelessness can be unnerving but relatively harmless. Mr. Schjeldahl's ceaseless promotion of the histrionic contemporary artist John Currin, for instance, would put a publicist to shame. He calls Mr. Currin "as important an emerging painter as today's art world provides," whose "virtuosity has overshadowed that of everybody else in the field." He also manages to name-drop Mr. Currin into essays where you would least expect it, including a review of El Greco, and one of Victorian fairy paintings.

Over the past decade, about the last thing the overheated art market needed was more praise for artists like Mr. Currin. But Mr. Schjeldahl sent his coals to Newcastle — or rather, to the Gagosian Gallery — at the expense of endlessly more deserving and underappreciated artists.

Too often in the decade covered here, Mr. Schjeldahl followed the money rather than good conscience. Faced with market forces, he bids "goodbye to critics functioning as scouts, umpires, scorers, clubhouse cronies, and occasional coaches." Rather than regret the loss of critical authority, he welcomes collectors to the driver's seat. "Preposterous amounts of money seem to concentrate the mind," he says. Yet considering the overvaluing of artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and yes, John Currin, the facts just don't bear this out. I doubt Mr. Schjeldahl even believes it.

Far more damning than Mr. Schjeldahl's abdication of critical judgment, however, is his embrace of art used for violent ends. Mr. Schjeldahl came out of the Generation of 1968 with a weakness for violence, which often translates into an affection for fascist and Nazi imagery. He rightly bristles at politicized art, but I find his willingness to aestheticize politics just as disturbing. (There is a difference between the two: Walter Benjamin famously wrote that communism pursued the former strategy, while fascism adored the latter.)

"Art love does not accord with good politics, good morals," Mr. Schjeldahl said in a 2004 interview. "Hitler had rather good taste, certainly in architecture and design. I think the Nazi flag was one of the greatest design coups in history."

Such enthusiasm, a targeted irresponsibility, gets repeated more than once in the current collection. Mr. Schjeldahl describes "October 18, 1977" by Gerhard Richter, another son of the'60s, as "a suite of fifteen somber paintings [belonging] to a tiny category: great political art." Yet Richter's hagiographic icons (not all that well painted, by the way) simply mythologized murderous German thugs.

In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl reserves his highest praise for Der Führer himself, whom he describes as "masterly once he found his métier." Hitler, Mr. Schjeldahl informs us in a review of Nazi art, "embraced cleanly abstracted and geometric styles, which later informed his own design work (notably the stunning Nazi flag) and his shrewd patronage of the gifted youngsters Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer." I have deliberated over what is the most odious part of this remark, and I have settled on the use of the word "youngsters" to describe Riefenstahl and Speer. For Mr. Schjeldahl, it's as if Nazi propaganda was little more than after-school high jinks committed by the Little Rascals.

Mr. Schjeldahl's disagreement with the curator Deborah Rothschild in this same review is telling. He begins with a quote from Ms. Rothschild: "The union of malevolence and beauty can occur; we must remain vigilant against its seductive power." That sounds pretty reasonable, but Mr. Schjeldahl offers a quick retort: "I disagree. We must remain vigilant against malevolence, and we should resign ourselves to the truth that beauty is fundamentally amoral."

Why a critic should feel obligated to accept and even champion beauty in the service of wickedness is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Schjeldahl embodies the critic as an accomplice. At his best, he is gleefully sly. At his worst, he is art's willing executioner.

'The Art of the Art Biography'

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN
Spring 2008

'Sketches of Painterly Lives: The Art of the Art Biography'
by JAMES PANERO

Recently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my calendar for a decade. Not to worry, the agent said: Academics do research; writers write biographies.

Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of the Italian Renaissance, would have most likely agreed. His Lives of the Artists of 1550 was notoriously loose with the facts. Never one for scholarly remove, he also heralded his fellow Florentines at the expense of Venice: We would have to wait until the second edition to read of Titian. But Vasari was both a painter and a writer. With his unique temperament he applied the biographer’s craft of the classical age to the artists of the Renaissance: from Cimabue in the 13th century through the artists of the Quattrocento to Il Divino, the divine Michelangelo of the 16th century. “I have striven not only to say what these craftsmen have done,” Vasari writes in Lives, “but also . . . to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better, and to note with no small diligence the methods, the feeling, the manners, the characteristics, and the fantasies of the painters and sculptors.” Lives is more than a parade of the facts. It is an artistic statement and a luxuriant as fine as any Italian fresco. Think of John Richardson’s gossipy defense of Picasso, only applied to the Florentine Renaissance.

Vasari called biography “that which truly teaches men to live and makes them wise, and which, besides the pleasure that comes from seeing past events as present, is the true end of that art.” By following his own advice, Vasari wrote the narrative of an age and the benchmark of the genre.

The Journal of Eugene Delacroix is one work of literature that brought Vasari to the modern era. Walter Pach, the great, early American writer of modernism, translated from the French in my 1946 edition of this fascinating memoir. Delacroix was anything but a hopeless, breathless romantic. His journal carries forward the biographer’s art and, like Lives, comes off as great conversation. Here Delacroix deliberates on everything from the importance of serious painting to his next meeting with Chopin. In an entry from 1847, Delacroix dashes off the following calculations:

All the great problems of art were solved in the sixteenth century. . . . The perfection of drawing, of grace, and of composition, in Raphael . . . Of color, and of chiaroscuro, in Correggio, in Titian, in Paul Veronese . . . Rubens arrives, having already forgotten the traditions of grace and of simplicity. Through his genius he creates an ideal once more.

Here he is on Monday, October 23, 1849: “I read the terrifying list of the riches, of the monuments of all kinds which disappeared from the churches during the Revolution. It would be curious to write something on this subject in order to edify people as to the most evident result of revolutions.” And here he is on Sunday, March 11, 1849: “Beethoven’s compositions are in general too long.” This is a story of art we can relate to, one with voice and a soul.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art.

My problem with many of the long, single-artist biographies of today is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, modern-day biographers might toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink. Or we get a clutch of color reproductions. But without direct contact with the work, in the safety of trivial observation, the art biography now lacks heart.

Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for De Kooning in 2005, built up their story of the artist around a tyrannical mother and a hardscrabble upbringing in Rotterdam.

Stevens and Swan are two of the best magazine critics around, but in their book they strangely make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling their document of facts, a chronicle of de Kooning’s dalliances and alcoholism written in excessive detail, the writers also abdicate to others their responsibilities as critics. How the authors feel about de Kooning is left an open question. Here is a book where I wondered what ever happened to Vasari’s exhortation “to distinguish the better from the good and the best from the better.”

Henri Matisse was the 20th century’s great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. “What I want 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.”

In her two volume biography of Matisse, Hilary Spurling offers an impassioned defense of Matisse that would make Vasari proud. She writes in Matisse the Master, her second volume: “The longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse’s work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang.”

Spurling can herself fall victim to an overabundance of detail. But thanks to her we now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to critical failures, by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice. And by recognizing the connections between Matisse’s paint treatment and the textiles manufactured in his hometown of Le Cateau—observations that became the subject of a marvelous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005—Spurling teaches us how to see Matisse in a new way.

Finally, one recent book demonstrates that you don’t have to write at length to get art biography just right. In just over 200 pages of Marc Chagall, recently published by Schocken, the writer Jonathan Wilson has crafted an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist’s life. It is a book that looks out from the artist’s work.

“The man in the air in my paintings . . . is me,” Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. “It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I’m not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own.” In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist’s life, that’s where Wilson finds Chagall.

Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that “sophisticated art aficionados weren’t supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark.” Chagall deserves more, and Wilson proves it. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the “twilight of a Jewish world.” Two hundred pages later, by engaging the style of Chagall’s work, Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skis above Vitebsk, where he belongs.

Russell Kirk, no stranger to writing about art, believed that biography could “apprehend the spirit of an age better through the lives of its great personages than through chronicles of events.” An art biography that takes flight, Marc Chagall brings Vasari, and Kirk, up to the present day. Now where’s my agent when I need him?

'An Old Master in Ruins'

NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Features
An Old Master in Ruins
Why is an El Greco worth less than a Koons? Gallerist Larry Salander called it a moral travesty, and decided, catastrophically, to do something about it.

By James Panero
Published Mar 24, 2008

The art dealer Larry Salander is ready to erupt. He puffs up, expanding his chest like a bellows. He presses his mouth shut. He squeezes his tongue against his palate and engorges his cheeks, his upper lip already damp with perspiration and a few molecules of lunch. Finally, with nostrils flared, he explodes.

“Our society now values a Warhol for three times as much money as a great Rembrandt,” he thunders, referring to the latest auction reports. “That tells me that we’re fucked. It’s as if people would rather fuck than make love.”

He says the last sentence slowly, emphasizing each word.

“That’s the difference between the Warhol and the Rembrandt,” Salander continues. “Being with Rembrandt is like making love. And being with Warhol is like fucking.”

Salander and I are just finishing a lunch of pasta fresca in the eat-in kitchen of his Upper East Side home. Now on the market for $25 million, the townhouse—almost a palace— is decorated with paint imported from Venice and fifteenth-century Sienese tiles. It reflects Salander’s eclectic taste, with African sculpture and American tonalist landscapes mixed in among the Canalettos. In the next room, Salander has inlaid a marble floor with the phases of the moon.

An aesthete with no formal art education (nor even a college degree), Salander built his art empire, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, on native artistic empathy and an intensity of will. “He is a very unusual combination of street vitality and aesthetic refinement,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic and a close friend of Salander’s who wrote catalogue essays for the gallery. “He’s a street kid who’s read Ruskin. I don’t know anybody else who so naturally recognizes the brutality of the world but lives in such a fine way.”

Artists, actors, critics, and buyers responded to his gravitational pull. When I visited Salander in Venice during the opening of the Biennale last June, he was a character in need of a Balzac, a prophet and a gambler who seemed to walk across the water of the Venetian lagoon. He spoke about Titian and Tintoretto as if they were close friends and skipped the contemporary art of the Biennale altogether. As we returned from the island of Burano, where we’d had dinner with his friend Robert De Niro, Salander said to me, “Art is the human attempt to make one plus one equal more than two.”

But Salander made a critical miscalculation. Over the last few years, he had been trying to apply his passion and alchemy to correcting what he saw to be a dangerous inversion of the art market. To Salander, many contemporary art collectors are philistines. But if he could use his gallery to create a new market for old-master and Renaissance art, perhaps he could shift the paradigms of the international art trade.

It was an intriguing idea, but it left him in ruin. On the opening evening of a show he hoped would electrify the market, angry investors closed down his multimillion-dollar gallery. A restraining order prevented Salander from entering the gallery or selling art anywhere in the world. He now faces a criminal investigation and lawsuits from investors who say they were abused, collectors who say they didn’t get what they paid for, and artists who say they never got paid. He could be upwards of $100 million in debt. As our lunch filled the afternoon, Salander spoke for the first time about his plan to rescue the art world from bad taste, and how it ultimately destroyed him.

Three years ago, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, located at the time at 79th Street and Madison Avenue, seemed to be an indestructible institution. Raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Long Beach, Long Island, Salander built his dealership from a small antiques shop in Wilton, Connecticut, into one of New York’s premiere art houses specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Becoming partners first with the more established dealer William O’Reilly and then with a passive investor named Myron Kunin, Salander mounted hundreds of museum-quality shows that seemed to rise above market concerns.

“Larry always has some mystery,” says Ann Freedman, the director of Knoedler and Company, New York’s oldest commercial art gallery, on 70th Street off Madison Avenue. “Success for him was to find the undiscovered painting, to prove this was a masterwork against all odds, to put on a show that nobody else would have dared to try to do. He just wanted to be special.”

Salander learned how to read the market. He developed a reputation for recognizing undervalued art, and took a prescient interest in the nineteenth-century pre-Impressionists and in early American modernists such as Ralph Albert Blakelock, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden Hartley, and Louis Eilshemius.

At the same time, living artists who eschewed the latest art-world trends found a kindred spirit in Salander, who showed the figurative painters Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Paul Georges, and Lennart Anderson. One day, Robert De Niro Sr., the accomplished New York School painter and father of the actor, knocked on Salander’s door and asked him to exhibit his paintings. Salander represented the artist for the rest of his life and subsequently managed the estate.

As a house for serious nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, the gallery had settled into a proven, commercially successful formula. But over the last decade, as the art market underwent a seismic shift, Salander noticed a particular gulf opening up between the markets for postwar and contemporary art, and most art created before Impressionism. New art suddenly started going for far more than older, established masterpieces. Many of the newly rich collectors preferred to spend their hedge-fund wealth on more recent, name-brand artists. A Jasper Johns was soon worth twice as much as the Metropolitan’s Duccio, the Madonna and Child purchased by the museum for as much as $45 million in 2004. An oversize sculpture of costume jewelry by the art star Jeff Koons was valued higher than a Tintoretto, an El Greco, or a clutch of Courbets.

To Salander, this development was a moral travesty. It was also a business opportunity. As he obsessed over these market dynamics, Salander eventually came to believe that the very survival of great art was at stake. By 2005, he had determined to be the first dealer to do something about it. He would risk his gallery’s established reputation as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century house by investing heavily in old-master and Renaissance art. He would make some money and, if his plan worked, save the contemporary market from itself.

Salander started out slowly, first by expanding his small, backroom dealership of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting and sculpture. But he was amazed at the availability of older art, and started to acquire it with vigor. “I ended up finding I could buy these things that I loved so much,” he says. “These great sculptures. Donatellos. And Luca della Robbias. And the idea I could have this stuff!”

It soon became apparent that the gallery would need to expand. In early 2005, Salander noticed a vacant 25,000-square-foot Italian Renaissance palazzo on 71st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. The rent was over $150,000 a month— almost three times the rent of his 79th Street venue for a space five times the size. Taking on the palazzo would entail an enormous amount of risk—especially since he had yet even to prove the existence of the market he hoped to dominate. But Salander was undaunted. “I said, I gotta either retire now or I gotta do this.”

The new branch of the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries opened in September 2005, with a grandeur meant to attract buyers from the contemporary-art world who might be willing to speculate on old-master and Renaissance art as an investment.

“I thought it was the most extraordinary place,” says Wieseltier. “A gallery that was consecrated to classicism and newness at the same time. It represented an aesthetic sophistication that refused to be dominated by the market, and therefore it was an act of cultural resistance. The purity of its intention was undeniable, and apparently catastrophic.”

The catastrophe came almost immediately. Salander began to have a cash problem. As the gallery acquisitions and payroll expanded to fill the needs of his new five-story fortress, Salander was forced to close down his 79th Street space. This dismayed many of Salander’s contemporary artists and longtime employees, who started to worry about the gallery’s standing.

But Salander stuck with his plan. He continued his regular schedule of nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions, now in the velvet-lined rooms of the palazzo, while amassing an enormous inventory of older work, including many overtly Christian sculptures—Ecce Homos, Mater Dolorosas, Virgins With Child—and dozens of wooden statues of Jesus Christ.

He saw his project as spiritual, even messianic. “We’re a soulless society,” he says, returning to a theme that surfaced many times in our conversation. “When I’m talking about the soul to people, they look at me like I’m nuts. But there has been a longtime manipulation of people who want to make money to dumb down the American society and rob us of the curiosity of our souls.” (Salander’s now writing a book on the subject called Soul Wars.)

Those who orbited Salander agree that his motivation was not primarily financial. “He’s passionate about the great painters,” says Liam Neeson, who purchased two paintings from Salander-O’Reilly and received two of Salander’s own works from the gallerist as a gift. (Salander is a regularly exhibited artist, and has a painting of the Crucifixion in the Smithsonian.) “He doesn’t see art as a used Tampax moving across a bare wall.”

As for the dealer in Salander, he couldn’t imagine how the market wouldn’t come around and follow his lead up Calvary. “I don’t think you need an M.B.A. from Wharton to understand this,” Salander tells me. “You have the greatest art in the world. A Donatello for sale. A Donatello? I couldn’t believe it. Parmigianino? The guy died when he was 37 years old. There aren’t a lot of pictures by this guy. And it’s less expensive. When Francis Bacon is $75 million, Parmigianino looks pretty cheap at $10–12 million.”

A Parmigianino may be comparatively inexpensive in today’s art market, but at $10 million or $12 million, it is far from cheap. Salander needed money to buy his art, and more money to hold on to it while he developed new buyers. He says he had a seven-year plan. “It wasn’t going to be producing money until towards the end of this thing,” he says, “because I was more interested in building the market for the big hit at the end.” So Salander took out a $19 million mortgage on his home and used the revenue to buy more art.

Then, in 2006, looking to end his money problems, Salander made a fateful decision, enlisting as a silent business partner a family friend named Donald Schupak. (Their daughters were friends from Dalton.) Schupak in turn brought in a Las Vegas casino owner named Jack Binion. Son of alleged crime boss Benny Binion, Jack had pioneered the World Series of Poker at his family’s Horseshoe casino and had developed interests in riverboat gambling.

As Salander describes it, Schupak lined up $10 million in financing from Binion and nearly another $5 million from additional sources. In mid-April 2006, Salander, Schupak, and the other partners formed Renaissance Art Investors, Inc. As part of the deal, Salander says he sold half-shares of $30 million of the gallery’s old-master and Renaissance art for an approximate $15 million payout from RAI. Still, the infusion of cash would not be enough to cover his mounting debts. He was sinking deeper into trouble.

Art galleries are largely unregulated businesses, and artists rarely file commercial documents to secure their loans to dealers, so until their day in court it’s impossible to know whether— or if so, just how severely—Salander defrauded his clients. Since the 71st Street gallery opened in 2005, dozens of artists, estates, collectors, and investors have come forward with serious allegations: that Salander withheld money he owed them; that he sold work he did not own; that he sold work whose provenance was misrepresented; and that he amassed over $100 million in debt from these schemes to float his old-master plans.

“The first clue I had that something was wrong,” says Lance Esplund, the chief art critic for the New York Sun, “was when I was trying to get paid for a catalogue essay I had written in 2006. The accountant kept dodging me.” At the start of 2007, a sea of artists, estates, and creditors began to make claims against Salander and his gallery for unpaid goods and services, and for mishandling artists’ work. Earl Davis, the son of the artist Stuart Davis, sued Salander for selling nearly 50 of his father’s paintings without remuneration, or even his consent. (De Niro would later claim that Salander had tried to unload paintings by his father to a gallery in Rome.)

The tennis star John McEnroe sued Salander for not delivering payment on an investment. Paul Rosenberg & Company, Salander’s former landlord at 79th Street, sued Salander-O’Reilly for up to $1.6 million in back rent and other debts.

It’s not that Salander did not have assets at that time—he admits he was continuing to buy up valuable work—he just did not have the cash (or perhaps the inclination) to pay everyone as money came in. Or as Joe Saracheck, the court-approved restructuring officer overseeing the bankrupted gallery, explains it, “The art business is much like the diamond business, but unlike diamonds, you cannot just liquidate art.”

By last summer, the lawsuits were showing up in the trade press, which in turn encouraged more creditors to come forward. In the month of August alone, Salander’s longtime partner Myron Kunin claimed in court that his “trust and confidence has been betrayed” by Salander for defaulting on the $7 million purchase of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Arthur Carter, the former New York Observer publisher who had exhibited his sculptures with Salander, filed suit for $1.2 million against the gallery for loans gone bad. The dealer Stanley Moss was awarded a $1 million judgment against Salander for outstanding payments on purchases. Roy Lennox, a managing director at the hedge-fund company Caxton Associates, sued Salander for $4.6 million and an additional $10 million in punitive damages, accusing him, among other things, of attempting to settle debts by passing off art with dubious attribution. Salander’s colleagues at the gallery quickly made for the exits.

To announce his move into the old-master and Renaissance market and quell concerns that his gallery was imploding, Salander began preparations in early 2007 for “Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture,” a blockbuster of an exhibition featuring works by Michelangelo and Titian that he planned to open on the evening of October 16. Over Labor Day, he brought in a single piece exceptional enough to anchor the show.

A London dealer named Clovis Whitfield arrived at the gallery that weekend with consignments from his own collection, including a rediscovered painting called Apollo the Lute Player. When the painting had been sold by Sotheby’s in 2001, it was attributed to an artist in Caravaggio’s circle and went for far below $1 million. But Whitfield had since discovered documentation that he believed proved the painting was by Caravaggio himself. Though the attribution was controversial, Salander intended to sell Apollo for $100 million.

The Caravaggio, he was certain, would reverse the gallery’sfortunes. “There was always the sense that he was going to make that one big sale that would make him liquid, and he’d pull it off,” says Roland Augustine, director of the Luhring Augustine gallery. The $100 million price tag was not arbitrary, either. A diamond-encrusted skull by the artist Damien Hirst had allegedly sold for the same amount in London. Salander’s Caravaggio would directly challenge Hirst’s backers and set up a showdown between the contemporary and old-master markets.

Yet just as the exhibition began to take shape, Salander’s partnership with Donald Schupak was falling apart. With the lawsuits now appearing regularly in the press, Schupak did everything he could to prevent the show from opening. Starting that summer, Schupak had become a regular presence in the gallery, often with his son Andrew. (Gallery workers nicknamed the pair Dr. Evil and Mini-Me.) According to one former Salander employee, Schupak “made it clear that he needed total control over everything. It wasn’t about the money anymore. He screamed into the phone a few times that he was literally going to get us and have his way.”

A few days before the October opening, Schupak and his lawyer filed a series of motions in New York Supreme Court designed to constrain Salander’s control of the gallery. Schupak installed a private security firm outside the gallery to videotape activity and search those exiting the building. He convinced a judge to padlock the gallery temporarily. Salander fought back, but the confrontation took its toll.

At 3 p.m. on the day of the opening of “Masterpieces of Art,” a rattled Whitfield showed up at the gallery. Tearful, he announced to Salander that he was pulling his paintings. As reporters and invited guests began to collect outside, Whitfield tossed his Caravaggio and other loans onto a truck and fled. At the same time, with the help of private security, Andrew Schupak began rolling out works from Salander’s storage that he claimed belonged to RAI. Salander left the gallery later that afternoon with his wife, Julie, daughter Ivana, and son Jonah, who lunged at a Bloomberg News photographer before walking home. The gallery, suddenly, was finished.

"Masterpieces of Art” never officially opened. Absent Schupak’s legal maneuvers, it might have, although it is doubtful the gallery could have stayed afloat for long. Upon Salander’s exit, the door was locked by court order. The district attorney’s office executed search warrants on the gallery and Salander’s townhouse and launched a criminal investigation, seizing computers, servers, and 90 boxes of documents. In November, Larry and Julie Salander filed for Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy from their second home, upstate, protecting them from the avalanche of suits filed against the gallery over the previous two years.

“The scenarios range from ‘He got in over his head’ to the other extreme, where he perpetrated a massive fraud,” says Robert J. Feinstein, who represents a committee of unsecured creditors against Salander. Roy Lennox has been more direct, accusing Salander in court of operating “an illegal Ponzi scheme.” But Salander denies any fundamental wrongdoing and shows little regret: “Why should that place be closed down by people who were late being paid and didn’t need the money anyway?”

In any case, when the bankruptcy is over and his assets are sold, Salander believes he will be left a rich man. (“The art,” he says, “is worth much more money than I owe.”) But there will still remain one fascinating question: Could Salander’s spectacular gamble ever have paid off?

“The old-master market operates in total ignorance of the twentieth-century market,” says the dealer Richard Feigen, who runs a successful backroom business in older art. “To attract the hedge-fund buyers is very speculative. They hear about Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons since they use their ears and not their eyes. How do you turn them on to the old masters?” And Leon Wieseltier admits that Salander “sometimes seemed like he was out to amass the most unpopular art he could.”

But it is possible to imagine the market changing—especially if the old masters began to take on the glamour of contemporary art. “If press and public could be persuaded,” says Whitfield, “if Martin Scorsese could have taken an interest, if Geffen and Wynn could have noticed, it could well have worked. Maybe there was a little bit of grandiosity in the thinking, but we know this piece of alchemy can be done.”

As for Salander, he’s certain his plan would have worked. “The timing was perfect,” he says. “There are now stories of hedging your bets against this bubble by buying old-master pictures.” This is no doubt true; Jeff Koons himself has been on an old-masters buying spree, spending $6.3 million for a sixteenth-century limewood carving just last month.

The prospect of Koons—Koons!—cornering the old-masters market is perhaps too much for Salander to bear, but it confirms he was onto something. “It’s an incredible thing when you have a vision,” he says as we clear the plates from lunch. “I don’t have the academic background. I don’t have any credentials. I love art as much as it can be loved. I understand what the morality of it is.”

'Tales of the Spirit'

ART & ANTIQUES
February 2008

'Tales of the Spirit'
by JAMES PANERO

For the study of art there may be nothing more important, and more impressive, than the catalogue raisonné. Literally a “reasoned” catalogue, the catalogue raisonné is a publication by a preeminent scholar or scholars that attempts to identify and describe all work produced by a given artist. Always printed in a small quantity, and with a price that reflects the expense of its production, such a book is rarely marketed to the general public, although it can be a beautiful object of art in itself.

The catalogue raisonné of the American painter George Inness (1825–94), recently published by Rutgers University Press and listed at $400, is no exception. Slipcased, weighing more than 16 pounds, with 1,274 pages divided among two volumes and nearly 150 color plates, it is a monument of scholarship on the iconoclastic painter of the Hudson River School, whose career spanned 50 years, from 1844 to his death. The publication of this catalogue is also a testament to the spell this artist can cast more than a century after his death. Behind the book is the story of the scholar who pursued the project for 15 years and the patron who made it possible.

This part of the story begins in the late 1980s, when New York financier Frank Martucci entered a Madison Avenue gallery and saw his first George Inness painting. He told me the painting encouraged him “to see beyond the canvas. There was a bigger world out there. Inness went beyond painting the everyday occurrences in life and expressed spirituality on canvas. He was an optimist, a non-conformist, a social egalitarian and an avid abolitionist.”

Martucci’s discovery had lasting repercussions for a self-effacing scholar named Michael Quick. In 1985 and ’86, Quick had organized a traveling retrospective of Inness’s works that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seen in Cleveland, Minneapolis and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where he was curator of American art) and ended at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Fresh from the success of that show, as Quick related it to me, he ran into Martucci, who “expressed an interest in supporting scholarship and asked me to name a project that I thought was the most important. And I told him that an up-to-date, improved catalogue raisonné that combined all the information of other scholars would be most useful.” Though Martucci admits that, at first, he didn’t know what a catalogue raisonné was, this did not stop him from underwriting Quick’s labors for the time it took to produce the book. In fact, Martucci would make several commitments to Inness. In addition to building a personal collection of eight Inness landscapes, he funded the construction of an Inness wing at the Montclair Art Museum in Inness’s New Jersey hometown. And then there was the catalogue.
Like his fellow American landscape painters Asher B. Durand and John F. Kensett, Inness began his training in an engraver’s shop in New York. He studied the 17th-century landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Mein-dert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael. Multiple visits to Europe brought him in contact with the Barbizon School in France and the pre-Raphaelites in England.

Upon his arrival to the United States, Inness took his first spiritual turn under the advisement of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a patron. As Quick writes in the catalogue, Beecher “advocated a more intimate, emotional relationship toward God, which he indicated could be found through ecstatic experiences in nature.” Inness’s spiritual development continued into the 1860s. Through the largely forgotten American painter William Page, Inness discovered Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Christian mystic and occult philosopher who also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and many other artists and writers of the period. Through Swedenborg and Page, Inness developed a “fresh concept of nature as a place of divine harmony and peace,” writes Quick, “together with a technique that was designed to create paintings full of this same harmony and balance.”

Inness’s vision progressed from strict fidelity to the observable world to mysterious images infused with rich atmosphere, which he built up through glazes of translucent pigment. In his famous early painting of Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley, from 1855, now in the National Gallery of Art, “Inness’s representation of Scranton is accurate, even down to the tree stumps in the middle ground,” writes Quick. For “Autumn Oaks” (c. 1876–77), a well known painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inness incorporated “a complicated process of painting the colors at nearly full intensity, glazing them back, and then adding intense highlights [so that] the color is both deep and intense, and the modeling is full and atmospheric.” As he reached the end of his career in the 1880s and 1890s, the layers deepened, and Inness produced his most haunting works, for example “Early Autumn, Montclair” (1891), now in the Delaware Art Museum, which Quick calls “one of Inness’s great late paintings.”

Martucci’s patronage allowed Quick to examine, personally, all of these paintings and then some. “It was two week-long trips twice a month for three years,” he recalls. “With just a few exceptions, I saw every painting in the book. That was one of the principles, that I actually examine each work. This was critical to the book’s success.” It also sets this book apart from the 1965 catalogue by LeRoy Ireland, which was based largely on black-and-white photographs of the paintings.
During this rigorous period of examination, Quick gained a new understanding of the artist. “It was a precondition for authenticity and also gave me insight into his work,” he notes. “I was able to arrive at some very new conclusions that could not have been discovered by any other means.”

After funding the indexing of old exhibition catalogues, magazines and microfilm, which accompanies each entry, Martucci underwrote the catalogue’s printing. This was carried out, after a delay of nearly a year, in Hong Kong, once the catalogue’s designers were able to color-correct and personally oversee the print run.

How does Martucci view the 15-year journey? “It was a lot of fun,” he says. “The purpose was quite provocative and certainly important. The outcome has exceeded my expectations, very much so. The amount of research that went into this becomes self-evident when one looks at the book. Every single picture has an extensive provenance with a commentary, a total exhibition history and summaries before each period. To me it’s quite unbelievable.”

“Today, people are interested in contemporary art,” Quick says. “Inness’s art is of a different kind. It’s not showy. It’s more subtle; that may be out of sync with today’s public.” But, he concludes, “reproductions have power.”

At the time of his death, George Inness was one of America’s best-known painters. Just over a century later, his spiritual landscapes contrast with the rather more jaded landscapes of contemporary art. A catalogue raisonné will never alter the fortunes of an artist overnight. But like a vision emerging from one of Inness’s mists, such a catalogue can provide the spark of recognition that makes the rediscovery of a great artist possible.

'Comeback Kid'

ART & ANTIQUES
December 2007

Comeback Kid

The return of Thornton Willis reflects the enduring legacy of abstract painting.

by James Panero

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” However in the past few years, a painter by the name of Thornton Willis, born in 1936, has re-emerged from near-obscurity. Almost 40 years after his New York debut, and after a brief shot at fame in the 1970s as a post-Minimalist, Willis is now creating some of the boldest work of his life, with critically acclaimed back-to-back New York solo shows, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea and Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. In an era defined by market trends, Willis is that uncompromising artist who still manages to rise above public taste.

“I was always an abstract painter,” he recently told me. “I’ve always done what feels right.” Willis is one of my favorite artists to visit in the studio. I spoke with him in his unadorned SoHo loft, among canvases propped against the walls, in the same neighborhood where he has lived and painted since the late 1960s. Here Willis is an original artist-resident, someone who has painted his way through the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial wasteland to multi-million-dollar residential enclave.

“I hardly think when I paint; I’m feeling,” says Willis. Seeing abstract art for the first time in the 1950s, he continues, “was like a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. A boom! Something fundamental to the human condition. I didn’t know what painting was before that. Seeing that work was the epiphany that brought me to painting. I’ve been chasing that ever since.”

Willis’s chase began in Pensacola, Florida. His family roots go back to rural Virginia and Georgia. His father was a Church of Christ minister, an evangelical who established congregations throughout the South. When his mother fell ill, Willis went to live with his grandparents. He was 7. “I always liked to draw. When I was 4 years old, my dad used to sit me on his lap and read the Sunday comics to me. They were in color. I was fascinated with the boxes, the color.”

Willis began in architecture school at Auburn University in Alabama. There he caught two traveling exhibitions: One featured the students of Hans Hofmann, the legendary painter and teacher of the Abstract Expressionists, and the other was a show of New York School painters brought by the American Federation of Arts. “Seeing those paintings spoke to me. It hit me on the head,” Willis recalls. He decided to become a painter, transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi to pursue abstract painting under the G.I. Bill. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study with Melville Price, an abstract artist from the 10th Street years who died in 1970 at the age of 49. In a recent interview with myartspace.com, Willis said, “From Mel I learned that the idea was to ‘live the work.’ To ‘be in’ the painting and to see the work as an extension of one’s self.” The life of the artist does not always fit into one’s assumptions about art history. By the time Willis arrived at abstract painting, Pop Art and Minimalism were in their heyday. “I see myself as having rejected those two possibilities,” he says. “Minimalism was reductive. I could not work that way. I need to act out on a painting. I need to work through accident.”

Willis moved to New York in 1967, a time when painters were starting to challenge the confines of Minimal art and experiment again with improvisation. “It was when Brice Marden and Richard Serra and Bob Ryman and Sean Scully began,” he recalls. “Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark and Lynda Benglis were finding new ways of making art: Serra tossing lead into the corners; or Saret working with chicken wire. It was sometimes referred to as the ‘fold and pleat’ movement. My work was taking the same cues.”

In the 1970s and early ’80s, through experiments with lines and voids, Willis developed a signature style that brought him international attention. He called it “the wedge.” Predicated on the relationship between figure and ground, a tension that Willis built up in his edging and color choice, these haunting images could resemble a curtain or a mountain peak, a threshold or a monolith. Wedges such as “Bisby” (1977) found an eager market. Collectors and dealers ranging from Larry Gagosian to Charles Saatchi to Sidney Janis to Jackie Onassis (who called Willis “Maestro”) scrambled to the studio and galleries to buy them.

At the time, Serra advised, “Just keep doing the same thing, Thornton. Just keep doing the same thing,” Willis recalls. But at the height of his fame, Willis felt he had exhausted his motif. He abandoned the wedge. He gave up figure-ground paintings. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, he in fact gave up painting entirely.

When Willis returned to painting in the late 1980s, his market had moved on. But Willis brought with him a new focus on Cubism and new interests. “I was reading about quantum physics, how everything is absolutely saturated with matter. With the figure-ground paintings there was the idea of negative-positive space. But in quantum physics I realized that everything is filled. There is no such thing as negative space. This influenced my own thinking about painted space. My paintings became areas of energy bouncing off each other. Cubism seemed to have that in it already.” Triangles and facets filled his canvases. Work such as “Gray Harmony” (1993) featured regimented designs of quiet beauty. Then came 9/11, and that changed everything. “The first plane went right over our house. I said, ‘That plane was really low.’ I listened. Kept listening. Then I heard something go ‘snap’ and I went to the fire escape. All day, refugees were streaming up the street. People crying. People covered in soot and ash. I went out onto the street and watched the towers come down.”

In shock, Willis did not work for six weeks. Then one morning he got on the other side of it. “I just started to draw,” he says. In three hours, he created his first painting after the attacks: In “Cubist Painting for Vered” (2001), a work dedicated to his wife, Willis did away with measured construction. “I realized the world was taking a major change, with more uncertainty.” Drips ran down the front; the painting wept.

A new urgency now fills his compositions, a tension between the structures of Cubism and the gestures of Abstract Expressionism. He says he struggles with these recent paintings. Edgy, bending and sticking out into our space, they are animated by a career in abstraction. The art critic for The New Republic, Jed Perl, has called them “wonderfully persuasive” and suggestive of “an emotional terrain at once rambunctious and saturnine ... Although Willis was always a powerful painter, he seems to me to be a far more inviting artist now.”

The life of Thornton Willis is a testament to the fact that an artist at any age, in any style, can produce remarkable work. He has been chasing abstraction for 40 years, and now, once again, the art world is starting to chase him.

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'

THE NEW YORK SUN

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'
BY JAMES PANERO
November 7, 2007

Isn't it ironic that postwar art has traded one Freud for another. The very influence that Sigmund once exerted in the 1950s, his grandson Lucian, now in his mid-80s, might claim today. John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, Tracy Emin: All are among the younger artists who look to Lucian's analysis of the body just as many Abstract Expressionists once drew on Sigmund's dissection of the mind.

In his new monograph on the artist, "Lucian Freud" (Rizzoli, 488 pages, $135), billed by the publisher as the most comprehensive survey of Lucian to date, William Feaver writes, "There's an easy assumption that, metaphorically speaking if not by actual bequest, Lu the Painter inherited the couch of his renowned grandfather." An easy assumption, yes, but an overworked one. Mr. Feaver, a British art critic and painter who has organized several Freud exhibitions, fortunately knows better than to spend much time on the Sigmund-Lucian comparison. Instead, his book hints at more interesting terrain. Although it is not an argument made explicitly in the book (a somewhat tongue-tied, soft appreciation), Mr. Feaver offers up nearly 400 reproductions, four interviews with the artist, and an introductory essay that suggests a different conclusion: The secret of Lucian's success may not be his Sigmundness. It may instead be his Englishness.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1922, Lucian escaped with his family to England in 1933. He did not look back. He never dilated on the Jewish identity that first sent him abroad — "Being Jewish?" Mr. Freud remarked to Leigh Bowery, the corpulent performance artist who became one of his favorite subjects, "I never think about it, yet it's a part of me" — he gave up on Germany — "Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been" — and, finally, he wanted little to do with Sigmund: "I think [psychoanalysis is] unsuited to the lifespan," he told Mr. Feaver, somewhat elliptically. "I feel very guarded about it but I'm fairly ignorant about it."

What replaced all this was an adopted national canon. Sure, boiling things down to national style may be reductive, but Mr. Freud clearly set about performing that reduction himself. The process began in boarding school, where Lucian worked to rid himself of Teutonic mannerisms. "When I came to England first I could only do German Gothic handwriting," says Mr. Freud. Mr. Feaver continues: "The spikiness lapsed and he developed a rounded, laboured, but not inelegant script of his own, each word treated as a novelty, written as though drawn."

The same transition can be seen through his early artwork. Despite little formal training, Lucian displayed an immense talent for draftsmanship. Although less well known than his paintings, his etchings remain a high point of his oeuvre (a subject that will be examined in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art starting in December). Ink drawings, such as "Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit" (1943), likewise became crystalline interpretations of the visible world.

Yet his paintings through the 1940s still shout "Weimar." The bug-eyed portraits of the period, though accomplished, betray an expressionist manner. Mr. Feaver writes how this led to the "assumption (he took it as an accusation) that he was a Germanic sort of artist, carrying on willy-nilly in prewar, pre-Hitler, 'Neue Sachlichkeit' style."

Well, up to a point, he was. In the mid-1950s, however, the manner matured. Suddenly we see the signature style, the splotchy red-yellow-green brushwork that he would apply, for the rest of his career, to his analysis of human flesh.

The 19th-century British painter Benjamin Haydon once remarked:

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things . . . yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed.

The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

If Mr. Freud was not born with English sensibility, he developed one in paint. And he found ready success in the "honesty" of these fleshy facts. It comes as no surprise that one of Mr. Feaver's interviews with Mr. Freud concerns Lucian's appreciation of John Constable. This interest began when Mr. Freud was "living in Dedham, in the Constable country. I'd seen the little painting of the tree trunk, close-up, in the V&A, and I thought what a good idea." Mr. Freud continues: "I mean, this is so English isn't it?"

But of course, beyond the interest in fact, Mr. Freud's most famous paintings are English for more tabloid reasons, too. Oscar Wilde once said, "The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral." As is underscored by Mr. Feaver's book, Mr. Freud's shortcoming is that he can abandon English fact for mere English sensationalism.

In 1964, Mr. Freud was dismissed from a teaching job for assigning his students to paint naked self-portraits that would be "something really shameless, you know." Thereafter, the subject in his own work became evermore shameless and grotesque. Enter Leigh Bowery and "Big Sue," Mr. Freud's obese painter's models. Enter taboo. For one painting he positioned his half-naked, pre-pubescent daughter Isobel on the floor beside a houseplant ("Large Interior, Paddington," 1968-69). He also featured a man, the photographer David Dawson, breastfeeding a baby as Francis Wyndham reads Flaubert's letters ("Large Interior, Notting Hill," 1998).

The slow rise of British art, which tracked the demise of the New York School and the dying influence of the French avant-garde, has privileged Mr. Freud as the embodiment of English style. Unfortunately, he inhabits the best and worst attributes of what England can offer up in paint. His champions point to John Constable. But Mr. Freud is rather more Dorian Gray.

'Art's New Financial Landscape'

ART AND ANTIQUES
November, 2007

Critic’s Notebook: Art’s New Financial Landscape
by James Panero

A frequent response to the sticker shock of postwar and contemporary art is to claim that the market is inflated, that we are experiencing a bubble. But does this term, usually reserved for stock and real estate prices, apply? The art market exhibits few if any of the traditional indicators of speculation or other instabilities in pricing. Unlike real estate, most art is purchased with cash in hand. There are no sub-prime mortgages propping up the purchasing of art, no unstable supports to come crashing down in periods of price correction. One explanation of the rise of art prices might be found in the rapid growth of global wealth, and this liquidity shows no sign of drying up. Art may simply be a luxury good with limited supply and growing demand.

But market skeptics are really saying something more. Underlying their concerns is the sense that art is suffering from a bubble in taste. It is difficult not to feel that disproportionate amounts of money are being lavished on certain artists, but does this necessarily mean that the market is overdue for some kind of aesthetic correction? Perhaps the art world has simply become more tasteless and will stay that way.

It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but even as art prices have risen across the board, they have not risen in equal measure to one another. Postwar and contemporary art has come to occupy a place in the market that never existed for it in the past, while prices for French, Italian, and other European art from the 16th through mid-19th centuries have experienced little uplift. Everywhere we can see the evidence of this sea change, from the very introduction of contemporary art auctions to the rise of the international contemporary art fair to the so-called deaccessioning of museum collections to fund contemporary acquisitions. Of course, older does not always equal better, but as the dealer Richard L. Feigen recently wondered in The Art Newspaper, should a Damien Hirst sculpture really carry a price tag comparable to that of the Halifax Titian, one of the world’s last Titian portraits in private hands (and still on the market)?

Maybe contemporary collectors just don’t realize how far their money will go in the arts of earlier periods. Lawrence Salander of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries has bet the bank that he can educate them. This fall and winter, in cooperation with the London dealer Clovis Whitfield, Salander is mounting an ambitious exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, including works by El Greco, Parmigianino, and Pontormo, with price tags that are a fraction of what you’ll pay for a Warhol. To top it off, Salander will feature the first work identified as a Caravaggio for public sale in the United States in several decades. (In 2001, Sotheby’s sold the work as "Circle of Caravaggio" and still disputes the claim.) The price point of this work, titled "Apollo the Lute Player," will be determined by the high water marks recently set by Hirst, say sources close to the gallery. Should Hirst be in the same league as a Caravaggio, even a disputed one?
 
A correction in price, predicated on a correction in taste, assumes that the collectors of art still care about the standards of the past. In the end, in areas where art price cannot be traditionally explained, and where there seems to be no end in sight to the sticker shock, one begins to think that there are other factors at work. Art has always been a valuable commodity, but only in the last decade or two has it come to be perceived as an investment-grade asset, with rates of return in certain cases equaling or exceeding those of more standard financial markets. Now, while art continues to function as a luxury good, a sign of social status and even as a source of personal delight and aesthetic fulfillment, the top buyers are leading us into a new world that transcends aesthetic concerns. What comes after modernism? The answer is not postmodernism. It may be closer to moneyism.

While postwar art has been swept up in this new phenomenon, at the forefront of the movement are contemporary artists who know how to fashion work for the buying public. Remember Jeff Koons, the 1980s art star and original Wall Street dandy who has been doing career maintenance ever since his market tanked in the last recession? He’s back in the headlines. A work called "Blue Diamond," a 7-foot-wide sculpture of monumental jewelry that Koons designed in polished steel in 2005 and 2006, is going up for auction at Christie’s in November with an estimated price of $12 million. If it sells, the sculpture will far surpass Koons’ previous auction record set in 1991, when his "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" sold for $5.6 million.

This is taxi fare when compared to the new Koons on the block, Damien Hirst. While the medium of his art may be dead animals, formaldehyde, diamonds and skulls, the subject of his work is the art market itself, and his work’s suitability as an asset. The artist’s admirers regard his financial success as part of a sophisticated commentary on the art market, but I think it is the other way around. Hirst’s commentary on the market is really a means of achieving financial success. This summer, as we all now know, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull sculpture, "For the Love of God," was reportedly sold to an anonymous group of investors, according to Hirst spokesmen, for the asking price of $100 million, topping off $260 million in sales for his White Cube Gallery show. Notice that word choice of "investors" rather than "collectors."Truly, it is the investors who are deciding the future of postwar and contemporary art. Consider the hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen. In a rare interview in 2006, this media-shy recluse lamented to The Wall Street Journal, "It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over, and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself." It should be safe to assume that a hedge fund manager with a winning market track record lasting a quarter of a century is not in the business of losing money. Through his collection of art, variously reported to be worth between $300 million and $700 million and amassed over little more than five years, Cohen may have discovered work that gives him pleasure, but he has also found a way to diversity his portfolio. In 2004, Cohen purchased Hirst’s pickled shark, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1991), from Charles Saatchi, Hirst’s Maecenas, for what was then considered an outrageous price, $8 million (see more on Hirst’s shark in News, page 34 of this issue). But he still does not want to take it home. Instead, Cohen has convinced the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to display his purchase on loan for a set period of three years. Cohen’s investment benefits from the museum’s formidable aura, while the museum looks to hook a future patron.
 
When our nation’s finest museums are reduced to banks for an investor’s appreciating assets, the art world is suddenly far beyond the purview of critics. To really know what the future of art will bring, you’ll have to ask the investors.

Picasso from the waist down

THE NEW YORK SUN
October 31, 2007

'Sketching A Portrait Of Picasso'
BY JAMES PANERO

John Richardson's multitivolume "Life of Picasso" has become an institution. Mr. Richardson, who has even set up his own foundation — the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research — has been researching the life for 25 years, and his work has certainly resulted in our more exhaustive study of the artist. "Volume I: 1881–1906" was published in 1991; "1907–1916: The Painter of Modern Life" came out in 1996. The new, third volume of his study, "The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932" (Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages, $40) surveys the midpoint of the career of Picasso, who was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Though this period is not Picasso's most engaging one (we can rank it after the Blue Period, after Cubism, before "Guernica"), Mr. Richardson still knows how to deliver his subject matter. In his hands, Picasso remains the priapic visionary who translated the sexuality of Andalusia to canvas, the mystical shaman who fought evil with evil, the sadistic lover who admired the Marquis de Sade, and the superstitious clown who refused to give old clothes to the gardener for fear that "some of his genius might rub off on the wearer."

Picasso, as Mr. Richardson explains, came from sybaritic stock: He was a "Peeping Tom like so many Andalusians," Mr. Richardson writes, who "suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male." For an Andalusian faced with a virtuous fiancée, Mr. Richardson continues, "regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response." Mr. Richardson's explanations would not exactly hold up in divorce court, indeed they can be downright silly, but his passion can come as some relief to the cooler and detached voice of much contemporary biography.

Yet for all that virility, the Picasso we find at the start of this new volume seems oddly emasculated. While his Cubist collaborator George Braque and the poet and friend Guillaume Apollinaire fought at the front, Picasso escaped to the safety of Rome. He settled into the world of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, accompanied by the composers Erik Satie, the choreographer Leonide Massine, and the dramatist Jean Cocteau, whom Mr. Richardson belittles as a "pampered, high-society homosexual … trying to gatecrash the avant-garde."

Picasso soon translated his accomplishments on canvas into tableaux vivants onstage. For his first production, "Parade," he designed innovative Cubist costumes. He also drew inspiration from the Farnese Hercules in Naples, inaugurating a classical period in his own painting. Finally he fell for a petite Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova, who became his first wife and who lifted Picasso out of his bohemian milieu.

Picasso painted the first portraits of Olga in the reverential style of the beaux arts. For this future minotaur, who would one day plunge "his monstrous, taurine penis," as Mr. Richardson delicately puts it, into a lover's "tumescent folds," his visions of the early 1920s were rather staid. Olga's transformation into a vagina dentata was still half a decade away.

Picasso never had much of a personality outside of the studio or the bedroom, and the glamorous society that surrounded him during this period clearly sucked up the artistic air. Picasso could paint remarkable work — there is "The Dance" of 1925 — but such achievements were rare, and Picasso can seem, in Richardson's telling, almost somnambulant. Picasso's friends, including Braque, were likewise left wondering what had become of the great artist: "Picasso's all too evident absorption into Diaghilev's effete world," Richardson reports, "left Braque worried about the state of his old friend's integrity."

This all changed, Richardson writes, on a "propitious" evening in January 1927 — propitious for the biographer, certainly, and propitious for anyone who prefers Picasso from the waist down. While cruising for love along the boulevards of Paris, the 45-year-old artist came upon Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was 17, "an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body — big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus." Ever the willing accomplice, Mr. Richardson is never at a loss for words when it comes to Picasso's bed games. After a brief attempt at domestic normalcy, "For the rest of Picasso's life sex would permeate his work almost as cubism did … As he once joked, he had an eye at the end of his penis." Mr. Richardson excels at writing from this point of view.

Picasso's mistress for nine years, Marie provided a counterbalance to "skinny Olga." She encouraged an avalanche of work and inspired Picasso "to unleash his sexuality and harness it to his imagery," which was often wickedly brutal. Picasso felt free to paint the most memorable work of the period, including "The Dream," now in the possession of the Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn (who in 2006 put his elbow through it), and the whimsical "Bather with a Beach Ball," now at the Museum of Modern Art: "In this glorious work," Richardson writes, "Picasso has pumped Marie-Thérèse so full of pneumatic bliss that she looks ready to burst." For Picasso this was as sweet as it got.

In his book "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy," Peter Gay takes stock of Picasso's achievement: "Of course, obviously, for any painter major or minor — or any poet or playwright — sexuality and aggression are indispensable raw material. What distinguishes Picasso was the animation, at times the brutality, with which he fixed love and hate on canvas and paper."

At issue, however, is how literally we should interpret Picasso's translation of emotion to paint. The poet and critic Roland Penrose once warned, "It would be too mechanical to read [Picasso's] portraits as a direct paraphrase of his troubles with one mistress or another; he was too imaginative for that." Richardson has build a great biography out of great gossip, but by looking for genius between the bedsheets, his ribald "Life" never quite credits the artist's imagination with the autonomy it deserves.

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

'Mystical Mediator'

ART & ANTIQUES
critic's notebook

'Mystical Mediator'
Re-examining the legacy of Robert De Niro Sr.
By James Panero

September 2007

Modern art has tended to be divided into one of two categories. Visit Venice during this year's Biennale, for example, and you mostly encounter art of the dominant style-work based in tone, volume, depth, illusion, narrative and theater. This is art with a story to tell, art as a window, art that is loud, art with a point. The points may be radical, but the means are traditional, in that everything from academic painting to contemporary political art shares the common trait of using one medium to depict another. In the history of taste, this "public" style of extraverted, didactic art has always won out. But modernism has long nurtured a minority position. Mystical and idealist, often occult and certainly introverted, this secondary style is most easily recognized by its embrace of color.

On view in Venice through September 10, at the San Marco Casa D'Aste, the work of Robert De Niro Sr. serves as a counterpoint to the official art of the Biennale. This artist, who died in 1993, gracefully internalized art's color-based legacy.

Although little-known outside the world of art, De Niro Sr. remains just as famous as his celebrated actor-director son in the eyes of serious painters. Drawing on the sonorities of Bernard and Gauguin, the luxuriance of Bonnard, the anxieties of van Gogh, the moods of Munch and the textures of Matisse, De Niro
was spellbound by color's potential. A child prodigy, born in 1922 in Syracuse, New York to an Italian father and an Irish mother, De Niro at first studied with Josef Albers but then abandoned Albers' rigid color theories and went in for the push-pull compositional dynamics of Hans Hofmann, the celebrated painter and teacher of the New York School. Hofmann became De Niro's champion and godfather to the painter's only son.

De Niro's art, like the work of his colorist predecessors, finds its roots most directly in Symbolism, synesthesia and the metaphysical philosophies of the late 19th century (De Niro took an interest in the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy). Here the unity of painting predominates. The interlocking flatness and
harmonies of shape and color take precedence over subject matter. The painting itself is subject matter. In De Niro's case, the Passion of Christ, a recurring theme in his work, becomes passion itself. Writing in 1981 about Bonnard, De Niro echoed a similar sentiment: "His works are not about happiness. They are
happiness."

De Niro's indebtedness to Bonnard comes through most clearly in one of his early paintings-appropriately, a centerpiece of the Venice show. "Venice at Night is a Negress in Love" (1943-44) features a Bonnard bather awash in Gauguin-like colors, the palette more intense and atonal than anything the earlier artists
could have imagined.

Clement Greenberg made note of De Niro's early color combinations, not altogether approvingly: "Where De Niro usually goes wrong is in his hot, violent color, which, although he had digested the favorable influence of Matisse, often over asserts itself and distorts the drawing."

I disagree. This work is a masterpiece. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s and through the 1970s and 1980s, De Niro cooled his colors into a glassy sea. His signature flourish came in the form of broad, brushy outlines that defined his figures. At their best these gestures foregrounded his murky depths with graceful sweeps. The success or failure of his paintings often hinged on how well these final applications tied his compositions together.

De Niro Jr. has a deep affinity for his father's work. At a press conference in Lisbon, he broke down in tears discussing it. In Venice, as I walked through the exhibition with him, and joined him at a press conference for the opening, he said, "I am so proud of my father. But as a kid I didn't want to go to the shows. I now consider my father the best painter of the century."

Artist and son share the hunched shoulders, the taciturn expression, the brooding intensity, the inward pressure. The father was a dandy, maintaining the personality of the bohemian artist. In New York he crossed paths with the greatest painters of his generation. But unlike the Abstract Expressionists, De
Niro was more a mystical mediator than an innovator. As financial success passed him by, he would hit up rich friends like de Kooning for cash.

The marriage between De Niro and Virginia Admiral, another esteemed painter (they met through Hofmann), did not last longer than a few years, yet the two remained close. In the late 1970s, as Admiral worked to convert SoHo lofts into artist studios, De Niro took up residence in one of her buildings on West Broadway.
Here he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

This beautiful, top-floor space, with skylights illuminating every corner, remains as De Niro left it: tubes of seeping oils haunt the palette board, books on art, theology and philosophy line the shelves, posters from the history of art cover the walls, clothes fill the closets. In one corner, an umbrella hangs on the handlebars of a bicycle. In another, the door of a built-in birdcage swings ajar (De Niro favored parrots). When I asked De Niro Jr. if he ever wanted to become a painter, he said he "never had an interest. My kids don't want to be actors. But I preserved the studio for the children." The studio remains in the private possession of the family, but fortunately, Salander-O'Reilly published a monograph in 2004 on De Niro's work
that is filled with images of this magical place.

In 1857, the poet Charles Baudelaire, drawing on the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the poet Heinrich Heine, laid the groundwork for colorist innovation in his sonnet "Correspondences," from part of Les Fleurs du mal. Here is how Richard Wilbur translated the second stanza of this famous poem, which became a manifesto for painters like De Niro: "Like dwindling echoes gathered far away/ Into a deep and thronging
unison/ Huge as the night or as the light of day,/ All scents and sounds and colors meet as one."

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away, the art of Robert De Niro Sr. remains a place where scents and sounds and colors meet as one. What a joy to see it in the city of Titian, where color was born.

'Tintoretto's Thunderbolt'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MASTERPIECE
'Tintoretto's Thunderbolt'

His 'Crucifixion' of 1565 just may be the Italian Renaissance's single best work of religious art

By JAMES PANERO
September 22, 2007

The Venetian painter Tintoretto (c. 1518-1594) never commanded the sculptural vocabulary of Leonardo or Michelangelo. He did not luxuriate in the warmth of Giorgione or Titian. He displayed neither the draftsmanship (disegno) of Florentine art nor the affection for coloring (colorito) that was the legacy of his native city.

But through a synthesis of each tradition, "il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano," as one Venetian writer identified it, Tintoretto may just have painted the single best work of religious art in the Italian Renaissance. His "Crucifixion" of 1565 comes as both a concluding statement to the art of the high Renaissance and also something wildly new.

To see it, you have to visit Venice. Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" continues to fill the back wall of the boardroom (albergo) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he left it. Tintoretto dedicated his artistic and spiritual life to this confraternity, a charitable organization of Christian laymen dedicated to the plague-healer St. Roch. Surrounded by over 50 other religious images that Tintoretto painted for the Scuola Grande for the cost of materials, the "Crucifixion" forms the centerpiece of one of the largest intact cycles of religious work by a single artist in history.

Unlike Michelangelo, who initially fled Rome rather than finish the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Tintoretto never hesitated to apply his vision to paint. He persevered even as he was rejected by the Venetian establishment -- a situation that may explain the manic, expressive urgency of his compositions.

Consider how he first made his way into the Scuola. Since Tintoretto was the son of a silk dyer (tintore), the profession of a quarter of the Scuola's membership, his acceptance by the confraternity might have been a given. But in 1564, when he entered the artistic competition to supply the first ceiling painting to the newly completed albergo, the odds were not on his side. A young man with an evangelical zeal, Tintoretto had already been rejected for membership. In the conservative Scuola, resentment ran high against his brash personality and unorthodox paint handling -- "the thunderbolt of his brush," as one 17th-century painter called it. One member of the Scuola even pledged to contribute 15 ducats if Tintoretto was not chosen for the commission.

Meanwhile Titian, the ruling monarch of Venetian painting, who supposedly once expelled Tintoretto from his workshop after recognizing the young student's great talent, backed his protégé Veronese as heir apparent to the colorito legacy. (Their three-way rivalry will be examined in a show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in spring 2009.)

Giorgio Vasari, the great Florentine chronicler of Renaissance art, recounts how "the little dyer" overcame the odds. (They had their differences, but Vasari still saw fit to call Tintoretto "swift, resolute, fantastic and extravagant, and the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced.") Rather than submit a drawing of his ceiling plan, Tintoretto secretly measured the open space and "sketched a great canvas and painted it with his usual rapidity, without any one knowing about it, and then placed it where it was to stand."

When the confraternity protested, Tintoretto made an offer: "If they would not pay him for the work and for his labor, he would make them a present of it." It was a clever move. Since no donation to St. Roch may be turned away, through this gift "he so contrived that the work is still in the same place." (It didn't hurt that the painting's subject was the Scuola's patron saint.)

Within a year, Tintoretto overcame the Scuola's lingering resentment; he was accepted for membership and allowed to attempt his great "Crucifixion."

The layout of the room posed several challenges. Three different architects worked on the Scuola's design. When it was finished by Scarpagnino in 1549, the building's small, elevated windows provided only minimal interior light. The albergo was also wider than it was long, so that any painting covering the back wall would have to be viewed from close proximity and below.

Tintoretto conceived of a revolutionary program. Rather than keep his design locked in strict perspective, which would have been distorted by the room's oblique points of view (think of the front row of a movie theater), Tintoretto folded his narrative around the central figure of Christ on the cross. He then depicted Christ bending down -- to address the good thief, the figures in mourning at the foot of the cross, and our gaze from below. The fixity of the cross provides an anchor within an undulating sea of dark details that seems to extend beyond the picture plane out into our own space. With blank faces, the mundane figures surrounding Christ stir up the awful scene. A crowd of onlookers, carpenters, soldiers and even a dog make up "a centrifugal energy that charges the entire picture," as the art historian David Rosand wrote in his survey of 16th-century Venetian painting.

The ominous tones, curved landscape and artistic urgency that underlie Tintoretto's color choice, composition and paint handling make this work a point of departure. Rather than look back to the neo-Platonic ideals of classical sculpture -- brilliantly embodied at the start of the 16th century in the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel -- Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" anticipates the fallen angels of our modern era.

Like a thunderbolt from the brush, Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" can stop you in your tracks. The Victorian writer and artist John Ruskin certainly thought so. "I have been quite overwhelmed today by a man I have never dreamed of -- Tintoret," he wrote to his father on his first visit to Venice. "I always thought of him a good and clever and forcible painter, but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers. . . . And then to see his touch of quiet thought in his awful crucifixion -- there is an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves. If that isn't a master's stroke, I don't know what is."

From 1565 to 1588, Tintoretto expanded his swirling cycle of religious art in the Scuola out and down from the cross of the "Crucifixion": to canvases on the facing wall of the albergo ("Ecce Homo," "Christ Before Pilate" and "The Way to Calvary"); to a monumental series of images from the New and Old Testaments covering the walls and ceiling of the Scuola's central upper room (sala superiore); to episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary on the walls of the ground floor (sala terrena).

Tintoretto's work at the Scuola, executed over more than 20 years, became a perfect union of form, content, application and artistic intention. In Tintoretto's lifelong dedication to the Scuola, "the act of painting thus becomes a gesture of piety," writes the academic Rosand.

Earlier this year, the Prado Museum in Madrid hosted the first major survey since 1937 of Tintoretto's work. The museum also published an excellent catalog, in English, on the artist. No museum exhibition will ever do justice to Tintoretto, since his largest work never travels, but the Prado show came close, shedding light even on San Rocco: "the most personal and intensely felt of his works, conveying a powerful sense of the artist's own deeply held faith," writes Frederick Ilchman, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts and an essayist for the catalog.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which remains active as a confraternity, long ago opened its doors to the public. It now also maintains an excellent Web site, www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it, which includes interactive pictures of the rooms.

But there's no substitute for the real thing. The artist El Greco once called Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" the greatest painting in the world. Next time you are in Venice, make a visit to the Scuola your own act of piety, and experience a work of art that reaches across the centuries to our own time and place.

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

'A(nother) Very Political Show'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A(nother) Very Political Show
By JAMES PANERO
June 26, 2007; Page D5

It isn't every day that you find yourself sitting beside Robert De Niro in a water taxi as he tries to lose two boatloads of paparazzi pursuing him in a slow-speed chase down the Grand Canal. Or that Bobby D asks you to explain Matthew Barney, the shock-jock artist now on display at Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection whom the New York Times once called "the most important American artist of his generation." ("Installation art and Vaseline," I say, which he repeats with a down-turned smile.)

Then again, it isn't every day that you're there for the start of the 112-year-old International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, when the Renaissance city fills to the brim with contemporary art. Leading up to the official opening, which took place June 10, the art world descends on Venice for its biggest, most spectacular and certainly oddest schmoozefest -- and departs just as the gates open to the general public.

The Arsenale, which houses the Biennale show's less established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom.
The Biennale mainly takes place in the docklands past San Marco and in a park nearby, the Giardini. Here the exhibition space is divided up among nations that maintain permanent pavilions and an international group show, this year organized by Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and formerly a curator at MoMA.

Seventy-six nations are participating this year, spread out not only in the pavilions across the Giardini but also in palazzos and other buildings throughout Venice. For the preview days, which began on June 6, hotels in Venice booked up months in advance. "Collateral" art events filled the city. Mr. De Niro was in town with the gallery owner Larry Salander to meet with journalists and present an exhibition of work by the actor's father, the accomplished and under-recognized New York School painter Robert De Niro Sr.

The De Niro show is now taking place at the San Marco Casa d'Aste in the center of town -- timed to the opening of the Biennale, but unconnected to the official exhibition. Neither Mr. Salander nor Mr. De Niro even made plans to see the central shows of the Biennale. For many, it's been a long time since the Biennale hosted must-see art.

The Biennale will remain open through Nov. 21. But visit Venice past the preview time and you miss half the point. Indeed, while the Biennale as an art fête may never be more important, the Biennale now faces stiff competition as a pre-eminent international art show from more nimble gallery-driven art fairs -- Frieze in London, the Armory Show in New York, Basel Miami, and Basel in Switzerland, which took place a week after the Biennale preview. Even Dubai now hosts its own contemporary art fair.

The Biennale has not been a "selling" fair since 1968. And with so much world-wide attention now focused on the marketplace, the exhibition has felt the pressure. Enter Bob Storr, the Biennale's first American-born curator.

At the preview press conference in Venice, Mr. Storr spoke only in English as he introduced this year's group show, an exhibition he calls "Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind: Art in the Present Tense." The title is meant to bridge the gap, as he sees it, between "conceptual" and "perceptual" art. "It is not a political show," Mr. Storr promised, but a "sober show at a time that lots of people are intoxicated by cash. The cash will go away some day. I hope the works in this show will not."

In fact, Mr. Storr has put together a very political show. Meant as a catch-all, "Think With the Senses" is instead an international survey with an all-too-narrow, tidy scope. Rare is the art here without a conceptual if not overtly political component. The Arsenale, a former naval factory building that houses his show's less-established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom, steps away from multimillion-dollar yachts parked outside.

One of the first rooms here is dedicated to the theme of crashing airplanes (by the artists Charles Gaines and Léon Ferrari). There is a work that explores the "politics of flowers" (by Yto Barrada). There are machine guns (by Nedko Solakov). There is a meditation on the Pinochet coup (by Melik Ohanian). There is a video of a child playing soccer with a human skull (Paolo Canevari's "Bouncing Skull"). There are portraits of tenured radicals like Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm (by Rainer Ganahl).

The other half of Mr. Storr's group show, which as usual is displayed in the Padiglione Italia of the Giardini, may contain more established artists, but the message is often the same. Here in a video, Mr. Ganahl repeats the words "I am not a terrorist" in different languages (at the Biennale, terrorists are the grievance group of the moment). Elsewhere, Raymond Pettibon has graffitied up a room with a diatribe against American politics. "America loves (adores) Israel," "Hillary Clinton, Hillary Kristol, Hillary Kramer: Post-op or same person" and "Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz" are scrawled besides images of the Star of David.

One can only imagine that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are the natural extensions of Mr. Storr's understanding of avant-garde art. The national pavilions, outside of Mr. Storr's control, do offer some relief. At the French pavilion, Sophie Calle has put together a chic piece occasioned by her break-up with a boyfriend. In a building off the Arsenale, the Italians have created a sensuous exhibition by Guiseppe Penone, a sculptor once associated with Italy's Arte Povera movement, which sought to create art from common, "poor" materials, and a humorous (for once) meditation on the American political process by Francesco Vezzoli. The Russians have a sophisticated work by AES+F Group, computer artists who channel Wagnerian mythology and Symbolism.

The U.S., meanwhile, under the aegis of the Guggenheim Museum and the State Department, has put on an uninspired posthumous show of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born artist who died of AIDS in 1996.

Mr. Storr promised to bring to Venice a diverse display of international contemporary art. But most of the artists in his Padiglione Italia -- Gerhard Richter, Elizabeth Murray, Nancy Spero -- can be seen in any major museum (often in exhibitions organized by Mr. Storr). Several of the younger, foreign-born artists in the Arsenale now work and exhibit in New York.

Mr. Storr's show, at the center of the Biennale, will be a disappointment to anyone who believes there is a place for art outside politics. The message here can also be downright bizarre. In his opening statement, Mr. Storr maintained that "the social barrier to enter a gallery is enormous. The barrier to come to Venice is not." They must be laughing on their yachts at that one.

On my way out of Venice, past the parking lots of the Piazzale Roma and a world away from the Biennale, I met up with Augustus Rylands, the 25-year-old Anglo-American son of the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This year, timed to the preview days of the Biennale, Mr. Rylands organized a modern and contemporary art fair called Cornice. It featured 52 galleries. "Unofficially, the Biennale is extremely commercial," he told me as we walked up and down his tent of gallery stalls. "To complain about art fairs is hypocritical to say the least. The gallery is always the greatest champion of the artist."

Outside, Mr. Rylands showed me the mockup of a monument to 9/11, a work by Helidon Xhixha sponsored by the Young Artists Foundation in association with Cornice. The sculpture reconfigures the Twin Towers as a vertical American flag -- a stirring tribute destined for Battery Park City. And unless I am mistaken, it does not include a single reference to Halliburton.

This summer, should you find yourself in Venice, be sure to check out the Scuola di San Rocco -- the guild hall with Venice's original art installation, a 16th-century cycle of paintings by Tintoretto, culminating in a 40-foot "Crucifixion" -- and side shows like the De Niro before making your way over to the Biennale.

Daniel Buren, the curator of this year's Sophie Calle show, once noted, "Increasingly, the subject of an exhibition is less likely to be the exhibition of works of art, than the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art." If you really want to experience the latter in Venice, best get yourself on the preview list for 2009.

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

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'

THE NEW YORK SUN
Books

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'
BY JAMES PANERO
March 14, 2007

The problem with art biographies is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, art biographers toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink — the models and the mistresses, the comrades and the critics. But without direct contact with the work — the reason we are reading the biography in the first place — can an art biography ever really describe the heart of its subject's life? And I'm not talking about including a few color reproductions.

In just more than 200 pages of "Marc Chagall" (Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95), Jonathan Wilson solves this problem with an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist's life. It is a book that looks out from the artist's work — the literalization of an oeuvre.

"The man in the air in my paintings ... is me," Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. "It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I'm not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own." In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist's life, that's where Mr. Wilson finds Chagall.

Mr. Wilson filters his story through a Jewish lens. His biography is just one of several dozen new and forthcoming books on "Jewish Encounters" published by Schocken/Nextbook in a series edited by Jonathan Rosen. Rather than limiting the narrative, Mr. Wilson's focus reveals Chagall in high relief. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the "twilight of a Jewish world."

In life, as in his art, Chagall floated over adversity. He skirted the race laws of Imperial Russia to study art in St. Petersburg. He made his exit of the Iron Curtain just as Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Academy" was moving in on his Vitebsk Free Academy. He took his last step on Vichy soil, with the help of Varian Fry and other American supporters, just as the Reich was sealing up the French borders.

Chagall also floated over distinctions that might have hemmed in more Earth-bound personalities. "His work and his life both reveal a reactive desire to be a Russian to Russians, a Jew to Jews, and a Frenchman to the French," Mr. Wilson writes. In his paintings Chagall often incorporated the figure of Jesus, whom he saw as the embodiment of Jewish suffering as a stand-in for the artist and, after the war, the Shoah. "[T]he Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there." Mr. Wilson argues that as a Jew working in Christian iconography, Chagall was like Irving Berlin, his painting "White Crucifixion" like the song "White Christmas." For Chagall, this meant imagining a "pre-Christian Jesus" who was "a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the modern world," as the artist said to Partisan Review in 1944.

In subject matter, Chagall drifted between the ascetic parameters of high modernism and the nostalgic sentimentality for a lost home. For art purists, this has been the one fact that grounds Chagall's reputation. The critic Robert Hughes once called Chagall "the Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism." But Chagall was more than a mere Jewish Surrealist, as Mr. Wilson writes, "preserving it in schmaltz." A novelist and literary critic, Mr Wilson himself floats above the etiquette of art biography to write magical paragraphs like this one:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality ... has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desper ately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists — think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Mr. Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that "sophisticated art aficionados weren't supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark." Two hundred pages later, Mr. Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skies above Vitebsk, where Chagall belongs.

'A Diorama's Moving Story'

Mountain Gorilla
Akeley Hall of African Mammals
American Museum of Natural History, New York

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 17-18, 2007

'A Diorama's Moving Story'

Masterpiece: Anatomy of a classic
Carl Akeley never lived to see his most lasting achievement

by James Panero

A silverback gorilla stands proudly before his family. Wild celery and Ruwenzori blackberry, Cusso and Tutsan trees fill the foreground. The volcanic Kivu range smolders in the view beyond. All on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

New York’s cathedral to the natural world, the American Museum of Natural History, is built on the belief that one’s betterment through education will lead to the betterment of all. The museum’s mountain gorilla diorama is an expression of this faith. Through the transformation of stones and bones into an art without artifice, we feel empathy for an unseen world.

The master of the habitat diorama was a larger-than-life figure named Carl Akeley. He was an artist who genuinely suffered for his art. Over two expeditions to Africa in the 1920s, he faced down charging elephants and strangled an attacking leopard with his bare hands. With a genius for invention and a polymath’s interest in science, naturalism and art, he took museum education into the 20th century with his affecting tableaux of plants and animals. His legacy of diorama art is finally getting its due.

Akeley built the first diorama for science education—a muskrat habitat, still on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum, in 1889. He also created a culture of taxidermists, foreground sculptors and background painters at the American Museum that elevated his craft into an art form.

On the museum’s 1926 Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition to Africa, artists joined scientists in the field. Shoebox-size mockups were ported from camp to camp. Armed guards kept watch over the painters for fear of animal attacks.

Akeley was there preparing material for a two-tiered hall of dioramas dedicated to African mammals, which he envisioned would include a herd of elephants as its centerpiece and the mountain gorilla display as its cornerstone.

Each diorama scene would be a precise reproduction of the flora and fauna of an exact time and place. Each display would require extensive on-site analysis. Each animal specimen would be sculpted in clay prior to mounting (before Akeley, taxidermists stuffed hide with straw).

When the Hall of African Mammals opened 10 years later, it become Akeley’s most lasting achievement. He never lived to see it.

In 1926, Akeley died of dysentery and malaria on the slopes of Mount Mikeno in Africa’s Belgian Congo. He is buried just beyond view of the site now depicted in the museum’s mountain gorilla diorama. Using scientific information gathered from his 1926 expedition, along with gorilla specimens Akeley had collected and prepared in 1921, Akeley’s colleagues completed this diorama in 1936.

It was a fitting tribute. Thanks to Akeley’s efforts on behalf of gorilla conservation, Belgium’s Leopold II established Parc Nationale Albert, Africa’s first national park and research facility, in 1925. The park now spans three countries, including the area around Mount Mikeno. Today, the forest depicted in this diorama would undoubtedly be gone, and the mountain gorilla would most likely be extinct, were it not for Akeley. (Dian Fossey, a naturalist who walked in Akeley’s footsteps, was killed near Mikeno in 1985 protecting Akeley’s “amiable giants” from poachers; her story became the subject of “Gorillas in the Mist.”)

After Akeley’s death, such background artists as James Perry Wilson, foreground sculptors as Raymond DeLucia, and taxidermists as Robert Rockwell went on to exceed Akeley’s artistic achievements. By mid-century, individual dioramas had taken on theatrical story lines. The diorama artist attacked the challenges of dusk, variable weather conditions, and animals in motion. The Hall of North American Mammals, one floor below Akeley Hall and born from the spirit of Akeley’s mountain gorilla display, contains many of these examples.

“All of the talents, all of the staff and techniques and methods and tricks of the trade that were utilized in the Akeley years were then brought to bear on the North American mammals groups,” says Stephen Christopher Quinn. As the heir to Akeley’s exhibition department at the museum, Mr. Quinn published “Windows on Nature,” the definitive, illustrated guide to the dioramas, last year.

As a kid, I remember becoming attached to the small winter scene of a Canadian Lynx creeping up on a Snowshoe Hare along a rime-encrusted ridgeline. I imagine I wasn’t the only one with feelings for the lynx’s prey crouching beneath a balsam fir. A similar emotion swept over Akeley upon encountering the mountain gorilla. “I envy that chap his funeral pyre,” Akeley wrote in his journal of 1921.

Theodore Roosevelt spent his own boyhood in this museum; his father was influential in its founding in 1869, and the original charter for the museum was signed in his family’s home. The Theodore Roosevelt rotunda, the museum’s entrance hall designed by John Russell Pope, has for generations served as the institution’s lofty shrine to our conservation-minded president.

Affixed to the wall of this hall is the following Roosevelt pronouncement: “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.” With his own form of virtual reality, Carl Akeley developed a way to reveal nature’s hidden spirit without words.

Next time you are at the American Museum of Natural History, step out of the lobby into the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, make a left at the Mountain Gorilla diorama, and you will find a masterpiece of diorama art that is as profound as anything in the museum.

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

'How the Right Went Wrong'

James writes:

The following is a feature I wrote for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine on my mentor, professor Jeffrey Hart. The article appears in the magazine's latest edition (January-February 2007). Following the article, I attach a letter from Hart in response.

UPDATE 12/22: National Review's Ramesh Ponnunu has also written a response, which I have posted here.

DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE
'How The Right Went Wrong"

Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hart '51 doesn't lack for conservative credentials. But he's never been on board with the Bush administration.

by James Panero '98

Jeffrey Hart ’51 has the personality of a sportsman. A retired professor of English, now in his late-70s, Hart still attends every Dartmouth football game, he says, “until it gets freezing.”

Nearly 60 years ago, when he first arrived at Dartmouth as an undergraduate, Hart set out from his room in Topliff (“a god awful dormitory,” he says, “it’s like a prison”) for a round of tennis across the street.

“I saw a student waiting there. Nobody around. So we played a set. Not a real competitive set. I beat the guy. Turns out he was number one on the varsity. The coach showed up while we were playing. He said ‘You ask me before you go on the courts.’ I said, ‘You weren’t here.’ He said, ‘You wait until I'm here.’ Our relationship went downhill from there.”

This episode turned out to be a problem for the coach, who “played tennis in his old army trousers and black socks,” according to Hart, then ranked on his Junior Davis Cup squad but not yet a member of the Dartmouth team. “To be fair, I was not lacking in self confidence.”

After two years at Dartmouth, Hart transferred to Columbia, where he became one of Lionel Trilling’s best students. Diana Trilling, the wife of the literary and social critic, calls Hart one of the “Who’s Who of the gifted undergraduates of the thirties, forties, and early fifties.”

Hart also joined the tennis team at Columbia. “Playing number one at Columbia, I won my match at Dartmouth during Green Key Weekend, and was pleased to be congratulated by the Dartmouth coach,” he says. “I was polite when the coach congratulated me. I felt like saying a few other things.”

Hart retired in 1993 as one of Dartmouth’s most admired professors of English—and one of its fiercest. In that year he taught his final course, on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot, to a roomful of 600 students. “It was given in Spaulding Auditorium,” he complains. “I had to use a microphone. I felt like Fidel Castro addressing a mob.”

Today Hart lives with his wife, Nancy, in a former schoolhouse in Lyme, New Hampshire, that was once owned by his father, Clifford (class of 1921). Nancy uses a corner of the house, by the stove, to keep the antique embroidery and quilts she sells at a stand in Quechee, Vermont. The other corners are filled with old paintings, mainly of ships. “Franklin Roosevelt’s personal sailboat is up there,” notes Hart, motioning toward the paintings.

Also visible are some less expected items—a manuscript called “Our Era Defined: Contempt for Fact,” and a dossier on “WMD Claims.” Hart’s dining room table displays an official-looking document called “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” produced by the “Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff.”

“I do my homework,” Hart mutters.

Typing away at his computer, Hart is now engaged in the game of his life, and his opponent is an unexpected one: George W. Bush.

A former speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, Hart does not lack for conservative credentials. He has advised National Review longer than anyone except its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr. During his teaching days he flew to New York City every two weeks to attend editorial meetings as the magazine’s senior editor. He still holds the title but the frequent trips have ended. A mentor to generations of Dartmouth students, Hart has also seen a small army of them graduate and settle into the conservative circles of Washington and New York. They have landed jobs at National Review, The Wall Street Journal and in Republican administrations, including the George W. Bush White House.

The conservative Dartmouth Review—“Dartmouth’s school of journalism,” as Hart calls it—was founded upon Hart’s suggestion in his own living room in 1980. Hart continues to serve as the newspaper's advisor, lunching regularly with student editors at his new favorite restaurant, The Canoe Club on Main Street.

Yet in 2005, not long after Bush’s reelection, Hart fired his first volley against the administration. In the galley copies of “The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times,” his history of the magazine, Hart included the following statement in his final chapter: “Bush will be judged the worst President in American history, from both a conservative and a liberal point of view, finding a consensus on the bottom, at last, and so achieving a landslide victory that evaded him in 2004.”
Hart’s strong words put him at odds with the editorial line of the magazine he was writing about and representing. His statements complicated plans to tie the book into the magazine’s 50th anniversary celebrations, part of which Bush was scheduled to take part in that fall—not as the “bottom among American Presidents,” but as the magazine’s honored guest.

Hart has always held certain views outside of the conservative mainstream. An advocate for stem-cell research, Hart debated another National Review editor on the subject in 2004. Early in 2005, Hart wrote a long editorial for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “The Evangelical Effect.” Finding fault in Bush’s evangelicalism—in 2000, Bush declared that Jesus Christ was his most influential political philosopher—Hart wrote: “The Bush Presidency often is called conservative. This is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.”
When his book finally appeared in hardcover at the end of 2005, after a rewrite, the Bush attacks were expunged, but a number of other position statements—on abortion, stem-cell research, and Iraq—still contradicted National Review’s editorial line and the line of the Republican Party. It was of little surprise that Hart’s book remained absent from his magazine's anniversary celebration. But Hart was only emboldened by the experience. By the end of 2005, he was engaged in the most controversial political match of his career.

After the episode over his book, Hart wrote an editorial on the conservative movement for The Wall Street Journal. Called “The Burke Habit,” it traced a line of conservative thought from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953).
Drawing on Pascal’s statement that “man is neither angel nor brute, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute,” Hart wrote: “The Conservative Mind, most of the time, has shown a healthy resistance to utopianism and its various informed ideologies. Ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.”

Point by point, Hart used this definition of conservatism to attack Bush and the Republican party platform for not being conservative enough, on the grounds of their “ideology.” He knocked the Republican record on the environment, suggested that a ban on abortion would never succeed, and lamented Bush’s neoconservative approach to Iraq. “Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative,” he concluded. “But the party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt….The consequences of that profound shift are evident.”

Reaction to the editorial was swift. In a little more than a week, Peter Wehner, director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, a special staff unit that reports to Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, e-mailed to journalists a five-page rebuttal titled “Responding to Professor Jeffrey Hart.”
Hart called Wehner's response "a worthless regurgitation of 'democracy is breaking out all over the world.' Abstractions, abstractions."

Hart had more to say in a letter to Michael Ellis '06, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review who now works with Wehner in the White House: "First of all, everything Reagan attempted succeeded. Everything Bush has attempted has failed. Social Security, prescription drugs, budget, Iraq, Katrina. More 'ownership society' bunk is coming up in 'medical accounts.' On the policy of preemptive war in Iraq: "In contrast to Bush, Reagan was very cautious in his use of force... As Margaret Thatcher said, he destroyed the Soviet Union 'without firing a shot.' That was a major achievement. Iraq is a disaster."
Even while falling out with his party, Hart relishes the sport of his latest engagement, as expressed in a more recent series of editorials, including one for the left-wing Washington Monthly that ran in October. He also appeared on National Public Radio denouncing Bush on stem-cell research, and he used a book-signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore, which aired on C-SPAN, to attack Bush on national TV.

“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both."

While Hart has won some supporters on the right, conservatives such as George Will, Francis Fukuyama, and Buckley have questioned the prosecution of the Iraq war but have largely restrained from commenting on Hart’s broader claims of Bush’s evangelical ideology.

Hart’s former students have different perspectives on their teacher’s latest game.

“Bush has been fortunate in his enemies,” notes Joe Rago ’05, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review and now a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. “That’s not the case with Jeff Hart. His critique of the Bush administration, whether one agrees with it or not, is probably the most rigorous, utterly principled, and intellectually stimulating ever set down.”

Alston Ramsay ’04, a former editor of both The Dartmouth Review and National Review who now works for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disagrees: “There is no doubt that Hart's encyclopedic knowledge of literature could make even the lousiest argument take on the sheen of verisimilitude. But in his recent writings the willingness to ignore contradictory evidence, the monopolistic way he defines his terms, the baffling dislike of Evangelicals—it all adds up, and even his legitimate points become hard to discern through the haze of his own internal contradictions. About the only thing Jeff Hart has convinced me of recently is that ‘conservatism’ is what Jeff Hart says it is. No more, no less.”

Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: “In every generation,” wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, “some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.”

The amusing affectations of Hart’s teaching days—the meerschaum pipes, the “TR for President” buttons—are now notably absent, replaced by the resolve of a sportsman intent on a win. He has sworn off alcohol. His daily schedule takes him from writing editorials in the morning to Baker Library, where he conducts his research, to answering letters and sending e-mail in the afternoon.

Hart has just completed a manuscript of essays called “The Living Moment: How Literature Matters.” During the fall term, he audited Robert Hollander’s class on Dante. “He’s a major scholar in Dante, probably the best in the English speaking world,” Hart says of Hollander. “Very demanding.”

And Hart’s next project?

He’s considering a memoir, among other things. “I don’t know whether to do that next or whether to write a book called ‘How the Conservatives Committed Suicide by Forgetting Burke and Backing Bush.’ I'm going to see if I can get an advance from an agent on that,” he says. “I’ve got to do that quickly before it’s banal.”

It may not be match point, but Hart is clearly content to run the President, and the conservative movement, all over the court.
---
James Panero ’98 is managing editor of The New Criterion and co-editor of The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent (ISI), an anthology of the conservative student newspaper.

***

Jeffrey Hart responds:
December 17, 2006

Dear James,

I think your article in the Alumni Magazine is very good, and it’s fun to have it there. It does make me more colorful than I feel, so maybe I’ll have to ramp up my act a bit to live up to it. Though, in a recent Blog Andrew Sullivan did refer to me as a “legend at Dartmouth,” before approving of something I’d published.

In your article you use the tennis analogy very nicely, making it into a larger metaphor, and the whole piece works together like an especially skillful New Yorker Profile.

I may take out a “New York Contract” on the life of the illustrator who did that cartoon. There go my chances of displacing Brad Pitt.

I think your article will be very good for The Dartmouth Review, among alumni especially, since as you say I have been associated with it from the beginning, and my conservatism is of the common sense kind, or, as Jim Burnham used to say, a conservatism that depends upon “fact and analysis.”
“Fact and analysis” are not the strong suits of “conservatives” who back Bush.

The work you put into the article made it good, and also calls for some comments and information from my direction.

One word I’d have changed in your article is “expunged.” My first-draft analysis of Bush II contained criticisms that were not “expunged” during the editorial process but rather “softened” by being changed into questions rather than conclusive statements. This change might well have made the book more hospitable to many readers.

Buckley did object to my conclusion that Bush had been the worst American president in that earlier draft. He thought it too categorical, and, at the time I was writing, he was right. That was soon after the 2004 election. But much of the evidence now is in. And I’m sure that somewhere James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party. He’s no longer the worst.

One paragraph, however, did disappear altogether from my text; and I did not notice this until I looked at the printed copy. I had been commenting on the approval by California voters of $4 billion for stem cell research, and on the laboratories that were proceeding without federal funds, I said that the argument about stem cell research is over “for all practical purposes.” I meant “political” purposes, a large majority in Congress reflecting a large majority of Americans favoring the research and federal support. That paragraph disappeared. About the stem cell issue, more in a moment.

However, though softened, as I say, my analytical criticisms of Bush were clear enough for many reviewers, including George Will, who noticed them in his New York Times review.

I was amused by the statement you quote from Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru that I’m among the conservatives who have lost the “intramural” argument about what conservatism in fact is.

What they are maintaining is that Bush now defines conservatism, and that to deny this is to lose the “intramural” argument.

To be sure, Bush claims to be a conservative, and the media generally take him at his word. But the media are what Marshall McLuhan called “low differentiation” in terms of communication.

Bush is not a liberal, and he is not a conservative. He is a right-wing ideologue whose abstract imperatives across the board are characteristically disconnected from actuality. That is precisely the reason why he is a failed president.

Moreover, I would insist that the definition of “conservative” has been clear since Burke evolved it (if I’m still permitted to use that verb) in his Reflections (1790) and his Thoughts on French Affairs (1791). In the first, Burke was struggling against “ideology,” as we would say, or as he called it “metaphysical politics” or “abstract dogma.” That is, thought disconnected from actuality, and destructive of social institutions, which he saw as the habits of society. In the second appraisal (1791), Burke recognized that, quite apart from the philosophes’ abstract ideas, the Revolution had been inevitable. Too many intractable problems had accumulated. In 1790, Burke was centrally concerned with social structure, in the latter with social process. ( Russell Kirk grasps none of that.)

I would call Burke an analytical realist, despite a few operatic passages such as the one on Marie Antoinette (his friend Philip Francis warned him against those.)

Getting back to Goldberg and Ponnuru, and the “intramural debate” I’m supposed to have lost.

Reagan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett called his book on Bush economic policy Imposter. And rightly so. But “imposter” also describes Bush comprehensively insofar as he claims to be a conservative.

Goldberg and Punnuru are certainly correct in saying that I have lost the “intramural debate” among the ignorami who agree that Bush is conservative.

I certainly was not aboard that Ship of Fools, so-called “conservatives” as well as “neo-conservatives” – more correctly neo-trotskyites – who sailed with Bush right over Niagra Falls and smashed to pieces on the rocks of reality below.

Of course, Iraq has been the centerpiece of Bushism, but it’s not the only disaster.

Iraq was Wilsonian democratizing ideology plus Rumsfeld Blitzgrieg. There were no WMD, the claims were dishonest, and the war has been the greatest strategic blunder in American history. The Middle East is and has long been more important to American interests than Indochina could possibly be.

The “conservatives” and neo-trotskyites made no analysis of Iraqi history, failed to examine the fractured religious culture of Iraq, or its resistant culture generally – paid no attention to all of those Burkean considerations of social structure. And failing to do so they have been the architects of disaster. Abstractionists, “democratizers” in the teeth of history and fact, they have resembled, mutadis mutandis, Burke’s enemies the philosphes.

Far from being a democracy, Iraq is now in a Hobbesian state of nature. The only regime Bush changed was his own, in the 2006 election. He did not effect “regime change” in Iraq, because there’s no regime there at all now. Bush broke it, and he can’t fix it. And he may have destabilized the entire Middle East, as Iran backs the Shiites and the Saudis the Sunnis.

The real-world result of Bushism, what Goldberg and Ponnuru call conservative, is that Bush’s overall approval rating is 31% while Cheney’s approval rating is lost in the carpet. And 27% actually approve the war. Who the hell are they?

If Goldberg-Ponnuru have won the “intramural argument” among the ignorami, their boy Bush has lost the argument with actuality.

I wasn’t the only one who got off that Ship of Fools. So did Colin Powell, but only after he had been suckered into using bogus intelligence to sell the war to Congress and the American people.

Iraq has not been the only problem with Bushism. On signature issues:

1. According to a CNN/USA Today Poll, 65% of the American people oppose the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, less than half, 29% favoring its overthrow.

2. 82% of the American people were opposed to the intervention of the Republican Congress and Bush in the Terri Schiavo case. When there was a spike in the demand for “living wills” because of the intervention, Ponnuru in NR declared such will should be invalid as tantamount to suicide. Somehow even the Tom Delay Congress never took up that idea.

3. Embyonic stem cell research is supported in the nation by almost 2-1, 58% -- 31%. This year, before the November electoral blowout the Senate voted 63-37 for federal funding. Bush was there with his veto. The socially conservative state of Missouri approved Proposition 2, pro-stem
research. How the new Congress will vote remains to be seen.

While the $4 billion voted in California has been tied up in the courts. Governor Schwartzenegger, confident of legal success, has loaned laboratories $150 million to proceed.

South Korea, Japan and Singapore push ahead, while China is cooperating with the EU on stem cell research.

I would say that on this issue my assertion that “for all practical purposes the argument is over was completely correct, indeed self-evident.

What is not self-evident is why NR continues to beat a tin drum on this issue.

Never to be out-extremed, Ponnuru declared editorially in NR that a single embryo (e.g., fertilized egg) “must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause.” No matter how noble the cause. In other words, the single cell is to be absolutized over every other consideration. WHHHHeeeeeeee! Even curing bubonic plague. Even end of the world!

It is a very peculiar kind of conservatism that values life only in utero.

In her article on stem cells in The Dartmouth Review, Emily Ghods-Esfahani quoted Professor Lee Witters (Biology, Medicine) to this effect:

“If you had a child with Diabetes Type 1 (debilitating, life-altering) and I told you I had a few cells that could cure her, would you turn this down?”

In the world of common sense there is only one answer to that question: “of course not.”

4. On the Evangelicals, I have cited numerous examples of where evangelical influence has been ideological and destructive, on bogus teachings of all sorts by “faith-based” groups on condoms, the notion that AIDS is transmitted by sweat, on and on; and we could add the corruption of the FDA on “Plan B” or the “morning after pill,” delaying and delaying until the Senate threatened to block a new director.

One of my favorites is the book on sale in federally-owned bookstores at the Grand canyon, telling tourists that the Canyon was caused by Noah’s Flood.

For the whole Evangelical influence I will use a synecdoche: Bush has said that “Intelligent Design should be taught along with Evolution.” “Along with” I suppose means in Biology Class.

Wow. I guess I really have lost the “intramural debate,” if Bushism is what “conservative” means.

We will have to look for another word to designate the reality-based view of the world heretofore called conservative.

Thanks again for the very fine article. It brought forward a great deal that deserves to be more generally realized.

Cheers,

Jeff

'A Man Named Jed'

NATIONAL REVIEW May 22, 2006

'A Man Named Jed'
a review of 'New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century,' by Jed Perl (Knopf, 656 pp., $35)

by James Panero

THE last time I saw Jed Perl, he was bounding down the long ramp of New York's Guggenheim Museum, just as I was hoofing it up. The occasion was the press preview for "David Smith: A Centennial." In my bag, I happened to be carrying Perl's massive new book, New Art City: a Sisyphean labor of a read, the type of book you curse for its length as you turn the page for more. Hauling it up the endless spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright's museum, I found the moment appropriately poetic.

"Love the book, Jed," I panted.

"Ten years of work," he smiled, shifting down to second gear. "And if you see me dead in the street, you know whom to suspect ..." This was a reference to Perl's latest art-world polemic, which had just then appeared as a cover story in The New Republic. The suspect in question was the main target of the article: Glenn D. Lowry, the organization-man director of the Museum of Modern Art.

The exchange on the ramp reminded me that Perl's preferred mode of discourse--and, indeed, his best mode--has always been the confrontational. New Art City may be a sociological history, a reanimation of an art scene 50 years past, but its arguments muscle their way right on through to the world we read about in Perl's criticism for The New Republic. Just as at the birth of modernism Alois Riegl identified a Kunstwollen, or "will to form," here we find the Jedwollen--or Jed Perl's will to confront the orthodoxies of today's art establishment.

The book is freighted with confrontation. Beneath its breathy excitement, it presents what Perl's supporters might call an account of the decline and fall of the modernist empire--and what his detractors might well denounce as a conservative history of modernism. "Conservative" is admittedly a strange word to apply to Perl: While he cut his teeth at magazines such as Hilton Kramer's New Criterion (where I work), Perl is no political conservative. His conservatism--like that of some others on the political left--is an aesthetic one, concerned with the defense of modernism's constructive practices, and of argument and aesthetic discrimination as opposed to vacuous toleration and nihilism. Perl's war is against the art world's refusal to fight. From mid-century on, this passive-aggressive sentiment has crept in to become art's dominant disposition; in New Art City, Perl sets out to distill the combative qualities he sees as the essence of modernism.

The mid-century modernism discussed in this book is about challenge--and the book can itself be a challenge to its readers. Here one is presented with spiraling thematic chapters that describe the "living theater" of New York, where "everybody believed that to get together and talk was to participate in this play whose scenes and acts took place in real time and real space." Perl attempts "a searching description, one by one, of the dramatis personae, of the proliferation of actors, each with his or her particular sense of things," but in so doing he describes the 1950s in what seems like real time.

There are endless quotations, discursive asides, and milling hordes of personalities. In just a few pages of Chapter 6, "A Splendid Modesty," one encounters such cultural touchstones as Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky, Thomas Hess, Lionel Trilling (on Henry James's Princess Casamassima), Mary McCarthy, Peggy Guggenheim, Dwight Macdonald, Krishnamurti, and Black Mountain College--where "the creative act was an act that grew and flourished amid a flurry of crosscurrents and competing ideas and ideals.... Willem and Elaine de Kooning were there, and Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the sculptor Richard Lippold and Buckminster Fuller." At times New Art City becomes what Randall Jarrell said of Andre Malraux's Voices of Silence: "not art history, exactly, but a kind of free fantasia on themes from the history of art."

In Perl's wear-you-down, last-man-talking, overly-hyphenated-and-alliterated prose style, the artists of the 1950s do not just "talk": They "talk and talk." Rather than "many artists," we read about "many, many artists." It's not "Picasso, Miro, and Matisse," but rather "Picasso and Miro and Matisse." Nor is this authorial flexing incidental to Perl's book: It goes to the heart of his esteem for modern art at its most muscular, chaotic, and sporting. As a writer Perl inhabits the qualities of his subject matter.

Arthur C. Danto remarked, in the magazine Bookforum, that Perl writes of the mid-century as if he "himself had lived that history--instead of the history he actually lived, wishing it had never happened." But this remark is unfair. Perl's history of modernism is the one we continue to live through, certainly in today's New York, if often in its negation. It also explains how, to take one example, the mid-century sculptures of the tough-minded David Smith can still take on what Louis Mumford called an "audacious failure" of a space for art--designed by another tough-headed modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright--and produce something new. In one of Smith's constructivist Cubi flexing up through the heart of the Guggenheim Museum, one finds a triumph that is very much of our own time: Smith's development as a sculptor, from surrealist to constructivist, demonstrates quite precisely the push-pull of modernism that Perl describes.

In New Art City, Perl picks up the story of art where his 1988 book Paris Without End left off. The title of art-world capital was New York's spoil following World War II, and with it came modernism's contradictory impulses of construction and annihilation. This tension developed at first, in what Perl calls the "paint-happy 1950s," into the vernacular of Abstract Expressionism. Here constructive forces produced two great urban academies for modern art, first the Hans Hofmann School and, later, the New York Studio School, which remains a presence in the city. "For Hofmann," writes Perl, "push-and-pull was a dream of what life could be, a dream simultaneously rooted in the dynamic relationship between one form and another, and in the dynamic relationship between a person and an environment." Perl extends the tension of the picture plane to include the theater of urban life.

The exposition of the "dynamic relationships," or "dialectics," comes two by two. But often the distinctions turn into hagiographic haze, as, for example, when Perl says that "the closer you look at the artistic thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, the more overlapping dialectical dynamics you will see--whether the dialectic involved [in] the relationship between the artist and tradition, or between the artist and the world beyond the studio, or the push-and-pull of forms in a particular painting or sculpture." Sometimes "overlapping dialectical dynamics" can be better understood as simply "stuff happening."

Perl's story heats up when modernism enters the 1960s. Commercialism, along with art's entry into the popular consciousness, brings Sears, Roebuck and other corporations into the art business. (The actor Vincent Price, strange as it may sound, was Sears's chief curator.) Meanwhile the Museum of Modern Art becomes "a kind of central committee for the cause of modern art," overriding the artistic individualism of the previous decade. "The museum that had become famous by reporting on the making of history," Perl writes, "was coming dangerously close to faking history." Similarly, in the Zen-like work of the young Frank Stella, "academic discourse brought about a new development in painting." Red-bloodedness was fast becoming passe, and "by 1960 the art world was entering its own Age of Criticism." In response, modernism's abstract legacy formed the "foundation for a newly forceful representational art." Empirical painters like Fairfield Porter, and the artists of New York's silver age of modernism, turned from the muscular heights of abstract expressionism to revel in the smaller glories of the domestic and everyday.

Yet even by the early 1950s, against the backdrop of the constructive developments taking place, New York had already been making way for the pernicious reintroduction of what Perl calls the "to-hell-with-everything gestures" of Dada, a minor movement from the early part of the century. This included the rediscovery of its slippery figurehead, Marcel Duchamp. "In my estimation," Duchamp told Newsweek in 1952, "there's no hope for the future of art at least for the next 25 years." The words proved prophetic; Duchamp's future came even sooner than expected. Perl writes: "The story of Duchamp's apotheosis in the decade leading up to his death in 1968 cannot be understood except in the context of the new audience for art.... Younger artists embraced Duchamp and even, sometimes, got to know him, beginning with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, those two cheerfully self-absorbed nihilists, who were quickly followed by a generation of whatever-the-market-will-bear nihilists, the generation of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein."

Duchamp's orthodox nihilism has insinuated its way into the contemporary art world, not by engaging the arguments of modernism, but by avoiding the conversation and mocking its terms of debate. In doing so, Dada's legacy has--as Thomas Hess wrote of Duchamp himself in 1965--"consolidated a position that is practically invulnerable to serious criticism."

Perl's account of the mid-20th-century art world is, in spite of its stylistic excesses, fascinating and instructive. In much of contemporary art, the push-and-pull forces of modernism have long since pulled away from the artistic struggle. New Art City is here to make sure we remember the fight.

'Art Czar'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Writer's Block

Art Czar
By JAMES PANERO
April 29, 2006

a review of 'Art Czar' By Alice Goldfarb Marquis, MFA Publications, 321 pages, $35

The scene is an evening at Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in 1947. One of the guests is Clement Greenberg, art critic and champion of Abstract Expressionism, particularly of the artist Jackson Pollock, who is on the cusp of national fame. (Life magazine will come calling two years later.) The predominantly American-led movement is threatening to usurp Europe's longstanding domination of the art world, and as it happens a European Surrealist, the German Max Ernst, is also at Guggenheim's gathering. Apparently provoked by Greenberg's preaching on art (it didn't help that the critic had it in for the Surrealists), Ernst dumps an ashtray over Greenberg's head.

In "Art Czar," her bracing biography of Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis describes how "the critic leaped up to throttle Ernst." But a young Surrealist, Nicolas Calas, "took a roundhouse swing" and knocked Greenberg to the floor. His date for the evening, writes Ms. Marquis, "rushed to press two aspirins and water on Greenberg, who gratefully swallowed the pills. However, seconds later, he remembered his aspirin allergy and roared that he had been poisoned."

Ah, the good old days. For art criticism, it was an age of titans. Chief among them was Clement Greenberg, whose career fortunes were as volatile as his private life, soaring in the 1940s and 1950s and declining into near obscurity in the last decades of his life. Ms. Marquis traces this path with economy and precision, leaving intact the contradictions of Greenberg's life: son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, secularist, Marxist, anticommunist, advocate of the avant-garde, and conservative counterweight to politically fashionable trends. In doing so Ms. Marquis has produced a biography that reads more like a novel, one that will no doubt excite and unnerve many readers -- not least those who still feel passionately about Greenberg's legacy, true believers and apostates alike. As for the old arguments, the ones Greenberg himself felt so strongly about, those likely will remain unresolved.

It speaks to Greenberg's power as a critic that he continues to provoke a dozen years after his death -- in 1994, at age 85 -- and nearly a half-century after the publication of his most important collection of writings, "Art and Culture" (1961). That slim volume included trenchant essays on established modern painters such as Klee and Cézanne. Perhaps most notably, the book also reprinted a piece called "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg's defense of high culture from mass taste. The entire volume defined the sensibility -- highbrow, severe -- that informed Greenberg's views of Abstract Expressionism. The book also presaged his advocacy in the 1960s -- as the Pop and conceptual art he detested rose to prominence -- of the "post-painterly abstraction" of Color Field artists such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

A new element in the Greenberg story -- notably absent from Florence Rubenfeld's "Clement Greenberg: A Life" (1997), a chatty biography that referred to its subject as "Clem" -- is a collection of letters from Greenberg to Harold Lazarus, a friend since childhood. Ms. Marquis has read the letters closely and woven them into a rich, if chilling, narrative of Greenberg's intellectual development.

In Ms. Marquis's presentation, one element predominates: Greenberg's lifelong contempt for his Jewishness. Writing from a camp in the Pocono Mountains, where he was a counselor one summer during college, Greenberg complained of "squalling Jew bastards from the very best homes in Long Island." Of his Jewish editors at the influential journal Partisan Review (which first published "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"), he wrote: "[They] make me sick. Preserve culture from the Jews. Hitler's almost right."

Greenberg's torn emotions and conflicted feelings, Ms. Marquis contends, drove him away from serious personal relationships. He embraced instead booze, pills and a form of radical psychological therapy that, we're told, "insisted that the patients sleep with a different partner every night and sever all close ties."

Yet his restlessness also spurred Greenberg, Ms. Marquis says, to flee the Marxism of his youth for the liberating freedoms of modern art. Do we have a bruised psychology to thank for creating this great American art critic? Maybe, maybe not. Ms. Marquis can be at times too quick to identify Greenberg's personal demons as the catalysts for his intellectual achievements.

Then there is the issue of political determinism. Ms. Marquis too casually attributes the rise of Abstract Expressionism (and of Greenberg's own profile) to the machinations of Cold War propaganda. She is right that the freedoms inherent in modernism were trumpeted by American cultural campaigns targeting the Soviet Union, but Ms. Marquis seems to have fallen for the standard left-wing academic line that this fact somehow discredits the art itself.

What does come through in this biography is Greenberg's intellectual complexity. It is true that a kind of radical and even Marxist theory was part of his critical apparatus -- Greenberg felt abstraction to be the end of a historical dialectic in art -- but he was hardly revolutionary in his approach to critical judgment. "Championing the new art of his time," writes Ms. Marquis, "he exercised discrimination, following the best of traditional art critics." In short, aesthetic values mattered to Greenberg as much as form.

An artist could have no better fan, no worse enemy. Sometimes he was both: In Greenberg's 1945 obituary for the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in the Nation magazine, he said that "for a short period of time, Kandinsky was a great painter," but then wrote him off, claiming that Kandinsky "in the last analysis remains a provincial" and "the example of his work is dangerous to younger painters."

The power of critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature -- both did much to shape elite and popular taste in the mid-20th century -- is hard to imagine today. Contemporary art is self-parodic and insulated against Greenberg's style of criticism, and art-world success is now determined almost exclusively in the marketplace, not on the printed page.

And yet in the precincts where art -- and thinking about art -- still matters, Greenberg is "indispensable," as Ms. Marquis notes. In an age when much art criticism is "conducted in a self-referential mumble," she says, "his rhetoric remains a benchmark for persuasive prose in the field of aesthetics." Her biography is a benchmark as well, for discussions of the life and legacy of Clement Greenberg.

'Seeing it his way'

NATIONAL REVIEW
November 21, 2005

'Seeing it his way'
a review of 'Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954,' by Hilary Spurling (Knopf, 544 pp., $40)

by James Panero

`The creators of a new language," said Henri Matisse, "are always fifty years ahead of their time." Matisse insisted on seeing the world on his own terms--and that choice, which he followed dutifully and doggedly, put him at odds with just about everyone and everything in his native country: the theorists, the politicians, the establishment, the avant-garde, and especially his fellow artists.

Matisse was the 20th century's great colorist; this we know. But what we did not know, until now, is that the abundant joys in his work emerged out of an armored spirit. "What I want 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 volupt‚: For this France lined up against him.

These revelations are the take-away of the second volume of Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse, the sequel to her 1998 Unknown Matisse. Matisse once described his paintings as "the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice." Such cries were ridiculed by the Paris art world when they were not simply ignored; the solace Matisse did find, outside of his work, came from collectors and critics in Russia, England, and the United States. (Late in life he regretted never relocating to New York, and encouraged American artists to stay put rather than come to Paris. The eclipsing of Paris and the rise in the 1950s of the New York School, which would be so influenced by Matisse, proved it was good advice.)

Spurling writes that "the longstanding, at one time almost universal, dismissal of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century as essentially decorative and superficial is based, at any rate in part, on a simplistic response to the poise, clarity, and radiant colour of Matisse's work that fails to take account of the apprehensive and at times anguished emotional sensibility from which it sprang." We now have two thoroughly researched volumes as a corrective to these failures--by a British biographer who eschews both academic nonsense and art-world prejudice.

Matisse begins Volume II in 1909 as a beast--a fauve--in the eyes of the French establishment. "Harmony--the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other--was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries . . . [His work] violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons." By 1954, Matisse is dismissed by a younger generation for having become a "spent force," lumped "with the reactionaries" because he refused to embrace the theories of the times. "From Bloomsbury's point of view, the wrong people liked him." In Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Matisse "emerges as a fictive monster of insufferable vanity, banality, and pretension." At one moment he is held in contempt "on the grounds that anyone not lined up alongside the Cubists or the Futurists was against them." At another, French Communists are promising, once in power, to turn his Catholic chapel at Vence, for which he designed the stained-glass windows, into a dancehall. Battered from all sides, Matisse almost never caught a break.

One has come to expect the story of modern art to be solid left-wing territory, but the evidence does not always bear this out. As uncovered by Spurling through an unprecedented array of primary sources, the story of Matisse--one of our greatest modern masters--is less Marxism than Reaganism. Matisse suffered for his politics, specifically because he had none: "Art for him had no political dimension." Matisse was driven by a temperament that was deeply conservative, deferential toward the art of the past. From Byzantium to North Africa to Old Believer Russia, not to mention Poussin, Courbet, Renoir, and C‚zanne, Matisse cultivated the essential qualities of lost aesthetics. His colorist style, stitched together by pattern and ornament, became a personal art academy far more academic than the salon styles of Beaux-Arts.

Matisse did not carry on liaisons with his models; he painted them. He did not live la vie de BohŠme; he moved his family to the Paris suburbs. In Tangier, "none of the standard forms of addiction or debauch could hope to match the risk and lure of painting." Matisse's drive to see his vision realized was often interpreted as madness by his contemporaries, and became a cause of desperation among his wife and children--his wife Am‚lie left Matisse in old age, finally broken by a lifetime of abandonment for art's sake. But Matisse was not fundamentally radical. He was, if anything, radically fundamental.

Matisse thoroughly repudiated the "international avant-gardes," group artists who terrorized talent when not painting by numbers. Cubist thugs were known to spray-paint anti-Matisse graffiti throughout Paris. (It should be noted that Picasso himself stayed above this; he knew Matisse was on to something, and he used their friendship to discover, for himself, what it was.) Matisse chose to work and live "without a theory"-and, therefore, without a following.

The results left Matisse open to persecution, both political and aesthetic. In addition to his offence-at Vence--of aligning art with the Church, Matisse once said of the art wonders of the Soviet Union: "I'm ready to paint as many frescoes as you like, only remember, it's no good asking me to paint hammers and sickles all day long." At the turn of the century, when polite Parisian society was shunning this fauve, two Russian businessmen became active supporters of Matisse's vision. One of them, Sergei Shchukin, commissioned some of the master's best-known canvases, including "The Dance" and "Music." So well known was this collection in Russia that Lenin himself had it confiscated during the Revolution. The paintings were "designated a teaching aid to demonstrate the decadence and corruption of the West" before being locked away from public view entirely.

Regrettably, in her extraordinary coverage of Matisse's life, Spurling gives short shrift to the life around him, and at times distracts us from his work. The real life of Matisse is what you find in his painting and sculpture. Spurling labors both to defend and to overcome the image of Matisse as a proper gentleman, but he was, in the end, a perfectly proper gentleman--one who created astonishing paintings. Where Spurling endeavors to describe every model who walked into Matisse's life, and every liaison that wasn't, the book runs long--particularly in the early chapters on the artist Olga Meerson. The narrative here also does not benefit from Spurling's at times florid language: "he responded like a man coming back to life again, or a lover receiving the advances of an irresistibly seductive mistress."

It is the highlights of Matisse's production--the Barnes murals, the Vence chapel, and the paper cutouts--that keep us on our toes. Confined by illness, Matisse spent his final bed-ridden years cutting and pasting bits of colored paper. What was thought to be madness led to some of his greatest work. This is the history of Matisse we must know.

Spurling's curatorial work may be the most rewarding aspect of her biographical research: To comprehend a great painter, one really must see the great paintings. Spurling has obliged by creating an eye-opening exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which ran this summer. Titled "Matisse, The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His Textiles," the show paired Matisse's paintings with his collection of textiles--he was the son of weaver, born in a weavers' town in northern France. The results of this completely original show not only demonstrated the influence of textiles on Matisse's art, but suggested how the patterns and colors of textiles encouraged this artist to see the world his own way. Fifty years after his death, we are just learning to see it that way too.

'The music teacher'

NATIONAL REVIEW

'The music teacher'
by James Panero

a review of 'Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts' (Kultur DVD, $149.95)

May 23, 2005

HERE is a recipe for a sure-fire television flop: Pack 3,000 children into a concert hall and have them sit perfectly still. Check. Perform classical music for an hour. Check. Hire conductor with self-described "lurking didactic streak" to work up music lessons and narrate instruction. Check. Use terms--such as "bitonality," "intervals," "glissando," and "whole-tone scale"--that even most educated adults don't know. Check. Inform audience that "My baby does the Hanky Panky" was written in the Mixolydian mode. Check. Perform Haydn's Symphony No. 88, elicit applause, then exclaim, "Well, it was all wrong!" Check. Ask children to get out "paper and pencils, please" in order to identify the composer, nationality, date, style, and form of two pieces--then perform a Mozart sonata and Prokofiev's Classical Symphony back to back. Check. Insist that Rossini's William Tell Overture has nothing to do with The Lone Ranger but consists merely of "Cs and As and Fs and even F sharps and E flats." Check. Explain: "No matter what stories people tell you about what music means, forget them. Stories are not what music means. Music just is." Check. Now combine these ingredients into 53 hour-long concerts performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and broadcast them in prime-time and weekend timeslots on CBS: Guaranteed to fail.

Well, Max Bialystok: Meet Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts aired over 14 seasons from 1958 to 1972 and were broadcast in nearly 30 countries. The show became a smash hit with over 20 million viewers--beating out Bonanza in Europe--and the high-water mark of network-television programming. Parents famously signed their children up for the concert series at birth. Through television Bernstein fathered a generation of classical-music lovers. You might just be one of them.

Twenty-five hours of the Young People's Concerts have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to throw down this magazine and order your copies immediately. As a boon to home-schoolers and to parents concerned with the state of music education today, these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone--adults and children alike--will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein's convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: "Folk Music in the Concert Hall"). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky's Petrouchka (Episode 11: "Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky") and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: "A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich"); Aaron Copland guest conducts part of his Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: "What is American Music?").

The appearance of the episodes improves as the series progresses. The foggy black-and-white episodes from Carnegie Hall in 1958 give way to the result of the millions of dollars' worth of equipment commandeered for the Philharmonic Hall shoots of the early 1970s. But while the clarity of the video track depends on the technologies of the day, the remastered sound of the New York Philharmonic is of consistent high quality. For the run of the show the format of the episodes remained the same, with Bernstein and director/producer Roger Englander maintaining the effect of live performance by eschewing studio work and postproduction editing.

(The shows' simplicity was deceptive; each episode required over a month to write, with that second-oboe close-up and audience cut-away shot timed perfectly to the music.)

"If you get all that," Bernstein announced in one episode, "you're the future conductor of the New York Philharmonic." He meant it. The success of the Young People's Concerts depended not only on the receptivity of a certain television audience but also on Bernstein's commanding presence and his faith in innate musical intelligence. He appealed to adults as well as children and differentiated little between his writing for children and the work he had done for an earlier, purely grown-up show he created in the 1950s. The music critic Tim Page remarked that "one senses that Bernstein presumed a greater musical knowledge on the part of his audience of children than most professional critics in the twenty-first century would presume their grown-up readers to have."

The maturing sensibilities of Bernstein's daughter Jamie, his narrative foil, represent the one arc that contributed to the increasing complexity of his lessons. She was six when the episodes started and a teenager plucking a Beatles tune on her guitar by the end. (That's how we arrive at the answer to the question posed in Episode 20: "What is a Mode?" A mode, it turns out, is the basis of understanding Lennon/McCartney's "Norwegian Wood.")

As he revealed in such books as his 1959 Joy of Music, Bernstein became obsessed with musical pedagogy. He despised what Virgil Thompson once called the "music-appreciation racket," and warned of the "music-appreciation appreciation" racket. He worried that music--"with its concentration of shapes, lines, and sonorous intensities"--might be fundamentally unexplainable. He said intelligent commentary on music was rare, "even among first-class writers": "The Huxleys and the Manns of this world are few and far between." To this we might add the Bernsteins of the world.

Of course Bernstein's lurking didactic streak hit the wrong note more than once. His urge to educate saw him through six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in which he eagerly grafted a culturally relativistic theory of music onto Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind--regrettable, especially since Bernstein gave up writing his Young People's Concerts to prepare them.

Lenny also famously hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party in 1970 that became the talk of the town and the subject of Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic. The parallels between the final episode collected on these DVDs, "Fidelio: A Celebration of Life," and Bernstein's Panther fundraiser are all too clear: In the plot of Beethoven's opera, Leonore, Florestan's wife, disguises herself as a man named Fidelio, and attempts to rescue Florestan from a Spanish prison in which he is being wrongly held for political reasons. The echoes in Fidelio of Bernstein's own contortions to raise bail money for Dhoruba Bin Wahad and the Panther 21 are uncanny.

Bernstein could teach Beethoven, but could not learn from Beethoven. Only Bernstein knows for sure whether this lurking didactic streak prevented him from composing his own great symphony and leaving a more lasting musical legacy. His most famous composition remains the score for West Side Story, a work of popular theater written by a young man.

As conductor, composer, pianist, and educator, Bernstein struggled to be all things. A clue to this conflict comes in the form of Bernstein's empathetic episode--the most personal of the series--on Gustav Mahler. A champion of Mahler's rich orchestral work, as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Bernstein brought Mahler back to international prominence after Nazism and the atonalities of 20th-century music had pushed the Romantic (and Jewish-born) composer into obscurity: "Some people say that Mahler's own music sounds too much like all the composers he used to conduct. Naturally, I don't agree ... Still, I admit it's a problem to be both a conductor and a composer. There never seems to be enough time and enough energy to be both things. I ought to know. Because I have the same problem myself. They are both one fellow called Mahler, or Bernstein. He was a double man in every single part of his musical life."

In writing television for children, Bernstein became whole, producing episodes even after he had stepped down as director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969. In the end he composed something more lasting than a symphony. According to Glenn Gould, "in the best and strictest sense of the phrase, [Bernstein had] 'done a great deal of good.'"

The resonance of the Young People's Concerts can be summed up in a coda that took place in Denver in 1960: A boy of four or five bounded over to Bernstein in a park and hit him. When he asked the boy why he did it, the child responded: "You didn't say good night to me! ... You were talking about Mahler!"

"Who is Gustav Mahler?," broadcast on February 7 that year, had run over.

'Dutch boy paints'

NATIONAL REVIEW
February 28, 2005

'Dutch boy paints'
a review of 'De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan' (Knopf, 752 pp., $35)

by James Panero

The American painter Willem de Kooning escaped Marx only to be done in by Freud. De Kooning enjoyed little time--perhaps only a few years in the late 1940s--between the maturation of a personal style, free of Depression-era politics ("We divorced politics from our art, although we were political," he once said), and his leveling by drink and fame. "I saw Jackson in his grave," he proclaimed at Jackson Pollock's funeral. "And he's dead. It's over. I'm number one." That was in 1956. He was already in decline.

It is hard to feel sorry for de Kooning. Add up the mistresses, abortions, and outbursts, and "Bill" comes off as The Great Cad. This is perhaps the lasting value of a new biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, art critics for New York magazine and Newsweek, respectively, who chronicle de Kooning's dalliances in excessive detail. For money and women, de Kooning immigrated from Holland to New York stowed away in a ship's boiler room; and he never seemed to care for much more. Once he had acquired both, in the 1960s, his art lost its snap of urgency. De Kooning was a product of his age, and he inhabited his time and place with little apparent self-awareness. Critics like Harold Rosenberg praised him for the same reasons that drove him to excess. De Kooning was hailed as an id with a paintbrush; for a few moments this id was the darling of the art world, for which fame he is now best remembered, more than for his achievements on canvas.

But the life of de Kooning now seems somehow less interesting than the life around de Kooning, so thoroughly documented by Stevens and Swan: poverty in Rotterdam, his tyrannical mother, the Dutch academies, modernism in '40s New York; the art of Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham (early influences); and the selling of American art in the 1950s and 1960s.

De Kooning's childhood reads as though it were tailor-made for movies; Stevens and Swan write with a cinematic eye, if not a critical one. Painting for de Kooning began not as a means of expression but as an escape from it. The art world in Holland provided him with academic discipline and a retreat from home life. The authors quote appropriately one of T. S. Eliot's comments about poetry, one that could apply equally to de Kooning's first encounters with art: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

De Kooning took refuge in the labors of art. He found early work in Dutch department stores and in commercial design. The style then in vogue was Nieuwe Kunst-the Dutch version of Art Nouveau. One of the revelations of this biography is how the sensuous surfaces of Art Nouveau, not to mention its commercial applications and faith in "art for art's sake," fundamentally affected de Kooning's art throughout his career. It saved him from the political pitfalls of the 1930s, certainly. (The like-minded Gorky put it best: "Proletariat art is poor art for poor people.") Art Nouveau also distanced de Kooning from the more spiritual painters of the New York School--Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, for example, who drew on the Symbolist traditions of 19th-century art. While they looked for depth in abstraction, de Kooning attacked his surfaces, obsessively.

"His unashamed celebration of painterly richness," write Stevens and Swan, "especially the whipped-up surfaces and strange pastel tonalities in his art, may stem partly from the hothouse cultivations of the time." Undoubtedly Art Nouveau led to Painting (1948), de Kooning's great early achievement, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This painting's ominous squiggles marching out of the picture plane "confounded the systematic, rational construction of space," writes one art historian, in a way that went beyond Cubism. Painting was de Kooning's breakthrough, and an appropriately titled one.

By mid-century, de Kooning had turned not only to the figure but also to autobiography; specifically, to his obsession with sex. He combined the techniques developed in Painting with the diabolical image of a woman--some say of his wife Elaine. Woman I (1950-1952), and the whole series of Women paintings from the period, became de Kooning's signature work. Woman I, alone, took two years to complete.

As novel as these paintings might have been-some critics believe they were less persuasive than Painting--indulgence was beginning to spoil de Kooning's freshness. "Woman I still appears eternally out of place," write Stevens and Swan, "homeless among the masterpieces at the Museum of Modern Art. Woman I'is personally, socially, culturally, and artistically fraught with uncertainty." Harold Rosenberg, a natural salesman who had developed such icons as "Smokey the Bear" for the Advertising Council, turned de Kooning's obsession over the Women paintings into art-world mythology. If "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event," as Rosenberg famously pronounced, then de Kooning was producing quite a show.

It was bad advice. Expressionism for its own sake, which ran counter to Eliot's admonition for "an escape from emotion," soon overtook de Kooning's art and life to the point of farce. Stevens and Swan write that he "appeared to be a textbook case for Freudian analysis, so fashionable at the time. Not only was he often blocked and subject to anxiety attacks, but all the world seemed to know that he had titanic problems with his mother." While Elaine stood by, de Kooning ran through one young woman after another; when he was not sleeping around, he was often drunk and abusive. He was art's number one for a short time, but he fast became the end of something and not the beginning: the end of sexed-up abstraction, the end of expressionism, the end of the New York School, the end of the id. The art world slowly turned against him. De Kooning devised his dream house and made plans to move to The Springs--Pollock's old town near the Hamptons--which he eventually did.

De Kooning outlasted almost everyone, dying in his studio on March 19, 1997, after more than a decade of "Alzheimer's-like dementia," during which he had continued to paint with the aid of assistants (not to mention Elaine, his dealers, and his lawyer). As he slowly cleared his late canvases of expression, he returned to where he had started--to Art Nouveau. But his achievements after the mid-1950s were minor. Reflecting on Gorky, Kline, Pollock, Rothko, and the other painters of his generation who died in their prime, one wonders whether de Kooning's reputation would have better survived had he not. My guess is no. As he became Abstract Expressionism's Living Master, and a profitable one producing salon work, he was able to cement a reputation he never fully deserved.

Stevens and Swan make few distinctions between good and bad de Kooning. In compiling this document of facts, the writers have abdicated to others their responsibilities as critics, and the book suffers for it. Their writing wisely avoids the jargon of theory, but too often lapses into such groaners as the following: "The unsettling power of the pictures--and their originality--lay in their way of mimicking the sexual act itself. It almost seemed as if the artist were screwing the women rather than painting them."

What finally makes the book worthwhile is the mass of detail the authors have dug up about de Kooning's work, especially concerning his "cuisine of art." His selection of paint, and his "novel use of sunflower oil, water, and benzene," distinguished de Kooning as a painter's painter. His talent was not for life but for canvas; if only he could have better distinguished between the two, he might have truly become an "American Master."

'Palestinian Authority

THE CLAREMONT REVIEW

Winter 2004

Palestinian Authority

by James Panero

A review of 'Humanism and Democratic Criticism,' by Edward W. Said

In November 1993, the New York Times Magazine featured a remarkably unprescient essay by Edward Said titled "The Phony Islamic Threat." He charged the media, government bureaucrats, and Middle East experts with conjuring an Islamic bogeyman to demonize at home and abroad. Coming only a few months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, the piece dismissed all talk of an Islamist threat as a reflection of American prejudice and insecurity. Then, in the 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airlines," as inventions of racist Westerners.

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said's theories on the interaction of Islam and the West have become dominant—one might say hegemonic—in the academy. He refashioned postmodernism into something called postcolonialism. Armed with the nebulous "deconstruction" theory of Michel Foucault, he seized a narrow canon of literature and enlisted it in the service of political advocacy; in his case, on the Palestinians' behalf. For over two decades he identified with this group, championing its cause at every turn, flacking it in every paper, ceaselessly hewing to Yasser Arafat's line, even serving as a Palestinian governor-in-exile in New York.

Before cancer took his life in September 2003, the University Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University fired some parting shots; Humanism and Democratic Criticism is one of them. For the most part, it is not an enjoyable read. The volume recasts four l