Jeff Koons Retrospective, Part 2

By Charles Kessler

This is my second post about the Jeff Koons retrospective (on view at the Whitney Museum of Art until October 19th). The first post is here. 

Installation View: Jeff Koons, A Retrospective, Whitney Museum.
(Click to enlarge)

Koons is one of those artists I hate to love, but when I made a concerted effort to ignore the fact that he's so rich and famous, and kind of a jerk, and I approached the show as if seeing the art for the first time, his work nearly blew my mind! It's bold, inventive, gutsy, impeccably crafted, and sometimes it's even profound. Is his art worth tens of millions? Of course not – but that's a different issue having to do with conspicuous consumption, not art. In a deeply visceral way, Koons captures a crass and vulgar part of our culture. As Peter Scheldahl wrote in the New Yorker, "if you don't like that, take it up with the world."

Of course I don't like everything Koons made – if I did it would mean he wasn't taking enough risks. For one thing, I don't think his paintings are very good. His early paintings are washed out color-wise (strange in light of their Pop imagery); and his later paintings have too much crammed into them, as if he's trying to muscle them into greatness. His Made in Heaven series of erotic paintings may be interesting conceptually, but they're pretty boring as paintings. And even his best paintings, the ones that aren't cluttered (like Loopy, 1999, below), don't go beyond basic 1960s Rosenquist-type Pop Art.

 Jeff Koons, Loopy, 1999, oil on canvas, 108 × 79 1⁄4 inches (Bill Bell Collection).

I have fond memories of seeing and being amazed by Koons's early work in the East Village at the International with Monument Gallery. It was completely different from the Neo-Expressionist and graffiti-oriented work so popular at the time. And looking back, many of the innovations and themes Koons was to deal with in the future were there: kitsch, sex, bright colors, mirror reflections, a variety of textures, inflatable sculpture, weight vs. weightlessness, and density vs. hollowness. 

Left: Jeff Koons, Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny), 1979, vinyl and mirrors, 32 × 25 × 19 inches (The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica © Jeff Koons); right: Sponge Shelf, 1978, sponges and mirrors (collection of the artist).

But even though Scott Rothkopf, the curator of the retrospective, has mounted a well-organized and coherent installation, and was sensitive enough to install this intimately scaled work in smaller rooms, it just can't hold up to the vast, crowded space of the Whitney.

To my surprise, after three visits to the show, I ended up liking Koons's later work the most – unlike practically everyone else writing about it. His later sculptures are simpler and more straightforward than his paintings, and there's a perverse intensity about them I find at once compelling and disturbing. His big flashy ones, the ones he's most famous for (like Balloon Venus below) are accessible, playful and monumental, like Claus Oldenberg's public sculptures – and they work great in this context. 

Left: Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000 BCE - 25,000 BCE, 4.25 inches high, oolitic limestone tinted with red ochre (Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria); right: Jeff Koons, Balloon Venus (Orange), 2008–2012, mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 102 x 48 x 50 inches.

Koons sculptures have several layers of meaning. Balloon Venus, for example, makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous prehistoric sculpture the Venus of Willendorf; and the differences highlight the contemporariness of the Koons sculpture. The Venus of Willendorf is a personal figurine meant to be held. It's a modest 4 ¼ inches high, and it's made of gritty stone. Balloon Venus is showy and public, 8 ½ feet tall and made of smooth stainless steel with a high-tech mirror coating. The Koons is all glitz. It's experienced as light-weight and empty (literally and figuratively) like our pop culture; whereas the Venus of Willendorf  is stone-age solid.

Koons is fanatical about getting the trompe-l'œil realism exactly right. He even worked with a balloon designer (who knew there was such a thing?) to create the models for his balloon sculptures, and he insisted on making each model from a single balloon so the finished sculpture would have a sense of continuous air pressure throughout the piece. Even the rendering of textures, for example what looks like inflated plastic in Hulk (below), is miraculously convincing. (BTW, it's a real functioning organ, not a bronze replica.)

Close-up detail of Jeff Koons, Hulk (Organ), 2004-2014, polychromed bronze and mixed media, edition of three (Broad Art Foundation).

A somewhat earlier sculpture, Aqualung, 1985, is especially impressive even though it's smaller than the work Koons is famous for. It is made up of 30 separate molds, and although they're all bronze, there's a remarkable variety of textures – everything from the rough surface of inflated canvas, to hard and shiny metal, to the texture of string and webbing.

Jeff Koons, installation view, Aqualung, 1985, bronze, 27 x 17½ x 17½ inches (edition of 3 plus AP). 

To his credit, Aqualung goes beyond showy facility; it's interesting from all angles, there's a complex variety of positive and negative spaces, and there is a unique play between weight and weightlessness – being bronze, it's permanently inflated, but, like Life Boat, 1985 (below) you would sink if you tried to use it. 

Jeff Koons, Life Boat, 1985, bronze, 12 x 80 x 60 inches (edition of 3 plus AP).

The flower sculptures and reliefs in this show are pretty opulent, but my memory of them is that they were much shinier in the 1991 Made in Heaven exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Soho. And because they were so gleamingly glossy, the Sonnabend flowers were as lurid and shocking as the sexually explicit paintings in that show. I thought that was brilliant.

Detail view of Jeff Koons, Wall Relief with Bird, 1991, polychromed wood, 72 x 50 x 27 inches, edition of three.

Unfortunately the ones in this retrospective, while lavish (perhaps excessively so – and that's a good thing!), don't have the glitzy vulgarity of the Sonnabend ones. I checked with one of the Whitney curators – sorry, I forgot to get her name – who looked it up and told me the flowers in the retrospective weren't in the Sonnabend show, and the Sonnabend flowers were made of glazed porcelain, while these are painted wood. Too bad. 

The same goes for his 1988 Banality sculptures. The ones carved from wood are warmer and not as edgy or as off-putting as the shiny porcelain ones. The warmth of wood is too friendly, too like the original tchotchkes they're modeled after. 

Installation view, Jeff Koons, Banality Series.  Pink Panther, 1988, on the far right, is glazed porcelain; and String of Puppies, 1988, second in from the right, is painted wood.

They are all, however, very weird – disconcertingly so, even if (or because) they're outwardly playful. Here are some examples:

Koons's blissed-out goofus of a Saint John the Baptist holding a pig that looks brighter and more alert than he, is pretty zany – although Koons's model, the 500-year-old painting by Leonardo with its eerie and epicene Saint John making an ambiguous gesture, is ultimately even more bizarre and unsettling. (Perhaps I'm over-interpreting, but I wonder if Saint John embracing a pig is a comment on Christianity nullifying kosher laws.)

Left: Jeff Koons, Saint John the Baptist, 1988, porcelain, 58 ½ x 30 x 24 ½ inches (the Sonnabend Collection); right: Leonardo da Vinci, Saint John the Baptist, 1513-16, oil on wood (Musée du Louvre in Paris, France).

Ushering in Banality, 1988, is ludicrous enough, but it gets even weirder when you put it together with this quote from Koons: “I’ve always thought of myself as the young boy in the back pushing the pig.”

Jeff Koons, Ushering in Banality, 1988, polychromed wood, 38 x 62 x 30 inches (edition of 3 plus AP); and detail from the back. 

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, is the most acclaimed sculpture in his Banality series, and it's loved by most critics, even Peter Plagens who otherwise hated the show.

The work derives from a famous publicity photo of Michael Jackson with Bubbles, his beloved pet monkey.

Left: publicity photo of Michael Jackson with his pet monkey; right: Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain, 42 x 70 ½ x 32 ½ inches (private collection).

Most critics believe the sculpture is about kitsch, fame and glitz, but I have a somewhat different interpretation. I believe it's about a poignant relationship.

In the photo and sculpture the poses are similar, and Michael Jackson and his pet monkey are wearing matching marching-band uniforms. Of more interest are the differences between the photo and sculpture.

In the Koons sculpture, the sleeves of the monkey's uniform hide its fur, and the foot of the monkey has no fur and looks so human it could easily be mistaken for one of Michael Jackson's hands. All of which make Bubbles seem more human-like. (Koons, remember, also humanized the pig in Saint John the Baptist, however unflattering to the saint, so there is some precedent.) And Bubbles is keenly looking out at the viewer, unlike the introspective and rather sad Michael Jackson.

Two views of Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain, 42 x 70 ½ x 32 ½ inches (private collection).

Furthermore, they're not sitting on grass, as in the photo, but on a shiny white and gold pedestal festooned with gilded flowers. In contrast to these rather regal surroundings is a lonely and isolated superstar gently holding his beloved Bubbles in his lap. I really do find the sculpture touching and heartbreaking.

And finally, there's Play-Doh, 1994-2014, a sculpture I love, and which Roberta Smith referred to as "a new, almost certain masterpiece.”

Installation view, Jeff Koons, Play-Doh, 1994-2014, polychromed aluminum, edition of five. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times.)

It might be the newest work in the show, but because of Koons's perfectionism, it took 20 years to fabricate the 27 interlocking individual pieces of painted aluminum.

Play-Doh was inspired by a mound of Play-Doh that Koons's son proudly showed him. The colors are thrilling – bright but semi-gloss and tactile, unlike his gleaming earlier work. And, like Ken Price’s Specimen Rocks, the crevices and broken edges are the same color as the surface, so it feels as if the color goes all the way through. And the work has a sense of weight and density, unlike most other colored sculptures which feel light and hollow (Koons's Balloon sculptures being an extreme example).

Detail close-up, Jeff Koons, Play-Doh, 1994-2014, polychromed aluminum.

BTW, I could swear there’s a dog image here – the yellow shape on top is his head and ear; the blue circle, an eye; and the blue curve, his nose. Koons made dogs in the past, as can be seen below, so this wouldn't be unusual.

Left: Jeff Koons, Split-Rocker, 2014, armature with about 50,000 live flowering plants, 37' tall (it was on view in Rockefeller Center until September 12th); right, detail of the top of Play-Doh. 

Half of Bushwick

By Charles Kessler

Sunday I went to 11 galleries, 17 exhibitions, 2 restaurants and a performance – and that's only about half of what Bushwick has to offer now. And most of the art was excellent. Here, chronologically, without comment, is what I saw and did:

David Brody and Cindy Tower at Valentine Gallery, 464 Seneca Avenue, until October 5th. 

Liz Ainslie at Valentine Gallery, 464 Seneca Avenue, until October 5th.

And there are paintings by Cathy Diamond in the Valentine Gallery gift shop (no photo).

Colin Thomson at Outlet, 253 Wilson Avenue, until October 5th.

Matthew Deleget at Outlet, 253 Wilson Avenue, until October 5th.

L A Burrito, 67 Wilson Avenue (at Jefferson) – good guacamole and chips.

Vilaykorn Sayaphet at English Kills, 114 Forrest Street.

Daniel Leyva, video installation at Interstate, 66 Knickerbocker Avenue, until October 12th.

Ragnar Kjartansson and The National, A Lot of Sorrow at Luhring Augustine, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue,
 until December 21st. 

Roberta Smith wrote an excellent review about this six-hour video (above) of a six-hour concert in which the same song was played over and over. I saw it at about the fourth hour, and it was intense.

The new Life on Mars Project Gallery space, 56 Bogart, includes paintings by Peter Acheson, Brenda Goodman, Farrell Brickhouse, Karen Schwartz and John Walker, until September 28th.

Todd Bienvenu, Backseat, 2013, oil on canvas, 47 x 37 ½ inches at Life on Mars Gallery, 56 Bogart, until September 28th.

Naomi Safran-Hon, installation view, at the Slag Gallery, 56 Bogart, until October 5th.

Liz Jaff installation at Robert Henry Gallery, 56 Bogart, until October 12th. 

Jason Tomme, an enlarged close-up detail of Potted Plants: Vultures, 2014, at THEODORE:Art, 56 Bogart,
until October 19th.

Brian Gaman, installation view at ArtHelix, 299 Meserole Street, until October 19th.

Kate Elliot, one of three exhibitions at Storefront Ten Eyck, 324 Ten Eyck Street, until October 19th.

Shrimp and okra at Falansai Vietnamese restaurant, 112 Harrison Place.

The chief was kind enough to let me try some beet wrapped spring rolls he's been experimenting with. They were delicious – as was the shrimp and okra above.

Any Size Mirror is a Dictator, "a processual dance-opera" created by Panoply Performance Laboratory and DREARYSOMEBODY at MomentaArt, 56 Bogart. 

Any Size Mirror is a Dictator, "a processual dance-opera" created by Panoply Performance Laboratory and DREARYSOMEBODY at MomentaArt, 56 Bogart. 

Other performances by this group will take place Thursdays through Sundays from 7-9 pm, until October 19th.

Corny end-of-the-day photo. 

Jersey City Last Sunday

By Charles Kessler

Multiple exhibitions opened Sunday in two Jersey City venues: MANA Contemporary and Drawing Rooms.

MANA is by far the largest art storage facility in the metropolitan area, and it's also what can only be described as a gigantic art mall. On their million+ square-foot site they have a framer, a printer (Gary Lichtenstein Editions), a full-service foundry, more than 100 art studios, a dance studio (Karole Armitage is there now), the Richard Meier Model Museum, and thousands of square feet of exhibition space.

But there's something creepy about the place.

Hallway for the art studios at MANA.

It's all a little too much and too slick for my comfort, and they're secretive and impulsive with what seems like their unlimited resources. They are buying huge warehouses all around them and building many enormous, admittedly beautiful, exhibition spaces – all in a very short time.

But with all their money, and all their resources, in the past I've found their exhibitions to be thin and lackluster, and the artists that rented their studios (at least the ones I was able to see) were either amateurish on the one hand, or too-polished commercial on the other.

NOT THIS TIME!

The Pellizzi Family Collections of Francesco Clemente and Chuck Connelly paintings had some of the best work of these artists, and from their best period – the early eighties.

Installation view, Francesco Clemente; on the right: Two Painters, 1980, gouache on 9 sheets of pondicherry paper joined with handwoven cotton strips, 67 3/4 x 95 1/2 inches.

Chuck Connelly's work has not been exhibited much lately, and it looked spectacular in this show – gutsy, mysterious subjects, and rich gorgeous color and brushwork.

Installation view, Chuck Connelly; on the left: Roller Coaster Car, 1984, oil on canvas, 90 1/2 x 108 1/4 inches.

Connelly became known in the early eighties along with Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but he never achieved the same acclaim as those two. I never understood why. I know, I know – he had a problem with alcoholism, and he was a difficult personality, but so was Basquiat, and Connelly's work is as least as good. A major Chuck Connelly retrospective would be invaluable.

Also, the work in MANA's artists' studios was terrific this visit. I don't have time to write about the art (I'm working on part 2 of my Koons post), but here are my top picks:

Catherine Haggarty – studio 590.

Geraldine Neuwirth – studio 570.

Ernestine Ruben - studio 468.

Rick Klauber - studio 432.

I wasn't able to take a good photograph of Danielle Frankenthal's work (who, I discovered, like me, is a former student and admirer of fellow LBAB writer, Carl Belz), so I took this one from her website.

Danielle Frankenthal – studio 504.

After MANA, I went to Downtown Jersey City to see Drawing Off the Wall, a series of installations expertly curated by Anne Trauben, on view at Drawing Rooms (until October 26th). The space is a former convent, and each of the small bedrooms has been converted to a gallery ideally suited to drawings and, as in this case, installations.

Again I don't have time to discuss the work, and only a few of the photographs I took are adequate, but all nine artists (Anne Q. McKeown, Anne Trauben, Maggie Ens, Jeanne Tremel, Suzan Shutan, Ellie Murphy, Nancy Baker, Kate Dodd and Larry Dell  – a refreshing eight of the nine are woman) did lively, playful and inventive installations.

Kate Dodd

Maggie Ens

Ellie Murphy

Jeanne Tremel

This is just a taste – go see the show!

Richard Jacobs: In the Moment

Richard Jacobs, Summit, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

By Carl Belz

Author's note: I've followed Richard Jacobs' s painting since the late 1980s when he established a studio in Waltham MA and I was able to include his work in an exhibition at the Rose Art Museum. The following essay was written for the catalog of his forthcoming exhibition at the Jack Geary Gallery (185 Varick Street, NYC), which opens on September 12 and continues through October 11. The full catalog is available online here. 

As a teenager, after days spent working as a summer guide at Lost River in Lincoln, New Hampshire, I used to jump from a waterfall into the river to cool off. I’d swim behind the waterfall and tread around in a small cave behind the raging downpour. The moments in that cave were amazing sensory experiences that have stayed with me. The water thundered down in deafening torrential sheets, yet it sometimes seemed to stop, as if you could glimpse the absolute present. There was mist all around, which created prisms in the sunlight, and sometimes it appeared as though the water might even be rising. The boulders, trees and sky of the landscape were mostly fuzzy in the background, but sometimes, for an instant, a section of water opened and they became as clear as the day. Deep space shot forward, became momentarily framed, and was then just as quickly lost. Everything was fast and slow at the same time, here and gone, past and present and future were interchangeable.

Richard Jacobs, Putney, Vermont, May 2014 

1.

Richard Jacobs and his generational colleagues were mostly too young to have seen "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," curator Henry Geldzahler’s canonical exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they’ve likely seen “Painters Painting,” the 1973 documentary classic it inspired, in which director Emile de Antonio interviews many of the artists in the exhibition, notable among them Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. If so, I can imagine the film seeming to them what it has come to seem to me, which is a glimpse of a world on the far side of a cultural divide, a world that for better and worse at times feels inaccessibly distanced by the interventions of the 1970s. And foremost among those I’d cite Postminimalism,* the ground-zero cultural critique that targeted what had gone before in the hope of shaping what was to come, was in large measure identified with the Women’s Movement, and, not least, doomed as blatantly sexist Geldzahler’s 40-member pantheon that had space for only one woman.

Elsewhere in the seventies, we got the one-size-fits-all commonplace of pluralism instead of the panoply of styles we became accustomed to in the sixties, and with it we also got the social history of art instead of formalism, and T. J. Clark instead of Clement Greenberg. In the process, politics, deconstruction and theory supplanted esthetics, connoisseurship and criticism, the reader replaced the writer, and meaning in turn became a function of context rather than individual talent, whose appropriated voice was regularly muffled by quotation marks. Beauty became suspect for its link to commodification, punk instead came to signify sincerity, and objects yielded to ideas via market-resistant conceptual art, while performances and installations both flourished. Realist art experienced a renascence with a boost from photography, yet the death of painting was widely reported. And irony spread everywhere, as postmodernism leveled the playing field and muscled modernism to the margins of the cultural arena it had dominated since the middle of the 1940s. The shifts echoed widely, the divide remains.

2.

Richard Jacobs’ paintings acknowledge the far side of the divide without fretting about its distance, and they position themselves firmly in the present while doing so. Like much current abstraction, the paintings are visibly intelligent and informed, they know the past whence they came, along with the wide range of techniques that enabled their construction. They know, for instance, how paint can be brushed on thick or thin, troweled in wet-on-wet or textured into layers, poured or dripped or stained, even sprayed or feathered into misty veils, their techniques together comprising a brimming arsenal of options developed in response to their maker’s evolving vision and ever-focusing yet intuitive urge to meaning.

Storm, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Their abstractness is likewise purposeful in being stripped of narrative and figuration with the aim of having them stand on their own, not in the name of any theoretical goal of purity--a recurrent misconception about modernist abstraction--but as an affirmation of their autonomy, which is synonymous with their modern condition, as it is with ours as well. Which is in turn to say their abstractness is a matter not of stylistic tropes or nostalgic appropriations, both common in our time, but a way of being in the world--as the best abstraction, past and present, has always been.

Loon Lake, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.

In referring to the paintings’ abstractness, I mean to distinguish them from nature, whose look they resolutely avoid imaging but whose animus they regularly and respectfully evoke – its visual richness and complexity, for instance, but also the diversity of its shapes and lines and spaces and colors, its ubiquitous and relentless presence, its resilience, its rhythms, its seemingly infinite ability to inspire awe and wonder, its magic.

Landscape, Figure, Portrait, Skull, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches

And each evocation is in turn attended by a capacious range of feeling unguarded by irony or quotes or conceptual gambits, feeling tendered instead with candor and generosity. Wholly present to us, the pictures in turn offer face-to-face, give-and-take encounters unencumbered by postmodern artifice, encounters absorbing us, and thereby affording us, an exhilarating glimpse of freedom from the confines of separateness that in modern experience routinely distance us from ourselves as well as from one another--and a glimpse, too, of how the divide may be narrowed.

Odalisque, 2002-2014, oil, acrylic and dye on silkscreen, 36 x 28 inches.

The pictures comprising the current exhibition were completed during the past two or three years, but it’s hard to tell when they were begun or in what sequence they became resolved. Jacobs typically works on many pictures at the same time and sometimes allows a decade or more to elapse between starting and finishing them. Process-based, he is a patient painter, willing to allow each picture to develop and assert its character independent of any overarching formal or conceptual program. He edits deliberately, often by masking and repainting existing shapes and areas, but however extensively they are revised or amended, the paintings throughout remain open with breathing light and color, eliciting the impression that they’re animated as much from within as they’re guided from without.

Soul Delay, 1997-2013, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 52 x 48 inches.

For the Anniversary of My Death, Homage to WS Merwin, 2005-2014, oil and dye on paper, 24 x 18 inches.

Their patient gestation, moreover, can be felt in the measured pace with which they yield their content. Measured, for instance, by the number and diversity of their parts and the formal complexity of their assembly. These are not the one-shot paintings of Abstract Expressionism in the fifties, the gestural paintings that appeared to have been accomplished in a single creative assault;; nor do they reflect the sixties version of the one-shot theme, the riveting Color Field arcs and bands meant to be knowable in the instant of our encountering them. Instead, the Jacobs paintings ask to be experienced slowly, allowing each shape and space and color and mark to be absorbed with the same patience that informed the creation and placement of that pictorial unit in the first place. In thus responding to them, we’re in turn able to empathize with and know them deeply in the way they know themselves, an epiphanous experience in which time seems to pause while past and future become interchangeable in an ongoing present, and their autonomy becomes mutual, theirs and ours alike.

3.

I got to know Richard Jacobs in the late 1980s after he’d completed his MFA at Yale and set up a studio in Waltham, Massachusetts, home to Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum where I was at that time the director. In 1989 I included his work in the group exhibition of area artists we annually mounted--which led to the acquisition of a picture for the Rose permanent collection--and I continued to follow his early development via the regular solo exhibitions he enjoyed at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston through the first half of the 1990s. After moving to Putney, Vermont, he was honored with an important show at The Cooper Union that was curated by Dore Ashton in 1997, but we were by then on separate paths and didn’t reconnect until the early 2010s, when he brought recent pictures for me to see while he was visiting family in nearby Lincoln, New Hampshire.

As if time had stopped, I was as flattened by them as I’d been with each new exhibition I saw back in the nineties, and I was in turn impressed to learn he hadn’t shown his work at all for over a decade following a firm but risky decision to put that part of his career on hold while focusing his energy on domestic priorities and the studio--the studio where, from the evidence of the pictures before me, the decision paid off where it artistically mattered most, which was by enabling him to bring them to full maturity. In response to their depth and character, I want first to suggest they make the margins of today’s cultural arena--where they can metaphorically be said to have been made--look like abundantly fertile territory for nurturing quality art, maybe more fertile, even, than the spotlighted center of the arena that is so regularly celebrated by our entertainment-driven media. And I will in addition say they demonstrate convincingly how such an art effectively spans any real or imaginary divide between the present and the past, while at the same time extending vital traditions of that past unequivocally into the here and now.

Malachite, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on silkscreen, 22 x 18 inches.

Wind, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on silkscreen, 48 x 72 inches.

Epiphany, 2014, oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.

_____________________________________________________________________________
*For postminimalism, see Susan Stoops et al, “More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s,” Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, April 21-June 30, 1996.

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.