Left Bank Art Blog

The Other Side

2012-01-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

By Charles Kessler

I've been paying attention to the backs of sculptures since my “Day at the Met” post last month. I’m especially fascinated with the backs that are beautifully finished even though the work was intended to be seen from the front, or primarily from the front — work made for niches, alcoves, or shelves, or made to be placed against a wall.

I suspect what might be going on is the artist was dealing with objects believed to be magical or holy or have some other power beyond ordinary objects. As a result, special care must be taken in the making (and possession) of them. Of course all art is experienced as different from ordinary objects, even Duchamp's Readymades. But this work was believed to be so important, so special that even the back had to be given proper respect. They may be simpler and more abstract than the fronts, but they are often more powerful because of it.

Here are my favorites, in chronological order, taken from the Met’s excellent website. Accession numbers are included in the captions to make it easy to find more information about the work. Just type the number into the Met's search window.

Enjoy!

Baby figure, 12th - 9th century B.C., Mexico, Olmec, ceramic, cinnabar, red ocher, 13 ⅜ x 12 ½ x 5 ¾ inches (1979.206.1134).

Ritual figure, Late Period or early Ptolemaic, 380 - 246 B.C., Egypt, wood, 8 ¼ inches high (2003.154).

Dionysos leaning on a female figure, Roman, 27 B.C. - A.D. 68, marble, 82 ¾ inches high (1990.247).

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, Seated in Royal Ease, Angkor period, Cambodia or Thailand, 10th - 11th century, bronze with silver inlay (1992.336).

Virgin and Child in Majestry, Reliquary, c.1150-1200, walnut with paint, gesso and linen, 31 5/16 x 12 ½ x 11 ½ inches (16.32.194).

Saint Margaret of Antioch, c.1475, alabaster, 15 ⅜ x 9 ⅝ x 6 9/16 inches (2000,641).

Prestige Stool, Female Caryatid, Buli Master, ca. 1810-1870, wood and metal studs, 24 inches high (1979.290).

Chelsea Gallery Roundup

2012-01-25T18:00:00.002-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Doug Wheeler, "Infinity Environment," SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012), David Zirner Gallery

I was in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies so I saw a lot of "Light and Space" art. I didn't like it then and I still don't. I think it's easy and cheap (Robert Irwin's floating disk paintings — soooo miraculous and Zen. Awesome, man!), but I didn't expect to find Doug Wheeler's "Infinity Environment" at David Zwirner (through February 25th) ridiculous and pretentious in addition to cheap.

First you have to wait your turn in an outer room, then you're required to take off your shoes and put white booties on your feet as if you're going into some kind of holy clean room.

Waiting area for Dour Wheeler's "Infinity Environment." The two people on the left requested anonymity.

Then someone instructs you on what you can and cannot do, where you're allowed to stand and what's the best way to experience the work. All this for the psychedelic experience of seeing nothing but white space (and maybe some floaters depending on your age). Oh please.

There were a lot of good things happening in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies -- Ron Davis, John McLaughlin, Charles Garabedian, Frank Gehry, Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, performance art -- just to name some. It's a shame that "Light and Space" art and the "Cool School" are getting the most attention now.

But Chelsea has a lot of work I love, and -- I never thought I'd say this -- most of it is video art. Although it's become a joke that now every exhibition of painting or sculpture has to have a video component, the video is usually pretty lame and the sculpture and paintings are really the main thing.

John Miller, "Suburban Past Time," installation view, 20112.

These exhibitions are the opposite; the real interest of these artists seems to be the videos and their other work seems secondary or peripheral:

John Miller's installations at Metro Pictures (through March 10th) are simple, strange and beautiful, but his videos (made in collaboration with Takuji Kogo) are more powerful. The text for the soundtrack was taken from personal ads, animated and set to manipulated voice recordings, which might not seem like much, but the result is poetic and deeply moving.

Paul Kasmin, in an additional new space around the corner on 27th Street, presents James Nares "Pendulum" films from 1976 (through February 11th) along with photographs and related work from the films. The films, shots of various objects swinging on a wire hung from a footbridge over a gritty Manhattan street, are claustrophobic and disorienting, and beautiful and haunting; the related work is just related work -- not much without the films.

Monica Cook at the always cutting-edge Postmasters gallery (through February 11th), is an interesting case similar to Allison Schulnik except not quite as extreme. The sculptures on display were used to make the animations and they struck me as heavy-handed and so disgusting they border on silly. But they work great in the animations. What is it about video that allows us to accept more pathos and melodrama than we'll tolerate in painting or sculpture?

Monica Cook, installation view, Postmasters, detail view of the character Oriana.

I was disappointed in Shirin Neshat's video at Gladstone Gallery (through February 11th). It doesn't have the stark dramatic impact of her past work; but it's a lot better than the photos on view which seem very cranked out.

One pet peeve regarding presentation of video: why the f*** can't galleries provide a proper viewing experience. Presenting video in a room without seats and expecting people to stand for twenty minutes or more is just rude and inconsiderate. Even worse, as was the case with John Miller’s videos at Metro Pictures, is showing them in a room where people have to pass in front of the video. Kudos to Postmasters and Gladstone for providing a proper theater.

Okay, since I'm all worked up, here's my rant on Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings." I like Hirst’s work, I really do. I like its ambitiousness, boldness, humor and inventiveness. But this is cynically corporate work that at best is mildly interesting for the variety he can achieve with such limited means. Moreover, I suspect his hype has finally caught up with him -- these shows have been poorly attended (I asked several of the guards, and they all agreed). I experienced it myself because Gagosian has a ridiculous rule about only allowing photographs that include people, and I had to wait a long time to find these two women.

But there's a lot of other abstract painting and relief worth checking out: Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read; Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg (especially his water colors); Martha Clippinger at Elizabeth Harris; and at the Howard Scott Gallery, David Goerk who, just when I thought minimal abstraction was finished, managed to do something interesting with it.

David Goerk, 6.13.2009, 2009, 15.2 x 15.2 x 5.1 cm, encaustic on wood.

Art News

2012-01-23T21:39:00.001-05:00

By Charles Kessler

David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29, November 2006, Oil on 6 canvases, about 72 x 144 inches (Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo credit - Richard Schmidt).

From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian on the popularity of David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy: “From Hockney to Downton Abbey: have our cultural tastes gone conservative?”

Via Hyperallergic: The Guggenheim has made 65 of its past exhibition catalogs available free online.

From the Los Angeles Times, an interview with Matthew Marks on the occasion of the opening of a gallery in L.A.: “Matthew Marks on lure -- and challenges -- of showing art in L.A.”

Agnes Gund, the classy art patron and former president of the Museum of Modern Art, writes about some potentially hopeful trends for artists: Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

And finally, there's this depressing article on our visual environment by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times: There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. … One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”

Kimmelman goes on to describe ways architects and city planners are beginning to deal with this blight.

A Parking Lot in Disney World, Orlando Florida

Panel on the Bushwick Art Scene

2012-01-20T13:35:00.001-05:00

Standing room only.

By Charles Kessler

Last night The Bogart Salon, one of seven (!) galleries now at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick, held a packed panel discussion on the "Nature and Future of the Bushwick Art Scene." It was expertly moderated by Hrag Vartanian, the founder and editor of Hyperallergic, and the panelists were Deborah Brown, director of the Storefront Bushwick Gallery; Burr Dodd of Brooklyn Fire Proof; writer-journalist for WNYC and Artnews, Carolina A. Miranda; and Marco Antonini, director of NURTUREart. You can find a pretty good summary at #bushwickarts (how can Paddy Johnson tweet so fast?).

One thing that surprised me was the carping about building codes. In the first place, compared to Jersey City they have it great, but more important, the reason why Bushwick is still relatively cheap is a lot of the activities (concerts, parties, live-work spaces, etc.) are not officially sanctioned. Everyone knows (or should know) that fire codes are important, but sometimes minor violations for what seem like trivial violations (Burr Dodd complained about being busted for fruit flies in his restaurant) can be frustrating. But they should keep in mind that when something is officially approved it becomes a lot more expensive.

Peter Hopkins, director of The Bogart Salon, took a great deal of care with the seating at the event, even going so far as putting names on the seats. He said he wanted to get people together whom he felt should know each other. I thought that was a terrific idea and typical of the way networking (in a good way) is encouraged in Bushwick and the way people are so helpful there.

Some Art News

2012-01-13T16:21:00.002-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Museum and Gallery News:

The Lower East Side gallery Feature Inc. has a museum-quality exhibition of Tantra Paintings (until February 12th). They are small abstract paintings in tempera, gouache, and watercolor on salvaged paper made by practitioners of Tantrism as a guide for their private meditation. The sophistication and subtlety of this work is astounding — equal to the best of work by Richard Tuttle or Tom Nozkowski. For more information see the Santa Monica Museum of Art and siglioblog websites. Here are some high-quality photos that illustrate how sensitive the work is:

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting; Legend: The eternal race of the feminine principle towards its masculine homologue; Jodphur, Rajasthan, 2008; unspecified paint on found paper; 13.625 x 8.875” (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.).
(Click to enlarge.)

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting; Legend: The illustrious fish; Jaipur, Rajasthan, 1993; unspecified paint on found paper; 9.125 x 7” (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.). (Click to enlarge.)

ANONYMOUS, tantric painting; Legend: The universal manifestation, always in evolution; Bikaner, Rajasthan, 1989; unspecified paint on found paper; 9.25 x 13.375” (Courtesy of Feature, Inc.). (Click to enlarge.)

L Magazine reports the blue-chip Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine will finally open their Bushwick space.
Christopher D’Amelio explains why they will be closing the D’Amelio Terras Gallery in Chelsea.
The Times reports that the Met is getting serious about contemporary art -- they hired Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator of Tate Modern, to be in charge of their new department of 20th and 21st century art.
And it’s hard to believe, but with the addition of their glassed-in Portico Gallery, the Frick has become even better. It’s a pleasure to walk along the portico in the middle of winter and look out at their grounds and Fifth Avenue.

Jean-Antonio Houdon, Diana the Huntress, 1776-95, terracotta, 75 ½ inches tall (photo, Michael Bodycomb).

Other Art News:

T J Clark recently wrote two typically brilliant reviews for the London Review of Books, one on Gerhard Richter and another on the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London.
Via Hyperallergic is this article on a building in Taiwan that almost disappears.

Sou Fujimoto’s ’21st-Century Oasis’ (All images by Sou Fujimoto via Architizer)

Here's a good read from The Morning News about the experience Christopher R. Graham, a music critic, had conducting a professional orchestra. He found it terrifying, and he felt completely over his head.
Slate has a series of articles by Tony Perrottet on Vatican City including secret areas of the City such as a bathroom within the Papal Apartments decorated with erotic frescos by Raphael in 1516, and the newly-restored Vatican Library.
Yvonne Rainer criticized Marina Abramovic's MoCA performance/gala for economically exploiting her performers. Now Abramovic adds fuel to the fire in a MoCA video about the gala. A clueless Abramovic talks about how much she appreciates the wisdom of the free market and/or the virtues of the pre-modern system of rule by kings.
Finally, The New Scientist reports on the discovery in Nigeria of a rare 2000-year-old Nok terracotta.

(Image: Nicole Rupp/Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Goethe-University Frankfurt )

2011-12-18T17:57:00.003-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (until January 29, 2012) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a show of African art that took my breath away. The exhibition is a little hard to find. It’s in gallery 199 where some of the museum's changing exhibitions take place, just off of the barrel-vaulted hallway south of the main entrance where the large-scale Greek and Roman sculpture is on display. This is a major international exhibition that gathers more than one hundred rare works from many museums in the United States as well as collections in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Portugal and France. The show is a big deal and not to be missed.

The sculptures, the embodiment of an ephemeral oral history and tradition, evoke and idealize important people from Africa’s past. In addition to the art, there are about twenty documentary photographs, mostly postcards from the early 20th century, of tribal leaders, kings and their retinue, and other important people.

Chief Kétounou of Bonou Village, Early 20th century French Dahomey, Republic of Benin,
(Holly W. Ross Postcard Collection)

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any good reproductions of the dramatic highlight of the show — an astounding twenty-two full-sized figures made in the nineteenth century by Hemba masters in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Go see them in person if you can.

A Day at the Met

2011-12-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

By Charles Kessler

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was especially crowded Wednesday so I spent most of my time in the less popular galleries — the English and French Period Rooms and the galleries containing medieval and ancient sculpture. I don’t know why these galleries aren’t popular, but it’s fine with me.

I recently wrote that when I look at art I often notice that many works I'm looking at share some visual characteristic or a theme or subject. In Washington, for example, a lot of work struck me as funny, and at the Met I noticed that a lot of art from different cultures and periods was abstract. Not abstract in the sense of non-representational, but abstract in the old sense of the word — abstracted or simplified nature. These two heads from Graeco-Phoenician sarcophagi of the 5th century B.C struck me as très Art Deco.

And this and other 5000-year old Cycladic figures could have been made by Brancusi:

The Bastis Master, female figure, early Cycladic II, 2600 - 2400 B.C., marble, 25 inches high (#66.148)

There were even several small wrought iron Medieval sculptures that fell into the abstract theme:

And I noticed that the backs of a lot of sculptures were not only abstract, but were also funny.

(I apologize for the poor photos -- I couldn't find them on the Met's site so I had to use the ones I took with my iPhone.)

The other common theme that kept coming up was what I call the "awww, how charming motif" -- these sculptures for example:

And then there were the English and French Period Rooms located on either side of the Medieval Sculpture Hall where the Met's famous Christmas tree is located. (BTW, no photographs of the tree are allowed because, a guard explained to me, the tree is copyrighted! You can find a good photo here if you want.)

You're not going to find many good paintings in the Period Rooms, but the rooms themselves are appealing and pleasant, especially when they simulate light coming through the windows. And the galleries are practically empty so you have them to yourself for long periods.

And on the way out, don't miss the Crypt Gallery of Byzantine Egypt under the Great Stairway.

All and all, an agreeable day at the Met.

Next post: a show at the Met that took my breath away, Heroic Africans, Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (until January 29, 2012).

Art News, etc.

2011-12-09T16:35:00.001-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Art News

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in 1922 in their apartment in Paris.

Laura Gilbert’s site, Art Unwashed, has become a go-to site for insider museum news. The Metropolitan Museum has reported future exhibitions only until June 2012, but Gilbert managed to uncover their plans until June of 2013. Here are some of the exhibition highlights from her site:

Rembrandt and Degas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, February 23 to May 20, 2012. Highlights: two early Rembrandt self-portraits on loan from Europe.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, February 28 to June 3, 2012. About 100 works collected by expatriates Gertrude Stein and her brothers.

Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years, September 2012 to January 2013. Warhol and his influence, thematically arranged. A Met rarity – a group show of contemporary art.

Bernini Models in Clay, October 2012 to January 2013. 50 models and several sculptures by the Roman Baroque master.

***

Typically museum websites are only about the museum itself — their collection, exhibitions, hours, etc., but the Walker's new site contains links and articles about the wider art world and hopefully will be an inspiration for other art museums.

***

More Bushwick Gallery News:

Storefront Gallery’s co-founder Jason Andrew informed me that Deborah Brown, Storefront’s other founder, has renewed the lease at its current location, and a new gallery will re-open there on December 18th with essentially the same name: Storefront Bushwick. The resourceful Jason Andrew will not be involved with the new gallery but will maintain his association with the Norte Maar Gallery.

Via L Magazine comes the news that Soho gallery Christina Ray will open a project space in Bushwick at the beginning of the year, and they will be changing their name to the Kesting/Ray Gallery to reflect the addition of David Kesting, Ray's husband, as co-director.

***

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company website has a complete series of videos documenting many aspects of the company. It’s called “Mondays With Merce” and includes 19 interviews with Cunningham that were filmed two years before he died. There are also forty-two interviews with Cunningham’s colleagues and dancers, and footage of 15 technique classes taught by Cunningham and rehearsal sessions of more than 30 works with him in charge. If you never saw Merce Cunningham or his dance company, this is the next best thing.

***

Warning: political commentary next — just skip it if you want.

Mr. Montgomery Burns

My first love was economics, and I still spend a lot of time reading the literature -- especially Paul Krugman's blog. Very occasionally I come across an article that's not well known, a least not known in the art world, but is so clear and compelling I want to call attention to it here.

A few months ago, billionaire Warren Buffett wrote a New York Times Op-Ed entitled Stop Coddling the Super-Rich. It was mainly about the fairness of taxing the rich; now Nick Hanauer, another billionaire, writes about the economic benefits of taxing the super rich: Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators.

Hanauer is a famous venture capitalist who helped launch more than 20 companies, including aQuantive Inc. and Amazon.com; nevertheless in bloomberg.com he wrote:

...I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

...The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000.

...So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

***

Urban Planning:

“Why should people get to see plans? This isn't a public project.”
--Bruce Ratner, the developer of the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, quoted in Crain’s, November 8, 2009

I'm a bit soured on Urban Planning lately after my bad experience with Jersey City's Powerhouse Arts District but, like looking at a horrific accident, I continue to read the literature. (I highly recommend the very readable, even entertaining, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It’s still the definitive book on urban planning but heartbreaking to read because, after 42 years, city planners still don’t get it.)

The New York Times had an article recently on how the Dutch, when they undertake big new development projects, put together what they call “structure plans.” Urban designers are called in to work out the best way to organize the site for the public good. They plan parks, squares, the street-scape, access to public transportation, and generally create a pedestrian-friendly environment. (This is the kind of thing the BMW Guggenheim Lab was concerned with.) The thing is, this is done BEFORE a developer submits a plan for the site. You might think "duh", but, except for Rockefeller Center and a few other notable places, that isn’t the way we do things here, e.g., Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and the re-zoning of neighborhoods like Lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and of course Jersey City (see our blog title photo above).

Barnett Newman -- It's Complicated!

2011-12-07T15:08:00.001-05:00

The Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 E. 73rd Street (just east of Fifth), has yet another terrific exhibition of relatively small work: Barnett Newman Paintings (until December 17th).

Barnett Newman, Untitled 3. 1949, oil on canvas, 23 ½ x 6 ¼ inches (private collection).

I complimented the dealer on the show, and on my way out, two nicely dressed middle-aged women asked me why I thought it was a good exhibition. I thought the show was a good one because the work was hard to assemble and it was installed sensitively, without over-lighting it. But of course they were really asking (and I think sincerely): “Why do you like this art?” I tried to help them by pointing out things about the work they may not have seen, but I knew that wouldn’t really satisfy them for a reason concisely put forward in a recent New York Times Opinionator post, Art and the Limits of Neuroscience:

Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do.

I was also reminded of the famous exchange between Franz Kline and a collector irate about Barnett Newman's first exhibition. The longer the version of this story the better, and I found a good long one here:

Franz Kline and Elaine De Kooning were sitting at the Cedar Bar when a collector Franz knew came up to them in a state of fury. He had just come from Newman’s first one-man show. ‘How simple can an artist be and get away with it?’ he spluttered. ‘There was nothing, absolutely nothing there!’
‘Nothing?’ asked Franz, beaming. ‘How many canvases were in the show?’
‘Oh maybe ten or twelve - but all exactly the same - just one stripe down the centre, that’s all!’
'All the same size?’ Franz asked.
‘Well no; there were different sizes; you know, from about 3 to 7 feet.’
‘Oh, 3 to 7 feet, I see; and all the same colour?’ Franz went on.
‘No, different colours, you know; red and yellow and green… but each picture painted one flat colour - you know, like a house painter would do it, and then this stripe down the centre.’
‘All the stripes the same colour?’
‘No’
‘Were they all the same width?’
The man began to think a little. ‘Let’s see. No. I guess not. Some were maybe an inch wide and some maybe four inches, and some in between.’
‘And all upright pictures?’
‘Oh, no, there were some horizontals.’
‘With vertical stripes?’
‘Oh, no, I think there were some horizontal stripes, maybe.’
‘And were the stripes darker or lighter than the background?
‘Well I guess they were darker, but there was one white stripe, or maybe more…’
'Was the stripe painted on top of the background colour or was the background colour painted around the stripe?’
The man began to get a bit uneasy. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘I think it may have been done either way, or both ways, maybe…’
‘Well I don’t know,’ said Franz. ‘It all sounds damned complicated to me.’

Thinking it might be easier to get, I sent the women to see the Matisse and the Model exhibition (through December 10th - hurry) at Eykyn Maclean, 23 East 67th Street (just west of Madison). It's definitely worth seeing but, unlike the Barnett Newman show, this one is way over-produced with multi-colored walls and pretentious extra-large wall texts. There's some good work though -- and even the not-so-good work is interesting to see.

November Art News

2011-12-01T11:00:00.001-05:00

By Charles Kessler

There’s been a lot of big news in the art world this month including yet another Leonardo da Vinci find. Last month I reported on art historian Martin Kemp’s extraordinary rediscovery of Leonardo’s La Bella Principessa, a portrait in ink and colored chalks on vellum. Artinfo interviews Kemp here about an even more important find, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi.

Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1500, oil on walnut panel, 25 13/16 X 17 7/8 inches

Due to the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery, London, there’s been more than usual written about Leonardo. One of the most interesting is this post by Jonathan Jones, a Renaissance man himself, on Leonardo as an animal rights activist and a vegetarian. All this has added so much to the already wildly popular Leonardo exhibition that the National Galley had to crack down on ticket scalping — tickets were going for up to £800 ($1242) on eBay.

Then there’s the Met’s new Islamic wing.

Damascus Room, 1119 A.D., Syria, Damascus, 22 ft. 1/2 in. x 16 ft. 8 1/2 in.
(Gift of The Hagop Kevorkian Fund, 1970 #1970.170).

The Met’s website once again does an excellent job of providing visual and art historical information including several videos showing the installation and conservation process. Holland Cotter has an enthusiastic review of the new galleries in the Times.

And finally, there’s been more on Pacific Standard Time — the encyclopedic series of exhibitions about the history of Los Angeles art. Two reviews I'd recommend are by Roberta Smith and Peter Plagens.

Hard Edge group exhibition with works by Ronald Davis and Judy Chicago at Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles,
May 1964. The Getty Research Institute, Gift of Rolf G. Nelson, 2010.M.38.2.

Plagens also wrote my favorite article on another big art event, the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

The Clyfford Still Museum's center exhibition gallery.

Other Art News:
Paddy Johnson reports that even more galleries are moving into 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick. And to help you keep track, Pernod, the company that sells Absinthe liqueur, and WAGMAG, the online Brooklyn gallery guide, have teamed up to create an app that’s a guide to Brooklyn galleries and to nearby bars that serve Absinthe. It’s doesn’t have nearly the number of galleries as our Bushwick guide, and it doesn’t provide an efficient route to take, but like ours it’s free; and if they ever include a lot more of the galleries, it will be useful.

Bryan Appleyard on the website MoreIntelligentLife.com reports that in 2010 Andy Warhol’s work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for an astounding 17% of all contemporary auction sales. Appleyard does a good job of putting this in context. And on the topic of Warhol and Pop Art, here is an excellent interview with Art Historian Hal Foster.

Also from MoreIntelligentLife.com is this entertaining piece about an exchange of letters between Groucho Marx and, of all people, T. S. Eliot. The exchange was initiated by Eliot, a great fan of the Marx Brothers movies. One of my favorite of Groucho’s letters to the famously buttoned-down and anti-semitic poet includes this: “The name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashevsky. All male cats are named Tom—unless they have been fixed. I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don’t hesitate. Confide in me.”

Damien Hirst is one of those artists I hate to love. Jonathan Jones doesn't have this problem. In advance of Hirst’s upcoming exhibition at the Tate Modern next year, he wrote this appreciation:

Hirst stands far above his British contemporaries. The depth of his early work is extraordinary and dazzling. The intensity of his imaginative grasp of reality is unique. He makes art that is about life, and death, and money too, which is another absolute truth of our world – unfortunately. The whole of recent British art is a footnote to his brilliance.

Richard Prince, on the other hand, is an artist I love to hate — Laura Gilbert uncovered documents filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on October 26 that show what a phony the guy is.

The Daily Beast/Newsweek has an excellent profile on the art dealer Marian Goodman. It corresponds nicely with a 1992 profile of Betty Parsons from the archives of the New York Times that’s been tweeted around (is that a term?).

Finally, there are two informative posts by Jonah Lehrer about creativity:
Need to Create? Get a Constraint:
"It’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance – a challenge we can’t easily resolve – that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious."
And The Importance of Mind-Wandering:
"...not all daydreams are equally effective at inspiring new ideas. ...According to Schooler’s data, individuals who are unaware of their mind-wandering don’t exhibit increased creativity."

Curatorial Flashbacks #20: The Rose at 50, Part 3: Community

2011-11-22T08:06:00.001-05:00

By Carl Belz

Community interaction during my years at the Rose didn’t stop at the entrance to the university, it extended to the cultural community at large, particularly the community of artists whose studios we regularly visited, whose work we annually exhibited and acquired, and whose presence we invariably valued as a resource and soundboard for our program. All of which I felt was entirely natural to do—which I even went so far as to imagine anyone would do within a museum whose mission was identified with the art of our time and was physically located in or near a highly sophisticated and culturally endowed city, whether it was Boston or Chicago or San Francisco or anywhere else in the country. Yet, I detected no trace of that community in the “Collecting Stories” installation, let alone an institutional relationship to it, prompting me to describe here how it came about under my directorship and what it meant regarding our exhibition and collection programs.

We began exhibiting Boston area artists at the start of my tenure as director of the Rose, in 1974, in response to a handful of considerations. For instance:

(1) There was plenty of talent available, as I had seen around town since coming to Brandeis in 1968 and had then begun to describe in monthly critical reports to Artforum magazine, where I served as a regional editor prior to moving my base to the museum. I knew there were many shows waiting to be done.

James Weeks, Figure by a Bed, 1960, oil on canvas, 164 x 131.5 cm.,

(from a catalog of an exhibition, Rose Art Museum, 2 April - 14 May, 1978).

(2) I felt we could fill a need. While there were relatively few commercial galleries in Boston at the time, there was even less in the way of institutional support. The Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art occasionally acknowledged area artists but looked primarily to New York for major exhibition programming. Suburban museums in Lincoln, Framingham, Brockton, and Duxbury served mostly local constituencies, while the college and university galleries and museums, which were numerous—at Harvard, Boston College, Wellesley College, Tufts, and Boston University—tended to be insular in serving mostly their campus constituencies. In undertaking support through exhibitions of area artists, I believed we could help generate the feedback that was so vital to their studio practice.

(3) I was attracted to the pleasures of learning about art through knowing art’s makers since the start of my professional career. I volunteered to organize and write about an exhibition of my studio faculty colleagues upon taking my first job at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1963; I supported Bay Area artists while I taught art history and was director of the Mills College Art Gallery in Oakland between 1965 and 1968; and I was already familiar with a growing number of Boston area artists whose studios I had visited, and whose work I very much respected, when I started at the Rose. I had my foot in the door to an untapped field.

(4) Exhibitions of area artists would be economical. The program budget during my first year at the Rose was $4K, so you can see how it made sense to utilize the abundant resources at hand.

I picked the first few shows, but the vast majority was selected in tandem with curator Susan Stoops, my Team Rose helpmate for close to 20 years. Their purpose was to provide exposure, which meant giving each artist enough space to show a significant body of work, maybe only three or four pictures if they were really large, maybe eight to 10 if they were very small, which in turn meant limiting the number of artists to half a dozen on average. We titled the shows—“Stepping Out,” “Restless Natives,” “Worlds Apart,” “Seeing and Believing,” and “Out of the Woods” were among my favorites—but the titles came after the art was selected, and they were meant poetically, to suggest the aura of the artworks commingling, to evoke their shared karma. Through 24 years we covered a lot of media—painting and sculpture and their hybrids, installations, photography, paper works—but we never started out by looking for one medium or another, just as we never started out with a theme in mind, or an expressive genre such as abstract, representational, and so forth.

In fact, that’s why IMO the program worked so well, because it never started from an a priori concept—as group shows almost invariably do—it each year evolved out of a natural, open-ended process of building relationships by interacting with artists in their studios, seeing what was going on in and around town, and letting the experiences sink in. It was as though the process allowed the exhibitions each year to create themselves, as though all we needed to do was listen to the voices of the artworks we’d seen and allow them to speak for themselves, and we’d then know when we had enough for a show, which would resonate with which, what their number would be, and how and when the show would happen. The challenge lay in the looking and listening, the rest was easy.

Alas, those exhibitions stopped happening when I left the Rose, despite the fact that they had been endowed since 1983 as The Lois Foster Exhibition of Boston Area Artists, and there was no evidence of them in the 50th anniversary exhibition. A personal friend close to the museum suggested that my successors, Joe Ketner and Michael Rush, were troubled by the area artists designation, feeling it was limiting, even demeaning, to the artists’ stature in the community. If that were the case, however, it wouldn’t be news. In my own experience, there were always culturatti around who threw up smokescreens like that to mask their concern about being thought provincial—it was an effect of Boston’s proximity to New York.

In any case, and apart from our annual shows, Boston area artists were further visible among our monographic exhibitions, which included ambitious retrospectives of James Weeks, David Aronson, and Barnet Rubenstein and mid-career surveys of Todd Mckie & Judy Kensley Mckie and Katherine Porter. In addition, individual works by Boston area artists, acquired through gifts and purchases alike, always figured in, and helped significantly to define, subsets of the permanent collection that we continually sought to shape and develop—minimalism and postminimalism, realism, sculptors’ drawings, and photography, to name a few.

All of which reflects equally the highly creative cultural community we served and the highly rewarding dividends it paid. Ask any Boston area artist and they’ll tell you what that environment was like.

(This is the third part of a three-part post)

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

Curatorial Flashbacks #19: The Rose at 50, Part 2: Education

2011-11-22T08:03:00.001-05:00

By Carl Belz

With the survival of the Rose’s death threat, and strengthened by press releases issued from the office of new president Frederick Lawrence, discussion has pointed to the museum henceforth becoming more deeply embedded in the campus community and serving more effectively—maybe even serving exclusively—the university’s teaching mission, the goal being to become indispensable to its host institution as a whole.

As the only director of the Rose who ever taught while at Brandeis, I submit the following on the subject of the museum’s relationship to the university community:

(1) I inherited the Charna Stone Cowen Student Loan Collection and kept it going throughout my tenure. It comprised prints, drawings and assorted artworks that were annually made available to students to hang in their dormitory rooms for $5 apiece. We periodically reviewed the collection to see if it contained objects that should be transferred to the permanent collection because of their increasing value. Early in my directorship, for instance, I found in the collection a wonderful 1942 David Smith bronze that I figured should be spared the hazards of the dormitory and sheltered more safely in my office. In any case, the program was always a big hit, a wonderful fringe benefit enhancing undergraduate life.

David Smith, Table Torso, 1942, bronze, height 10 inches, formerly Charna Stone Cowen Student Loan Collection.

(2) I transformed the Rose Art Decorating Service (We Pick Up and Deliver) into a campus-wide operation. I learned early on that the museum was responsible for decorating the president’s suite and a few administrative offices, and, in an effort to beautify the Brandeis working environment and improve everyone’s quality of life—it was one of those utopian dreams I carried over from the 60s—I informally let it be known that members of the faculty and administration could borrow artworks from the Rose for their offices; they had only to make an appointment, spend an hour or so looking at pictures with our registrar, pick them out, and, subject to the director’s approval, we’d deliver and hang them. You probably figure I created a nightmare for Roger Kizik, our preparator, whose job it was to actually deliver and hang the pictures—as you can imagine, there was a resident art critic in every office complex—but he invariably met the challenge with aplomb and, mirabile dictu, became in the process a highly valued, campus-wide ambassador for the museum.

Installation View, Judy Pfaff, Elephant, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, January 26 - March 5, 1995

(3) A significant amount of teaching took place in and around the Rose’s exhibition program, especially during the 1990s when, in a position newly created, education coordinator Corinne Zimmermann and curator Susan Stoops regularly worked with undergraduate interns in connection with special as well as ongoing projects. For a 1995 Judy Pfaff site-specific installation titled “Elephant,” a team of undergraduate concentrators from the Department of Fine Arts was enlisted to assist the artist throughout her creative process. Two years later, during a weeklong residency with Jonathan Borofsky on what he called “The God Project,” undergraduates from all academic departments were extended an open invitation to come to the museum anytime between 10 AM and 10PM, interact with the artist, make paintings expressing their spiritual beliefs, and then have those paintings exhibited in the company of several of Borofsky’s own works.

In addition, we periodically showcased work by members of the Department of Fine Arts studio faculty. I mounted a 1976 retrospective honoring the founder of the department, Mitchell Siporin, and a 1981 mid-career survey of paintings by Paul Georges. Group shows of the entire faculty, generally five or six artists, took place in 1982, 1987, and l994, the intervals informally determined via ongoing consults with the artists themselves. For each show, the artists individually presented gallery talks that I always enjoyed attending; coming in many cases from Yale’s graduate program, the painters in particular were culturally and intellectually informed, and, take it from me, they really knew how to talk.

Mitchell Siporin, Back of the Yards, 1938, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches, (Smithsonian American Art Museum, #1971.447.83).

(4) After becoming director of the Rose, I continued to teach a lecture course or seminar each spring on the history of contemporary art, and I also worked with individual students in one-on-one independent studies. Occasionally, either on my own or in tandem with an art department colleague, I was able to supervise an exceptional student in preparing an exhibition that was mounted in one of our public galleries. In any of these cases, however, my new base of operations radically affected my teaching. Instead of relying on slides alone, the age-old art historical practice, I had ready access to a broad spectrum of physical objects I could present to students for face-to-face, in-the-flesh encounters. Within a couple of years, I also realized I could introduce them to the context within which I was responsible for collecting and exhibiting those objects, so I initiated a bi-annual spring semester seminar on museum methods and procedures. The seminar ranged from practical challenges to ethical and aesthetic speculations, and it regularly included progress reports on the major exhibition I annually prepared for the close of the academic year—updates from the real world, you might call them. It was a seminar I personally had never taken, a seminar that didn’t even exist when I was in college or graduate school, a seminar whose content was derived not from theory but from my own day-to-day, ongoing, always enlightening, on-the-job training.

The educational programming outlined above, which was partly academic and partly administrative (read service oriented), was fully in place during Evelyn Handler’s tenure as Brandeis president, which was from 1983 through 1991. I reported directly to her office, and our meetings generally focused on development and administration. From the outset, for instance, President Handler directed me to beef up my small advisory committee into a full-fledged Board of Overseers that would “give, get, or get out,” as it was put at the time. Further on, she shared with me her wish that all Brandeis undergraduates would visit the museum at least once before they graduated. Thus did we become poised, she and I, for an ongoing and sometimes uneasy tug of war about the Rose’s intellectual or philosophical identity and program, about its institutional purpose—about whether it was first of all academic or administrative or developmental.

While working on the mandate to expand our Board of Overseers, I sought to finesse the second directive by explaining that Team Rose conceived its educational mission not as serving legions of students with a one-time taste of culture, but as serving them in numbers small enough to enable in-depth, lasting experiences. In treating aesthetic encounters as educational in and of themselves, we equated those encounters with knowledge traditionally gleaned in the classroom. Beyond service, then, and by way of intellectual (read academic) content, we conceived our exhibitions and publications as contributing to the ongoing discourse surrounding the art of our time. And, finally, we were in turn gratified by the number of students—large or small, depending on your perspective—who absorbed that mission, among them, Adam Weinberg, now Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Gary Tinterow, now the Engelhard Chairman of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Kim Rorschach, now Director of the Nasher Museum at Duke University; and—ever near and dear to my ex-jock athletic heart—Doug Stark, now Director of the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum in Newport, Rhode Island.

Does any or all of this programming—or maybe some variation on it—represent the kind of embeddedness that translates into indispensability? The question is not hypothetical, as I learned to my alarm on a lovely spring afternoon back in the late 1980s when President Handler told me during a reception at the Rose that I was not going to like what she was going to do to “my” museum. That’s all she said. What she meant, I had no idea. Only later did I hear secondhand that she was planning something draconian, like selling part or all of the collection. But whatever the plan, it never left the boardroom, because, as I was also told, steadfast opposition led by university trustee and devoted museum supporter Dr. Henry Foster instead prevailed. Thus did the question seem to become hypothetical, at least for a while—until it became again very much not hypothetical with the 2009 Jehuda Reinharz announcement. And now? I’d say it’s now not only not hypothetical, it’s very real and immediate, central to any discussion of the museum’s identity and mission at the moment it readies itself to move ahead under a new director.

(This is the second part of a three-part post)

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

Curatorial Flashbacks #18: The Rose At 50, Part 1: Collecting

2011-11-22T07:06:00.001-05:00

Opening reception, "Collecting Stories," The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (photo thanks to the Slowmuse website).

By Carl Belz

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis recently kicked off its 50th anniversary celebration with an exhibition called “Art at the Origin: The Early 1960s,” an event that a few years ago seemed to have been cut off at the neck with the announcement by then president Jehuda Reinharz that the museum would be closed and the collection sold in order to keep its host institution financially afloat. The exhibition highlights paintings acquired by founding director Sam Hunter, all of them new at the time—by artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg, Louis, Kelly, Warhol, and Lichtenstein—paintings that effectively, and in some cases controversially, identified the Rose with the art of our time. That identity persists into the present and is widely appreciated, as evidenced by “Collecting Stories,” the second part of the current exhibition, which is displayed in the museum’s spacious Lois Foster Gallery and consists of acquisitions by subsequent Rose directors during the past four decades, many of them by artists who, loud and clear, voiced their support for the Rose during the bleak months of its threatened demise.

I spent 24 years as director of the Rose prior to retiring at the close of the 1997-98 academic year. Returning on a recent weekend afternoon to see the anniversary exhibition, I found myself excited to be once more among valued old friends, especially the Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and post-painterly warhorses comprising “Art at the Origin” that I’d hung countless times while visually writing and rewriting the histories of contemporary art they told.

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University with Stephen Antonakos neon sculpture

Yet my spirits dipped as I continued from “Art at the Origin” to “Collecting Stories.” The past 40 years, represented by a little of this and a little of that, also included old friends—some of them personal, you might say, insofar as I was involved in their acquisition—but for me the selections lacked the visual and thematic unities that highlighted the “Origin” section of the exhibition; fewer in both size and number, they also seemed to pale in comparison to the museum’s first decade, leaving the impression—unintentional, I’m sure—that the Rose’s glory days of collecting had come and gone in the 60s. With that, I began having doubts about what the Rose had accomplished during my own tenure as director. Had it really been as visually fragmentary and aimless as it now looked? Had it in fact lacked cohesive intellectual substance? Even the Steve Antonakos neon we’d acquired for the Rose façade in 1986 (see photo above), the signature and site-identifying commission I’d gone mano a mano with then president Evelyn Handler to have realized—even it had disappeared into storage. I felt in turn an urge to defend myself, to pen from my own perspective a few thoughts about the institutional history reflected in the current exhibition, including the mission that’s been publicized in conjunction with it. With your indulgence I offer them here.

Sam Hunter’s most important acquisitions comprise the Gevirtz-Mnuchin Collection of 21 artworks (hereafter GMC) that were purchased in 1962/63 with a one-time gift of $50K from Leon Mnuchin and members of his and his wife’s families. In the context of today’s art market, that $50K translates into an astronomical number and makes for a fabulous investment story—I could even add a chapter about the years I spent envying that $50K—but it’s not the story we’re interested in here. Which is:

(1) Ranging from AE through Pop and Color Field painting, the GMC represented a broad swath of contemporary expression, meaning its vision of the art of our time was bigger than smaller, more inclusive than parochial; as such, its presence would be felt in subsequent acquisitions by allowing wide latitude in their selection while encouraging depth at the same time. A balance of breadth plus depth, that was the ticket. But we don’t get that balance in the Lois Foster Gallery. We get a mix of genres, encountering realism (Gregory Gillespie), postminimalism (Ana Mendieta), and the feminist critique (Kiki Smith), for instance, and we thereby catch a glimpse of the edgy complexity of the 70s and the renewed expressionism of the 80s and 90s. Yet it’s a glimpse only; as far as the larger collection picture is concerned, we sense the range but are denied the richness, and we miss an important lesson about the content of the GMC. In fact, there’s plenty more to see where those isolated examples came from, including, for starters, major paintings by Bill Beckman and Agnes Martin and Joan Snyder, paintings that buttress significantly the kindred examples now in the gallery and demonstrate they are not as isolated as they appear.

Joan Snyder, Painter, catalog for an exhibition with an essay by Carl Belz. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, April 15 - July 31, 1994.

(2) The fact that the GMC artworks were purchased rather than gifted signified a focused and proactive approach to shaping a fledgling collection and demonstrated a first principle in museum practice generally, which is: To sustain growth, you need funding, preferably endowed; you may be a developmental whiz, able to charm the birds from the trees in attracting gifts to your collection—which Sam Hunter seems very much to have been as well—but your credibility in selling your mission can be no better served than by putting your own money on the table to demonstrate that you really mean what you say.

That same proactive approach, signifying the Rose’s ongoing leadership in its field, has been supported increasingly by endowment since 1981 when the museum’s very first purchase fund was established. I remember the day. I remember sharing a congratulatory handshake with Vice President David Steinberg, with whom I had made the pitch for funding to the trustees of the Rose estate, who that day gave us $500K. I remember being thrilled that a major piece in our institutional puzzle, a piece missing since the museum’s opening 20 years before, was now in place. And would be there in perpetuity. And would thereby ease what had been my growing concern—that, in the absence of ongoing funding, the Rose would, by default, become a museum defined by the 60s alone. Take a look at the labels in the Lois Foster Gallery, they provide a subtext within the current exhibition that lets you see how those funds have proliferated and more fully appreciate the collection growth they’ve enabled.

(3) Prior to acquiring any pictures with his $50K gift, Sam Hunter wrote a memo to Brandeis president Abram Sachar—I came across a copy years ago, purely by chance—informing him of the gift and explaining that he, Sam, would be making the acquisitions and that they would be subject to no committee of any kind, otherwise the deal would be off. Wow, think about that, a truly free-wheeling image out of the past, like an image from another world, an image of museums “at the origin”—before they became “professional,” before spectacle and entertainment, before corporate support and the corporate model—museums before trustees and overseers whose worldly business success privileged them to tell seasoned museum experts how to conduct their museum’s intellectual and aesthetic business. Sam’s memo was prescient; you certainly wouldn’t find his acquisitions procedure in any museum handbook today, but that doesn’t mean its underlying concern isn’t still with us—as I learned the hard way with the Frank Stella acquisition that didn’t happen.

(This is the first of a three-part post)

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

More Washington

2011-11-17T12:06:00.001-05:00

By Charles Kessler

A lot of paintings at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington struck me as funny. I recently wrote that I found some of de Kooning’s women comical (and there is support for this in the de Kooning biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan — highly recommended, by the way). I also recently found some of David Smith's sculptures playful, so maybe it's just my mood. But intended by the artist or not, I thought these paintings were a riot. See if you agree.

Frans Hals, Portrait of a Member of the Haarlem Civic Guard, c. 1636/1638, oil on canvas, 33 7/8 x 27 3/16 inches (National Gallery of Art, #1937.1.68).

Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Daniel in the Lions' Den, c. 1614/1616, oil on canvas, 105 1/2 x 147 1/2 (National Gallery of Art, #1965.13.1).

Titian, Venus with a Mirror, c. 1555, oil on canvas, 49 x 41 9/16 inches (National Gallery of Art, #1937.1.34).

This is one of my favorite paintings and Titian obviously loved it since he kept it in his studio until his death, so I doubt it was intended to be funny. Nevertheless I can’t help thinking she’s saying: “Who, moi?” There’s less doubt about this painting though:

Giorgione and Titian, Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, c. 1510, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches (National Gallery of Art, #1939.1.258).

Raphael, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, 1508, oil on panel, 31 3/4 x 22 5/8 inches (National Gallery of Art, #1937.1.25).

I know this is no ordinary baby, but come on.

***

The contrast between the way traditional and contemporary art are displayed is more extreme at the NGA than anywhere else I know of. The West Wing, where their traditional art collection is housed, is a quiet, sedately lit, intimate space with plenty of places to sit, whereas the East Wing is over-bright and uncomfortable, and most of the galleries are way out of human scale. Some very public art like Stella, Calder, and Pop Art, can handle that, but most contemporary art isn't helped by this kind of dramatic space.

And some of the East Wing installations are just plain disrespectful:

From the left: Robert Morris, Nam June Paik and Richard Tuttle installed in a vestibule near an elevator.

***

Mel Boucher's art has become decorative and more popular. Coincidence?

Mel Bochner, Amazing!, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas.

Mel Bochner in conversation with James Meyer, November 9, 2011, NGA East Building Auditorium

***

Who said nothing’s perfect:

Jun ware bowl with rosewood stand, early 12th-mid 13th century, China, Jin dynasty (Freer, #F1982.14a-b).

***

"The Invention of Glory" (until January 8, 2012), an exhibition of The Pastrana Tapestries, considered among the finest surviving Gothic tapestries, is at the NGA. Why are tapestries always so drab?

***

I was surprised I liked Warhol’s Shadows so much, but the other major Warhol exhibition in Washington, the NGA’s Warhol: Headlines (until January 2, 2012), was a surprising disappointment. They seemed crude and unresolved — not always a bad thing, but not something I’d expect, or want, from Warhol.

Andy Warhol, A Boy for Meg, 1962, oil on canvas, 72 x 52 inches (National Gallery of Art, 1971.87.11).

***

Some good surprises:

Alberto Giacometti, Standing Man, 1929-30, painted plaster (NGA 66.2043)

Giacomo Balla, Futurist Flowers, 1918-25 (reconstructed 1968), wood and paint (Hirshhorn, #86.222.1-10)

Bernardino Luini, The Magdalen, c.1525, oil on panel, 23 x 19 inches (National Gallery of Art, #1961.9.56).

I guess there’s a hole in my Italian Renaissance art history, but I don't remember Bernardino Luini. Strangely the NGA website doesn’t have anything on his paintings, only his Fresco Cycle with the Story of Procris and Cephalus, and those frescos don’t look at all like his paintings.

Washington D.C. - Fall Color

2011-11-15T21:41:00.001-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Resplendent fall foliage in Washington -- who knew? It primed me for all the color-oriented art I was to see.

According to their website, The Phillips Collection has been devoted to exploring “the development of color and light in modern art;” and the main attraction at The Phillips Collection right now, the exhibition Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint (until January 8, 2012), fits in perfectly with this mission. It is also the primary reason I traveled to Washington.

Edgar Degas, Dancers at the Barre, early 1880s−1900, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 inches
(The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).

It is a comprehensive exhibition that deepens our understanding of Dancers at the Barre, one of the most famous paintings in their collection. The show consists of about 30 major paintings, bronzes, drawings and prints from around the world that shed light on this painting's subject, composition, style of painting and color choices. In addition there are photographs from a conservation study of the painting that show Degas’s continual revisions of the dancers' positions and the many adjustments in color he made. It's an impressive scholarly and aesthetic achievement.

Dance was a major subject for Degas (he did more than 1500 works on the subject!) and it makes sense to me that he’d be attracted to ballet. Ballet dancers, even when practicing or just hanging around, get into more interesting poses than other people. They also seem to float when they move, and even their clothes, their tutus, are light and airy. All of this allows Degas to free his forms from gravity and let them flow, breathe and glow like colored air.

BTW, if you love Degas, in addition to the work at The Phillips there are 19 paintings, 33 drawings and 38 prints at the National Gallery. Even more impressive, the National Gallery has the largest collection of sculpture by Degas in the world -- 66 of them, a remarkable two-thirds of his entire sculpture production including 52 of his original wax models. This should be enough to indulge the most fanatical Degas admirer. (But if you still haven't had enough, there's the Degas and the Nude exhibition in Boston.)

Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878-1881, yellow wax, hair, ribbon, linen bodice, satin shoes, muslin tutu, wood base, overall without base 39 x 14 x 14 inches (National Gallery of Art #1999.80.28). This is the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime.

Among the other Phillips exhibitions aiming to “explore the development of color and light in modern art” is Eye to Eye: Joseph Marioni at the Phillips (until January 29, 2012). Marioni is known for making almost monochromatic paintings that are composed of several layers of semi-opaque colors. His earlier work, like Robert Ryman’s, was about the physicality of the paint, and his later work, while superficially not much different, is more lyrical. I think he achieves this new lyricism the way Morris Louis does it in his "Veil Paintings" — by showing what colors are underneath each layer, even if it’s just a little peek around the edge, sensitizing you to what colors are in the mix and thereby creating depth, light and air.

Joseph Marioni, Green Painting, 2010, acrylic and linen on stretcher, 142 x 147 cm.

Morris Louis, Faces, 1962, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 136 inches (Smithsonian American Art Museum).

And then there’s the Phillips’s Mark Rothko Room, an installation originally created in 1960 by the museum founder Duncan Phillips with Rothko’s involvement. It’s a small room with one classic Rothko painting on each wall, it has a single bench in the middle, and there is a limit of no more than eight visitors at a time. That might sound nice, but I’m beginning to find it irritatingly precious and pretentious. The work stands up well enough by itself and these theatrical trappings are a heavy-handed embarrassment.

On the other hand, the room in the East Building of the National Gallery with Matisse's cut-outs is unpretentious in spite of the restricted hours and low light necessary to protect the work. I suspect the reasons for this are that the room is larger, the art is bigger and more assertive, and the raggedness of the cuts (Matisse's version of rough brushwork) makes the work feel very present.

Detail, Henri Matisse, La Negresse, 1952, paper collage on canvas (National Gallery of Art)

The other major exhibition in Washington is also involved with color — of all things, Andy Warhol: Shadows (until January 15, 2012) at the Hirshhorn. It’s a show of rarely seen work — 102 large canvases silkscreened and hand-painted (with a mop) blown-up photographs of shadows in Warhol’s studio. The canvases are hung arbitrarily edge-to-edge for almost 450 feet along the Museum’s curved galleries. I say hung arbitrarily because Warhol originally said they should be hung randomly, but when they were first exhibited, Warhol allowed his assistants to hang them any way they wanted (which wasn't random), and the Hirshhorn, unnecessarily I believe, stuck as much as they could to the original installation.

Hirshhorn Museum installation view of Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978-79. Organized by the Dia Art Foundation. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Photo by Cathy Carver.

I don't ordinarily think of Warhol as a colorist, but this exhibition changed my mind. Not only are these gorgeous, virtuosic, luscious paintings in themselves, but the installation is a unique color experience in that, like architecture, it changes over time as you walk along it. The experience of one painting, or group of paintings, affects the experience of the next. It’s a thrilling journey.

Another nice thing about this exhibition is the presence of what the Hirshhorn refers to as their "Interpretive Guides" — staff people who tend the exhibition but are not guards. Their job is to engage viewers about the work and answer questions. I hope other museums follow suit.

Bushwick Gallery Guide

2011-11-08T13:35:00.000-05:00

By Charles Kessler

Bushwick Gallery Guide

Bushwick was slow to recover from the looting and rioting after the infamous blackout of 1977, so it was a relatively dangerous area well into the 1990's. But now, like in the rest of New York, drug activity and crime are way down. I personally have never felt unsafe anywhere I've gone in the area.

It’s a diverse neighborhood with a large population of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and South Americans as well as many other nationalities; and even the artists are not all young hipsters but are all ages. Bushwick is also a varied urban environment with two- and three-family townhouses next to six-family tenements next to four- and six-story factories mixed in with stores, restaurants, bars and now art galleries. But it’s the large supply of loft buildings at relatively low rent, as well as the convenience of many nearby subway stops, that has attracted artists — many of them from nearby Williamsburg.

The galleries are spread out over a large area. What is being called “Bushwick” actually includes parts of eastern Williamsburg and Ridgewood, Queens. If you have the energy, it’s possible to do it all in one afternoon (it's about 4 1/2 miles), but, if you want, you can easily split the tour into eastern and western sections. For the eastern section you can end with Factory Fresh (G) and walk back to the Morgan Street L stop from there. For the western section you can start from the Myrtle/Wyckoff L and M subway station and tour in reverse order beginning with Famous Accountants (K). You can return via the Jefferson Street L (at Wyckoff and Troutman).

Most galleries are open Friday - Monday, 1 - 6 pm, but not all of them. I only included galleries that are at least consistently open on Sundays from 1:00 - 6:00, but it's a good idea to check their websites (gallery names below are linked to their websites), email them, or call the galleries in advance to confirm. It’s also a good idea to take the gallery phone numbers with you because in some cases you may need be let in.

I took the opportunity to list some bars and a variety of restaurants along the route, as well as galleries that are only open by appointment. These are not on the map but are placed in the listings next to the galleries they are closest to.

To start the tour, take the L train to Morgan Avenue and go out the Bogart Street exit (toward the back of the train if you’re coming from the west). 56 Bogart is across the street from where you exit.

A - 56 Bogart Street galleries:

Bogart Salon - (203) 249-8843

Interstate Projects tom@interstateprojects.com

Momenta Art - (718) 218-8058 email them via their website

NURTUREart - (718) 782-7755 gallery@nurtureart.org

Studio 10 - (718) 852-4396 studio10bogart@gmail.com

Nearby:

Luhring Augustine Gallery - 25 Knickerbocker Ave (at Ingraham)

(212) 206-9100; info@luhringaugustine.com

The gallery will not be open until at least January. This is the first big-time Chelsea gallery to

open a branch in Bushwick. (Rumors are the Andrea Rosen Gallery will be next.)

B - To go to: Centotto - 250 Moore St (Call to be let in: 908-338-3590)

Head south on Bogart St two blocks

Turn right onto Moore St ½ block

Destination will be on the left

postuccio@gmail.com

Nearby:

Roberta's Restaurant 261 Moore St (near Bogart Street), (718) 417-1118;

Open Daily 11a.m.-Midnight

MoMo Sushi Shack, 43 Bogart Street (near Moore Street), (718) 418-6666

Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday

C - To go to: English Kills - 114 Forrest St -- use door to the garden on the right

Head back on Moore St to Bogart St

Turn right onto Bogart St, go 0.1 mi

Turn left onto Flushing Ave, go 269 ft

Sharp right onto Forrest St

Destination will be on the left

(917) 375-6266, info@englishkillsartgallery.com

Nearby:

Grace Exhibition Space (Performance art), 840 Broadway, 2nd Floor. (646) 578-3402

D - To go to: Airplane - 70 Jefferson St - basement

Continue southwest on Forest St to the end, 276 ft

Take the first left onto Central Avenue, go 0.2 mi, 4 short blks

Turn right onto Jefferson Street, go 0.1 mi

Turn right onto Evergreen and take a quick left to stay on Jefferson

Destination will be on the left

(646) 345-9394; airplanegallery@gmail.com

E - To go to: Microscope - 4 Charles Pl

Continue southwest on Jefferson, turn left on Bushwick Avenue, go 0.1 mi

Slight left onto Myrtle Avenue (just before the subway bridge)

Take an immediate left onto Charles Pl.

Destination will be on the right

(347) 925-1433; info@microscopegallery.com

Nearby:

Tandem (Bar and Restaurant), 236 Troutman Street (between Wilson and Knickerbocker) (718) 386-2369

F - To go to: Storefront - 16 Wilson Ave

Head back on Charles Pl to Myrtle Avenue and quick turn left onto Willoughby Ave

Go 1 blk and turn left onto Evergreen

Go 1 short blk on Evergreen and turn right onto Troutman St, go 0.3 mi, 2 long blks

Turn left onto Wilson Ave, go 0.2 mi, about 4 short blocks

Destination will be on the left

(646) 361-8512; jandrewnyc@yahoo.com

Update: Co-founder Jason Andrew will be leaving the gallery on December 18th and Deborah Brown, Storefront's other founder will be taking over the lease. The gallery will be called Storefront Bushwick.

Nearby:

Narrows Bar, 1037 Flushing Ave (near Morgan)

Opens around 5 pm, (281) 827-1800

G - To go to: Factory Fresh - 1053 Flushing Ave

Continue northwest on Flushing Ave

Destination will be on the left

(917) 682-6753; ali@factoryfresh.net

Nearby:

Cafe Ghia Restaurant, 24 Irving Ave (at Jefferson Street)

(718) 821-8806, open Sun-Thur 11-10pm, Fri-Sat 11-11pm

Arepera Guacuco (Venezuelan restaurant), 44 Irving Ave (at Troutman Street)

(347) 305-3300, Open for lunch and dinner every day.

The Bodega (Bar/Restaurant), 24 Saint Nicholas Avenue (corner of Troutman St.)

Kitchen open until 2 am.

Sugar Art Gallery, 449 Troutman St (between St Nicholas and Cypress Avenues)

Open by appointment only. (718) 417-1180

H - To go to: Norte Maar - 83 Wyckoff Ave

Continue of Flushing Ave 3 blocks

Turn right onto Wyckoff Ave and walk 5 short blks

Destination will be on the left:

(646) 361-8512; email them via their website

I - To go to: Regina Rex - 1717 Troutman St - ring bell #329

(The numbers change when you cross the Queens border -- it's not as far as the address would imply.)

Head back on Wyckoff Ave for 2 blks

Turn right onto Troutman St for 2 ½ long blks

Destination will be on the left:

(646) 467-2232; info[at]reginarex.org

Nearby:

Northeast Kingdom (Restaurant/Bar), 18 Wyckoff Avenue (at Troutman), (718) 386-3864

Sardine 286 Stanhope Street (between Irving and Wyckoff), a small gallery/boutique

J - To go to: Valentine - 464 Seneca Ave

(This is a bigger space than it appears to be from outside.)

Head back on Troutman St ½ blk

Turn left onto Cypress Ave and walk 5 short blks

Turn left onto Dekalb Ave, go 0.3 mi, 3 long blocks

Turn right onto Seneca Ave, go 0.2 mi, 3 1/2 blks

Destination will be on the right:

(718) 381-2962; valentineridgewood@gmail.com

K - To go to: Famous Accountants - 1673 Gates Ave

Continue southeast on Seneca Ave, 0.3 mi, 7 1/2 short blks

Turn right onto Gates Ave

Destination will be on the right:

(917) 309-3540

FamousAccountants@gmail.com

Nearby:

Small Black Door (Art Gallery), 19-20 Palmetto St. (before Forest Ave)

Open during receptions and by appointment only.

Use contact form on their website to get in touch with them.

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer who lives in Jersey City.

Lower East Side Gallery Update

2011-11-03T18:51:00.000-04:00

Sloan Fine Arts is the only Lower East Side gallery I know of that closed — they’re looking for a new space. While that’s a real loss (hopefully not for long), the good news is thirteen (!) new galleries opened in the last few months — a surprising three of them are on Forsyth Street. The even better news is all of these new galleries are run by smart, ambitious, nice people. Here are the details:

BosiDamjanovic Gallery
48 Orchard Street, NY 10002
http://www.bosidamjanovic.com
(212) 966-5686

Brennan & Griffen
55 Delancey Street, NY 10002
brennangriffin.com
(212) 227-0115

Katie Grinnan, Accordion Thoughts And Everyday Superposition, Brennan & Griffen Gallery, installation view

Callicoon Fine Arts
124 Forsyth Street, NY 10002
callicoonfinearts.com
(212) 219-0326

Essex Street
47 Essex Street, NY 10002
http://essexstreet.biz/
(312) 399-0531

Golden
120 Elizabeth Street, NY 10013
http://goldengallery.co/
(773) 209-8889

steven harvey fine art projects
208 Forsyth Street, NY 10002
shfap.com
(917) 861-7312

Louis B. James
143B Orchard Street, NY 10002
Louisbjames.com
(212) 533-4670

Lu Magnus
55 Hester Street, NY 10002
LuMagnus.com
(212) 677-6555

Mulherin + Pollard

187 Chrystie Street, NY 10002
You can also enter at the end of Freeman Alley
mulherinpollard.com
(212) 967-0045

SHOW ROOM
170 Suffolk Street, NY 10002
http://showroom170.com
(646) 559-2856

Marc Straus (temporary)
132 Delancey Street, NY 10002
Enter on Norfolk Street - second floor
They will be moving to 299 Grand Street between Eldridge and Allen in January.
http://marcstraus.com/
(212) 510-7646

Forsyth Street view of the toomer labzda gallery

toomer labzda
100a Forsyth Street, NY 10002
www.toomerlabzda.com
(917) 488-3388

Y Gallery
165 Orchard Street, NY 10002
ygallerynewyork.com
(917) 721-4539

Also:
Thierry-Goldberg
103 Norfolk Street, NY 10002
http://www.thierrygoldberg.com/
(212) 967-2260
Moved to a larger and nicer space at 103 Norfolk Street (between Rivington and Delancey).

NOTE: The good people at the gallery Feature Inc. have put their excellent LES Gallery map online. In the future, a link to this site will be on the right sidebar instead of the LES guide we have been providing -- it's somewhat out of date anyway!

October Chelsea Roundup

2011-11-02T22:21:00.001-04:00

By Charles Kessler

About a third of the galleries are installing new shows that will open Thursday -- it’s going to be a CRAZY night in Chelsea!

OBG’s:

Roy Lichtenstein, Entablature, 1974, oil, magna, sand, magna medium, aluminum powder on canvas,

60 x 90 inches (Paula Cooper Gallery)

It seems like the top-tier Chelsea galleries are competing with each other to present museum-quality exhibitions. Paula Cooper proves her mettle with Roy Lichtenstein: Entablatures (extended through November 12th).

The paintings, completed between 1971 and 1976, are based on illustrations he found in Greek and Roman architecture journals, but I also believe Lichtenstein was making a tongue-in-cheek reference to Minimalism generally and to the the striped paintings of Kenneth Noland in particular. See below:

Kenneth Noland, Via Light, 1968, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 113 inches, (courtesy of Lelie Feely Fine Art).

Richard Pousette-Dart, Cloud Sign, 1950, Oil and graphite on linen, 36 x 74 inches

(Luhring Augustine Gallery).

Richard Pousette-Dart: East River Studio at Luhring Augustine until December 17th.

This is a show of rarely-seen paintings and wire sculptures he did in the 1950s. One interesting sidelight is the exhibition is organized by the well-known artist Christopher Wool, who studied with Pousette-Dart in college, and Pousette-Dart’s daughter, the painter Joanna Pousette-Dart.

Burning, Bright: A Short History of the Light Bulb, Pace Gallery on 22nd Street until November 26th.
(The Pace Gallery website is so bad I won’t expose you to it; instead, here’s a write up in Art Daily.)

It’s amazing how many artists have used the light bulb as a motif in the last century. As you'd expect, the show has the well-known light bulbs of Jasper Johns and Claus Oldenberg, but there is also work by many others including Man Ray, Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and a delightful small cat lamp by Alexander Calder.

LA OBG’s:
Undoubtably because of Pacific Standard Time there’s been more than the usual number of exhibitions of older Los Angeles art and artists in New York. Here are three that I think are among the most interesting.

Sonia Gechtoff, the Ferus Years at Nyehaus gallery until December 17th.

Sonia Gechtoff, Death of a Child, 1957, oil on canvas, 66 x 97 inches

This is an artist I knew nothing about, and one of the very few women that showed at LA’s now-famous Ferus Gallery. The only other woman artist I can think of is Jay DeFeo and, like her, Gechtoff was from the Bay area and stylistically closer to West Coast Abstract Expressionists like Hassel Smith.

The gallery is giving away a beautifully printed color catalog of the show. It includes a 2006 interview with Gechtoff by Marshall Price and several photos of the period.

Llyn Foulkes at Andrea Rosen Gallery until December 3rd.

Llyn Foulkes, Happy Rock, 1969, oil on canvas, 88 x 84 1/2 inches

There's been quite a bit of Foulkes's art shown in the last few years, maybe because the surrealistic and conceptual quality of his work is compatible with post-modern sensibilities. The focus of this exhibition is on Foulks’s 1963 to 1991 rock landscapes. These are strange, disconcerting and haunting works.

Pacific Standard Editions, Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl; 465 West 23rd Street - Ground Floor, (temporary location) until November 5th.

During the 60’s and 70’s, all the New York heavies — Stella, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauchenberg and many others — would come to LA to make prints at Gemini. This show provides a small taste of what was done in those years. Look for the Ron Davis multiple — it’s a knock-out.

I’m looking forward to Robert Graham: Early Work 1963 - 1973, opening November 7th at David Zwirner.

The press release says the show will contain his Plexiglass boxes. The boxes contain small wax sculptures of suntanned bathers at the beach, or small domestic interiors with figures making love or otherwise enjoying themselves. The viewer is very much a voyeur and a giant one at that. This work was very popular when it was first shown; I remember even Clement Greenberg liked it, but for whatever reason it's hardly ever seen anymore. Unfortunately Graham’s work became more somber and academic as he got older. He died in Santa Monica, California, in 2008.

Robert Graham looking at his wax sculptures in his exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery, 1968. © Robert Graham. Image courtesy of Jerry McMillan and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica. © Jerry McMillan. This photo was taken from the Getty Museum's website.

Younger Artists (sort of)

William Powhida, Derivatives at Postmasters until November 26th

and Allison Schulnik at ZieherSmith until December 17th.

Video has become obligatory for exhibitions by younger artists — and the videos are usually not as good as their other work. The opposite is the case with these two artists.

I’m frankly getting a little tired of standing and reading Powhida’s work in a gallery setting -- it’s a lot easier to read, and seems more appropriate, on his website -- but, as he’d be the first to point out, you can’t make money that way. His video, on the other hand, is an entertaining extension of the obnoxious art-star persona he created this summer at a performance at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea.

Likewise, even though LA-based Allison Schulnik is 32 years old and a CalArts graduate, this is a very immature artist — talented but sophomoric. As you can see from the reproduction (below), her work is heavy-handed, melodramatic, sappy and kitschy. But this kind of theatricality and pathos seems to work better in her video.

Allison Schulnik, Yogurt Eater, 2011, oil on linen, 84 x 68 inches

I saved my favorite for last: Shane Hope, Transubstrational: As a Smartmatter of Nanofacture at the Winkelman Gallery (until December 23rd).

Shane Hope, "Transubstrational - As a Smartmatter of Nanofacture," (installation view showing his hand-made 3D printer, Winkleman Gallery). Photography by Etienne Frossard.

I recently wrote that some of de Kooning’s works have so much going on and are so complex, they’re like nature itself. Well this applies in spades to Shane Hope’s work. I thought his last show was dense, but now he’s crammed in even more by adding a third dimensions. I can’t describe it better than Ed Winkleman:

For his new series of lenticular-3D prints (titled "Post-Scarcity Percept-Pus Portraiture"), Hope has continued to customize user-sponsored open-source nanomolecular design software systems. He uses this software to modify, manipulate and design groups of molecular models. To build his painterly pictures, he assembles together tens of thousands of these models, resulting in fantastic compositions depicting organic, inorganic, synthesizable, theoretically feasible and nano-nonsensical molecules. The lenticular 3D print format presents holographic-like relief-sculptural depth, providing an extraordinary view into molecular design spaces and how hacking matter happens.

Don’t get the wrong idea, the work isn’t the dry by-product of some intellectual/conceptual conceit; the process is absolutely integral to the meaning and experience of the work, and the result is rich art in every way: beautiful, glowing, mysterious and downright profound.

Art News

2011-10-30T19:54:00.002-04:00

By Charles Kessler

I wasn’t going to write about Gagosian’s Bob Dylan exhibition because I think it got more attention than it deserves, but people I know who care about art, and think about it, have asked what I think, so….

By presenting Dylan's art in the same gallery and at the same time as Jenny Saville's, Gagosian is suggesting they're in the same league. They're not. Of course it isn't Dylan’s fault that Gagosian showed his work, but every time Dylan had to deal with something a bit challenging, like hands or kneecaps, he sloughed over it -- the guy didn’t even try. And even compared to some other musicians, like John Lennon or Captain Beefheart, Dylan’s art isn’t very good. I mean let’s keep things in perspective — this is the work of a dedicated hobbyist; he's somewhat better than Eisenhower but not as good as Churchill.

***

Another thing people keep asking me about is this new “Occupy Museums” movement. I think Hrag Vartanian nails it on the blog Hyperallergic when he writes: "Leave it to the art world to make everything about them…." And in another post he presents his objections in more detail:

If we’re going to change the way museums do things then we have to find them an alternate mode of funding. If rich patrons aren’t going to fund them then they’ll need a more grassroots approach (Kickstarter?) or maybe public money, but neither of those seem likely at the moment. ...Who gets to decide what goes into a museum of the 99%? That’s a bigger question I’d love to know the answer to.

***

There’s a lot going on in New York right now, but don’t miss David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy at the Whitney - it’s pure joy. The show originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, In the catalog, the curator, Carol S. Eliel, makes somewhat of a phony argument. She tries to refute the claim that David Smith only worked with cubes later in his career -- but who ever said that in the first place?

David Smith, Cubi I, 1963, Stainless steel, 124 x 34 x 33 ½ inches, (Detroit Institute of the Arts)

In any case, the work is glorious: inventive, sensual, playful -- note the little sphere on the bottom of Cubi I (above) propping up the precariously stacked stainless steel boxes. (BTW, despite its name, it's not the first Cubi sculpture.)

I’ve seen a lot of David Smith's work over the years, but the thing that got to me this time was the compelling illusion of the stainless steel dematerializing into ephemeral light. Maybe it was the way the work was lit that made the difference, but the calligraphic burnishing on the stainless steel created squiggles of light that floated in space in front of and behind the steel surface, transforming the steel into what looked like transparent gray scrim. You can see a little of this illusion in the photo below, but you really need to see the work in person and move around it to truly experience the illusion.

David Smith, Untitled (Candida), 1965. Stainless steel, 103 × 120 × 31 in. The Estate of David Smith/VAGA, New York. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson; courtesy the Estate of David Smith, NY.

***

The Metropolitan Museum of Art upgraded their website making it a lot easier to use. It now contains good reproductions of most of their collection, including many high-resolution images.

***

I'm working on an update of the Lower East Side galleries -- there are 15 new ones, about 75 all together. Incredible! And I'm also working on a map of Bushwick galleries. Stay tuned.

Curatorial Flashbacks #17: Writing About Art, Part 2

2011-10-23T08:18:00.000-04:00

By Carl Belz

As promised, here are a few more short essays on individualpaintings acquired for the Rose Art Museum where I was director from 1974through 1998. (BTW To celebrate my appointment to that directorship, spouseBarbara scored an acquisition of her own, the car you see pictured in thephotograph above. It’s a ’49 Mercury, and it was the car of choice among coolguys when I was in high school between ’51 and ’55. Also the car James Deanmemorably drove in Rebel Without A Cause. I always wanted one, but being coolwasn’t in my arsenal back then, so I had to wait a while to get my Merc—like,about 20 years. But, better to be cool later than never cool at all,right?)

Jo Ann Rothschild, In Memory Of Edwin Rothschild, 1995,mixed media on canvas, 92 x 134 inches.

On my first visit to a studio, I like to take some time toget a feel for the space and the artist, so I usually just pace silently aroundfor a while, looking as much at the art as at the postcards and reproductionstacked to the walls, the books and magazines lying around, and the tapesstacked next to the audio system—anything that might inform my comments on thework itself or, if I come up short on that score, might at least circle aroundthe work and lead to a conversation about personal tastes in art or literatureor music. The approach has generally worked well, but it carries no guarantees.When I first visited Jo Ann’s studio back in the seventies, for instance, therewere no reproductions or books or tapes to talk about, just her paintings. Andthough they were very large and very abstract, signals of high ambition, theynonetheless left me cold, because they were very expressionistic, displaying aslash-and-burn manner that recalled the kind of New York School painting thathad pretty much exhausted itself 20 years before and seemed able to surviveonly when laced with irony. But the paintings exhibited no trace of irony, sothere I was, stranded by what my mother had always told me, which was, “If youcan’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I must have said something at least vaguelyencouraging—probably that I’d be interested in seeing how the workdeveloped—because Jo Ann occasionally asked me to look at new paintings afterthat first visit. I remember one time around 1990 when she brought pictures tothe museum, probably about 35 or 40 of them, and to my surprise not one of themmeasured more than a foot in either dimension. The images in a few casesloosely alluded to landscapes but otherwise remained abstract, and the surfaceswith few exceptions retained the expressive handling I was familiar with. Thesize, however, was what most intrigued me, because I felt it indicated aquestioning of gestural bravura, maybe even an urge to rein in theexpressionist impulse that had previously been the work’s signature. The newdirection looked promising, but it also looked experimental, as though theideas it proposed had yet to be fully worked out. I talked a little more than before,but not much.

I was glad curator/friend Susan Stoops was with me when Ireturned to the studio in 1995. Concerned that I would again not really likethe work and again be left with nothing to say, I hoped Susan would carry theconversation and maybe help me with a fresh perspective on the art. But thatturned out to be unnecessary, for I was totally flattened by what I saw, yet Ifelt not the least bit awkward in not knowing how to articulate my response.The paintings were again very large—in Jo Anne’s attic studio, we could look atonly one at a time—and they were still very abstract, but their abstractnesswas now radically open and expansive. With each canvas, I found myself thinkingless about what Jo Ann had meant by the paintings than what the paintings meantin themselves, as though she had detached herself from them, stopped tryingabove all to express herself through them, and had thereby set free and allowedto sing the pictorial elements of drawing and color and space that shepreviously sought to bend to her will and possess as exclusively hers—as thoughshe had found her voice once she stopped looking for it.

My experience that day was fully rewarding and instructive:rewarding, as a reminder that good artists can open even reluctant eyes if youremain open to them; and instructive, as a reminder that good art doesn’t needwords, because it invariably speaks eloquently for itself.

David Ortins, #2395P, 1995, oil and wax on wood panel, 68x 44 inches.

Innovative techniques and new materials occasionally appearin art and quickly gain widespread usage, as collage did in the 1910s, or asacrylics did in the late 1950s, and their usage can initially seem to transformeven the most ordinary pictures into objects of wonder. With acrylics, forinstance, staining in the manner of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis andKenneth Noland quickly became a dominant painting technique, and by the middleof the 1960s we were surrounded by acres of Color Field pictures, each of themseeming more glorious than the last. Such was their allure, and it wasirresistible; their surfaces were everywhere soft and inviting, their coloreffortlessly spread and glowed, and light breathed life into them as generouslyas in nature itself. You probably think I’m exaggerating in saying thesethings, but that’s the way it really was. At least for a while. By the time the1970s were under way, stain painting had lost a lot of its original freshnessand become routine and predictable—like collage, which at this point has beenso thoroughly academicized that even school children practice it with ease.Which is not to deny the significance of Color Field painting as a whole, letalone the significance of its major practitioners. I mean only to suggest thatnew techniques and materials can sometimes infatuate you on impact, only tothen cloy the appetite on which they feed.

The 1990s counterpart to acrylic staining in the 1960s iswax. Though wax has for centuries been available to painting in the form ofencaustic, it took on new meaning with the highly personalized andautobiographic art that has proliferated during the past decade or so. Pick upa canvas or board, sketch upon it an image of a figure or paste upon it an oldphotograph, then pour on a coat of translucent wax and bingo, you’ve instantly got a visual metaphor for memoryor some related emotional effect. In studio after studio I observed thatpractice, and I was at first as seduced by it as anyone else; remembering thesixties, however, I soon began to look harder at sure-fire effects that oftenfailed to go beyond mere sentimentality, and I became wary whenever Iencountered pictures incorporating wax.

I had seen some of David Ortins’s paintings by the timeSusan Stoops and I first visited his studio in 1994. He had been doinggeometric abstractions that were executed on white wax grounds, but the waxmostly served to provide a clean support and didn’t call particular attentionto itself, so it was accordingly unproblematic. The new pictures presented an entirelydifferent situation. Instead of an overall geometry, the images consisted oftwo or three spare rivulets of color—red or yellow or black—that flowed easilyfrom top to bottom in the center of each painting and dramatically exposed thewax ground, making it pictorially assertive where it had before been hardlynoticeable. Forewarned, I would have thought the situation risky, but insteadit took my breath away. Smooth and immaculate, the whiteness of the wax slabfelt as pure as natural light, detached and impersonal, yet exhilarating. Wewere fortunate in being able to purchase one of those paintings for thepermanent collection, and I especially enjoyed installing it once or twice inthe company of our Louis stripe painting, because they communicated someaningfully with one another, but also as reminders that the uses of newtechniques and materials don’t always become cloying—in the right hands, theycan actually make hungry where most they satisfy.

Alex Katz, Ada With Superb Lily, 1967, oil on canvas, 46 x51-1/2 inches.

Born in 1927, Alex Katz came to artistic maturity during the1950s. Back then, one of the values we aspired to in presenting ourselves tothe world was that of being cool. James Dean and Marlon Brando, for instance,were both cool. Their manner was sometimes hesitant, as if they were consciousof our gaze and wary of being looked at, on stage or before a camera—maybeanywhere—but it was also assured, suggesting inner confidence, being on top ofthe situation while choosing to hold back from it, and from us as well. Thealoofness was cool, lending to their manner an edginess that kept us wanting,an edginess that Alex Katz must have grasped, for it is a characteristicfeature of his paintings.

Ada is the artist’s wife, and she appears regularly in hispictures, sometimes with him or with their son Vincent, occasionally with both,but most often by herself, as she is here. Whenever she appears, however, youcan be sure of one thing: she will be composed and ready to meet her audience,a model of urbane decorum, fully in control, and invariably in style, glamorouseven when casually attired. Just was she is at the moment of this picture,seated in a canvas lawn chair, assertively facing us through her chicsunglasses, her formally pulled back yet clearly in order and tied with anelegant silk scarf, her sophisticated presence appropriately complemented bythe Superb lily that rises behind her and completes what is indeed a strikinglydignified and superb image. There aspects are all carefully observed andrecorded, making Ada seem familiar, and stirring in us the feeling that wemight on another occasion have met her.

This is surprising in view of Katz’s generalized approach tohis subject. His drawing is broad and crisp, silhouetting and flattening thefigure in its space, and his color is applied in large, even masses thatfurther reduce both subject and setting into schematic shorthand notations.Since we are in fact presented with very few specific details, how can we feelwe might have met this person, that she is familiar? What kind of familiarityare we talking about?

I think it’s like the familiarity we feel in relation tomovie stars or professional athletes or public figures we know through themedia world, that is, in contexts for which they are always prepared and whichare themselves tightly controlled, quick, and two-dimensional. Who could bemore familiar than your favorite anchorperson on the local television news?Yet, as Marshall McLuhan first pointed out, when we happen to see such a personin the unstructured, extended, and three-dimensional world of normal everydayexperience—say, at an art exhibition—we’re ironically uncertain if it’s theperson we thought we were so familiar with. Wishing our two worlds to reinforceone another, we cautiously approach, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Ada Katz?”Cool.

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

De Kooning and the Figure/Ground Dilemma

2011-10-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

By Charles Kessler

Given the quality of his work and his great range and inventiveness, de Kooning may be the best American painter of the twentieth century, but he wasn’t the most radically original. That honor probably goes to Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still since they were the first to do away with figure/ground distinctions in their work -- the main innovation of American painting in the 1940's and 50's.

Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950, oil and enamel on canvas, 81 x 100 inches (Art Institute of Chicago)

It’s not that de Kooning never merged figure/ground early on -- his Excavation, 1950, began as an interior with figures but became so broken up that it's all one thing. But he never stayed with it in a consistent way like Pollock and Still who made it a characteristic of their art. (This can also be said of large scale.)

This has NOTHING to do with quality. Merritt Parkway, 1959, is a great painting, but it still deals with figure/ground relationships like a traditional landscape,

Willem de Kooning, Merritt Parkway, 1959, oil on canvas, 80 x 70 1/2 inches (The Detroit Institute of Arts)

Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday, 1955-56, oil and newspaper transfer on canvas, 96 x 74 inches (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

whereas Easter Monday, like an Analytic Cubist painting, is broken up so much that there is little or no figure/ground distinction. (You can see some great examples of Analytic Cubism at the ever-so-swank Acquavella Gallery, 18 East 79th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues. They have a major George Braque retrospective until November 30th.)

Without figure/ground distinctions, it's hard to create space in a painting; things get clogged up, they don’t breathe. It also usually means giving up shapes and forms, so as a result the expressive possibilities of the medium become limited. Is a field of color (Rothko, Newman) or layers of lines (Pollock) or a pile of shapes enough? Can you say much without forms in a space? And can you keep it up if you do? Picasso never went all the way, and Monet's water lilies kept the distinction, however subtle. Even Pollock backed off in his later work.

Clyfford Still managed to have it both ways by maintaining an ambiguity as to whether or not something is a fissure in a field of color revealing part of another field of color underneath, or a unique, self-contained irregular shape.

Clyfford Still, 1948-C, 1948, oil on canvas, 81 x 69 inches (Hirshhorn Museum)

De Kooning, in his late work, also figured a way around this dilemma by creating ambiguity. Follow a de Kooning line and it transforms into a ribbon then an outline of a shape or a contour of a volume that becomes a gaseous field of color all the while turning in and out of space.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled I, 1985, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 inches (Private collection, Germany).

Some Thoughts about MoMA’s de Kooning Exhibition

2011-10-20T11:32:00.001-04:00

By Charles Kessler

Willem de Kooning, Woman II, 1950-52, 76" x 58", oil on canvas, (MoMA)

I hope this exhibition puts an end to the myth that de Kooning's "Woman" paintings are misogynistic. Most of de Kooning's women, at least most of the ones I’ve seen, are powerful, sexually aggressive, and often outrageously funny. Perhaps people continue to have this misconception today because the most famous de Kooning painting, MoMA’s Woman II (above), might possibly be interpreted as misogynistic. But that painting is not typical. Compare it with this painting, for example:

Willem de Kooning, Woman with Bicycle, 1952-53, oil on canvas, 77" x 49" (Whitney Museum of Art).

(Sebastian Smee reported in his review of the show, that de Kooning told his brother-in-law, Conrad Fried, about seeing prostitutes in Amsterdam flashing their breasts for a fraction of a second (as advertising I assume). I think that comment is particularly relevant to this painting.)

***

Like Picasso, de Kooning uses color mainly to distinguish one shape (or brushstroke) from another rather than for what it does best: glow, resonate, breathe and interact with other colors. It’s not until the early sixties, with paintings like Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point (below), that he really deals with color, and then not again consistently until twenty years later, when he abandoned what he called “fitting in” — the placement of the parts of a painting so they interweave across the surface in an all-over manner (Easter Monday, 1955-56 - further below, for example). I believe this was precipitated, or at least reinforced, by de Kooning's dislike of Picasso’s late work which he saw in the fall of 1980 at the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Also at that time, Elderfield reports in the de Kooning catalog (p.450), “He told Judith Wolfe that he had become interested in Matisse because that artist’s work didn’t have the ‘fitting’ quality of Cezanne and the Cubists.”

Willem de Kooning, Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963, oil on canvas 80 x 70 inches (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).

***

There are some surprising congruences with de Kooning’s work, especially his late work. His The Cat’s Meow (owned by Jasper Johns, BTW) reminds me of East Village Graffiti art -- people like Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, or maybe even Carroll Dunham or Elizabeth Murray’s late work.

The Cat's Meow, 1987, oil on canvas, 88 x 77 inches.

and there's this congruence:

Just saying.

***

Some of de Kooning’s work has so much going on and is so complex, they’re like nature itself. Check this out for example:

Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday, 1955-56, oil and newspaper transfer on canvas, 8' x 6'2" (Met).

***

Finally, on an entirely unrelated matter, what's with the dust bunnies all over MoMA? Has anyone else noticed? Don’t they ever vacuum? Weird.

Window overlooking Brazilian artist Carlito Carvalhosa, Sum of Days, MoMA installation, 2011.

My next post: de Kooning and the figure/ground dilemma.

Curatorial Flashbacks #16: Writing About Art

2011-10-17T07:12:00.000-04:00

By Carl Belz

Friends occasionally ask if I like writing about art. I say “like” doesn’t quite do it. Writing is a challenge, the words often resist, as if they’re actually physical. While their meanings are in many cases elastic, they can’t just be pushed around, they deserve respect. Though pleasurable to work with, they’re neither toys nor mere entertainments. Still, when responsibly employed in the job of writing about art, the words invariably guide and enable the urge to clarify my experience of the object at hand and articulate its content. And when all of that comes together the writing can be highly gratifying. To suggest what I mean, I’m here reprinting a few short essays, each devoted to a single painting, which I initially penned in conjunction with exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum. The pictures were all purchases for the Rose permanent collection.

Tina Feingold, Bleed, 1997-98, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

Bleed is dated 1997-98, indicating Tina worked on it over a two-year period, not unusual from what I know about her practice of embarking on a series by working on one picture for a few days, then starting a second, and a third, and maybe a fourth, at which point she’s likely to go back to the first one and add a couple of layers of color, or to the second, or the third, and so on, before beginning the fifth or sixth, for that’s how the series evolves, always back and forth, back and forth, layer upon layer upon layer, a matter of process more than product, as you can easily see if you look at the edges of the painting where the successive layers physically accumulate, as naturally as twigs and pebbles forming a line on the edges of a pond, into sensuous ridges of pure pigment gently rimming the surface but serving no pictorial function whatsoever other than to acknowledge how abundantly rich and rewarding the making of a painting can be, which, if you think about it, is actually saying an awful lot, and of a magnitude that you can easily imagine might require a couple of years to say, especially if you were determined to say it as fully and convincingly as Tina has, in which case you might also understand how the painting came to be titled Bleed.”

The painting, a gift from the museum’s Board of Overseers, was presented to the Rose during a reception held in my honor in June 1998, in advance of which curator Susan Stoops had asked me on behalf of the Board if there was an area artist I wished to see represented in the permanent collection whose work we had not yet acquired, and I thought immediately of Tina, because she had been a close personal friend for many years, seeing just about every exhibition I ever mounted, reading closely each of my catalog essays and providing thoughtful responses to them while prodding me to write more, sharing provocative books and articles I had overlooked, traipsing around galleries and museums with me when I wanted companionship, reporting on shows elsewhere that I was unable to get to, attending for a full semester every lecture on the history of contemporary art I delivered at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and telling me later that they regularly inspired her to go back to the studio and paint, all that and more, yet asking nothing in return, except maybe an occasional studio visit during which she would put up with my telling her to get rid of the image and go for abstraction and other stuff I doubt she wanted to hear, but that never impeded our conversation or affected our relationship other than to deepen it, which is why I thought of her in connection with this gift that has my name attached to it, and, as I’m sure you can see, why Bleed caries significances that range far beyond its being a wonderful painting.

Linda Etcoff, Still Life With “Chop Suey”, 1985, oil on canvas, 44 x 60 inches

As is her practice, Linda Etcoff carefully planned this picture before executing it from direct observation. This means she selected and arranged the trays and glassware, the Edward Hopper poster, the lemon, the umbrella, the cup and saucer, the ashtray and cigarettes, the flowers and vase and table, everything, even the colors of the walls and window. She selected them with the idea of creating a decorative ensemble to which each object would appropriately contribute in terms of design and color. Thus, not just any ashtray or pack of cigarettes would do, only the right ones, and thus, too, if the studio wall was initially white but the ensemble she envisioned called for blue, then she would repaint the wall before proceeding to paint the painting of it. In the painting itself the artist’s refined taste and scrupulous attention to detail are fully apparent in the crisp and exacting depiction of the objects and in the harmonious visual bouquet of their arrangement. We are presented with a high order of decoration.

Of course the painting is more than just decorative, more than just an attractive still life, a poster announcing the exhibition of an esteemed American master, and a view of the city outside the artist’s studio. Let’s look again.

A table with two trays and a vase of tulips stands in the immediate foreground; behind it on the right is a wall on which the poster is taped, and behind the wall is the studio window with a stool and still life before it. But wait: the window is not actually a window, nor are the stool and still life actually a stool and still life. They are parts of another painting, another Linda Etcoff painting that rests on an easel that stands behind the wall that stands behind the foreground table in the painting we’re actually looking at.

So we have three paintings in one: first, the painting we’re addressing, Still Life With “Chop Suey”; second, the unnamed painting on the easel in Still Life With “Chop Suey”; and third, the Etcoff painting of the Hopper painting reproduced in the poster, the title of which is Chop Suey. Paintings of paintings and of reproductions of paintings, art coming from art, as we know all art does. In this case, however, I want to say that that dictum lies at the heart of the painting, animates it throughout, constitutes its subject. Etcoff develops her art out of her own past, but equally she develops it out of the art of artists such as Edward Hopper, and thereby does she honor and extend the tradition of American realist painting. In the sheer quality of her picture, finally, she also—and notably—enriches it. A high order of decoration is invariably as meaningful as it is satisfying.

John Salt, Lunch Room, 1977, oil on canvas, 42-1/4 x 62-3/4 inches

This is a pretty bleak image. The lunch room is closed down, its windows boarded up. The Pepsi signs are weathered and dingy. There are graffiti on the on the wall, along with posters we can’t read, their messages forever lost. It’s been awhile since the place hummed with activity, if it ever did. Then there’s the car standing in front of the lunch room. It looks like an old Chrysler Newport, a newer model than the one my father bought in 1952—a dependable American car made by a dependable American company, a family car—but this one has sure seen better days. It’s banged up and filthy, its paint is faded. There’s rust around the wheel wells and on the rocker panels. The hubcaps are gone. The tires are probably retreads. Did someone park it there, or was it simply abandoned? It’s hard to say, just as it’s hard to imagine that it ever stood new in a showroom or that it was a vehicle for Saturday night cruising and good-time fun. It must have had another life, maybe several lives, but the pathos of its present condition effaces any past it may once have enjoyed. And finally there’s the snow, snow in the city, always dirty, never seeming really to be snow at all, just some kind of sloppy mess that clogs up the drains and forms deep puddles that make it impossible to cross the street, and you ruin your shoes anyway. Talk about the death of the inner city, you’ve got it here in spades.

When advanced painting jettisoned narration, which was about a century and a half ago, photography was there to rescue it for the visual arts, and with photography it remained, eventually giving rise to pictures that moved and told their stories through real time. (BTW If you think it’s merely coincidental that movies were invented at the very moment when vanguard painting was putting a stake through the heart of narration by eliminating all traces of the visible world and becoming totally nonobjective, then maybe you should think again.) It remained there, that is, as long as painting wanted to go in the direction of pure abstractness in the process of defining its separateness from the other arts, from photography, for instance, or literature and poetry. But that urge was pronounced dead by the 1970s when painting, via postmodernism, embraced anew all manner of concerns that had previously been discarded from it, including narration.

Yet, if you were schooled in modernist purity and felt an obligation to retain its moral imperative, and you also felt the appeal of postmodernism’s promise of freedom—which is how I see the situation of John Salt and other photorealist painters—how would you go about resolving your dilemma? Well, you could do it by using a photograph to make a painting that looks like a photograph. Because photographs are flat, they don’t violate the flatness of the picture plane that modernism taught you to honor, and because they’re inherently narrative, they free you to tell stories you want your paintings to tell, stories like the one about the car in the snow in front of the lunch room.

(This is the first of a two-part post)

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

Chelsea Roundup

2011-10-16T00:16:00.003-04:00

By Charles Kessler

Richard Serra is one of those artists, like Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, that I hate to love. I mean the guy is such a pompous jerk, but as I wrote in a recent post, his obnoxious personality goes hand in hand with the chutzpa needed to make such powerful work.

This new work is massive sculpture -- more non-utilitarian architecture than sculpture, really. It practically touches the (very high) ceiling of Gagosian's 24th Street space, and it fills the entire space. As you walk through the labyrinth of massive steel walls that sometimes tilt threateningly overhead and other times squeeze you into narrow spaces, there are surprises along the way -- a sudden opening or an unexpected volume curving in a new direction. This is not at all like his past, more minimal, work -- it's very varied, beautiful, even artful. If you can't get there to experience it, the next best thing is this installation video.

***

The Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street) has a handsome show of Frank Stella's early work.

Frank Stella, Untitled, 1966, acrylic and fluorescent alkyd on canvas, 64 x 128 inches.

Like Serra, Stella has changed from his early minimal work. But I also think there's been a change in the perception of this early work, and this show corroborates it. What looked so minimal and non-art when it was made now looks complicated and down right beautiful, if not out and out decorative.

***

Another good show of older work is the paintings of the late Milton Resnick at Cheim and Read (547 West 25th Street). This show focuses on what I think is Resnick's best, the work he did from 1959 to 1963. Yet again, what seemed like minimal, monochromatic work, is now perceived as juicy, painterly, and lush.

Milton Resnick, Straw, 1982, oil on canvas, 80x60inches. (Click to enlarge).

More Art News - I'm still catching up.

2011-10-13T17:24:00.002-04:00

Apple Logo adapted by Jonathan Mak

The Times reports how this design turned into a controversy, but I like it as a tribute to Steve Jobs more than Chris Thornley's "original" version.

***

Pacific Standard Time (PST), the enormous series of exhibitions (170 exhibitions at 130 museums and galleries) that explores and celebrates Southern California's art history has begun with a bang and will continue banging for the next six months. The Art Newspaper has an excellent article on how the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Foundation joined forces to become a catalyst for this ambitious enterprise.

According to the New York Times, Dave Hickey thinks it's corny, boosterish and largely unnecessary, and maybe he's right, but I'm glad they're doing it. Under-appreciated artists like John McLaughlin are getting their due, and attention is being paid to long-ignored aspects of LA's history. I hope to see some of it.

Another bit of good new for Los Angeles: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has partnered with The Motion Picture Academy to create a new movie museum. Los Angeles, amazingly, does not have a major museum devoted to film, and now one will be established near LACMA in the old 300,000-square-foot May Co. building.

***

The Guardian reports art historian Martin Kemp has proven that what Christie's rejected as a "20th-century fake" is really a lost Leonardo masterpiece torn from a 15th-century portfolio.

Against the odds, Kemp tracked the volume down, to Poland’s national library in Warsaw; the stitch-holes are a perfect match for those on La Bella Principessa, a portrait in ink and coloured chalks on vellum. It is overwhelming evidence, Kemp says, that the portrait dates from the 15th century – and not the 19th century, as Christie’s thought when it sold it in 1998 for £11,400 (it could fetch £100m as a Leonardo).

Possible lost Leonardo

I was pleased to read that a former teacher of mine at UCLA, Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti, agrees with the attribution. Good to see he's still in the game.

I remember Pedretti regaling us with his attempts to deal with the Italian bureaucracy in order to get permission to look behind a Vasari fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence to see if Leonardo's famous Battle of Anghiari is still behind it. This was in the sixties, and, according to a recent Times article, they're still trying.

***

Clyfford Still, 1949 No. 1 (PH-385), oil on canvas, 105 x 81 inches (Estate of Clyfford Still).

The Clyfford Still Museum is set to open in Denver (of all places) on November 18th. It will house a mind-boggling 94% of the artist’s total output -- 825 paintings and 1575 works on paper. The Wall Street Journal reports that Dean Sobel, the museum director, has a chance to rewrite American Art History. Sobel says, "The goal for us is to put Still back in, to show the greatness of him and that he was the great innovator of the movement. He creates Abstract Expressionism before all the others." And Tyler Green, one of my favorite art bloggers, is already at it with a three-part article on Clyfford Still, here, here and here. I hope they succeed. I love Still.

***

Art Review Magazine has just published its list of the top 100 powers in the art world. If you care, Ai Weiwei beat out Larry Gagosian for number one.

And finally, via The New York Observer I found out about crochet street artist Olek's latest:

I haven't seen it yet, but I'd guess it's somewhat of an improvement over the original (below) -- at least until it gets raggedy.

Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal, Astor Place Cube (Alamo), 1967, 96 inches each side

The Sixties Live -- and that's a good thing.

2011-10-12T07:45:00.001-04:00

Woodstock, New York, Last Sunday

Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, New York, yesterday

I'm Back!!!

2011-10-08T14:30:00.000-04:00

By Charles Kessler

I just came back from two weeks touring Spain, Tangiers and Portugal. It was great (need I say it?). But whew, I'm exhausted! I'm not complaining, mind you -- we loved every minute, but I'm exhausted. And coming home to an art scene as insanely full and hectic as New York's isn't helping.

Let me begin by telling you what I'm NOT going to write about: The Prado. It's beyond anything I can say -- period. The monumental paintings by Velasquez, Rubens and Titian and the boys are so grand, powerful, and resolved that they're beyond words, at least my words. Maybe some day I'll take a crack at writing about Goya's "Black Paintings" (especially his heart-wrenching Drowning Dog) -- the only body of work at the Prado that's unconventional enough and unresolved enough to allow me some room for discussion -- but that's it.

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de, Dog half-submerged, 1821-1823, 131 cm x 79 cm (Museo Nacional Del Prado).

Later I'll write a bit about the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid's enormous modern art museum, but for now I want to report on some interesting articles and art news I've read in the last month or so.

British street artist Banksy has been in the news a lot. He directed a TV special called "The Antics Roadshow" for Britain's Channel Four on infamous pranksters. It was shown on Vimeo for a short time, but it's gone. Watch for a possible return. Perhaps more interesting is his (faked?) feud with "arch rival" King Robbo. The best reporting I found on this is on ArtInfo's website, here. Like Banksy's movie, "Exit Through the Gift Shop", one doesn't know what is real.

Calvin Tomkins, who has written about artists for The New Yorker for more than fifty years, was honored at the Whitney's annual gala, and he deservedly earned his own profile in the New York Times.

Speaking of profiles, the classy, veteran gallery dealer Paula Cooper has a great one in the Observer.

Even Larry Gagosian can't make a go of a bookstore.

CLOSED

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones has written at least two perceptive and provocative posts while I was away: Was postmodernism born with Close Encounters of the Third Kind? and We need critics to define truly great art. How does he do it?

I'm only up to the J's -- more later!

On Vacation

2011-09-16T07:55:00.001-04:00

No posts until the beginning of October.

de Kooning, a Retrospective

2011-09-14T23:24:00.000-04:00

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, (1976). Oil on newspaper mounted on paper mounted on linen, 29 1/8 x 22 3/8". Fractional and promised gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 802.1996

A friend invited me to the opening of the de Kooning retrospective at the Modern tonight, and we were both blown away. What really struck me, aside from the jaw-dropping quality of the work, was de Kooning's great range -- he may be second only to Picasso in that respect.

I want to write about this show, but I need to see it a few more times and read the catalog essay written by the curator, John Elderfield. I'm going away Friday for a couple of weeks, but I'll get on it as soon as I get back. In the meantime, go see it if you can.

Willem de Kooning, Pirate (Untitled II), 1981. Oil on canvas, 7' 4" x 6' 4 3/4". Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 107.1982

Sol Lewitt at Mass MoCA

2011-09-13T09:45:00.000-04:00

By Charles Kessler

Sol Lewitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective, Mass MoCA, on view for twenty-five years.

Some artists are hurt by retrospectives -- their work is revealed to be thin or repetitive or minor or just boring. Other artists, Sol Lewitt in this massive semi-permanent retrospective for example, are shown to have great range and substance.

I've seen a lot of Lewitt's art over the years, and even though I've usually liked it in a mild way, I think the mechanical generation of the work kind of put me off. To quote him: "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." (These timelapse videos show how the work was made.) But this show blew me away. I love that Lewitt didn't insist on a rigid consistency (e.g., only straight lines drawn on discrete squares or bands of four colors on white walls), but that he'd change his mind and experiment with different ideas (e.g., bright colors and curved lines). The work here is absolutely thrilling.

Elizabeth Murray on 9/11

2011-09-10T09:23:00.000-04:00

The New York Times

September 23, 2001

ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE AFTERMATH

ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE AFTERMATH; Clinging To Belief In Art

By ELIZABETH MURRAY

WHEN my husband and I went to bed on Sept. 11, our house on Duane Street, just six blocks from the World Trade Center, was in total darkness. We felt as if we were in a war zone. I said to him that I felt how futile my artmaking seemed right now: how could balancing shapes with line and color have any meaning or be of any use to anyone? Bob is a poet, and I felt that words were the only way all these feelings that were surfacing could be adequately expressed.

The next morning I made myself go into my studio and work, because however futile it may be, it's what I do, and all I can do. I worked with no light -- only the daylight and smoke filtering through my studio windows -- until I couldn't see properly anymore. I played the most beautiful music I have -- Berlioz's ''Harold in Italy'' -- and I felt lucky beyond words to be able to be in my studio balancing shapes with line and color.

A few days ago I made myself go into the street, where I ran into two friends, one a writer, the other a sculptor. They were talking about a show going up in Chelsea -- photographs that depict simulated images of people jumping from buildings. One person thought this was offensive. The other said: ''The work is there; it was done before all this. It exists.''

I don't know where I stand on this. A good deal of art is going to seem silly and inconsequential now, and so will a lot of artists, I suppose. I cling to my belief in art as a way for us to try to understand our real situation in life, which is a condition of not knowing what is coming around the next corner.
I don't know what will happen to my career or to the art business. I think that perhaps things will slow down and that it may be good for things to slow down and get quieter so that we can all think and reflect. Maybe there is no understanding, but there is opening yourself and trying to continue to grow and hope.

Great Idea!

2011-09-09T09:30:00.000-04:00

The Local Cafe, 144 Sullivan St. (near Prince St.), SOHO

Whew!

2011-08-28T12:51:00.000-04:00

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Wreck Buoy, 1849, oil on canvas (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

Leonardo's Deluge

2011-08-27T15:20:00.001-04:00

Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, c.1517-18, Black chalk, 15.8 x 20.3 cm (Probably acquired by Charles II; Royal Collection by 1690, RL 12377). More of Leonardo's deluge drawings can be found here.

More Art News

2011-08-21T11:20:00.001-04:00

By Charles Kessler

LINKS:

Via the art blog Two Coats of Paint, I learned of this video (below) about Hans Hofmann’s legendary art classes in Provincetown. It contains interviews with many of his former students including Mercedes Matter and Red Grooms, and archival video and photos of his classes.

If you don't want to spend $75 or $100 or more on a western art history textbook, especially since it won't even have very many good reproductions let alone videos narrated by some of the top people in the field, smARThistory.com's free art history "web-book" is for you.

Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, the founders of smARThistory, say they have "aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy." I checked out a sampling and agree.

For some striking large-format photojournalism, check out The Big Picture: New Stories in Photographs, on the Boston Globe’s website.

EXHIBITIONS:

Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection (Until September 18, 2011).

I went to the Whitney mainly to see their comprehensive Lyonel Feininger exhibition so I was surprised to come across this delightful show — a selection from the more than 1000 works of the original Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney collection. (BTW, even though I’m not a great fan of Feininger, I learned there’s more range and depth to him than I realized.)

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Chinoise, 1914. Limestone, 61 1/16 × 19 15/16 × 14 7/8 inches (Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.79).

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was staggeringly rich even by the standards of today’s billionaires. She was the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the richest man in America at the turn of the century, and the wife of Harry Payne Whitney from one of New York’s wealthiest families. Defying her background, she became a sculptor, and not a bad one as you can see from this photo (above). Perhaps more important in terms of her place in history, she was a major patron of contemporary American art at a time when American art was ignored.

The original Whitney Museum of American Art at 10 West 8th Street, c. 1931-3.

The exhibition attempts to capture the look of the original museum and the democratic approach to collecting and installing — salon style with a diversity of subjects, styles and quality. (The Studio School took over the building, and the original Whitney Museum entryway, lobby and several rooms on the first floor - now used for the school's gallery - are still pretty much intact and are open to the public.)

One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition is by the under-appreciated painter Louis Eilshemius.

Louis Eilshemius, The Flying Dutchman, 1908, oil on composition board, 23 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches, (Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney).

Mark di Suvero at Governors Island, presented by Storm King Art Center (until September 25, 2011).

Governors Island, New York

Governor’s Island is worth a trip in itself. You have to take a ferry there (click here for the schedule)
so you feel like you’re on summer vacation somewhere. It’s a verdant island with historic old residential homes once used by naval officers. They even have a beach with a volleyball court, a bandstand and a hamburger shack.

Governors Island Beach

The show is the largest outdoor presentation of di Suvero’s sculpture since the 1970s — 11 sculptures created over a period of 40 years and spread out over the 172 acres of Governors Island.

Mark di Suvero, Fruit Loops, 2003, Steel, 16’ 4” x 15’ x 11’ 7” (Collection of Agnes Gund, New York).

These are big sculptures, some 16 feet tall, but they never feel imposing or oppressive the way Serra’s work often does. Rather they are human in scale and even intimate in their way. De Suvero had a good point with regard to the height of his works: “Forty-story buildings are being torn down in New York so that sixty-story buildings can go up. Why are people so surprised at seventeen-ton sculpture?”

Storm King developed a free app to accompany the exhibition. It’s particularly useful since no map is provided and you really need something to locate the sculptures.

BMW Guggenheim Lab, at the corner of Second Avenue and Houston in the Lower East Side (Until October 16, 2011).

This isn’t an exhibition so much as a city-planning science museum. It’s purported goal is to get ideas from people about what makes a city livable, but, so far at least, it’s more didactic than that, and probably more interesting because of it. They will have lectures, films and various events, including games (like the one shown above), about the needs, trade-offs, and challenges of cities.

The "lab" is housed in a temporary space designed by the Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow. Made of carbon pillars and carbon fiber and open front and back to the street and air, it's more of a high-tech tent than a building. Practicing what they preach about livable cities, they provide a nice amenity -- a plywood food shack run by Roberta's, Bushwick's popular pizza restaurant.

This will be a long-term experiment. After they finish here, they'll pack up and take the show on the road to Berlin, Mumbai and several other cities.

Roberta's at the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

A quick note about "artist/philosopher" (the curator Alexandra Munroe's designation) Lee Ufan exhibition in the Guggenheim's uptown space. It is precious beyond belief. It's embarrassing in its pretentious artiness, and it's appallingly derivative. This is a bad show even in comparison to the recent run of bad Guggenheim shows. "Artist/philosopher" indeed!

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Until October 30, 2011).
The show is a bit of a rip-off. The show should be called The Face of Jesus: a few Rembrandt paintings, drawings and prints and a lot of paintings by his pupils. And it costs $16 general admission and an additional $9 for the “Rembrandt” exhibition — $25 total. There are a few major works, though, that for me were worth the price of admission. I particularly liked seeing two of Rembrandt's famous “100 Guilder Prints” side by side so I could observe how Rembrandt wiped the plate in different ways to bring out different features of each print. And there was this profoundly moving painting:

Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ with Arms Folded, ca. 1657-1661, Oil on canvas, 43 x 35 1/2 inches,
(The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York, 1971.37) Photograph by Joseph Lev.

And finally, I noticed a strange phenomenon at MoMA and I wonder if you may have noticed it too. Almost always, on one side of a wall between galleries the art is wildly popular, while the opposite side is practically deserted.

Okay Van Gogh's Starry Night is famous, but Picasso’s Three Musicians isn't. And Cezanne's Bather and the Brancusi sculptures completely shunned? What's with that?

Bushwick News

2011-08-19T12:11:00.001-04:00

By Charles Kessler

Bushwick is toward the top of the map, in maroon.

Most young artists coming out of art school can’t afford Williamsburg anymore, so for the last five or ten years artists have been flocking further east to Bushwick. For the moment, Bushwick's run-down warehouses are more affordable because there are still vestiges of gang activity, few trendy restaurants and bars (Roberta’s, 261 Moore Street near Bogart Street, being the most noted exception), and a somewhat longer commute to Manhattan.

The galleries are spread out over the two-mile neighborhood, but they’re coalescing more and more around the Morgan Avenue L train stop where there are about a dozen of them. The prominent nonprofit arts organization Nurture Art will be moving into this area, joining Momenta Art, a recent Williamsburg transplant, and a couple of other art galleries -- all in the same building at 56 Bogart Street. Nurture Art hopes to open in October.

A bigger surprise is that the blue-chip Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine will open up a 12,000-square-foot space at 25 Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, also near the Morgan Avenue L station. Artist/filmmaker/dance documentarian Charles Atlas will be their first exhibition.

The new home of Luhring Augustine Gallery, photo courtesy of mercurialn via Flickr and ARTINFO

PLEASE NOTE: MOST OF THE GALLERIES ARE CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER. In the fall I’ll post a map and guide to the Bushwick art galleries similar to our Guide to the Lower East Side Galleries.

A Fleeting Impression

2011-08-15T16:19:00.000-04:00

By Kyle Gallup

Today my world is black, white and gray. I’m kept company by an image of a single, mercurial cloud hanging in the summer sky and hovering above buildings silhouetted by an overhead sun that makes every edge feel razor sharp.

I’ve begun working on a series of altered prints, images of a sunny view outside my studio window. Drawing on top of the prints with pencil, I intend to change the character of each print by building up the surface and creating a quiet, visual drama in each one. Retreating into my dark, book-lined room, I’m set up on a long, craggy table. Sequestered from the outside, I hope to find some peace of mind in the process.

While working I’m watching an early episode of the 1960’s TV show “The Fugitive.” I’ve taken to this program, obsessed with it and the idea that a man on the run with little more than the clothes on his back and a few dollars in his pocket can survive.

It’s 1964 and America feels different than today. The small towns, filmed in black and white, which Dr. Richard Kimble passes through, have main streets with mom & pop stores, huge cars, and children playing in the streets. A person wanting to lose himself, hide or find a job can easily thumb a ride into town for a couple of weeks and then be on his way.

While listening to and considering the dangerous situations that Richard Kimble finds himself in I take time to build up graphite on the paper. It’s slow going and my pencils need to be sharpened every few minutes to give me as much control as possible. With the porous, soft material I create depth and density. I especially like the feeling of rubbing the steely-colored dust with my fingers, making the darks as black as possible.

Thoughts of temporality run through my mind, as I consider how a single cloud can take shape and change form many times over, positioning and repositioning in the vastness of the sky. This floating presence has a relationship to the buildings around it making it feel organic and weightless. The cloud’s fleeting, rootless character is captured by my use of technical means—its identity caught for posterity in a diaphanous, bright white in my final drawing.

I can bear to watch Richard Kimble endure hiding out, getting double-crossed, captured, and escaping again and again because I trust that at the end of his journey he will find what he’s looking for—the one-armed man who murdered his wife. He will finally be set free from the pain and desperation that have plagued him for so long. I watch David Janssen’s solid, subtle, truth-filled performances without disbelief even while I doubt that a fugitive today could hop a freight, assume many aliases, and persuade people of his innocence.

Though our lives are constantly in flux, I take comfort in the thought that as quickly as a cloud passes across the sky, a man on the run can find momentary refuge. The message is simple: change carries a particular kind of freedom and can be expressed and accepted as an end in itself. The key? Living and creating in the moment.

Kyle Gallup, Cloud #1, 2011, 11 x 15 inches, graphite on lithographic print on paper.

Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.

Curatorial Flashbacks #15: Early Daze

2011-08-08T12:23:00.001-04:00

By Carl Belz

My first encounter with the museum profession had me writing a few paragraphs for the brochure of a modest Man Ray exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in the spring of 1963. I’d earned my doctorate earlier that year with a dissertation on Man Ray’s contribution to Dada and Surrealism and, armed with a BA, MFA and PhD, all from Princeton, I was about to set off to my first teaching job, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

I came upon Man Ray through surveys of Dada and Surrealism I read while preparing for my qualifying examinations during spring semester 1962. He was mentioned chiefly as the lone American participant in those international movements, initially in New York, where he became friends with Marcel Duchamp following the 1913 Armory Show, and then in Paris, where he moved in 1921; and he was invariably represented by the two readymade objects that remain most closely associated with his signature: the flatiron with the nails on its surface—called “The Gift”—and the metronome with its attached photo of a human eye—called “Indestructible Object.” On the lookout for a dissertation topic throughout that semester, I began to think Man Ray might be my ticket, and I was encouraged to pursue that possibility when mentor Robert Rosenblum agreed to be my adviser on the project.

Digesting the scant literature on Man Ray that existed in 1962 required little time and effort but didn’t take me very far toward building a thesis. For that, I needed primary source material, which meant going to Paris for a month, visiting with Man Ray at his studio three or four times a week, seeing work both old and new, talking at length with him about his art and artistic thought, collecting and notating images of paintings, drawings and objects provided by the Man himself and, for much of the rest of the time, making copious notes for future reference. Throughout the process, Man Ray was fully and wonderfully accommodating. Along with all of the above, he sort of took me under his personal wing, loaning me old exhibition announcements and brochures to study, occasionally inviting me to accompany him on errands around town—we ran into Yves Klein one morning—taking me to lunch a few times and, shortly before I was scheduled to return home, showing me a little snapshot that I was unaware he’d taken in which I could be seen sitting on a couch in his studio, surrounded by objects of his making, among them the memorably cosmic painting of a woman’s lips called “Observatory Time, The Lovers” and, nearby, his early mobile comprised of readymade coat hangers called “Obstruction.” I naturally coveted the photograph to document my experience but, unable to summon the audacity to ask for it, I was fully content to return home with its memory—along with what I felt were the makings of a doctoral dissertation.

Man Ray, Observatory Time, The Lovers, Oil on canvas, 1936.

Man Ray, Obstruction, 1961 (replica of the 1920 original), Mixed media, Dimensions variable.

Which I spent the next several months writing, rewriting and shaping into a final presentation and then readying myself for its defense. All went well, and I was especially buoyed one day toward the end of the process—which had begun to feel like a necessary rite of passage that tested not only merit but endurance as well—when I received in the mail the little photograph of myself, signed by the master, that you see reproduced here. I was momentarily baffled in not knowing where the image had come from, but I quickly remembered the studio snapshot and realized Man Ray had edited out all but a tiny fraction of the information contained in the original photograph. Wow! How could he think to do that? I was astonished by his inspiration, by the magic he’d performed, and I was in turn reminded of why I’d gone to graduate school in the first place—to learn about art’s past and the wonders of its achievement. Further, and equally important, the photograph reminded me that there were real artists out there beyond the confines of Princeton’s ivory towers, artists living lives in the here and now, all the time making new stuff that would become art’s new history. Thus did the spell over my cloistered graduate school existence begin to dissolve—and the real world begin to beckon.

Photograph of Carl Belz by Man Ray, Paris, 1962, 5-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches

Getting the PhD sounds like a smooth ride, but the back story suggests otherwise—how I was often in the dark about what I was doing during both my undergraduate and graduate years, which was mostly following my intuitions, winging it, chasing a dream of one sort or another.

For instance, I didn’t go to Princeton to prepare for advanced study in the history of art, I went to Princeton to play ball and prepare for medical school. And I did pretty well on both fronts. I was a career .300 hitter in baseball, while in basketball I helped lead our freshman team to an undefeated season (freshmen weren’t permitted to play varsity in those days), averaged double-doubles (points and rebounds) for my three-year varsity career, shot my way into the elite 1,000 point club, set that single game rebounding record I told you about in an earlier Flashback, was twice named to the starting five of the All-Ivy team, captained Princeton to a share—with Dartmouth—of the Ivy League championship in my senior year, and only once got ejected from a game (against Harvard, for fighting, grrr). In the classroom, I aced organic chemistry in my sophomore year, then became a biology major, was admitted to medical schools at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of my senior year, decided on Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and set my sights on moving to New York.

The Princeton varsity basketball team (minus one) for the 1956-57 season, with Carl Belz 3rd from the left, Sports Illustrated, December 8, 1997.

But that plan didn’t materialize, as I got seriously distracted, and eventually redirected, by art and art history. I took a drawing course with artist-in-residence Stephen Greene—he also taught a painting course, and that was the extent of art practice available at Princeton in those days, when studying art only meant studying art history—and, corny as it sounds, it turned out to be a life changing experience. While I learned that I couldn’t make particularly good drawings, I nonetheless learned awe and humility in the face of those who could, and I wanted increasingly to know more about them. So I used the handful of electives available to me in my senior year to take as much art history as I could, I became thrilled and consumed by the new world I’d discovered, and, late in the game—but not too late—I dared myself by submitting an application to stay on and pursue an advanced degree in Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology. Which I did.

Little did I know what I was getting into. I thought graduate study brought together a small group of people who, like me, had been blown away by art and would be spending large chunks of time talking about how great Titian and Velasquez and Pollock were. No. We were not there to learn and discuss the history of art per se—it was assumed we had already done that as undergraduates and needed only to fill in a course here and there to complete our introduction to the spectrum of western art history—we were there to learn the methods of the art historical discipline via encounters with the scholarship in which those methods were embodied. Accordingly, instead of Titian, Velasquez, and Pollock, our role models became individuals like Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky, and Meyer Shapiro. It took me most of my first year to figure that out, as my grades sadly attested. I got a mere “pass” in my graduate seminars, adding up to an implicit suggestion that I think twice about continuing in the program. Fortunately, I was still too naïve to read that writing on the wall.

I was, however, fully able to grasp what the writing said about the financial situation I would face in my second year, when my fellowship would be reduced to tuition alone—it said I’d better find work pronto! That’s when my undergraduate experiences began to pay off. Based on the lab skills I’d learned in science courses, I landed a job with a small chemical research firm in town, which I worked fulltime during the summer of 1960 and was able to continue on a part time basis once the academic calendar resumed in the fall. By that time, I’d also earned a spot playing professional basketball on Saturday and Sunday nights—and earning $50 a game—for the Scranton Miners of the Eastern Basketball League, which served as a breeding ground for NBA hopefuls at a time when the NBA consisted of only eight teams. The EBL was also a haven for a number of players who had been banned from playing in the NBA because of their participation in the game-fixing scandals that had rocked college basketball in 1951, players who performed at the very highest level of the game as it was played at that time, players like the legendary Bill Spivey, Jack Molinas, and Sherman White, players way better than me but against whom I was able to hold my own—thus proving to myself that I was more than just a hotshot in the small world of Ivy hoops.

My seminar grades improved with each semester as I learned more about why I was where I was and what I was supposed to be doing there. Accordingly, my confidence rose, and my fellowship stipend was restored to a respectable level. By the time of the Man Ray exhibition, I’d been at Princeton for eight years, and I was more than ready to move on. Which I did, holding academic positions at a couple of places starting with UMass, in the process casting about intellectually while mostly doing teaching and writing—some art criticism, some art history, even a history of rock music published by Oxford University Press—until 1974 when, instead of tenure, I was offered the directorship of the Rose Art Museum. I knew virtually nothing about running a museum—museology didn’t even exist when I was in school—so I learned on the job and, as I did, it gradually dawned on me that I’d absorbed aspects critical to my new position when I was still at Princeton. Through my dissertation project, I had been introduced to working with living artists, I got a taste of how much I enjoyed and found meaning in that, and I subsequently learned I was pretty good at it and that it was central to my personal and professional identity. From its opening in 1961, the Rose Art Museum was known as a museum of the art of our time, of living art, and I made it even more so by emphasizing the artists who made that art. So it came to be that I was in a productive place, and an especially right place for me, which, for part of me, was enormously satisfying, though another part of me felt as though I had spent more than a decade circling back to where I started. So I wondered: How come it had taken me so long to figure my self out, and how long would it take to know more fully my self in each moment of the ongoing present.

But those are the questions we all live with, aren’t they, the questions that signal our humanness in modern experience, the questions that our modern, living art is made to lay bare and address? And because our selves are ever evolving via new encounters with one another and with our shared world, those are the questions we’ll continue to ask, knowing that they’ll take as long to answer as they take—as any artist will tell you.

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

Some Art News

2011-08-06T17:32:00.000-04:00

By Charles Kessler

A couple of new galleries opened on the Lower East Side.
The Hole
312 Bowery (just above Houston)
212-466-1100

July 21st, The Hole hosted “The History of American Graffiti” book-signing event featuring special guest TAKI 183. Photo from their blog, “Art From Behind."

The Hole Gallery moved from a hole of a space on Greene Street in Soho to a relatively large and airy space in the Lower East Side. The gallery is run by Kathy Grayson, a former director of Deitch Project, and the gallery employees are nice, young, ambitious and willing to try new things. For example, their last show, FriendsWithYou, the art of the Miami duo Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, included a pop-up store that sold Native Shoes, a footwear company that makes some pretty wild shoes.

Mulherin + Pollard Gallery
212-967-0045
The gallery is at the end of Freeman Alley, across from Salon 94, off of Rivington between Bowery and Chrystie Streets. You can also enter at 187 Chrystie Street, but Freeman Alley is much more interesting. They have a group show there now entitled Mundus Incognita, but as yet there’s nothing on their website about it or future shows.

In other news:
Today Roberta Smith has an excellent review of the Met’s Frans Hals exhibition; this in contrast to the disappointing New Yorker review by Peter Schjeldahl (you can get only an excerpt online). Unfortunately, Schjeldahl's reviews lately have been superficial, contradictory and, surprising for The New Yorker, sloppily written.

One of the many nice thing about the Hals exhibition is the comparison you can make between Hals's painting Malle Babbe and a student version of the same subject. It really gives you a sense of how good Hals is.

Detail, Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, 1633-35, Oil on canvas (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

Detail, Style of Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, mid-17th century, Oil on canvas, (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Via the Los Angeles Times I found out about a FREE iPad app that has breathtaking photos, live-action video and interviews of a series of dances Merce Cunningham choreographed for the nonprofit visual and performing arts journal 2wice. And did I say it was FREE?

From 2wice's Merce Cunningham iPad App

While I’m on apps, the National Gallery, London has two — a very good free one with a couple of hundred photographs of their collection that can be downloaded HD directly into your iPhone or iPad photo album; and a great $1.99 one with almost 2000 photos. Here’s a sample; click to enlarge:


Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, (The Burlington Cartoon), c.1499-1500, charcoal, black and white chalk on tinted paper mounted on canvas, 55.7 × 41.2 inches, (National Gallery, London)

A report from the Brussels-based art dealers’ federation Cinoa is going around the blogosphere. They found that art fairs and on-line art sales are taking over as the main source of revenue, and it’s hurting traditional galleries.

Another thing making the rounds is an article in The Art Newspaper about why art is getting bigger. They conclude: Commissioning and acquiring art has always been a way for the wealthy and powerful to affirm their position, taste, influence and money; and there is nothing new either about huge spaces to display it in.

Finally, this to lift your spirits: The New York Times went through their archives and came up with a series of photographs of kids playing in New York. It’s a joy to look at.

1977: In the mud at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Neal Boenzi/The New York Times.

EVERY THURSDAY: ¡Arriba! Music and Dance on the High Line

2011-08-05T10:23:00.001-04:00

Last Night, 9pm

Check the High Line website for more events.