Lower East Side Review

Rivane Neuenschwander, a still from the video The Tenant, 2010.

Image courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; 

Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; and Stephan Friedman Gallery, London.

Video is so ubiquitous in the Lower East Side that it's become a ludicrous cliché. I find most of it boring, self-indulgent, and annoying in that it's so damn controlling. Yet video was by far the best thing I saw yesterday.  In an otherwise lightweight and simple-minded mid-career survey of Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967) at the New Museum, there was a lovely, mesmerizing and funny video, The Tenant (2010). The video tracks a soap bubble as it meanders through a deserted apartment. What really makes this simple video fun, and even dramatic, is a soundtrack that subtly plays with our expectations.

Also at the New Museum was the first U. S. retrospective of the eccentric Surrealist/Beat painter, performer, poet, and writer Brion Gysin (1916- 1986). His recent claim to fame is that he never achieved the fame of his most prominent collaborator, William S. Burroughs, or of the many people he influenced (John Giorno, Brian Jones, David Bowie, Patti Smith, and Keith Haring, among others). It goes to show it's possible to be influential without being very good. It's frankly a pretty lame and repetitive show. About the only thing with any guts is his wall-sized, collage-like, films. 

Lesley Heller (54 Orchard Street) has a show of Israeli videos by young (20's and 30's) artists curated by Lilly Wei. Stills of the videos are on the gallery walls, and you can request to see whichever you want. Some of the most powerful are by Oded Hirsch.

Oded Hirsch, still from the video 50 Blue

As to the other LES galleries, Roberta Smith observed there's a lot of Abstract Art being shown. (BTW, this is yet another confirmation of the uncanny phenomenon that some subject, medium or style seems to predominate in the galleries at any one time. It's as if there's a theme for the day or something, and this time it was abstraction.) But her article strangely left out what is probably the most relevant show, Creeds, Colors and Combinations at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 21 Orchard Street. Work by Louise Despont in particular offers a fresh approach to abstraction with her intimate, complex drawings that relate to Indian Tantric drawings but without the hippy, psychedelic connotations. 

Louise Despont, Winter Drawing, 2009, 

Graphite, colored pencil and ink 

on antique ledger book page, 

24 x 18 inches

Despont will be the next show at Nicelle Beauchene, so we'll get to see how her works hold up in quantity.

Rightly praised by Roberta Smith is Markus Linnenbrick's disorienting environmental installation at numberthrityfive Gallery, 39 Essex Street. 

NOTE: Small A Projects, 261 Broome Street, is now the Laural Getlen Gallery - same gallery, it's just that the owner, like Stephan Stoyanov (formerly Luxe) 29 Orchard St, decided to eschew cleverness and use their own name.  Maybe numberthirtyfive will follow suit soon. 

See what you missed!

Today -- Jersey City’s Seventh Annual Bolivian Parade, 

celebrating the independence of both Bolivia and Ecuador

The Radiant Man

Film Forum  is now showing a terrific documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Here's the film's official website. Something really annoyed me about it, however. For some reason, maybe to add drama, they edited a Marc Miller interview with Basquiat in such a way as to make Miller seem like a racist and Basquiat a victim. The same thing occurred in Julian Schnabel's 1996 film Basquiat. This is a totally bum rap and a complete falsification of the art world's open-armed reception of Basquiat at the time. 

For a more complete and accurate representation of both the interview and Basquiat, check out Marc Miller’s invaluable website, 98Bowery.com, and in particular the section on Basquiat. 

Dionysus vs. Apollo

One of the great treats of the MoMA Matisse show is the opportunity to spend time with Matisse's Bathers by the River and then hurry downstairs to compare the experience with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon -- two of the greatest paintings of the twentieth century, and two extremely different paintings and experiences. It makes me want to take back all the bad things I said about the Modern ... naaah.

In many ways the competition between Matisse and Picasso was like the rivalry between the younger, hot-blooded, passionate Michelangelo and his older, cooler rival, Leonardo. The 36-year-old reserved and self-assured Henri Matisse created an enormous controversy with his Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-6 (not included in the show). His first dealer, Berthe Weill, recalled it was greeted with "an uproar of jeers, angry babble, and screaming laughter," when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendents in 1906.

Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-6, Oil on canvas. 

The Barnes Foundation. (5' 10" x 7' 11")

The young Turk Picasso, only 27 years old at the time, set out to one-up Matisse (and himself, as it turned out) with his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In the 1907 Salon, Matisse exhibited Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra,  whose radical distortions, and perhaps also the blue color, so annoyed Picasso that he was driven to make his Les Demoiselles even tougher.  (The two Matisse paintings were bought by the Steins, and, to stir up trouble, they made sure Picasso saw them in their house.)

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, 1907, 

The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland (36 1/4 x 55 1/4 in)

Matisse answered back with his very strange Bathers With Turtle. 1907-08, Museum of Modern Art (70 1/2 " x 88").

Picasso pushed Cubism in new directions, and Matisse responded with his own take on Cubism with, among other works, Bathers By The River, a painting he began soon after Les Demoiselles and one he worked on intermittently for nine years. 

Henri Matisse, Bathers By The River, 1916, Art Institute of Chicago,

 (approximately 8 1/2 feet high by almost 13 feet wide)

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, 

Museum of Modern Art (8' x 7' 8")

In many ways the two paintings are as different as can be: 

• A whorehouse in a crowded interior vs. abstracted nudes in an open landscape that's almost twice as wide as Les Demoiselles
• Confrontational, in-your-face vs. self-contained and detached
• Provocative and aggressive vs. harmonious and austere

It’s also the difference between Pollock and DeKooning on the one hand, vs. Rothko, Newman and, to a lesser extent, Still (who falls more in the middle), on the other. The Abstract Expressionists were very familiar with Les Demoiselles because in 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co. art gallery in New York City held an exhibition titled "20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903–1923" that included Les Demoiselles; and of course the Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting (for $24,000!) soon after. 

Less known is that Matisse’s Bathers was also very familiar to the Abstract Expressionists. Clement Greenberg reported (Art & Culture, p. 233): 

Matisse's huge "Bathers by a River" of 1916—17, now in the Chicago Art Institute, hung for a long time in the lobby of the Valentine[-Dudensing] Gallery, where I myself saw it often enough to feel able to copy it by heart.

I haven't been able to find out exactly when that was, but it was sometime beginning in the thirties and ending when the Valentine-Dudensing Gallery closed in 1948. So the painting was there early enough to be influential on the Abstract Expressionists. And like Picasso and Matisse, the competition between the Abstract Expressionists made all their work greater. 

Art and the Market Economy

I've been thinking more about my recent post on Mark Rothko and his conflicts with the art marketplace. Those were tough times, and Rothko was an extreme case, but even today every artist I know has an uneasy relationship to the art market. And artists still have mixed feelings about financially successful artists.  Its not just jealousy at work either - in subtle ways there’s a feeling that making money on art is suspect; that art isn't a commodity - or at least it's not just a commodity.

Lewis Hyde’s 1983 cult classic, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, provides some insight into the difference between market and gift economies - especially the last chapter of the 2007 revision which updates the book and is more nuanced and realistic.  According to Hyde, a traditional gift economy is based on the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.  He describes the spirit of a gift economy (in contrast to a market economy) as a gift culture where reciprocity is a broad community custom, rather than an explicit quid pro quo. (For our purposes, the word contribution might be a better, less confusing, term than gift - used in the sense of a contribution to a scholarly journal or conference, or a contribution to the advancement of something.)

Obviously the market economy has its good points: it’s efficient, it can deal with strangers (you can do business with people outside the tribe) and there’s no lingering sense of obligation - the only obligation is to pay the agreed-on price.

But unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, the market economy has overwhelmed the gift economy. Public functions have been privatized, universities have been selling the technology created there, there’s been an expansion of copyrights (thanks to Disney), and the rich think of themselves as self-made (Warren Buffet a prominent exception), forgetting the contribution society has made to their wealth: infrastructure, education, enforcement of contracts, etc.. (I wonder how well these “self-made” millionaires would do in Haiti?) Even worse for the art world is that quality has been confused with financial success. About the only exception to this trend, and it’s a major one, is the internet, with things like the open source movement (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia, etc.), and of course blogs - all of which have created large, vital and cooperative gift communities.

The market economy is not good at supporting education, hospitals, libraries, pure science and scholarship, public service, the humanities and the arts. Democratic communities that value these things tax themselves to support them.  And it’s not been very good at creating a cooperative community. (I don’t mean a buddy-buddy thing - although there is that too - but more a professional relationship.)

Artists (fine artists, not necessarily folk, commercial or outsider artists, although the fine art tradition often expands to include these), like scientists and scholars, are part of a tradition that goes back thousands of years, and to contribute to this tradition it's necessary to build on the past. Artists need to exhibit, at least try to, in order to contribute to the tradition. That’s why successful artists who pre-sell work still want it exhibited; and that’s why there’s a long tradition of artist/teachers and apprenticeships.

I’m not saying that  artists should give away their art (that’s why I don’t like the term gift). But artists need to separate making a living from making their art. Artists need to reserve what Hyde calls “a protected gift-sphere” in which the work is created.

Melons or Moroccans?



I came back from a short vacation (Providence, RI -- it was great) and made a beeline to the Matisse exhibition at MoMA because it was the last day of member previews. I'll be writing more about the show later, but for now I want to focus on Matisse's 1912-16 masterpiece, Les Marocains (The Moroccans), owned by the Museum of Modern Art.

The MoMA website describes the painting the way it’s described in the catalog as well as in many other places: At the upper left is a balcony with a flowerpot and a mosque behind it [other descriptions say, more specifically, a marabout dome], at lower left a still life of vegetables [more often referred to as “golden melons and green leaves”], and to the right a Moroccan man [often described as an Imam], seen from behind, wearing a round turban.

The show confirmed what I always thought about the painting: that the "melons and leaves" in the lower left of the painting can also be read as Moroccan Muslims praying.

First of all there's a black-and-white grid that art historians describe as “gridded pavement” under the “melons and leaves.” It would be pretty difficult to grow melons on “gridded pavement.” But the clincher is several sketches Matisse made for the painting that I saw for the first time in this exhibition. They clearly show praying figures (see below).

Letter to Amelie Matisse of compositional sketch of the Moroccans, 1912

Letter to Charles Camoin of compositional sketch of the Moroccans, 1915

I think, at minimum, Matisse wanted it both ways.

Curatorial Flashbacks: My Day In Court

William Beckman, Self Portrait (Orange Shirt), 2003, 

oil on panel, 18.5 x 16.25 inches 

By Carl Belz
You likely remember a time when you were told you’d have your day in court, your chance to set the record straight, bask in the light of truth, see justice done. Well, I actually had my day in court, it must have been at least 15 years ago, down in Poughkeepsie, New York, where I appeared as an expert witness on behalf of my friend, painter William Beckman. An expert witness! Wow, just think how that one fed into my fantasies about my life as a Hollywood movie—coming to the rescue, making clear what nobody else had understood, swaying the jury toward our cause at the moment our cause had seemed lost.

We were in court because Bill had been involved in an accident back in 1978 when a tree-spraying device he was using malfunctioned and seriously injured his right hand—his painting hand—leaving him unable to grip firmly the brushes he customarily used for close, often exquisitely finished details in his figure compositions. He was working at the time on “Double Nude,” a frontal, slightly larger-than-life, three-quarter length portrait of himself and his then-wife Diana that referenced, while modernizing, Albrecht Durer’s iconic “Adam and Eve” from the first years of the 16th century. The painting was already six months in the making, which meant it was probably a couple of months from completion, but the accident extended its gestation to nearly a full year.

Which didn’t mean Bill went on the shelf until his hand healed enough for him to resume his practice, far from it. What he did instead of taking a sabbatical from the studio was to take up a new medium, which was pastel, and a new subject, which was the rural landscape around his home in upstate New York. Pastels were soft, yielding their rich color without requiring a pressure grip, and Bill was thereby able to expand his creative arsenal without missing a beat while his hand was at the same time allowed to heal. As a bonus, the subject of landscape was already familiar to him—from growing up on a working farm in Maynard, Minnesota, to the daily runs he made on the roads around his home and studio in preparation for the marathons he’d annually run in New York, Boston, and elsewhere in those days.

A lot happened between 1978 and the mid-1990s when a trial took place in a Poughkeepsie courtroom to determine how much income William Beckman had lost because of the malfunction of the aforementioned tree-sprayer, to wit:

Bill finished “Double Nude” by the close of 1978 and sent it to Allan Stone, his New York dealer, who sold it the following spring—I believe the price was $35K—to Herbert W. Plimpton, a private collector living in Boston, Massachusetts.

Herb Plimpton was a friend of mine who was in the process of forming a collection of contemporary realist-type painting that he envisioned would one day belong to a college or university museum where it would serve the institution’s educational mission. In the interim, all of the pictures he acquired, including “Double Nude,” were kept at the Rose Art Museum, where I was director, on what was known as an extended loan basis.

Bill called me in the spring of 1979 and asked if he could come to the Rose to see “Double Nude.” The picture had left his studio immediately after being completed and had quickly sold, which meant he’d had virtually no time to live with it, absorb it, and see how he felt about it. In any case, he came to the museum, we met, and a lasting friendship began.

In 1984 I mounted at the Rose Art Museum—and afterward sent to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art—an exhibition of paintings by William Beckman and Gregory Gillespie, a mid-career survey of two artists I had come to admire deeply who were themselves close friends and, as such, constantly pushed one another to their artistic limits.

I wrote the catalog essay for the Rose exhibition. A couple of years later, I wrote an essay about Bill’s new work for an exhibition he was having at the Frumkin-Adams Gallery in New York. And following that, I wrote an essay on Bill’s paintings of couples—there were four or five at the time, spanning a decade or so—that was published in Art in America. Thus was my expertise established.

Somewhere along the way, the manufacturer of the tree-sprayer did a recall of their faulty product, thereby acknowledging their liability, and they offered Bill $100K in compensation. Which he was advised to decline by the law firm that through the years had kept a suit open on Bill’s behalf, but without ever pursuing it aggressively, which Bill himself never did either. For his part, he was above all committed to going about his job of work in the studio, which he did successfully and, for all intents and purposes, as if the accident had never happened.

And so it was that we arrived in court where Bill’s lawyer sought to employ what I’ve always referred to as the Tommy John Argument. Tommy John was a Los Angeles Dodgers power pitcher who tore up his arm, had it surgically rebuilt, and returned to the mound as a finesse pitcher. According to his lawyer, Bill Beckman was an artist who could paint every hair on his sitter’s head, had an accident that injured his painting hand, and returned to his studio painting more broadly, meaning you could no longer count the hairs on his sitter’s head. The economics of the argument, presumably, were that power pitchers make higher salaries than finesse pitchers; likewise, tightly painted realist pictures are more valuable than loosely painted realist pictures. In any case, that seemed to be the lawyer’s argument when we rehearsed it the night before the trial.

Sad to say, Bill’s lawyer never got very far with the economics argument, not with me on the stand, because every question he asked about the art market got objected to, with the objection sustained, on the grounds that my expertise was limited to art, it didn’t include the art market. Not that that mattered when the defense lawyer took over, which was even sadder. I can still see him approaching me, he’s holding several magazines…Oh, one’s the Rose catalog of Beckman and Gillespie, and there’s the Frumkin-Adams brochure, and even a copy of Art in America, and he identifies each one and asks me if I wrote the words there, and I say Yes, and he notes the dates when they were published and asks if they came after the accident, and again I say Yes, and then—and here’s the crusher—he starts reading aloud excerpts from the essays, sentences with words like “masterpiece” and “compelling” in them and phrases like “one of the best artists of our time,” and he asks if I meant them and—starting now to lose it, as my pride is expanding just to cushion my humiliation—I once more say Yes, adding for emphasis, I meant them then and I mean them now!

So you’ve been told you’ll have your day in court, but you’ve also been told you live in an unjust world, which makes for an ironic combination, right? Not for Bill Beckman, whose high ambition for art, coupled with his disciplined talent for its practice, rendered moot the question of whether an accident with a tree-spraying apparatus negatively affected the success of his enterprise. He received not a cent from the Poughkeepsie jury, but justice was his before he even set foot in the courtroom—not because he made some entitled demand for it, but because he’d morally earned it where it really counted, which was in the studio.

Work of Art

Spotted at The Flag Foundation opening last night. I wonder what they were talking about.

Art as Entertainment

Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant, Ken

Last Friday I saw the play Red. It was about Mark Rothko's struggle to keep his art from being compromised.  Rothko was working on a major commission for the very upscale Four Seasons restaurant in the then new Seagrams Building. He hoped the work would be so powerful it would "ruin the appetites" of the rich patrons, and overcome the Philistines. After a visit to the restaurant, he realized he was being naive. He refused to allow his paintings to be used as decoration and returned the money. This was a moral triumph, but a sad revelation.

Rothko and the other Abstract Expressionists of his generation believed their art was too tough, too profound, to be accepted by the public.  They believed that the few financially successful artists at the time had sold out. When acceptance and success eventually came to them, they became alienated from each other, and alienated from their own selves. Many years after the Four Seasons fiasco, I believe Rothko came to realize there was no hope of keeping his art from being trivialized, and this, plus his alienation, contributed to his suicide.

One of the great traumas of my early art education was attending a party (a "gala”) in Beverly Hills for winners of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) “Young Artist Award.”  The curator of LACMA at the time was Maurice Tuchman -- a Freddie Prinze look-alike who was smart, did some great shows and should have known better. He kept going on about how "cool and trendy" the work was -- treating the art like entertainment, and the artists like stars. The Beverly Hills ladies ate it up, but most of the artists were cringing or, like Alex Smith, snuck out. I realized then that no matter how tough or rigorous the work was, approached in this manner, it was dead.

Mark Rothko despaired of people ever understanding his art, but the thing is, these ladies weren't stupid, and they obviously showed an interest in art. All they needed was education.

Museums are trying to be more accessible. They need to show politicians that they have the numbers and diversity to justify their government funding. Museums now have singles nights, rock concerts, nice restaurants, comfortable places to sit and hang out, and many other ways to attract a new audience. That's not necessarily bad, except when they confuse art with entertainment and dumb down their exhibitions (like when the Dallas Museum trivialized their King Tut exhibition by pairing it with belly dancing. I guess they couldn't afford Steve Martin).

Rather than dumb down they should educate people about art like the Getty Museum did with a recent, terrifically illuminating, exhibition: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils -- Telling The Difference . Here, from the exhibition website, is an example of the kind of things they presented in the exhibition:

Nicolaes Maes, Dutch, about 1655, Red chalk, Frits Lugt Collection, Institut Néerlandais, Paris, France,

Maes was especially receptive to the Rembrandtesque subject of old women. His image (above) is drawn with less energy than in Rembrandts drawing, which is rendered with forceful lines that change directions. Maes's fine handling of the face and headdress is only slightly more delicate than the finely spaced strokes of thin, parallel-hatched lines of her dress, creating a more uniform finish.

Rembrandt, Dutch, about 1640–1643, Black chalk, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art

Basic stuff, but it gets you to look at the drawings and see subtleties that might otherwise be missed. It was one of the few shows where I noticed people talking excitedly about the art rather than spewing inanities about the frame, cost of the painting, sex life of the artist, etc.

Museums need to be careful. They're fooling themselves if they think they can compete with real entertainment.  If they don't educate the public, if they don't create true art lovers, when the admission price increases too much, or when art is no longer cool, or when the public simply gets bored, museums will lose them.

The Expanding Vision of Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54 in.. Whitney Museum of American Art

By Kyle Gallup

Charles Burchfield was a singular, inventive artist who painted American landscapes with a deep feeling for the natural world around him. He stayed true to himself throughout his career, translating his experience of nature into watercolor paintings that reflected  sounds, light and weather and his own inner emotional terrain. Throughout the decades he painted, he made changes in his imagery and art-making process to better express the monumental influence nature had in his life.

Entering the new Burchfield exhibit, “Heat Waves in a Swamp” at the Whitney Museum, I am immediately confronted by a young master of watercolor. The year 1917 is what his admirers dubbed, “Burchfield’s Golden Year of Painting.” Looking at the work, I think it must have been a fulfilling period for him. The immediacy and individuality of each image is depicted with ease. One painting after another is fluidly drawn and washed with clear light and color.  I imagine that everyday he must have seen images all around him that he wanted to paint. The first rooms are full of eerie looking houses, gardens and backyards taken over by the buzzing of insects, looming churches with ringing bells, rain-filled landscapes and sunny days in the field.

By the twenties, Burchfield is painting images of what was then popularly known as the American Scene. His watercolors turn darker and more opaque as he tackles images of abandoned scrap yards, ships, foreboding industrial landscapes and lonely houses on small town streets. As magnetic as these paintings are, nothing compares to the shift he makes in the forties when he begins to expand his smaller, earlier paintings into large, ambitious watercolor landscapes.

“Two Ravines” (1934-43) and “The Coming Spring” (1917-43), beckon me to look deep into these long-evolving pictures. The experience of looking at them differs greatly from that of his earlier work. The earlier paintings seem to keep me at a distance, looking at the scene, exploring his watercolor technique through his watery brushwork and drawn line.  These two paintings are bigger in scale, more physical. Burchfield works the surface with his brush, covering and modeling every area densely. When looking at the paintings, my eye travels inside the picture, over the moss and fallen leaves, over the rocks, and felled branches, up hills, through flowing water, and into the light and dark trees in the distance. These paintings feel so complete that the experience of looking at them is one of stepping into the picture itself. Now, I sense not just the insects, sunlight, the wind and dark shadows, but the artist’s own presence, as he painted and became one with the landscape in front of him.

At this point in Burchfield’s career, I suspect he must have felt less satisfied with his ability to go out into the field and create another watercolor scene. He needed to search for more, and get more out of each painting for himself. The current exhibit does a good job of explaining and illustrating how Burchfield expanded his earlier themes and paintings. With diagrams next to several paintings in the show, there is an intimate sense of the challenges he set for himself in particular works.

The painting, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way” (1946), yet again expands the boundaries of his technique and ideas. This painting moves past the conventional depiction of a landscape at night. A house is tucked behind animated foliage, flowers and flying insects, stars flicker and form constellations in a thickly brushed and mottled night sky.  Again, I  hear the insects buzzing and feel the thick night air. Its fantastical quality is something that the artist explores throughout the last years of his life. The last gallery in the Whitney includes large watercolor paintings like  “Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring)” (1950) and “Gateway to September” (1946-56) and “Dawn of Spring” (ca. 1960s). The paintings have a sweetness that is not present in his work from earlier decades.

Charles Burchfield, Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. Watercolor on paper, 401⁄8 x 293⁄4 in. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York

After years of exploring and translating his deep and intimate connection to nature, he makes otherworldly paintings that reflect his quasi-religious or spiritual view that would have represented a new kind of fulfillment in his work. Burchfield’s last decade of paintings are often described as cosmic.  I think these paintings allowed him to align his internal passions with a more universal and abstracted view of the natural world around him. He was less interested in the scene before him, continuing to broaden his vision while uniting his internal passion for the visual, spiritual and experiential roles nature held for him.

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