Curatorial Flashbacks: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

By Carl Belz
Helen called a few days after we’d given our printer the green light to proceed with the catalog for Frankenthaler: The 1950s, which would open at the Rose in early May 1981 but had already been in the works for about a year. She had been reading again the draft of my essay for the catalog (it was my curatorial practice, when working with living artists, to share my words with them in order, hopefully, to avoid surprises and misunderstandings), and she wasn’t keen on my use of the word glamour in describing how she had entered the New York art world fresh out of Bennington College in 1949 and at once encountered personally such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Franz Kline. She said glamour was associated with celebrities, with movie stars, for instance, while she was just a painter, and would I mind using another word instead?


Which I said I’d be glad to do, for it wasn’t the first time Helen had called about the catalog—only the first time after our printing deadline had passed—and by then I’d gotten my blinders on, determined that nothing, least of all my ego, would keep me from reaching the only goal that had come to matter to me, which was to make the exhibition the best it could be. To that end, I had earlier agreed to put on hold a chunk of my original essay. It was a coda to the body of the text, which dealt with the criticism of Frankenthaler’s work that had appeared during the 1950s, and it focused on how that criticism, which, despite its generally favorable consensus, had nonetheless reflected the male-dominated perspective of the time, a perspective through which she usually came up short of her male counterparts. But Helen didn’t go for the coda, she said she didn’t see herself as a woman artist, she just saw herself as an artist, and she said the show wasn’t about that kind of issue anyway. When I objected that the gender question was historically important in illuminating critical bias, she expressed confidence that a more appropriate context for my observations would present itself on another occasion.  
     
Of course there were also times when I did the calling—to keep Helen informed about loans for the show, to ask her advice about approaching one or another of the collectors, and so forth. At one point, for instance, a problem came up with MoMA and our request to borrow Jacob’s Ladder, a magisterial stain picture from 1957. I’d written William Rubin, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, described the project and its significance, and included loan forms—all standard operating procedure—and I’d gotten back a form letter telling me that stain paintings are very delicate, that my request had come on very short notice, that blah, blah, blah, and that, no, they couldn’t lend the painting. All of which I told Helen in a depressed phone call, in response to which she told me to sit tight, maybe there was something she could do. Which I guess there was, because I got a call the very next day from one of Rubin’s assistants saying how pleased MoMA would be to lend Jacob’s Ladder to our very important exhibition. Then I remember thinking, “There’s stuff going on here that they didn’t teach me about in school.”

Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob's Ladder, 1957. Oil on canvas, 

113 3/8" x 69 7/8" Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

Gift of Hyman N. Glickstein

I called Helen again when I was stumped—and oddly amused—about dealing with television journalist Lesley Stahl. She owned a picture we very much wanted, First Class Motel Bedroom (1959), but she was reluctant to lend it because it would leave an empty space on her wall for about four months. Without pause, Helen suggested I call Andre—Andre Emmerich, her dealer for many years—which I did, and he said the gallery would be pleased to lend Ms. Stahl a replacement picture, it was no problem, they’d done it before, and it occasionally led the collector to a new acquisition—thus, a good deal all around. And far more pleasant than my telephone encounter with the collector in Omaha, Nebraska, that took place at about the same time—the collector who, I’ve forgotten his name, told me he’d lend his picture only on the condition that I would reproduce it in color on the cover of the catalog. For that one I didn’t call Helen, and I didn’t call Andre, I just told the collector I’d find some way to struggle along without his painting. 

So everything was set by the end of February—the essay, the checklist, the reproductions, even the acknowledgments, plus a bonus in the form of a gorgeous poster of the breathtaking Open Wall (1952-53) that Helen was personally having produced in time for the opening on May 10. Still, I was anxious, exceedingly anxious, about Mountains and Sea. Mountains and Sea, the 1952 painting that, if there were such a thing as Helen’s signature painting, would have to be Helen’s signature painting. The painting that had seemed to assume legendary status even before its surface was dry, the painting that was famously said to have provided a bridge between Pollock and what was possible, the painting that art history books had singled out as having launched the entire color field movement. And the painting, alas, that wasn’t going to be in our show. 

Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea, 1952. 

Oil and charcoal on canvas. 86 5/8" x 117 1/4" 

On extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

How, I asked myself, could that be? How could we have an exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler’s work in the 1950s, her first decade, the decade that established her as a major contributor to the art of our time, without including Mountains and Sea? It wasn’t that it couldn’t have been included: It was accessible, it was right down the road in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; moreover, Helen owned it, it was only on loan to the National Gallery, meaning she could ask, within reason, to have it shown wherever and whenever she wished. 


To understand how it was that Mountains and Sea would not be in the exhibition, you have to accompany me back to the fall of 1980 and my first face-to-face discussion with Helen about the checklist for the exhibition. I’d sent her my tentative list, chronologically ordered, and we started going through it together, Helen agreeing to one title, then to another, and another, until we got to Mountains and Sea, at which point she said, “No, not Mountains and Sea.”  


“Not Mountains and Sea?” I repeated incredulously. 


“No, no,” she calmly remarked, “It’s a wonderful picture, but it’s very delicate, and I’m very happy with where it is now. Besides, including it would be like having a terrific exhibition of late 15th Century Florentine painting and putting the Mona Lisa right in the middle of it.”


Stumped for a response, I continued through the list and then retreated to Boston. There was a lot to do, but much of it was registrarial—contacting donors, pursuing loans, arranging to have reproductions made—leaving me plenty of time to study the criticism that had tracked Helen during the 1950s and get ready to write about it, and plenty of time, too, to fret about Mountains and Sea and envision being embarrassed by its absence from what was otherwise shaping up to be a dynamite show. At one point I called the marvelous Maureen—Helen’s assistant, Maureen St. Onge, the person who kept Helen’s world turning ever smoothly, the person, it seemed to me, that Helen couldn’t have been without—and asked if she could put in a word for the picture, knowing all along that that was in my job description, not hers.       


So I gave it another shot late in the calendar year in a meeting at which Helen and I planned to finalize the checklist. Again, we went through it chronologically, Helen agreeing to one title, then to another, and another, until we got to Mountains and Sea—I stubbornly included it, as if refusing to believe Helen had actually nixed it—at which point she said, “No, not Mountains and Sea.” 


“But Helen!” I stammered…


“No, no,” she calmly remarked. “It’s a wonderful picture, but it’s very delicate, and I’m very happy with where it is now. Besides, including it would be like having a wonderful Faberge exhibition and putting the Hope Diamond right in the middle of it.” 


Well, that did it, I didn’t have the energy to go another round, I resigned myself to the fact that there’d be no Mountains and Sea in our exhibition, I did what I had to do, I got over it. And guess what? Mirabile dictu, the exhibition was an unqualified triumph—for Helen, for the Rose Art Museum, and for me as well. We got a glowing review from Hilton Kramer on page 1 of the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section, our attendance swelled as never before in my experience, and, through the course of the show, I was regularly congratulated by art world acquaintances and professional colleagues for my curatorial decision to leave Mountains and Sea out of the mix—they even called it courageous. In response, I generally smiled modestly, bowed my head slightly, and softly acknowledged, “It’s a wonderful picture, but it just seemed so obvious to include. Besides, it would have skewed all of the other great pictures in the exhibition.” And then I went ahead and told them the truth!

Art House Emerging Artists Series

Art House Productions (SE corner of Hamilton Park in Jersey City near Erie and 8th streets) is going to be a great venue for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate and get some exhibiting experience in a nurturing environment. Last night at the opening (see video above) there was a 3-hour performance installation of "Broken Glass" by Jessica Nelson and Jessica Smith (aka "The Jessicas") who are also exhibiting some sculpture and installations, as are Oren Misholy and Phil D'Martino.

Christine Goodman (shown charmingly sticking her tongue out at me in the video) has become the paid, full-time Executive Director of Art House Productions. This Monday, August 9th, from 6pm-9pm, there will be a cocktail reception celebrating this good news: LITM, 140 Newark Ave, Jersey City (1/2 block from Grove St. PATH Station). A $20 donation includes 1 free drink and appetizers.

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.