Some Worthwhile Links

Some of the best art writing can be found in London newspapers, especially by Adrian Seale and Jonathan Jones of the Guardian and Richard Dorment of the Telegraph. Here's a taste of some of their recent work:

Adrian Seale:
Frieze art fair 2010: the verdict: "What is it about contemporary art? Last year's good is this year's bad. There are lots of tacky mannequins dotted about the place this time, some more human than others, and the occasional dealer so badly dressed and so transfixed by the lack of action that you think he's a shop dummy."
Jonathan Jones:
Jonathan Jones on art: "Art is an ambiguous and evasive way of communicating. A vast field of porcelain sunflower seeds may indeed be a political metaphor. But just because the artist intends it that way does not mean it will be understood that way."
Richard Dorment:
Paul Cezanne: The Card Players: "In what other subject could several men be shown sitting around a table facing each other without talking, gesturing, or even looking up? In a card game, each player studies the hand he has been dealt so intently that his lack of movement and the absence of even the slightest expressive reaction to his opponents, looks quite natural. The subject of a card game was as close as Cézanne could find to a human still life. "

Other worthwhile links:

John Richardson, the foremost Picasso scholar, wrote a tough and informative article in the New York Review of Books entitled "How Political Was Picasso?". Basically not so much.

John Gapper in FT Magazine wrote a revealing piece on why Annie Leibovitz, as famous and great a photographer as she is, cannot find acceptance as an art photographer, and as a result her earning power is less than it would be.  

The Los Angeles Times has a funny article, "Art Magazine to artists: Drop Dead", about how London's Art Review doesn't have any artists in the top ten of their annual "Art Power 100."

Jersey City take note: via The Jersey City Independent comes this report --  San Francisco Is 2010 City R D Winner - Cities - GOOD: "'Feasible,' 'relevant,' 'inspiring,' 'focused,' 'achievable,' and 'shareable,' were all words our City R D judges used to describe the Walk Stop proposal aimed at making the Midtown area of San Francisco safer and more walkable."

Finally, The New York Times reports on the real estate ambitions of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Jersey City Museum take note: "'The arts center has to be the town square of New Jersey,” Mr. Goldman said. “Corporate events, weddings, bar mitzvahs, poetry festivals, other nonprofits doing their fund-raisers here, graduations, job fairs. It has to be more than what’s on your stages.'"

Curatorial Flashbacks #8: Closet Artist, The Sequel

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University

By Carl Belz

I made a career change in 1974 when I was denied tenure in the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis and instead offered the directorship of the Rose Art Museum. It was a surprise move, angering me on the one hand and appealing to me on the other, a can’t-refuse proposal that—irony of ironies, as only the gods could have known—would be book-ended 24 years later by a like proposal to take early retirement. I stewed about it, and I talked to a few artist friends whose opinions I respected. They said I’d be fine without tenure, they said its comforts would just be confining. I listened, and I decided to run with the offer.

The Rose, you see, wasn’t exactly a plum I’d been tossed, not back then, not in 1974. Its program budget had been slashed in 1971-72 from $20K to $4K—that’s an 80% cut! — prompting director Bill Seitz—one of my Princeton mentors who’d also encouraged me to come to Brandeis in the first place—to depart for greener pastures at the University of Virginia. The high profile enjoyed by the museum throughout the 1960s had accordingly, even dramatically, receded. Still, the Rose had a lot going for it. There was the permanent collection, for instance, most noticeably the 21 new pictures—including the Warhol, the Johns, the Louis, the Lichtenstein, and the Rauschenberg—that director Sam Hunter had famously put together in 1962-63 with the Gevirtz-Mnuchin Purchase Fund, and that had put the Rose Art Museum on the contemporary culture map within a year of its opening. Whatever shows we couldn’t afford, we could always show the collection.

Also positive was the impact of a new addition to the museum that had been completed just months before I took over as director. It gave us a couple of modest galleries, but its primary purpose was to provide storage and work space for the collection and professional staff that had been desperately needed—no kidding—since the day the original building opened in 1961. What this meant to me personally was that my first job would be to move the permanent collection, at least the bulk of it, out of the makeshift, inadequate campus sites where it had for years been lounging and into the museum proper. Which meant getting to know the collection in depth, piece-by-piece, and not just the famous pictures, the Pop masterpieces, but all of them.

Roy Lichtenstein's Forget it! Forget me! 1962 (Rose Art Museum)

Which was in turn an eye-opening experience for me, arriving as I did with the baggage of an art historian, for as an art historian I had regularly dealt with a number of the artists represented in the Rose permanent collection, with Lichtenstein and Louis, for instance, with Kline and de Kooning, with Warhol and Wesselman, but that number was nugatory and insignificant in relation to the number of artists otherwise comprising the collection. In addition to those art historical peaks that I taught in the classroom, I came upon the seemingly countless artists who occupied the spaces in and around the peaks, the artists who were mentioned but once in the canonical texts, or maybe weren’t mentioned at all. Hey, there’s Milton Avery and Hyman Bloom, Ilya Bolotowsky and Bruce Conner, Max Ernst and Fritz Glarner, Philip Evergood and George L. K. Morris, and on it goes, on and on—OMG, I didn’t know we had a John Graham! An early Marsden Hartley, too! But who’s David Burliuk?  And who, for that matter, is Nicholas Vasilieff? Hold it, there’s Stephen Greene, artist-in-residence at Princeton whose drawing class I took, and it actually changed my life! Wow!

So I went on to mount many collection shows over many years, and in the process I increasingly saw the collection as an alternative to the history of art that I had brought to the museum. I began to see it as constituting a history of art in and of itself—or, more accurately, as constituting any number of histories, depending on which aspects of the objects’ content you wished to emphasize via any particular collection exhibition. Far from arranging themselves in a linear or arboreal pattern, which were the formalist models I’d learned via Clement Greenberg and Alfred Barr, the objects seemed at times to encourage connections among one another that, depending on how you turned them to the light, were more conceptual than visual, allowing the disconcerting impression that everything is connected to everything else.

Such thoughts were still buzzing in my head when I came out of the closet to perform my 2nd IC installation, which was in the early winter of 1991-92. I decided to cover the side walls of our two principle galleries—they measured 12 by 45 feet upstairs and 10 by 45 feet downstairs—top to bottom and end to end with pictures taken from storage racks and bins without regard for anything but the size and shape required to fill the next available space after the installation was started in the upper left-hand corner of the first wall. The effect was of a salon hanging—but with a vengeance, meaning the pictures were too tightly abutted to allow even minimal informational labels. To finish off the installation, I planned to hang a lone picture dead center on the back wall of each gallery to signal its privileged status, though I held off deciding which pictures they would be until the rest of the installation was complete. Otherwise, the show was set to go.

Except that it wasn’t, because our registrar, friend Lisa McDermott Leary, voiced deep concern that the installation was over-the-top outrageous, that it was going to be excessively demanding on our audience, and that it was even a bit aggressive—a response that had never even occurred to me. Then she insisted that we at least provide a few minimal clues about what was taking place on the walls, which I (somewhat reluctantly) agreed we would do.

First, we found a student who volunteered to make a diagram of each wall display, accurately outlining each object in terms of size and scale in relation to the other objects on the wall, and then adding to each a number corresponding to an informational master list that would be available at the front desk for anyone who wished to know the artist’s name, the title, and the date of the picture. (As it turned out, I loved the wall diagrams, they reminded me of photographs of members of the New York School that you’d see in old magazines—a picture of the artists on one page and on the page opposite a diagram outlining and numbering each figure, plus a caption that identified #4 as Jackson Pollock, #7 as Barnett Newman, and so forth. I thought it was a fun reference.)

And second, I wrote an explanatory wall label about the installation, a statement about how the objects resting in storage—which is the way they were presented in the show—are filled with potentials for interpretation and meaning, and how our curatorial responsibility in exhibiting them is to enable their voices to soar, to yield their bountiful pleasures. Implicit in the statement was the assumption that, freed from the baggage associated with names and dates and titles, our viewers would experience the exhilaration of pure looking. (If I were writing that text today, I would liken the installation to the albums we see on Facebook—gridded arrays of images, often unidentified, which suggest kinships and comparisons and are presented solely for visual delectation, along with the hope of maybe prompting a comment or two.)

As to the finishing touches, the lone pictures on the two rear walls, I vacillated among a bunch of options—best picture in the collection, most important picture, most valuable picture, and so on—but they all seemed pretty conventional, so I decided to finesse the big questions having to do with some kind of worldly significance in favor of a couple of pictures that just meant a lot to me personally, maybe even encourage me to take the dreaded risk of walking the line between feeling and sentiment.

One was a 1983 photograph I bought for the collection by John Kennard of a little league baseball field in upstate New York. It was taken looking out from behind home plate, and the field was empty. But it wasn’t empty for me, it was filled with the ghosts of the guys I had played with and against on fields just like that from the time I was 11 or 12 until I graduated from college—it was a haunting picture of my growing up.

The second picture was a 1979 watercolor called Service by Catherine Bertulli of her then-husband Roger Kizik, seen from above, serving up a tennis ball. Roger donated the picture to the collection, he framed it, and he installed it. He was our preparator at the museum for many years, he was a terrific painter as well, and he was also a close friend. We’d been through some things together on Team Rose—you could say we shared trunks of memories—so showing the picture of him was also my way of saying, Long may you run.

There’s an afternote to this story that I can’t resist including. During the course of the exhibition, John Hanhardt, Curator of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, came to campus to deliver a lecture on a video presentation that had been guest-curated by colleague Pam Allara from the Department of Fine Arts and installed in the two galleries in the new wing I mentioned earlier. He arrived early to review the video, we met, we chatted, and he strolled—politely, I thought—along the walls I’d covered with pictures from the collection. When he started his lecture, however, the first thing he said was that the collection installation provided a perfect context for the video art—it reflected the visual cacophony of our culture, the cascade of images everywhere dazzling us, the improbable montages we’re daily confronted by and grope to explain.

How terrific was that? He got it, that’s exactly what I was thinking! I felt vindicated. What more could I ask? Standing at the back of the auditorium with my museum colleagues, I caught Lisa’s eye and nodded—not with a smirk, but with a modest smile of satisfaction. Which she acknowledged with a smile of her own.


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

The Open Road: John Baldessari at the Met

John Baldessari, Aligning Balls, 1972(Photo from C-Monster.net)

By Kyle Gallup

We are at the crossroads of new ways of thinking about art, and the making of art. Boundaries that have delineated traditional art practices, and so many of the art movements of the last century—Modernism, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, Formalism—to name four — are outmoded. Walking into the John Baldessari exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the viewer enters an expansive world, a country waiting to be discovered. Though he is known as a conceptual artist, he uses traditional forms—photography, painting, collage and video—in his work. He finds a perfect tension between the idea and its manifestation as an object in the world.

For me, viewing so much of his work in one place was like diving into a crystal clear pool. His deeply honest and transparent approach to art-making sets him apart from his peers, students and followers. His concepts dictate his use of materials. Baldessari focuses on a few things most important to him: ideas, words, and photography. He steps back, taking his hand out of the art-making process but without sacrificing his sharp eye for putting disparate elements together.

I liked many of the works in the show; one of my favorites was “Aligning Balls” (1972). Baldessari sets himself the task of photographing a red ball thrown up into the air. This forces him to act quickly without regard to properly composing a photo. This piece is a selection of more than thirty small snapshots of a tiny red ball suspended in a calm field of blue. Sometimes there is a cloud afloat in the sky or a treetop nestled on the edge of the image. The pictures are delicately strung together with a drawn dark chalk line on a wall. One must get right on top of the pictures in the small-scale work, creating intimacy with the piece as an object. This is in contrast to the expansive space within each photograph. Round-headed nails, the same size as the red balls, pin the glass-covered photos in place, reinforcing the reality that the installation is itself an object in the world.

His video pieces, though appearing rough and gritty, have a beauty in their repetitive simplicity and honesty. They have a thing-ness about them, much like watching a firefly trapped inside a jar with air-holes punched in the lid. (Baldessari's 1971 video I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art can be seen on vodpod's website.)

As an artist, I am still in the process of making sense of Baldessari’s work and the meaning it holds for me personally. For others who plan on seeing ”Pure Beauty” my advice is to take your time, go slowly, and surrender yourself to each of the works as you come upon them and you will be rewarded over and over again.

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

How to Make a Living as an Artist

By Charles Kessler

I recently came across a couple of useful and insightful books about the art world. I'll be writing about Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton in a future post, but for now I want to report on Jackie Battenfield's The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love.

I know this is problematic for a lot of artists. I recently wrote about how we are all conflicted about making money on our art, including (maybe especially) successful artists. But we all need to get our work out to a larger audience in order to participate in the fine art conversation of our time, and this book can help.

The book convinced me of the value of artists' statements in promoting work. I hate artists' statements. They're usually pompous -- silly even -- poorly written and useless; but the book shows how to write one that won't make you gag. Here are some of her tips:

• It is much better to write simply about what you know and use words and phrases from everyday language.
• Is this writing specific to my work, or could this statement be applied to many other artists?
• Eliminate words like unique (all works of art are unique -- it’s a given);  first (you may be wrong); and only (probably not, and hard to prove).
•  Refrain from informing viewers how they should feel, be moved, challenged, or changed by experiencing your work.
• Compose your statement with a sympathetic friend in mind who is genuinely interested in the work and wants to know more about it.
• Instead of defining your work by what it is not, simply state what it is.

Because it's important, she has two chapters on networking: Your Best Allies: Your Network of PeersHow to Build a Community to Survive Being Alone. There's a chapter with viable advice on Generating Your Own Opportunities including information on open studios, art registries, public art, working with other artists, and creating a website and/or your own blog (hey no -- forget that one). and

Some other practical advice and information:

• Consider, outside of your peers, whom you want to see your work and why.
• Promoting your work requires you to be assertive. It does not mean you are impolite, disrespectful of others, or inappropriately aggressive.
• There’s an exhibition checklist.
• There's a chapter on how to price your work.
• And finally, toward the end of the book, she offers this sage advice: If I’m not being regularly rejected, it means I’m not pursuing opportunities.

By the way, there are several blogs and websites listed on the right sidebar here under the heading "Downloads and Resources." Especially worth mentioning in this respect are:

Edward Winkleman, an art dealer and one of my favorite bloggers. He compiled several posts into a section called "Advice for Artists Seeking Gallery Representation." This is valuable advice from the horse's mouth.

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). Topics include: fundraising, insurance, legal, marketing and web site development.

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer based in Jersey City.

Curatorial Flashbacks #7: The Frank Stella Acquisition That Wasn’t

Frank Stella, Chocorua IV, 1966, Fluorescent alkyd and epoxy paints on canvas, 120 x 128 x 4 in., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College

By Carl Belz

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth recently opened an exhibition of Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons, a major 1966-67 series comprising 44 pictures in 11 shaped-canvas formats, each executed in four versions, and each titled for a New Hampshire town where Frank and his father took fishing trips when Frank was growing up in the 1950s. The show marks the first time that all 11 formats have been hung together, and it constitutes a spectacular event in documenting the moment when Frank laid down the blueprint for the artistic identity we continue to associate with his work today.    

In checking the website for the exhibition, one item in particular caught my attention, which was that Chocorua IV had recently been purchased by the Hood in honor of Brian Kennedy who was Director there between 2005 and 2010, who curated the show, and who is currently Director of the Toledo Museum of Art.   

That acknowledgment was heart breaking: It catapulted me back to September 1997, about a week after my birthday, when Brandeis Dean of Faculty Irv Epstein called me to his office for a meeting. We exchanged greetings. He asked me how I was. I told him I felt as though I’d arrived, I’d finally become a sixty-year-old smiling public man among school children. I got a blank look in return. I asked him what was on his mind. He asked me if I’d ever thought about retirement. Whoa, baby, what was coming down here?  

Undaunted—you can never say I wasn’t naïve—I told him I’d thought about 2001 but rejected it because it was so embarrassingly awful a movie, then I added quickly that I’d also considered 2000, a nice number—you know, the millennium and all that—plus 25 years at the helm, a dignified span. “Oh,” he queried, “You became director in 1975?”  

“No, Irv, it was actually 1974, but we could say it was 1975, we could bend the facts a little for esthetic effect, like artists do all the time.” Then, wondering what was behind his question, I asked him what he and the President had in mind.   

“We were thinking of this coming January 1st.”  

Yikes! And again yikes! He was proposing I take an early retirement, and it was a proposal that, lacking the security of academic tenure, I was in no position to refuse.   

But I nonetheless told him at once that January was impossible, I was in the process of curating a full-scale, mid-career survey of paintings by Joseph Marioni, which would take place in the spring, and I was working with my colleague, curator Susan Stoops, on a couple of major acquisitions we hoped to secure by the end of the academic year. He said he’d get back to me, which he did: I was permitted to finish out the academic year as Director of the Rose.  

One of the acquisitions I was referring to was a picture by Frank Stella, whose work I had followed enthusiastically since we were both undergraduates at Princeton in the late 1950s, and whose association with Brandeis had begun in the 1960s. He received a Jack and Lillian Poses Creative Arts Award in 1966. He taught courses in the Department of Fine Arts as a Visiting Artist during the spring semester of the 1968-69 academic year, and an exhibition curated by William Seitz took place at the Rose Art Museum in coincidence with his residency. I curated a second exhibition, “Frank Stella: Metallic Reliefs,” a decade later. He was presented with an honorary degree at the Brandeis commencement in 1986, and he returned to campus a year later to help us celebrate the 10th anniversary of our Patrons and Friends Exhibition Program. I’d be hard-pressed to name an artist—let alone an artist of Frank’s stature—with a relationship to the University more steadfast than Frank Stella’s. That he should be represented in the Rose Art Museum permanent collection in my eyes needed no further explanation.  

I talked with Frank about acquiring a picture for the Rose—an “historical” picture, if possible, something from the 60s or 70s—and was pleased to learn we could work directly with him instead of going to the secondary market via one or another of his gallery representatives. We then zeroed in on his Polish Village series from the early 70s, which referenced conceptually his Irregular Polygons, included his first three-dimensional relief-painting constructions, and initiated the exploration of sculptural expression that he pursues into the present moment. Each of the 40 Polish Village formats was executed in three versions, the first in paint and collage on canvas, the second in raised materials on wood, and the third in paint and collage on cardboard built into tilted sections.   

Frank Stella, Jarmolince III, 1973, Mixed media on board; 116 x 90 x 8 in.

 What we settled on was this: The Museum would acquire three works—a first, a second and a third version, each representing a different format among the 40 formats in the series. We would purchase the first two works for a total of $180K, while the third would be a Gift of the Artist in Honor of Carl Belz. It was an extraordinarily generous offer, and I was accordingly excited to present it to the Museum’s advisory Board of Overseers for their approval, which I did in the early spring of 1998.   But the presentation didn’t go off as planned. From the outset, there was contention around the table. A handful of voices seemed to have a separate agenda: The Polish Village pictures weren’t very strong; there was one in the Victor Ganz auction last year, and it was the weakest painting in the whole collection; Stella was just trying to unload works that wouldn’t sell; we should save the money to enhance the search for a new director. And so it went, I couldn’t believe the pettiness of the opinions, I was flabbergasted, but I took a vote anyway, and it was 9 to 5 in favor. Phew! The good guys had won, but it sure didn’t feel that way, it felt not like a cause for celebration, it felt like a bummer, as though we’d staggered to the finish line. And it got worse. When I called the Dean to report on the vote, he told me he couldn’t approve a transaction of that magnitude with that close a vote; it had to be unanimous, or close to it, which was a whole new procedural wrinkle, invented on the spot as far as I could tell. So there was no victory at all and no Stella for the collection. I felt like crying.  

The whole business became clear soon enough. Among those opposed to the acquisition were two or three individuals with strong donor potential who had the attention of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinhartz, and who were, therefore, effectively in control of how business was being done at the Rose Art Museum at that moment. And what did they know? “Save the money for the next director”? How degrading to the Museum—as if the Rose’s programming history and collection couldn’t by themselves attract worthy candidates for the job. Likewise, my “lame duck” status as director, which I was earnestly reminded of by one of the businessmen on the Board when I informed him of the dean’s decision—as if that fact outweighed the artistic, intellectual, and institutional substance of the proposal that had been on the table.   

So here’s the moral of the story, as I see it, for those of you who might be thinking about a museum career: Make sure the professionals run the show, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that having a lot of dough entitles the amateurs to dictate how you should do your job of work—as happened back in 1998 when a few of our wealthy Overseers got muscle by getting the ear of the President. Which makes me wonder how those folks responded when they heard that same President announce in 2009 that he was closing the Rose Art Museum and selling off the permanent collection. I wonder if they enjoyed getting a proposal they couldn’t refuse?  And should I take consolation in knowing that Brandeis at least won’t have any Frank Stella paintings to cash in on?

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

Festival, market...art fair?

By Irene Borngraeber

Around this time a year ago I published what I thought was an innocuous article about the organizers of Jersey City's first self-proclaimed "art fair"--and ended up with the biggest backlash I've ever had.  The problem wasn't my coverage or what the event was trying to do, but the term "art fair" itself.  I had assumed that readers would understand the difference between fair, art market, and art festival (there's even an entry in wikipedia about it!)--but I was all kinds of wrong.

The artists involved in a weekly outdoor market jumped all over me for excluding them as the original Jersey City "art fair" and, even though I tried to explain that I had been using the term in its commercial sense (think Armory or Affordable Art), they weren't having it--and I began to get upset.  Not because they didn't like the article, but because it had suddenly become my responsibility to make them understand a turn of phrase that was so fundamentally ingrained in the commercial art market.  I had assumed any artist seriously interested in selling their work would have already been aware (like it or not) of the fairs and their importance, and what the idea of bringing one to Jersey City could actually mean for putting local artists on the map.  But the fact that people were so confused and angry about the term made me wonder what else was getting lost in translation.

Fast forward a year--and we're still having linguistic difficulties with the sticky "art fair" term.  But this time, the issue lies with the organizers' use--year two.  I realize these are tough times for JC art.  The museum, one of the event's creators, is on the brink, and I doubt there was little (if any) money available to put this show together.  But, simply selling art in a hotel-like setting for a weekend and sending out a press release the week before doesn't make a show an art fair.

I don't want to knock anyone involved in this project, because "art fair" or not, we need more commercial art outlets in Jersey City, and any step in that direction is an important one.  But I believe it's important to be both precise and honest about what we call these events.  I came expecting the press and posers and buyers that buzz around Red Dot or Pool--and was disappointed.  And I'm sure others came (and left) with a very different idea of what an art fair actually is, right or wrong.  Ultimately, we may not be ready to host a true commercial fair in Jersey City, but we can certainly provide valuable showing opportunities for artists and chances for buyers to take work home--let's just be careful about what we call them.  

Still Ignored

Chopped liver, gribenes and lettuce.

By Charles Kessler

Clyfford Still, that is -- snubbed by the Museum of Modern Art in their exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York.

Contemporaries of Still have entire rooms of their own: Mark Rothko (eight paintings), Barnett Newman (seven paintings plus 18 drawings in the entryway) and Jackson Pollock (eight paintings and an additional six paintings near the entrance). There are only two paintings by Still, and they are buried in the middle of the show.

In MoMA's defense, the exhibition is drawn entirely from their collection, and it’s not surprising that they own only two Still paintings. His paintings were very hard to come by. Still intentionally sold very little of his art; instead, he gave work away under strict conditions on how it was to be displayed. He gave the Albright Knox 31 paintings and the San Francisco MoMA 28 paintings; and, after he died, Still willed a whopping 825 paintings and 1575 works on paper (almost everything he ever made) to the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

Clyfford Still, 1944-N No.2, oil on canvas, 104 x 87 in. (MoMA)

But why didn’t MoMA curator Ann Temkin at least place Still's seminal 1944-N No.2 in the beginning of the show where it would have stood out as an extraordinarily advanced and mature painting?  And it’s not only MoMA who undervalues Still. Roberta Smith’s review of the show points out how outrageous it is to have de Kooning represented with only four paintings, yet she doesn’t even mention Still. Peter Schjeldahl, in an uncharacteristically shallow review of the show in The New Yorker (sorry, no link available), includes Still as one of the “definers of the movement,” but “by a whisker.”

But let's compare what Still’s contemporaries were doing in 1944:

About the only artist in Still’s league was Jackson Pollock, and a case can be made that this work, great as it is, is not yet his mature work. The others didn't catch up until 1949-50.

In another post I'll write about Clyfford Still as one of the first to break from cubist composition and how he pioneered color-field painting; but for now I'd like to discuss Still's leading role in the development of large-scale paintings. This is a complicated issue. Many artists made an occasional large painting: Picasso, Matisse, Pollock; there’s even a knock-out large painting by Richard Pousette-Dart in the show. But Still was the first to make large scale a characteristic of his art by having an exhibition in which all the work was large.

There’s a lot of dispute about this including by William Rubin, long-time MoMA curator, who suggested in Artforum (February, 1967) that Still was duplicitous:  “To be sure, recent exhibitions of Still’s paintings have included giant canvases dated in the forties, but there is no evidence - based upon work exhibited at that time - of any such pictures before the fifties.” But in spite of Rubin’s doubts, Still did have an exhibition in 1944 at the Richmond Professional Institute in which all the work was large. (I found out about this exhibition while doing research for my MA thesis on Still -- in 1973 -- sheesh. FYI, a letter describing the exhibition was sent to me and later published in a catalog (page 182) of a huge exhibition of seventy-nine paintings of Still’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 17, 1979 - February 3, 1980.) 

Admittedly Richmond is out of the way, but by 1945 Still moved to New York and lived there off and on for most of this period; and he maintained close relationships with most of the first generation Abstract Expressionists (he even got Rothko a teaching job in the late 1940‘s at the San Francisco Art Institute).

Still also had an influential one-person show of twelve large paintings at the Art of this Century Gallery in New York in February 12 - March 2, 1946. Robert Motherwell, the most educated and historically minded of all the Ab Ex’s, said in a Summer 1967 interview with Sidney Simon in Art International: “I must say, it is to Still’s credit -- his was the show, of all the early shows of ours, that was the most original. A bolt out of the blue.” 

So why is Clyfford Still consistently disregarded? Tyler Green, who is rapidly becoming my favorite art blogger, puts it well: “... Still was a  paranoid, insulting, mean-spirited, grandiose, pompous, officious, self-important jerk. He treated MoMA and its curators badly and made it difficult for the museum to exhibit — let alone own! — his work.”

But if being an asshole is cause to be erased from art history, a lot of great artists would be unknown today.

It's All in the Details

Check out the blog Look Into My Owl for some thrilling close-up images of MoMA's “Abstract Expressionist New York” exhibition. Here's a taste:

Philip Guston, Painting (detail), oil on canvas, 1954

Ad Reinhardt, Number 43 Abstract Painting, Yellow (detail), oil on canvas, 1947

Tyler Green on the Influence of Gris on Matisse

Tyler Green: Modern Art Notes has an interesting take on the influence of Juan Gris.
 
"Gris’s greatest influence on Matisse was to lead him away from color and toward composition so strict and rigorous that it might be better called architectonic. Gris’ influence on Matisse is most readily evident in Matisse’s shocking late-1914 portrait of his daughter Marguerite, titled Head, White and Rose (above)."

In Greed We Trust

Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family, 2002-3, silicon, acrylic, human hair, leather, timber

I know this isn't about art, but you can always just skip it if you want.

I never understood why individual Wall Street brokers didn't  take wild financial risks in the past. I mean what changed in the last 40 years? This article by William Cohan explains some of it, and offers some good solutions.

Make Wall Street Risk It All - NYTimes.com:
"... The change occurred when Wall Street firms stopped being partnerships, in which every partner put his full wealth on the line every day, and became corporations, which put the risks on their shareholders and creditors."

"... To my mind, its central feature should be that each of the top 100 executives at Wall Street’s remaining “systemically important” firms be personally liable for the risks they take. Not just their unexercised stock options or restricted stock, but every asset they have in their possession: from their cars to their fancy homes to their bulging bank accounts. The days of privatizing the profits for Wall Street and socializing the risks must end. As radical as this sounds, in truth it would be no different from when — before 1970 — Wall Street was a series of private partnerships."