The Color Picture Now: Feeling Foremost

By Carl Belz

Into our modern era the job of color in painting was to articulate the visible world, which it did anew with eye-opening freshness and authority in the hands of the Impressionists, only to have their successors advance the case that color could be shorn of its descriptive function and employed expressively, to embody feelings not otherwise visible. Thus liberated, emphatic personalized color provided, during the past century, the engine that drove the Brucke and Blaue Reiter expressionists in Germany, the Fauves in France, and, following World War II, the Post Painterly Abstractionists of the New York School. What the latter gave us—what Rothko and Still and Newman and Hofmann, Frankenthaler and Louis, Noland and Olitski and Stella, gave to the art of our time—were pictures as visually arresting and emotionally moving as any produced by moderns and modernists alike since the middle of the 19th Century.

Postmodern sensibilities that germinated in the 1970s haven’t generally endorsed the value judgments guiding that synopsis of color picture history. Disillusioned by the failed promises of the previous decade—a reaction quickly transferred to 20th Century modernism generally—they’ve opted more for cultural deconstruction and critique, for irony, and for detached, anti-aesthetic interest than for quality and conviction. From such a position, the tradition extending from Matisse to Stella, say, is seen less as a pictorial achievement than a decorative art historical sidebar, an assessment echoing a concern that was initially voiced decades before, most notably by Marcel Duchamp, who, in the face of the Fauves and Cubists, declared the new art mere visual pleasure—in a word, retinal. As a corrective, he called for art to restore ideas to itself, the implication being that it would otherwise devolve to comprise objects lacking meaningful content, objects, that is, which were indistinguishable from ordinary things in the world, things that could only nominally be considered art, like bottle racks or bicycle wheels, for instance, instead of the real McCoy, like the things in museums. And so was born conceptual art—art that equates content with ideas.      

Conceptualism’s critique notwithstanding, the colorist equation of content with feeling continued to figure prominently—as it had figured prominently since the late 1940s—across our visual culture’s increasingly pluralistic stage during the later 1960s and the 1970s. Which is when the three painters presented here—Ronnie Landfield, Sandi Slone, and Darryl Hughto—were coming into their early maturity. Each was fully schooled in modernism, and each absorbed from the start the ways and means of Post Painterly Abstraction, in particular its primary emphasis on a personal and expressive use of color, but also its techniques of paint application, staining and pouring among them, methods of getting paint from the can or tube and onto the canvas that minimized paint’s physicality on the one hand and indulged it on the other, but in either case suppressed the gestural handling of it in order to allow color its maximum impact. Each has now been painting for more than four decades, and each has in the process periodically made ambitiously large pictures, as well as pictures that are frankly and unapologetically beautiful, candid in celebrating color as a vehicle of emotional content, intuitively smart in structuring its deployment to assure the content’s credibility. Regularly inspired by their modernist past, yet at the same time unburdened by it, each has also looked periodically to nature, not in opposition to abstraction, which was the charge presented against painting nature in the 1950s, but as a resource for enriching it.

In that context, here is Ronnie Landfield:

My inspiration has been my conviction that modern painting is fueled by the combination of tradition and the realities of modern life. Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language and the landscape…as a metaphor for the arena of life. The revelation of a primal image that delivers an immediate response in the viewer is my goal. 

Here, Sandi Slone:

The recent works do not describe nature. They attempt to imitate the processes of nature in the way they are made, relying on the fluidity of chance and rigorous control that is rooted in exploring the unexpected and the unknown.

And here, Darryl Hughto:

My absolute favorite motif is the imaginary landscape, usually just consisting of a horizon, sky above and land or sea below, maybe a blob or two on the horizon reading as islands or clouds. With this format I am the most free with color and paint handling. It puts more pressure on the color, and the simplicity of the drawing allows the viewer to relax and just feel it. I can have my cake, as I had it when I was totally geometric and painting diamonds, and eat it too, great savory hunks of paint swimming in buckets of puddles and pours. 

Ronnie Landfield’s signature paintings generally comprise stained fields of light-breathing color bordered by a single color geometric band along the lower framing edge and sometimes one or two additional bands rising along the sides of the picture. The bands represent a formal element he first employed in minimalist paintings of the 1960s in response to Donald Judd’s quarrel with painting’s inherent spatiality and part-by-part relationships—his claim being that painting was flawed by illusion, that it wasn’t its literal self—so Ronnie Landfield added the bands as a way of reminding us of painting’s flatness. All of which probably sounds kind of academic, even a little preposterous from the distance of nearly half a century, but such were the issues informing critical discourse at the time—they were immediate, they felt genuinely urgent, and they occasionally found their way into the studio, just as their counterparts do today.

Ronnie Landfield, For John Keats, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 81 x 93 inches.

Ronnie Landfield, Joseph’s Coat, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 88 x 81 inches.

But you don’t have to know all about that discourse when you look at the pictures themselves, you just have to know that what the bands might have meant in the past isn’t necessarily what they might mean now. I, for one, find the bands highly effective. They lend structure to the paintings but without suppressing them, without imposing their will upon the range and spontaneity of feeling that’s lyrically articulated within them or the exhilarating release we experience in looking at them. Concomitantly, the freedom that is expressed and celebrated within the paintings, and that is identified with our response to them, is acknowledged as existing within limitations—which is how freedom invariably exists in lived experience, for it would otherwise be not a reality, but a hollow concept. The bands’ meaning in these paintings thereby becomes timeless.

Ronnie Landfield,  The Deluge, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 120 inches.

Ronnie Landfield,  On the Threshold, 2008, 44 x 29.5 inches.

Ronnie Landfield,  Blue Wall, 2010, 44.5 x 53 inches.

Sandi Slone is clearly sensitive to the bonding of freedom and limitation in citing her reliance on the “fluidity of chance” in tandem with “rigorous control”. What I especially appreciate in the statement about her current working procedure, at the same time, is the urge whereby chance and control enable her pictures to “imitate nature in the way they are made”. The urge is certainly evident in her recent pictures, which appear as phenomena that have come into being entirely on their own, like celestial or aquatic torrents, brilliantly illuminated from within, that sweep through space without human agency or intervention, without being shaped or composed, as if obeying rules of their own—like natural forces.

Sandi Slone, Tiger Eye, 1976, oil and acrylic on canvas, 69 x 80 inches.

Sandi Slone,  Rasputin, 1984, oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 inches.

To an extent, that effect has been present in Sandi Slone’s pictures from the outset: in the earth-color masses abutting in her 1970s broom paintings, in the cascading and pooling washes and stains in her pictures from the 1980s and 90s, in the minimally, yet visibly stroked circles of the past decade that seem, like a crack of lightning, to have happened out of nowhere in an instant. It’s an absorbing effect that stimulates a wide spectrum of feeling, wide and full, like the bounty of nature itself. In the face of it, I’m reminded of what modernism is all about, how it’s about creating worlds and how to go about the process of shaping their character—as it has been since its beginning. Which in turn reminds me of what Flaubert said at the moment of that beginning: “The author in his book must be like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.”

Sandi Slone, Fire Wave, 1990, oil, acrylic and sand on canvas, 60 x 126 inches.

Sandi Slone, Sky, Field, Lips, 2009, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36 inches diameter .

Sandi Slone, Vast, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, 18 x 14 inches.

Darrly Hughto’s painting format in the 1970s comprised diamonds within rectangles or squares, sometimes centered and aligned with one another, sometimes askew. It sustained an effective run of pictures through the decade, but the work then slackened, whereupon he tried working en plein air, he cast about and wrestled with himself, and, by the later 1980s, he emerged as a landscape/still life/figure painter. He wasn’t alone in radically shifting gears during a career in full stride. David Park and Philip Guston had both famously done so out of dissatisfaction with abstraction and the urge for a more outwardly focused kind of pictorial content. But Darryl Hughto wasn’t after a new kind of content.

Darryl Hughto, Saint Gingerbread, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 78 inches diagonal.

Darryl Hughto, Radiance, 2002, acrylic on canvas, 58 x 81.5 inches

He harbored no argument with modernist abstraction, far from it, but neither was he out to demonstrate the kind of virtuosic, many-voiced performance—already a postmodernist trope at the time—whereby a solo show of new work looked for all intents and purposes like a group exhibition. Rather, what I think he was looking for was a new format, one that would anchor and extend anew his reach into the color-as-feeling territory he’d been inspired to explore all along. Which he found in landscape more than anywhere else, as his own words clearly acknowledge, and as the chromatic splendor and emotional exuberance of his pictures surely attest. He’s referenced both German Expressionism and the French Fauves in connection with his newer pictures, bringing to mind Kandinsky and Matisse. I’d personally add Nicholas de Stael, from the 1950s School of Paris, whose luscious physical color reminds me of Darryl Hughto’s sensuous “hunks of paint.” As you probably know, French painting back in the 50s was regarded as the kind of painting our Abstract Expressionists didn’t want to make. It was too French, too arty. Today, however, the deep satisfactions of Darryl Hughto’s paintings enable us to see in the present the pictorial exuberance that was being overlooked in the past. Good art can do that, it can make you rewrite art’s history.

Darryl Hughto, Pillar Point, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 52.5 x 68.5 inches.

Darryl Hughto, Great Spruce Head Island Sunrise, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 57 x 47 inches.

Darryl Hughto, Cherry Island, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 29 x 36 inches.

Paintings I really like I think about living with, like the paintings of Ronnie Landfield and Sandi Slone and Darryl Hughto. The worlds they take me to are generous and accommodating, pleasured by art that is meaningful in and of itself, art that is justified simply by being, like nature. I like to think there’s room in my own lived world—even in the lived world at large—for that kind of experience. I share Matisse’s dream of “an art filled with balance, purity and calmness…a spiritual remedy…for the businessman as well as the artist”—even though I’m no businessman or artist myself.


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

Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Blue Coat. 1965.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, translated by Ralph McCarthy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1911. (This review was originally published in Art New England (April/May, 2012).)

By Carl Belz

When I assumed my post as director of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, in 1974, my first task was to move the collection from a handful of makeshift sites scattered around campus to a proper storage vault that had recently been added to the museum itself. It was a great opportunity so see just about every painting and sculpture we owned—prints and drawings, mostly unframed, would come later—and I was excited by the chance to handle the objects, feel their heft, study their condition, and read the labels on the stretcher bars to see whence they’d come to the museum. To greater and lesser degrees, I was familiar with the artists they represented, some widely acclaimed, some lesser known, and some whose names meant nothing at all to me. There was a woman’s coat, for instance, it was entirely covered with visually buzzing, aqua- and black-striped cotton phallic protuberances that gave off a weirdly disturbing sexual vibe. A registrar’s tag identified it as having been made in 1965 and accessioned in 1967, which meant it had been acquired by William Seitz, the Rose’s second director. Bill had been a curator at MoMA and had come to Brandeis shortly after mounting “The Responsive Eye”, an ambitious international survey of Op Art, a passion I assumed he brought with him when he came to Waltham. For me, that provided a handy context for understanding the dress itself and its presence in the collection, and with that I was pretty much satisfied.

Little did I know. Little, in fact, did a lot of people know, unless they’d hung around New York’s downtown art world where Yayoi Kusama set up shop and operated from the late 1950s through the 1960s, in which case they would have known the coat wasn’t just a one-hit Op Art wonder, known it also referenced Pop Art’s celebration of common objects and their sometimes surrealist transformations, known it demonstrated the gripping formal effect of Minimal Art’s modular repetitions, and known it signaled the first tremors of the women’s revolution that would erupt at the close of the decade and affect art’s history into the new millennium. They’d further have known how the phalluses—or, in some cases, Kusama’s signature polka dots—could proliferate, spread from an article of clothing to nearby tables and chairs to surrounding walls and thereby generate whole obsessive environments, sites for Kusama Performances and Kusama Happenings that she dedicated to peace and love. At the same time, they probably wouldn’t have known the full meaning, for the artist, of her friendships with Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd, yet they did probably wonder whatever happened to her when she left New York in 1973, returned to her native Japan, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977, and, for the most part, dropped off everybody’s cultural radar screen.

But they surely know now: Through the many major exhibitions, starting in the later 1980s and continuing at the moment I write, which have celebrated her achievement in cultural centers around the globe; and through Infinity Net as well, her generously personal autobiography, which was first published in Japanese in 2002 and is now available in a 2011 English translation. It’s a terrific read, packed with information—about her life, her art, her career, her vision—that I’ve merely glossed here, because what especially fascinates me about it is how similar it is to her visual art—and yet how different. Similar in what I would call Kusama’s minimalism, her use of simple, modular units, the spots and dots of color and light in her installations, for instance, units that pair comfortably with her penchant for unembellished sentences and the direct, matter-of-fact literary voice of her autobiography. At heart, the art and the writing proceed with a steady and absorbing rhythm. It’s when the elementary units begin to accumulate that each medium begins to yield its separate and distinct aim. The installations become visually cacophonous and disorienting, reaching for the heavens, dissolving our selves among the stars, while the prose feels earthbound and determined, directing us inward to know ourselves in the here and now. Heaven and earth: pretty impressive, especially from an artist I initially identified as an eccentric seamstress.

(Editor's note: A major exhibition of Yayoi Kusama can be seen at the Whitney Museum of Art until September 30, 2012.)

Art News

By Charles Kessler

I’m going away for a week (the Berkshires — nature, yecch) and I only have time for a brief post, but I’m really excited by these shows. The best contemporary art in NYC right now can be seen in Bushwick, all in one building — 56 Bogart. Bogart Salon is exhibiting breathtaking wrap-around colorfield paintings by Shingo Francis.

Shingo Francis, Bound for Eternity, 2012.

Theodore:Art has one of the best shows of small abstract paintings I’ve seen in a long time. It includes work by such well-known artists as Harriet Korman as well as several vital looking newcomers like Chris Baker, Mel Bernstine and Gary Petersen.

Gary Petersen, Untitled S5, 2012.

Chris Baker, Bewindan, 2012.

Studio 10 has a group show, another in a series of excellent group shows. This one is called Text, and it consists of work that relates to the written word and the materiality of paper. It includes work by John Avelluto, Mary Carlson, Audra Wolowiec and Meg Hitchcock who has some of the most intense paintings you’ll ever see. She cuts up a text, letter by letter, usually from religious books, and reassembles it, letter by letter, to form a passage from another religious text. The painting below isn’t in the show, but it’s representative of her work and is the best reproduction I was able to get.

Meg Hitchock, Mantras & Meditations

Finally, Slag Gallery is showing installations by Claudia Chaseling, one of the most exciting new artists to come on the scene. Chaseling spends half her time in Germany and half in Bushwick, and she’s been doing these powerful, exuberant and somewhat disturbing works in both places.

Claudia Chaseling, INFILTRATION,  2012 - installation view.

DO NOT MISS THESE SHOWS IF YOU CAN POSSIBLY HELP IT!

Art News, June 25, 2012

By Charles Kessler

The New York Times reports that a new uranium-thorium dating technique determined the paintings in El Castillo, a cave in Spain, to be at least 40,800 years old — 4,000 years older than what was previously thought to be the oldest human art, the paintings in the Chauvet Cave, France. Maybe I have an overactive imagination, but from this photo it looks to me like hands reaching out of a hole in the wall. If so, these cave paintings are a lot more sophisticated and theatrical than banal hand prints — and much more in keeping with what we know about cave paintings.

40,000 year-old hand stencils, El Castillo Cave, Spain.

In the last three years, Chinese archaeologists have unearthed 110 new terracotta warriors, 12 pottery horses, parts of chariots, weapons and tools near the Qin Emperor's mausoleum in China's northern Xi'an city. They may be some 38,000 years younger than the El Castillo cave paintings, but they’re still pretty old (221-206 BC) and are well-preserved and colorful. You can see more photos here.

Chinese archeologists working on terracotta warriors in Xi'an, China, June 9, 2012.

There are at least two websites that I know of devoted to documenting the fast-disappearing neon signs of New York: Thomas Rinaldi’s blog New York Neon takes an historic approach, and Kirsten Hively’s Project Neon! is more slanted to art. Both are beautiful and comprehensive.

Colony Music (animated), Broadway at 49th Street, New York City ( Photo from Project Neon!).

The Gagosian Gallery's exhibition Picasso and Francoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris 1943 - 1953 has more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, but I was especially excited by the sculpture and ceramics (I'd estimate about 50 of them). They look like the work of four or five great artists instead of work spanning ten years by just one person! The show closes June 30th — DON'T MISS IT!  The Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue at 77th Street. 

Pablo Picasso, Femme portant un enfant, 1953, wood and part of a palm leaf, 68 x 21 x 14 inches, private collection. (Photo by Patrick Goetelen, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

The Barnes Foundation's New Facility

By Charles Kessler

The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania (photo by Dmadeo)

In 1922 Dr. Albert Barnes, who made a fortune developing and selling Argyrol, an antiseptic silver compound used in the prevention of infant blindness, created a foundation to promote the appreciation of art, philosophy and horticulture. As an art collector he was far ahead of his time, and he managed to put together one of the best art collections in the world. Because he hated Philadelphia society, he built his museum and school in Merion Pennsylvania, a suburb about five miles outside of the city. To see his museum you needed to make a reservation months in advance because it was only open to a limited number of people, and only for two days a week. Going there felt like going on a pilgrimage to someplace rare and special.  (The New York Times has a virtual tour of the interior of the original building that gives you some idea of the place.)

Interior of the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. 

Barnes had a lot of eccentric ideas about art and the teaching of art. He arranged his collection into “ensembles” based on the formal characteristics of the work (space, line, color) rather than chronology, geography or style; and, in keeping with his egalitarian beliefs, he mixed hardware and metal ornaments in with the fine art. After he died in 1951, serious problems arose because Barnes’s trust cast these eccentric ideas in stone in perpetuity. Any changes to the arrangement of the collection or to the facility’s grounds — restrictions very like the Gardner's in Boston — were prohibited. And even worse, he put some unwise financial declarations in his will which, over time, shrank the endowment to the point that the foundation couldn’t maintain the building and collection.

In the face of raging opposition that still persists, the Barnes Foundation got court approval to move the collection from Merion to Philadelphia. In support of the move, local charitable foundations (some of which had been established by the very people Dr. Barnes hated with a passion) pledged millions of dollars to build a new space and create a substantial endowment. Last May the Foundation moved the collection to a new building — a building-within-a-building really. Inside a larger building, they constructed a detailed replica of the interior of the original Barnes museum with the collection installed exactly the same way it was in Merion with a very few changes. Surrounding this replica is a lobby, a large court, a bookstore, library, offices, and plentiful parking.

The new Barnes Foundation building as seen from Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 20th Street.

There are many good reasons why breaking the Barnes trust was a bad idea. An article in Philanthropy Roundtable claims, "These actions erode that sense of trust, to the detriment of future philanthropy;" and articles by Tyler Green and Christopher Knight make some persuasive points. But I find arguments in favor of the move more compelling. Why should a collector be able to control an important art collection or any other important cultural resource FOREVER? And for that matter, I don't see why people should have total control even during their lifetimes — they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy a cultural monument, for example. And while a case can be made that this type of installation is a cultural artifact worth preserving, there are other ways, short of wholesale preservation, to document it.

The bottom line is I LOVED the new Barnes. The lighting is soft and diffused, unlike the inconsistent lighting in Merion (and unlike the harsh, too-bright lighting in most contemporary wings of encyclopedic museums); it's open many more hours; and it's in a much more accessible location. And the new museum, even though it’s wildly popular and more accessible now, is no more crowded than Merion because the daily occupancy is still limited. In fact, for some reason, it feels less crowded than my memory of the old place. And the docents could not have been more helpful, especially Gabrielle Aruta who is eminently qualified (she went through the Barnes course and also taught the philosophy of John Dewey at St. Joseph’s University). I am grateful for all the time she spent talking with me.

For the most part, I found Barnes's eccentric “ensembles” engaging, if sometimes simple-minded (e.g. a group of paintings and metalwork all have a bluish tone, or they are all interlaced). But there certainly are some problems with his arrangements. Many of the smaller galleries upstairs, where there are works on paper and small sculptures, feel way too crowded. It felt disrespectful of the art (ironic given Barnes’s egalitarian views).

George Seurat, Poseuses (Models), 1886-1888, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ x 98 ⅜ inches.

I also think Seurat’s Models is hung way too high. Even though it's a large painting and can be seen from that distance, it needs to be seen up close for a viewer to experience Seurat's pointillist technique, and, equally important, it needs to be seen on our level so the figures in the painting can seem to inhabit the same space we do. And finally, I wonder if even the “ensembles” that I found engaging will eventually wear thin once they're no longer novel. Besides, Barnes himself continually rearranged his collection — why should it be set in stone now?

The new building has exquisitely refined detail and is filled with beautiful light and textures, but it does have some problems. For one thing, the building is shockingly hostile to the street — a potentially lively street at that. To rudely turn your back on it by placing a parking lot along it, and even worse a wall, is inexcusable.

View of the Barnes Foundation from the Whole Foods Market across the street.

(What is it with museums and walls? The Modern did the same thing to 54th Street. Do these architects  still believe that cities are a bad thing and that people want to get away from them? I understand there might be security issues, but come on, they don't have to build a fortress. Hopefully the new Whitney will be street-friendly — right now there’s a veritable moat around it!)

I also feel the entrance lobby is too stark and not all that welcoming; and the Annenberg Court is coldly formal, and uncomfortably tall and long relative to its width.

The Walter and Lenore Annenberg Court looking east. The entrance to the Barnes replica is on the right. (Tom Crane/The Barnes Foundation via Bloomberg).

But the biggest problem for me is I feel there's something ersatz about the whole thing. It's like an agglomeration of period rooms, a Disney version of an eccentric collector's art museum, or, as Tyler Green more strongly puts it: "The stage-managing of the art feels ridiculous, even kitschy."

A view of Room 6 in the new Barnes Foundation — a replica of the original. (Tom Crane/The Barnes Foundation via Bloomberg).

But all of these criticisms come to nothing when confronted with the art — it will make you weep with joy! They have 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris —including some of the very best, like his Card Players and Portrait of a Woman (see below).

Paul Cezanne, Les Joueurs de Cartes (The Card Players), 1890 - 1892, oil on canvas, 53 ¼ x 71 ⅝  inches.

Paul Cezanne, Portrait de Femme (Portrait of a Woman), c. 1898, oil on canvas,  36 ¾ x 28 ⅞  inches.

They have 60 Matisse paintings including his best mural.

Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1932 - 1933, oil on canvas, as seen from a balcony.

And they have Matisse's Joy of Life which, along with Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon, is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century art. And now Joy of Life is in its own alcove instead of hanging in a stairway as in the old Barnes — and it looks fantastic! Much bigger than I remembered it in Merion. And it absolutely glows. The alcove is kept relatively dark in order to protect the fragile painting, but because of the low light, the colors aren't washed out. And for the first time I really experienced it as an idealized, even hallucinogenic, pastoral paradise, rather than a decorative design.

Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1906, oil on canvas, 69 ½ x 94 ¾ inches. 

Here's a detail of the right side that just blows me away:

Detail: Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre. Click to enlarge.

And there's a lot of great African art, which Barnes was one of the first to collect for aesthetic rather than ethnographic reasons.

Edo peoples, Nigeria, Standing Male Figure, copper alloy, 22 x 9 x 9 inches.

Altogether, there are 2,500 items in the collection including 44 Picassos, an astonishing 181 Renoirs (say what you will about how sickly sweet his work is, the guy could paint), and major works by Rousseau, Modigliani, Degas, van Gogh and many others. There are also Asian paintings; medieval manuscripts; and Old Master paintings including works by El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens and a lyrical, long (10 ⅞  x 50 ¼ inches) early Titian. And a lot of decorative metalwork.

My own "ensemble" of Gustave Courbet's Woman with White Stockings, 1864, flanked by Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Caryatids, c. 1910.

And finally, this time I noticed that eroticism is a major leitmotif at the Barnes, not only the Renoirs, as you'd expect, but Gustave Courbet's Woman with White Stockings and many other works — even Matisse's Joy of Life seems erotic in this context. It shouldn't be surprising; Barnes was famous for being a handsome lady’s man (to use the old-fashion expression) so that may be a factor; but mainly it was consistent with his philosophy — eroticism being something the common person can relate to.

Visiting the Barnes Foundation
General admission is a steep $18, but it’s $15 for seniors, only $10 for students, and it's free for children under 5. The first Sunday of every month is free, and all Friday night concerts and other events in the Annenberg Court are free and open to the public.

Hours: Daily, 9:30 - 6:00 except Friday when they're open until 10:00. They are closed on Tuesdays.
Since admission is limited and timed (although you can stay as long as you want once you're in), it's wise to get tickets in advance here, or by calling (866) 849-7056.

Getting there:
For just $10 - $15, a little more than the Chinatown bus would cost (and a lot safer and more comfortable), and about ¼ of what the cheapest Amtrak fare would be, you can take a New Jersey Transit train from either Penn Station New York or Penn Station Newark to Trenton, and easily transfer (usually within a few minutes, and on the same track) to SEPTA, the Philadelphia rail system, which will bring you to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. The trip takes about two hours (as compared to one hour via Amtrak).

From the 30th Street Station it's an easy and pleasant walk to the Barnes.

The 29th Street bridge over the Schuylkill River.

Leave the station through the 29th Street exit, cross the somewhat challenging street in front of the station, continue walking straight along a bridge over the beautiful Schuylkill river, and walk one long, tree-lined block until you get to 20th Street (about 5 minutes); turn left on 20th Street and walk past a beautiful historic block, past some ugly modern buildings and finally walk past the very grand Logan Square on your right and the Beaux Arts-style Science Museum on the left. When you cross Benjamin Franklin Parkway, another challenging intersection, the Barnes will be on the left. Altogether about a ten minute enjoyable walk.

And the ride back was enjoyable too. Here's what I saw on the train ride home:

Art News

By Charles Kessler

Jersey City Art News

Installation view, Material Tak; paintings by Jsun Laliberté on the left, and Anne Sherwood Pundyk on the right.

Material Tak, Panepinto Galleries, 371 Warren Street, Jersey City (Until July 15th)
Almost everything that’s now happening with abstract painting is represented in this handsome exhibition located in what used to be the Warehouse District of Jersey City. The exhibition was curated and sensitively installed by Kara Rooney, who has brought some life into the moribund art scene here. The artists in the exhibition, Mark Dagley, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Kati Vilim, Jsun Laliberté, and Peter Fox, are from Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jersey City; and all their work is accomplished and complex (in a good way).

Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Levels, 2012, acrylic and oil on panel, 14 x 11 inches (not including the painted background).

I was particularly interested in Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s installation. By creating a wallpaper-like background for her paintings, Pundyk transformed this large, Chelsea-style space into a congenial environment — a more private, almost residential, space that allows you to slowly savor this rich work.

Two of my favorite Jersey City artists currently have exhibitions on view.
Nancy Cohen, whom I wrote about here, is in two shows: Accola Griefen Gallery, 547 W. 27th St  #634 in Chelsea (until June 23rd), and Precarious Exchange at The Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton, NJ (until September 9th).

Nancy Cohen, Spill, 2011, glass, metal, wire, resin, handmade paper, wool, 77" x 16" x 9" -- and detail on the right (Accola Griefen Gallery).

And Edward Fausty will be showing photographs at the Mayson Gallery, 254 Broome Street on the Lower East Side, from June 13th until July 18th.

Art House Productions, one of the most active and vital cultural organizations in Jersey City, is presenting the original play Something to Remember Me By from June 14 - 23. It should be a real treat; their publicity states: ... Please join us at the Morris estate where your hostess, Ms Abigail Morris, will welcome her closest family and friends for an evening of celebration and forgiveness. ON THE MENU: An assortment of sweet memories, bitter grudges, and dark secrets. The audience will be sitting at the dining room table with the cast. Tickets are only $15 to $25 and you can buy them online here.

After their Saturday, June 23rd show, Art House will have their annual Summer Blowout, with live music, food, raffles and all kinds of silly fun. Tickets are $10.

If you took my advice and went to the Nimbus Dance Works Spring Season Dance Concert, you saw an enthralling performance that included new pieces by Artistic Director and Founder Samuel Pott, and by the Turkish choreographer Korhan Basaran. Hopefully next year Nimbus will install steeper risers so everyone will be able to see better. You can find photos of the concert here, on their Facebook page.

Museum news:
The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC may sell its landmark building. Art blogger Tyler Green has been on this potentially scandalous story. The good Corcoran news is, beginning June 30th they will be presenting a retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series of paintings. It is a major show consisting of more than 80 paintings, drawings and mixed-media works that Diebenkorn made from 1967 to 1988. The Corcoran is the only place this travelling exhibition is going to on the East Coast. It will be there until September 23rd.

The Whitney Museum sent out an email updating the progress on its new museum near the High Line. Here's a video about it.

The New Whitney - Image courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop in collaboration with Cooper, Robertson and Partners.

They are saying the new 200,000+ square foot facility will have three times the space as the old museum devoted to exhibiting their permanent collection; a 170-seat theater with double-height views of the Hudson River; a 13,000+ square foot space on a stepped roof facing the High Line for outdoor sculptures, installations, new media, and performance presentations; and an 18,000+ square foot special exhibition gallery— the largest column-free art museum gallery in NYC. Sounds good.

The New York Times reports on Dia: Chelsea's plans for a new building in Chelsea.

Other News:
Also from the Times is this: How the Art Market Thrives on Inequality.

Because each piece of fine art is unique and can’t be owned by anybody else, it does a more powerful and subtle job of signaling wealth than virtually any other luxury good. High prices are, quite literally, central to the signal — you don’t spend $120 million to show that you’re a savvy investor who’s hoping to flip a Munch for $130 million. You’re spending $120 million, in part, to show that you can blow $120 million on something that can’t possibly be worth that much in any marketplace.

Pacific Standard Time (PST) is a series of more than 60 exhibitions about the art history of Southern California that the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute instigated. Once again they have shown leadership by putting their entire PST archives online. Not only that, but the Los Angeles Times reports the Getty Research Institute, partnering with several other major art institutions, has created The Getty Research Portal, an art history version of Google Books with about 20,000 titles already online and much more to come. What a resource!

Two Chelsea exhibitions I recommend:
Brice Marden's new paintings at Matthew Marks, 526 West 22nd Street, are small and tactile. Delicious work.

Brice Marden, Years 2, 2011, oil and graphite on marble, 21 ¼ x 11 ¼ inches.

And yet another sign of the positive influence of Richard Tuttle that I wrote about here is the work of  Michelle Segre, Derek Eller gallery, 615 West 27th Street.

Michelle Segre, Let Me Love Your Brain, 1997-2011, mixed media, 83 x 69 x 41 inches.

And finally, From Dance Magazine, is a discussion with six choreographers about making work for film.

Bushwick Open Studios - BOS 2012

By Charles Kessler

BOS 2012 — Bogart Street.

BOS 2012 was a BIG studio tour — more than 500 artists, plus dozens of events including dance concerts, performances, plays, rock concerts and parties, all of it spread out over three square miles from east Williamsburg to Ridgewood Queens. And there was a lot of good art, some very good indeed. That plus great weather (it seems the few times there was a brief rain shower I was inside!) and plenty of pleasant places to stop along the way to have a beer or coffee and rest up, made this one of the best studio tours I've ever gone to.

But the main reason I loved this tour, and I’ve written about this before, has to do with the spirit of collegiality in Bushwick. There’s a welcoming camaraderie that pervades the area — and it’s not the affected peace-and-love phoniness of the sixties. Rather it’s unpretentious and sincere — very different from the ironic cynicism that has been so prominent in the big-money art scene of the last decade or so.

With a tour this big, deciding where to go is a major problem — you can’t possibly do it all. The free guide was attractively designed, but at 88 pages and 14 ½  x 10 ½ inches, it was necessarily overwhelming. The website was a little more useful in that you could search for the type of art or event you might be interested in; nevertheless, narrowing things down was impossible. Most useful was a nifty free iPhone app (unfortunately no longer available — too bad, it would be a good resource). Not only could you search for types of events, but it could locate where you were and display what studios and venues were nearby. (Next year I wish they would add the ability to save favorites and note them on the map so you could plan your tour more easily.)

But even the iPhone app wasn't enough for an event this massive. According to people I talked to that were part of the tour, and my own observations, most people only went to the larger studio buildings like 56 Bogart and 1717 Troutman. It's too bad because they missed some good venues like 250 Moore Street where the Centotto gallery and the artist Tim Kent are located. I'm sure I missed plenty of good stuff.

Tim Kent at 250 Moore Street

On Friday night, kick-off night, there were several gallery openings and parties, most of which went on until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning -- I  pooped out by 11:00. That night I did go to the Bushwick Starr's fifth annual performance showcase — The Bushwhack Series.

The Bushwick Starr executive director Sue Kessler (no relation), and Noel Allain, artistic director (Photo - Jared Klein, Time Out). 

The Bushwick Starr, 207 Starr Street, is a professional theater group that produces cutting-edge original theater in a small (about 50-60 seats), well-equipped black box theater. They did a series of short, well-acted plays. Unfortunately there were only about 20 people in the audience when I went, maybe because of all the other competing events, but, according to Jason Andrew who has produced many events, this is par for the course. That's the one disappointment I have with the Bushwick art scene -- there is little or no interaction with, or even much support for, the other arts. I long for the way it used to be in the sixties and seventies in New York. I hope it will change. Maybe something is happening even now.

Saturday was my busiest, most exhausting day. I wanted to cover a lot but didn't know how long it would take so I was really pushing it at first until I realized I could do everything I wanted to do without killing myself (and being disrespectful to the artists). I tried to concentrate more on studios than galleries which I'd be able to see another time. Nevertheless I saw a lot of gallery shows and they were terrific, possibly because they showed their best work; and several new galleries opened up for the event. (I'll be updating the Bushwick Gallery Guide soon. The old guide can still be found in the right sidebar under “Gallery and Museum Guides.”)

Lisa Levy, Rockin' Mommy Love

The tour started off promising. In front of 56 Bogart, Lisa Levy, costumed in a gray wig, house dress and large eyeglasses, sat in a rocking chair and offered to comfort people. After reassuring me that I wouldn’t crush her if I sat in her lap, Levy rocked and hugged me. ... It was wonderful. I loved it!  I could have used it again at the end of the day, but she was gone by then.

Oliver Warden, Untitled Box, 2010 Photos by Jo Jo Phong.

Inside the lobby at the entrance to the always interesting Agape Gallery was a very different kind of performance: Oliver Warden’s Untitled Box 2.0, 2010. Warden, in an amazing feat of endurance, stayed in a two-way mirrored box for two seven-hour days (correction - see comments). When someone flicked the switch, a light would turn on in the box, revealing Warden standing there unsmiling in a suit and tie. He immediately shut the light off again so that just the mirror was visible. The effect was creepy, and every once in a while, as you wandered the floor, you'd hear someone to shriek and laugh.

Charles Schultz and Charles Kessler at Cynthia Sparrenberger's studio, 56 Bogart (photo: Anne Sherwood Pundyk).

Yet a third kind of performance took place at The Bogart Salon, 56 Bogart. It was the filming of ISHA: A Tell All Tale, a wild and colorful Bollywood-style soap opera. Viewers were invited to participate if they wanted to.

Kesting/Ray opened a small space (bigger than their current space in Soho, however) only a couple of blocks west of 56 Bogart, but since everything else is east of 56 Bogart, I fear they might still be off the beaten track. I hope not because it's a beautifully proportioned space with lots of natural light, and they're showing good work.

1717 Troutman is a huge loft building that had 32 studios and two galleries, Regina Rex and Parallel, on the tour.

At 1717 Troutman for some reason -- maybe I was overwhelmed by it all -- only the two gallery exhibitions Regina Rex and Parallel stood out for me.

There were many other strong gallery exhibitions in other venues including Microscope, a serious, almost scholarly gallery when it comes to film and video (they curated a couple of film and video exhibitions for BOS), and Airplane where I saw this imposing and disconcerting sculpture:

Jennie Shanker, Brick Shithouse, 2011, denim, sand and red shale, 36 x 36 x 36 inches (Airplane Gallery).

One of the better and bigger group shows was Holy BOS, a two-day, three-night music, film, video, performance and visual art festival in a former church. The space was large enough to hold large, almost environmental sculptures.

Holy BOS at the Bobby Redd Project Space, 626 Bushwick Ave.

This isn't an art installation, it's a hallway at 56 Bogart at the end of day one.

Sunday I was the designated guide for several friends, and while that slowed things down to the slowest person at any one time, an event like this is a social occasion too - it’s not all business even for a compulsive art blogger. And the pleasure my friends had, their delight and enthusiasm, was more than enough to make up for missing a few spaces.

One would think that by the second day, especially in the more heavily trafficked spaces, the artists wouldn't be all that friendly. They were definitely exhausted, but they were still gracious, and happy that people came by, and pleased to talk about their work. We had some lively and enthusiastic discussions.

A new gallery, Ethan Pettit Contemporary, moved to a very small space in a building with many art studios, 199 Ingraham Street.  They promise to keep regular hours (noon - 7:00, Thursday thru Saturday). I saw a lot of sculpture in that building, and I particularly liked the work by studio-mates Jeanne Tremel and Eliot Markell because of the way they manage to incorporate color without making the sculptures seem to be weightless or hollow.

Jeanne Tremel, Not Listenin' (front view), 2008, crochet thread 11 x 4 x 3 inches.

The Loom (their address is 1087 Flushing, but it's better to enter from Thames Street) had a painting contest between two graffiti-style painters. It took place in their pleasant oasis of a back yard situated in the middle of an industrial area. We went inside to rest up (I had the best cortado I ever had), and we would occasionally hear cheers from the contest. They also presented Seeking Space, a group show of  30 artists “who do not have the opportunity to exhibit in a studio space.”

117 Grattan Street is yet another large loft building, and this had a lot of art I liked. Sharon Butler of the excellent blog Two Coats of Paint just moved there and organized a small group show that included a few nice small paintings by Larry Greenberg of the Studio10 gallery. And Patricia Satterlee's paintings, in another studio in 117 Grattan, were rich, complicated semi-abstractions that kept me off-balance with unexpected and quirky images. I asked her what she thought of Tom Nozkowski's work since I saw a relationship there. Rather than becoming defensive, she said she loved Nozkowski's work and was delighted I thought there was a connection. This mature and sophisticated reaction was typical of the many other Bushwick artists I talked to about their work and is indicative of what I see as a favorable change in the ethos of the art world.

Patricia Satterlee's Studio, 117 Grattan - “Gloria” series of paintings.

One of the last things I saw, the Bushwick Basel art fair, encapsulated a lot of my feelings about Bushwick.

Bushwick Basel at Starr Space (Photo Alissa Guzman via Hyperallergic).

First of all, the art was first-rate, and it was presented in an intimate and sociable environment. In a generous gesture to the community, Jules de Balincourt, one of Bushwick's most successful artists, organized the fair and donated his space. He told Paddy Johnson, “You know, I’ve been lucky and some of my friends haven’t been. I want to do something good.” That speaks to the supportiveness and camaraderie I've noticed in Bushwick, but there was something else. When Balincourt first announced the fair, he indicated that it was a kind of spoof or parody on art fairs, and he got some good-natured push-back for that remark. Clearly people were uneasy with irony, almost embarrassed; in Bushwick now, they are more comfortable with straightforward sincerity.