Flash Mob Dance

Nimbus Dance Works, Jersey City

All About Downtown Street Fair in Jersey City

What I loved most about this street fair is everything was local.

There's Somethin' Happening Here

There are THREE exhibitions of 1980's East Village art in New York now. While I'm delighted to see this work is at last getting some attention, not one of these exhibitions is comprehensive enough to give a feeling for what the art scene was like then.

Installation view of the New Museum's exhibition Come Closer (Photo: Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen). On the left is Paul Tschinkel's video Haircut, 1975 (a topless Hannah Wilke giving Claus Oldenburg a haircut); and on the right is part of  Curt Hoppe's painting Bettie and the Ramones, 1978 (done in conjunction with Marc Miller and Bettie Ringma's conceptual photography project "Paparazzi Self-Portraits" and signed by the Ramones). 

The New Museum has devoted their small fifth-floor space to Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969 - 1989.  In some ways, the small crowded space is a good thing because it helps reinforce the casual, raw quality of the work and captures a little of the spirit of those times. It would be even better if they packed in more art — or better yet, crammed the entire museum full with this work, but unfortunately the New Museum has become too conservative for that.

The exhibition draws heavily on my friend Marc Miller's archive and his comprehensive website 98Bowery.com. If you want to learn about this period, you're better off going to Miller's website because not only is the amount of work in the exhibition insufficient, but the labeling and documentation are atrocious. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth spending time with this show since in a small way it does capture what the scene was like then. (If you want to see more photos of the show —The New Museum's site has only three — check out Tim Schreier's post here.

Door to Keith Haring's apartment (Photo: Tim Schreier)

The most ambitious exhibition of the three (and it's not very) is Times Square Show Revisited at the Hunter College art gallery (68th Street — enter through the lobby on Lexington). It pulls together a small fraction of the art originally shown in the historic Times Square Show organized by Colab in June of 1980 in a run-down four-story building at 41st and Seventh Avenue.  The original show was a free-wheeling, not to say chaotic, installation of the art of more than 100 artists, and it included painting, sculpture, music, performances, film and fashion. The current show is sedate and tiny in comparison; and doesn't come close to capturing what the original was like. (A recent show that came closer to evoking that spirit, although with current art, was This Side of Paradise, a huge exhibition at the Andrew Freeman Home in the Bronx that took place last April. I wrote about it here.)

Installation view, Times Square Show Revisited

It was almost impossible to identify the individual works in the Hunter College show from the check list provided, but the explanatory wall texts were informative and the exhibition's website is excellent.

Crossing Houston, the third exhibition, is getting very little attention, and that's a mystery to me because it has works from the mid-1980's by such well-known East Village artists as Keith Haring, David Wonjnarowicz, John Ahearn, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Jane Dickson and many others. It was organized by Hal Bromm, Paul Bridgewater, and Gracie Mansion, who herself was one of the major figures of this period. The show, appropriately enough, is in the Lower East Side, in the former New York Studio Gallery, 154 Stanton Street at Suffolk.

The New Museum, or better still the Whitney, should do a major exhibition of East Village art. It's overdue.

Inspiration in Downtown Jersey City

Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping Choir lifting spirits at a benefit for No Gas Pipeline last night in Grace Church.

City/Drift -- Bushwick

By Charles Kessler

I spent most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Bushwick attending (and participating in -- it was that kind of event) Citydrift, an exhuberant, chaotic, playful, all-embracing art-community undertaking. Among other things, it included night-time scavenger hunts for art, artifacts and about 100 mini-tequila bottles; an art time-capsule (the art was documented and placed in a dumpster, and the whole thing eventually will be buried somewhere); a large golem erected at Momenta Art, brought at night to the nearby Brooklyn Fire Proof cafe/bar/gallery where later that night, with supreme irony, some drunks set it on fire; Lisa Levy's Ego Evaluations (her diagnosis was that I have an inflated view of myself - oy); 4-person ping pong (played crosswise); Barry Duncan palindromes; and many panel discussions. And these are just the events I remember or heard about -- I'm sure I missed a lot. 

I still don't know WTF is was all about. Here's an inscrutable explanation from their website:

Citydrift is a replicable meta-event qua group installation/art discourse composed loosely in different measures on Guy Debord’s Situationist concept of the derive or drift, Jan Hoet’s 1986 project in Ghent, Chambres D’Amis, and Colin DeLand’s playful reconfiguration of art fair paradigms with his “Gramercy Hotel” model.

See what I mean?? But it didn't matter. Everyone just went with it in their own way, which was fitting, and some interesting art, performances, insights and a lot of great schmoozing came out of it. 

Peter Hopkins, the director of the Bogart Salon gallery, was the "Creator/Director" of the event, and the inexhaustible (and exhausting) driving force. He was greatly aided by the herculean efforts of Meenakshi Thirukode ("Queen Bee") and the interns Maya Meissner and Wilson Duggan. 

Peter is an important artist in his own right, and this event could be seen as his mad art. He enlisted several Bushwick galleries and what I'd guess was a hundred people, mostly artists, but also art writers, independent curators, and even two long-time East Village and now Chelsea dealers: Magdalena Sawon of Postmasters Gallery, and Wendy Olsoff, of the P.P.O.W. Gallery.

The primary activity was “drifts.” On Friday night, groups of people (ten groups by my count -- you can find some information on them here), led by an artist or artists, drifted around Bushwick with some general aim in mind, but open to other things too. The idea was to go with the flow. Saturday the groups met back at Momenta Art or the Bogart Salon, reported on their drifts, and often made some art derived from it. 

Perhaps the best way to capture what took place is to describe one of the drifts. 

Christopher Williams recording sounds in his drift area (Photo: Jason Das).

Working with the Hart Island Project (collaborations were the norm), Chris Williams and Jason Das of the Glass Bees art project and their group explored places in Bushwick where people died who were buried in Hart Island, New York’s enormous potter’s field. They took photos, made sound samples, did drawings, and picked up stuff from the locations. On Saturday and Sunday, Williams and Das created a performance and installation from the drift (see photos below). 

Jason Das and Christopher Williams in the Bogart Salon working on their Citydrift installation.

In addition to all this, on Saturday and Sunday there were four panel discussions mainly about the Bushwick art scene, including one about blogging that I participated in. Unfortunately these panels weren't well attended -- I suspect because people were pretty burned out by then, plus it was difficult to figure out what was happening when. And there were a lot of competing activities.

Citydrift panel discussion called Curators in Bushwick: citydrift and The New Model. From L to R: Wilson Duggan, Angela Washko, Meenakshi Thirukode, Melinda Hunt, Stefan Eins and Bonnie Rychlak. You can read their bios here.

The Go Brooklyn studio tour was happening, and several galleries had openings including Centotto, Slag, Theodore Art, Brooklyn Fire Proof, Luring Augustine, the new galleries Ethan Pettit and Robert Henry; and Interstate Projects opened a new big gorgeous space at 66 Knickerbocker with what I believe is one of the best exhibitions in New York now. Here are some photos:

Interstate Projects, view from their courtyard (where they expect to show sculptures and have music and performances).

The artist Cheon Pyo Lee working on his sculpture in Interstate Project's basement gallery space.

Installation View, Cheon Pyo Lee's exhibition, Medium is the Same.

And wait -- there's more! Sunday the Bushwick Starr presented COVERS by Katy Pyle which I saw and loved. 

All and all, a pretty full weekend -- even for Bushwick. 

Jersey City Street Art

An anonymous artist has been beautifying Monmouth Street in and around Fourth and Fifth streets in Downtown Jersey City. I suspect it's the same person who festooned the utility poles around Astor Place with plastic ties. Write in if you know who it is.

While taking these photos, I happened upon two of the three gorgeous sisters who call themselves the Big Hair Girls. They're local dog walkers and singers in a band appropriately enough called the Big Hair Girls. What better street art could there be?

Art News, August 20, 2012

By Charles Kessler

Los Angeles:

Hyperallergic just published this map by artist Zach Alan. It superimposes a map of Manhattan (the little red rectangle is Chelsea) over a map of Los Angeles with art venues flagged. The map graphically illustrates how spread out LA art spaces are. I’ll be in LA next week and will be experiencing this art sprawl myself.

Margo Leavin in her Robertson Boulevard gallery, 1996  (Edward Ornelas / Los Angeles Times / August 14, 2012)

The Los Angeles Times reports the Margo Leavin Gallery will be closing after 42 years. To her credit, Leavin started the gallery with very little capital and built it up to be one of the most important galleries in Los Angeles. I have fond memories of Margo Leavin; she's a smart and cultured person who always did her homework --  I'd often see her at exhibitions not only in Los Angeles but also New York. 

Jersey City: 

New street art on Monmouth between 4th and 5th streets.

What I particularly like about this work, aside from the whimsey, is that there are many such works on both sides of the street, so it's like an installation or environment. 

There are two new shows:

Tabula Rasa, curated by Aimée Burg (until September 16^th), 

Curious Matter gallery, 272 Fifth Street in Downtown Jersey City.

Open Sundays noon to 3pm and by appointment.

This is a jewel of a show installed in an appropriately small and intimate space -- the front parlor of an historic row house. From the catalog:

TABULA RASA is a group show of work discussing/showing the idea of the table and the discourses we have with this object and space. It is not only a matter of what a table is but also what takes place at or on a table. Our language appreciates the literal and metaphorical potential of this everyday object: when we are open to possibilities, we say All ideas are on the table. These interactions–from a romantic dinner for two to a large board meeting–span every class and social space. This show’s focus on the table examines these crucial instants and decisions.

Steven Paneccasio, Tablecloth, March, 2012, photogarph, 17 ½ x 22 inches.

And opening Saturday, August 25^th 7 - 9 PM is: Shimeon Nandlal 2012

Art House Productions
One McWilliams Place (the old St. Francis Building, SE corner of Hamilton Park) 
The press release describes the show as "Self-motivated drawing, poetry, music, theater and dance by self-taught artists." It includes work by Buckle, Boss Jones, Chris G., and Haruko Glory. Should be interesting.

Other art news: 

GalleristNY reports the Canada Gallery will be moving to a larger (and more accessible) space on the Lower East Side — 333 Broome Street (between Chrystie and Bowery). They will be sharing the space with a new branch of the Marlborough Gallery — yet another big-time gallery that wants a LES venue.   

62 East 4th Street, the newly restored home of Duo Center and the Rod Rodgers Dance Company.

I just went on a tour of the East Fourth Street Cultural District organized by FAB (Fourth Arts Block). I’ve been going to La MaMa and The New York Theatre Workshop for years but I never knew there were TWELVE other performing arts venues in that one block between Second and Bowery. And what a history! You can read about some of it here, but take a tour if you can. 

Interior, 62 East 4th Street. Among other things, the opera scene from Godfathers II was shot here, and Andy Warhol used it to show gay porn films. 

And finally, Alastair Macaulay, the respected dance critic of the New York Times, just wrote a thoughtful article about nakedness in current dance that I think applies equally to the visual arts. 

Art News - August 13, 2012

By Charles Kessler

Monumental Iron Age statue discovered in Turkey.
The NY Times reports archaeologists in Turkey discovered the top part of a statue of a Neo-Hittite king that's about 3,000 years old and may have been more than 10 feet high.  They say the piece indicates artistic creativity flourished in Iron Age small cities and kingdoms. 

Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay stands near a 3,000-year-old statue of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma.

Lost Raphael Portrait Found.
The Art Newspaper reports Poland’s long lost Raphael, confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 for Hitler's Führermuseum, was recently found in a bank vault.

Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1513-1514, 28 x 22 inches, (from the Czartoryski family collection in Crakow).

LA MoCA Update:
In an interview with the LA Times, MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch denies he "courted celebrity sizzle and populist appeal at the expense of serious scholarship."

Meanwhile, as first reported in Bloomberg News (The LA Times seems to have been cut off from MoCA press releases probably due to Christopher Knight’s criticism), MoCA will be replacing Paul Schimmel as chief curator after all -- IF they raise the money. Deitch will not take over the job himself. 

And on a disturbing note, Eli Broad (above), MoCA's questionable savior, halted promised payments to MoCA. He says they have $2.1 million in grants they haven't put toward exhibitions. Why that has anything to do with his multi-million dollar pledge is beyond me. 

Art Critic Robert Hughes died.

Robert Hughes rose to star status by introducing television audiences to the development of 20th century modernism in The Shock of the New: A Personal View in 1981. (Helmut Newton)

There are several justly laudatory obituaries. Jonathan Jones wrote a heartfelt one for the Guardian here.

Many episodes of his groundbreaking and perceptive television series about modern art can be found on YouTube. Here are the first five:

Episode 1: The Mechanical Paradise  

Episode 2: The Powers that Be
Episode 3: The Landscape of Pleasure
Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia
Episode 5: The Threshold of Liberty

The Philadelphia Weekly asks why so many Philly art galleries are closing.
Travis Heck, director of one of those galleries, Extra Extra, suggests one possibility:  "There was just really no support from larger institutions to get the collectors to the galleries." 

Artists and small art galleries sometimes have an inflated sense of importance and entitlement, but I don't think it's too much to ask larger art institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art to occasionally bring a group of collectors to local art galleries, or to at least find other ways to encourage their members to go to local galleries.

Paula Cooper portrait by Rudolf Stingel based on a 1984 Mapplethorpe photograph.

Interview with legendary art dealer Paula Cooper.
Classy Cooper talks about what Soho was like in the seventies and eighties, and notes some major changes in the art world since then. 

Art News

By Charles Kessler

Tsuris at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA):
Your Essential Guide to MOCApocalypse 2012 by Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic art blog, is

the best summary I've found about the MOCA shipwreck. The post contains links to the most important articles about this on-going fiasco. 

Jeffrey Deitch's stewardship wouldn't be such a catastrophe if there were more alternatives in Los Angeles.There's nothing wrong with a graffiti or a disco show, or a show curated by James Franco, unless it's to the exclusion of more challenging exhibitions. Unfortunately, LA still doesn't have enough contemporary art venues to fill the void. When the Guggenheim turned populist under the direction of Thomas Krens and did shows like The Art of the Motorcycle, it wasn't to the exclusion of other contemporary art exhibitions in New York. In fact the Guggenheim's shows added variety to the art scene and stirred up controversy (always a good thing). As big as the LA art world has become, it will be devastating if MOCA continues the way it's been going, or worse, retrenches or closes.

The Boston MFA receives rare Benin art:

New York collector Robert Owen Lehman, son of the prominent banker, gave the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston 34 rare West African Benin sculptures that he collected between the 1950s and the 1970s. But the Huffington Post recently reported that the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria is demanding the return of 32 of the pieces which it says were looted during the Benin Massacre of 1897. Is there a statute of limitations?

Commemorative head of an Oba (King), Benin kingdom, Edo peoples, Nigeria, late 16th century. Copper alloy (Robert Owen Lehman Collection).

Two chronicles of 70's and 80's New York art:
Whitney Kimball's interview with Alan Moore for the art blog Art Fag City gives a taste of the East Village in the early eighties. This is the first of several future interviews with people involved with ABC No Rio, the trailblazing East Village alternative space. If the interview peaks your interest, check out ABC No Rio Dinero, a book Moore co-authored with Marc Miller.

Alan Moore standing beside Becky Howland's Real Estate Show poster (©1980 Becky Howland. All rights reserved).

And the David Zwirner Gallery finally published the exhibition catalog 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) about the influential Soho alternative space that some consider the first. The Times reviews the catalog here.

Gordon Matta-Clark preparing works at 112 Greene Street in 1972 (photo by Cosmos Sarchiapone).

Arts Graduates Find Their Way to Jobs and Satisfying Lives

Who knew? A study of more than 36,000 arts alumni of 66 institutions in the United States and Canada shows people with arts degrees are generally satisfied with their educational and career experiences. 82% were satisfied with their ability to be creative in their current work; only 4% of respondents report being unemployed and looking for work; and 86% of those with a master’s degree in the arts as well as 71% with a bachelor's degree have worked as professional artists.

A view of the ancient citadel in the heart of Aleppo, Syria (via flickr.com/stijnnieuwendijk)

On a sad note, Hrag Vartanian, the energetic publisher of Hyperallegic, reports UNESCO is alarmed at the threat to the place of his birth, the Old City of Aleppo, Syria, a World Heritage Site since 1986. 

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.