Thinking About Everything And Nothing

Essay for the exhibition Nothing is Everything at Pagus Projects, Norristown, PA (opening March 22nd).  

By Carl Belz

Nothing is everything. The existential proposition is appealing, particularly in relation to visual art. But not all of it. Not art that originates in the purposeful urge to engage directly social or political issues and concerns, for instance, or undertake partisan cultural or institutional critique, or promote exclusively an ideology of one sort or another – in other words, and regardless of quality, not art that’s subsumed first and last by service to a personal agenda or theoretical program. Instead, art that addresses the ways of the world from a position that’s oblique to them, art that is self-aware in acknowledging its limits and autonomous in its being – art as art that stakes its all on being knowable in and of itself and is otherwise good for nothing. And why does such art mean everything to us? Because its ongoing process of knowing and acknowledging is synonymous with the experience of coming to ourselves from within rather than without, and too because it so candidly mirrors what modern experience – what our being in the world in the first place – is itself all about.  

The art I’m referring to, modernist art, includes the paintings in this exhibition, a genre of abstraction representing a vital thread within the larger fabric of abstract painting, one whose history now reaches back a full century. In terms of formal character, it generally looks like painting that’s been pared down to its essentials – to a single field of color, for instance, or a few elemental stripes and shapes, often geometric, that are presented singularly or in some kind of progression – hence, its designation as reductive, monochromatic, minimal, systemic and so forth. It’s painting that risks appearing not as non-art, not as ordinary things like readymades – a sub genre that’s tracked abstraction since its beginning – but as art in which there seems to be nothing going on or nothing to look at, art that’s been drained of art’s usual effects and signifiers, as though it’s art in name only, art that may even be nugatory.        

The risk has not been merely academic. While reductive and minimal-type paintings have historically not wanted for meaning, their meaning as perceived has at times fluctuated dramatically between the all-or-nothing extremes of everything and nothing. Kasimir Malevich’s seminal White On White, a white square in a white field, envisioned via pure geometries a utopian future imbued with pure artistic feeling, yet his art was quickly condemned under the Stalin Regime of the 1920s as a negation of life’s and nature’s’ purities, and he was ordered to paint as a social realist or not paint at all. A full generation younger than Malevich, Barnett Newman came to maturity in the early 1950s with paintings consisting of vast color fields inflected only with a few slender vertical stripes – zips, as he called them – radically simplified paintings for which he audaciously claimed a life-altering experience of the sublime but which, when exhibited, brought instead mostly ridicule – they were considered empty and pretentious – a response that turned Newman from publicly showing his work for most of the decade. A third generation in this Malevich-Newman line is represented by Frank Stella, a steadfast admirer of the work of both older artists, who wanted in his celebrated Black Paintings, the first of the stripe paintings he developed between 1959 and 1965, not any supra significance – no utopian purity, no sublime – only abstract images that would present themselves front and center with unequivocal punch and authority, everything about them clear and accessible, requiring nothing but a willingness to look in order to understand them. You can imagine the artist’s dismay when a critic designated them nihilist Dada abstractions!

Stuart Fineman, Alan Greenberg and Karen Baumeister are not likely to encounter the resistance, let alone the hostility, faced by their forebears. A full half-century of lean-looking abstraction now informs the historical record and occupies a firm position in the lexicon of painting within the art of our time. Which is not to say they don’t face a challenge in wanting to find a responsive audience for their pictures within the ebb and flow of today’s cultural environment – an environment ubiquitously laced with cynicism and irony, bound to mass media, visually glutted, serving up art as spectacle and entertainment, and promising instant gratification while racing breathlessly and inexorably to the next great thing. Against that backdrop, which is nothing if not challenging, they present us with lean-looking pictures that picture nothing, that are reticent, that are slow to reveal themselves and their pleasures, pictures of the sort that are at their best when encountered not in clusters before crowds but one-on-one and face-to-face, the way we encounter one another, which is how we come to know fully everything they are. Our current cultural environment puts such pictures at risk, not only in increasing the odds against our getting their meaning right but against our finding time to get any of their meaning at all.

Alan Greenberg:

Alan Greenberg, Five Holes, 2014, acrylic and gesso on plaster, 37 x 24 ½ x 2 ¼ inches. 

And what are the pleasures we miss if in thrall to our culture’s hurried visual cacophony? In the case of Alan Greenberg’s slabs of color – they sometimes look like painting-sculpture hybrids – it’s the pleasure that attaches to their substantial and visually engaging physical presence, to the vital way they assert themselves via richly worked surfaces variously scarred and smoothed, edges rough yet supple, bulk that’s sometimes ample and sometimes spare, sometimes firm and sometimes yielding – that is, to physical presence linked not so much with things in nature, inanimate things like rock formations, but more meaningfully with the spectrum of experiences we associate with our own bodies and with the human body generally. Not the body as we imagine and dream it – the body weightless in which we magically soar – rather the body obdurate that sometimes gets in our own way and over which we end up tripping ourselves – the body in lived experience; which is the same body that is also prized and celebrated here – the body capacious in enabling self expression, the body confident and resilient as well as robust and sensuous, the body as a vehicle for pleasure than which none more satisfying is known to us.

Alan Greenberg, Left: Red Two Holes, 2013, acrylic & gesso on plaster, 16 x 10 x 2 inches; Right: Red Oblong, 2014, acrylic & gesso on plaster, 24 ½ x 18 x 2 inches.

Alan Greenberg, Small Yellow/Green, 2013, acrylic & gesso on plaster, 16 x 16 x 2 inches.

Alan Greenberg, Left: Small Grey, 2013, oil, acrylic & gesso on plaster; Right: Ultramarine Blue 2013 oil, acrylic & gesso on plaster.

Karen Baumeister:

Karen Baumeister, Installation view, Left: Deep Violet Grays to Pink, 2013, acrylic on linen, 40 x 40 inches; Little Pink, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches.

Karen Baumeister’s pictorial route is physically reserved and quietly dignified, a matter of guiding her brush with a sure and gentle hand in coating everywhere the painting surface, gradually and steadily building it, unifying it stroke by stroke and layer by layer, and thereby bringing it patiently and fully to resolution.

Details of above, Karen Baumeister, Deep Violet Grays to Pink, 2013 (left); Little Pink, 2012 (right). 

In keeping with her reserve her palette is hushed, typically inclining toward soft reds and greens, grays, and off-whites, a range of color imbued with the life-giving natural light in which the paintings are made, color at the same time glowing within a quiet register of feeling that attaches to lived experience, a murmur of the heart, a fleeting thought, the whisper of a memory. Reserved yet clearly felt, the pictures are accordingly personal, even intimate; they seem made not for museums as much as for private living spaces, for times when they can be engaged and known individually and in depth – but also for moments when they catch our attention while we’re doing something else, looking up from a book, say, and we notice they’ve become bathed in natural light at a certain time of day and we thrill to see them suddenly come alive and blossom anew. Such are the pleasures of living with an art framed by the feelings that attend being human.

Installation view, Karen Baumeister, Pink Whites to Yellow, 2013, acrylic on linen, 40x40inches; and detail of Pink Whites to Yellow, 2013.

Stuart Fineman:

Stuart Fineman, untitled series/works, 2013, dry pigments and acrylic ground on paper, 44 x 22 inches.

Emphatically more than minimal in appearance, Stuart Fineman’s recent pictures are better described as field paintings in the way the layers of closely-valued pigments comprising them are made to penetrate and mingle with one another to produce a seemingly boundless, overall presence of splendrous, radiant color. A chromatic presence that’s altogether visual – intangible, that is, not a graspable thing, not a wall or a tapestry or even a veil – a presence whose inner light references phenomena like the evanescent glow of an autumnal sunset in the natural world, yet equally references the abstract, dematerialized and otherworldly world of Byzantine mosaics we know in the world of art – thus, pleasuring references that also freshen and deepen our appreciation of worlds we’re already familiar with. And further a presence directly related to modern experience via its acknowledgment that the human spirit informs our being in the world to no less an extent than the human body or the human heart, which is to say body, heart, and spirit vitally complement one another – as they complement one another within the works of each of the artists in this exhibition – in our ongoing quest to be whole in and of ourselves, a quest that may not equate with everything we might be, but one that is surely not nothing in the context of the imperfect world we live in.

Stuart Fineman, untitled series/works, 2013, dry pigments and acrylic ground on paper, 45 ½ x 22 inches.

Stuart Fineman, untitled series/works, 2013, dry pigments and acrylic ground on paper, 45 ½ x 22 inches.

Stuart Fineman, untitled series/works, 2013, dry pigments and acrylic ground on paper, 55 x 22 inches.

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

Art Seen

By Charles Kessler

First what I sadly did not see:

Hudson, the much loved and respected director of Feature Inc., died suddenly on February 10th. You can read about his many accomplishments in this obituary, but what was most remarkable about him is he never hid in a back office. His desk was always in front where he would greet people warmly. I often had interesting discussions with him about the work on exhibit or some other art topic. I'll really miss him; he was a real mensch.

Katherine Bernhardt, Stupid, Crazy, Ridiculous, Funny Patterns, Canada Gallery.

Roberta Smith gave Katherine Bernhardt's show at Canada Gallery a rave review calling it "exuberant" and done with "panache." I agree. I've loved Bernhardt's work for a long time and wrote about it several years ago, so it's nice to see she's getting the attention she's long deserved. Phil Grauer, one of Canada's directors, wondered if recognition would have taken so long if she was "one of the boys." Good question. Phil also said David Zwirner bought a painting – I sure hope she doesn't end up at Zwirner's mega-gallery and become one of the boys.

I didn't go to any art fairs this season – I hate them. I think they're demeaning to art and artists, vulgar, and mercenary; and they're so crowded that I feel herded like cattle. But there were a couple of fun (if not particularly good) huge group exhibitions timed to take advantage of all the people in town for the art fairs. The best was Spring/Break (unfortunately it ended March 9th).

Lia Chavez, Luminous Objects: Re-imagining the Large Glass Bride, curated by Tali Wertheimer, Spring/Break Art Show. 

By my count, Spring/Break had 39 different curators and about 150 artists. It took place in an old school on Prince and Mott that reminded me of the scruffy good old days of PS 1.

Simon Lee & Eve Sussman, Seitenflügal (Side Wing), 2012,  single channel video, Spring/Break Art Show.

Sussman and Lee shot this video, somewhat reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window, which captures a glimpse of people going about their everyday lives in an apartment building in Berlin. I found it strangely mesmerizing and at the same time uncomfortably voyeuristic.

Walter Robinson, Black Mirror, curated by Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori, Spring/Break Art Show. 

I used to find Walter Robinson's paintings dry and illustrational. But over the years his drawing has become more economical, crisp and bold, his colors more sophisticated and interactive and glowing, and his paint handling more delicate and subtle. Robinson's subject is still pre-war pulpy eroticism, something he's been involved with since the seventies, but now the paintings are a visual delight.

Another enormous show was The Last Brucennial (through April 20th), a messy salon-style installation of almost 400 artists of widely varying quality.

It's almost impossible for good work to look good in this environment. That's one of the reasons I hate art fairs. But at least this show doesn't have the vulgar commercialism and snobbery of an art fair; on the contrary, there's a democratic egalitarianism here that's definitely not about making money, and it's very refreshing.

And of course there's the Whitney Biennial 2014 (until May 25th). This time it was organized by three curators, each separately responsible for their own floor. Except for powerful videos by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, I found this Biennial meh at best. Not bad, just not fresh or challenging. (See the Times review for some photos.)

I know I'm going through a period where I'm not inspired to write about the work I've been seeing, and it may be a general (I hope temporary) lack of enthusiasm. But I honestly felt that everything in this Biennial looked self-consciously hip and lacked any true authenticity or vision. What good art there was, such as paintings by Louise Fishman, Jacqueline Humphries, Dona Nelson and Amy Sillman, I've seen plenty of times before.

This is the last Biennial in this building. Next year the Whitney moves to a new building near the High Line in the Meatpacking District. Here's a rendering of what the new building, designed by Renzo Piano, will look like:

Image courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop in collaboration with Cooper, Robertson & Partners.

Beat Nite Bushwick/Ridgewood

By Charles Kessler

February 28th was the tenth semi-annual Beat Nite, an event in Bushwick and Ridgewood where about a dozen galleries stay open after hours. It's organized by the tirelessly enterprising Jason Andrew of Norte Maar, and  the galleries that participated in this one were chosen by artist/gallerist Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia Gallery.

It was cold, and the galleries were spread out over a large area, so ordinarily I would have only gone to about half of them. Fortunately I was lucky enough to be offered a seat on a bus that made the rounds of all the galleries. And touring around with a group was a nice way to meet some interesting people.

Here are some highlights:

Valentine Gallery – The paintings are by Patricia Satterlee. She's in the center wearing a red scarf.

This was a perfect jewel of a show not only because the art was good, but the work of each artist played off of, and illuminated, the work of the others. The artists in the show were David Henderson, Jude Tallichet, and Patricia Satterlee (one of my favorite painters). Unfortunately the show closed March 9th.


Parallel Art Space has had a Jersey City connection. They collaborated on an exhibition with Jersey City's excellent Curious Matter Gallery, and the director of Parallel, Enrico Gomez, has attended Jersey City art openings; in fact I had a genial conversation with him last week at a JC Fridays event.

Parallel Art Space – reliefs by Kim Tram.

Airplane is a basement space with a back yard where sculpture is sometimes exhibited. They are finally getting some attention for their consistently excellent shows.

Airplane Gallery.

Signal usually exhibits monumental sculptures, wall murals and large paintings. The concrete parabolic sculpture in the back (called a "sound mirror") focuses and amplifies ambient sounds, and a microphone in the center picks up and alters the sound, creating a feedback loop.

Tim Bruniges – Mirrors, Signal Gallery. In the foreground, Julie Martin, the director of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) is talking to Jason Andrew, the director of Norte Maar.

Centotto is a small apartment gallery run by the brilliant poet/artist and Doctor of Italian Literature, Paul D'Agostino. Most of Centotto's exhibitions have an evening or two devoted to discussions about the work.

Work by Ben Godward at Centotto Gallery.

English Kills is known not only for the consistently first-rate work they exhibit, but also for the congenial BBQs and pot lucks they do in their side yard. Brent Owens, to his credit, created a wide range of painted wood sculptures and reliefs (yes, the work that looks like hanging carpets in this photo is carved and painted wood). People loved this work – Owens is an artist to watch.

Brent Owens, For Thinkin' Long and Dark, English Kills Gallery.

This was the fourth Beat Nite I've been to, and if you haven't gone yet, I highly recommend you go to the next one if you can. To be notified of future Beat Nites and other worthwhile events, subscribe to Norte Maar's newsletter here. 

A Weekend in New Haven

By Charles Kessler

I highly recommend New Haven to all art lovers. It's still a bit funky, but it's become a lot better — less crime, more good restaurants and interesting stores, and lots of first-rate music, dance and theater available (we saw the play 4000 Miles at the Long Wharf Theater and loved it). And New Haven is still relatively affordable.

And of course there's Yale – it's gorgeous, the epitome of a Gothic Ivy-league college; and Yale's cultural resources are extraordinary. The Beinecke Rare Book Library, one of the largest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world, is worth a trip in itself. There is something about this multi-story glass display of books, presented as if they're holy, that's profoundly moving.

Panoramic of the interior of The Beinecke Rare Book Library.

When I visited, there was an comprehensive exhibition of endpapers – Under the Covers: A Visual History of Decorated Endpapers (until May 28th).

William Wordsworth, Winnowings from Wordsworth ..., 188?, Edinburgh. (I can't find the exact size but it was small, about 4 - 5 inches tall.)

Endpapers are sheets of paper pasted to the inside covers of books. It began as a way to protect medieval illuminations from the wear of wood covers, but over time they were used for purely decorative purposes. This exhibition traces the development of endpapers from their beginning, in medieval times, until the present – all from the Beineke's own collection.

There's also the Yale Center for British Art, the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom with a collection of about 2000 paintings and 200 sculptures. Not being a great fan of most British art, I didn't go there again this time.

And then there's Yale's outstanding encyclopedic museum where I spent most of my time. I wrote about the Yale Art Gallery last year, soon after they opened the newly restored and much enlarged new space. This trip I was able to spend more time on individual works.

Marcel Duchamp, American, Tu m’, 1918, oil on canvas, with bottlebrush, safety pins, and bolt, 27 1/2 x 119 5/16 inches (gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier – 1953.6.4). 

Tu m' is Marcel Duchamp's farewell to painting, and it's a summing up of his past work. I must have seen this painting a dozen times over the years, but I've focused on its conceptual aspects. I never realized how beautifully painted it is – how delicate and sensual.

Detail: Marcel Duchamp, Tu m'.

Detail: Marcel Duchamp, Tu m'. (Duchamp hired a sign painter to paint the hand.)

And after a close examination, I also noticed this strange beading around the bottom edge of the painting like a black gritty caulk.

Detail: Marcel Duchamp, Tu m' (bottom of left side).

I never read anything about this, but you can be sure, knowing what Duchamp scholars are like, someone has written a long brilliant essay on it.

Some of my other "discoveries" from this visit are:

Carlo Crivelli, Saint Peter, ca. 1470, tempera on panel, 11 9/16 x 8  7/16 inches (gift of Hannah D. and Louis M. Rabinowitz – 1959.15.15).

This is a small painting, about letter-size, but I enlarged the photo here so you can see how dramatic it is close up. Saint Peter, as Crivelli depicts him here, is not someone who will easily give up the key to heaven.

Another small painting that I spent time with and savored is this glowing Seurat:

Georges Seurat, Black Cow in a Meadow, ca. 1881, oil on panel, framed: 6 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches
(gift of Walter J. Kohler – 1969.96.1).

This Andrea del Sarto is on loan so the Yale Gallery website doesn't have a reproduction of it, but luckily I was able to take a pretty good photo. I was struck by how modern it looks.

Andrea del Sarto, Portrait of Bernardo Accolti, c. 1528-30, oil on panel (private collection).

According to the typically informative wall label, Andrea painted this rapidly from a memory of meeting Bernardo Accolti about fifteen years earlier. Remarkable!

I also paid more attention to this Manet, a painting obviously influenced by Goya's Clothed Maja. 

Édouard Manet, Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume, 1862–63, oil on canvas, framed: 46 7/8 x 54 5/16 inches (bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark – 1961.18.33).

Detail: bottom right, Édouard Manet, Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume. 

I know, I know, I'm a sucker, but I'm totally charmed by the playful kitten on the bottom right.

There were also several temporary exhibitions, and two of my favorites were:
Red Grooms: Larger Than Life (until March 30th) – his fun homage to the great artists of the twentieth century.

Installation view, Red Grooms: Larger Than Life.

This show was all from Yale's own collection and included several very large paintings and twenty preparatory cartoons and other drawings.

Red Grooms, Cedar Bar, 1986, colored pencil, colored crayons, and watercolor on five sheets of paper, mounted to board and framed in artist's wood frame, framed:119 1/2 x 324 x 3 inches (Charles B. Benenson Collection – 2006.52.56). 

And finally, Byobu: The Grandeur of Japanese Screens, an exquisite exhibition of Japanese screens, mainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every one of them was breathtaking. This show was filled out by work from private collections.

Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips, Japanese, Edo period, 17th century. Right screen from a pair of six-panel folding screens: ink, mineral color, gold, and silver on paper (collection of Peggy and Richard M. Danziger).

Short Post on Denver

By Charles Kessler

I guess it's pretty obvious from the dearth of recent posts that I haven't felt like writing lately. I've been seeing as much art as usual, and, if anything, I've been traveling more than usual to look at art: Boston, Denver, and recently, New Haven/Yale. So what I've decided to do for now is simply post photos of work I've seen that may be of interest, and maybe write something very brief about them. I'll start here with my January trip to Denver to see Clyfford Still's works on paper – something people didn't even know existed. Still gave the Clyfford Still Museum more than 1575 of them in addition to the 825 paintings he gave the museum – 94 percent of his entire output! (I wrote about Clyfford Still in a lot more detail here and here.)

Below is the last drawing, the last work of art, Still made.

Clyfford Still, PP-1444, January 4, 1980, pastel on paper.

Dean Sobel, the museum director, was kind enough to take me around the conservation labs and show me some of Still's works on paper. 

Paper conservation room, Clyfford Still Museum.

Painting conservation room, Clyfford Still Museum

For the most part, the paintings Still gave the museum are in excellent shape, but some are damaged, and I got a chance to see some of the ones they are working on. Here's a detail close-up of one of the most damaged paintings:

In addition to the enormous collection of Still's art, the museum has Still's complete archives – books, record albums, letters, articles he kept over the years – everything! The museum has a well-funded research center which, to quote their press release, "will foster humanities-based engagement with the Clyfford Still Museum collections, its archives and the manifold ideas they embody." So these archives will be thoroughly studied. 

Clyfford Still Museum Archives. 

I also went to the Denver Art Museum, which I wrote about before here. I spent most of my time with their extensive pre-Columbian art collection and this gallery of Northwest Coast Indian Art:

Left: Chief Johny Scow, Welcome Figure, c.1900, Kwakwaka,wakw tribe; right: a Tlingit house partition from about 1840.

The Welcome Figure once held a large copper plate in its upraised arms. Such plates signified the wealth and power of the clan, so while you were welcomed, you would also know you're dealing with a prestigious clan. And the house partition separated the chief's apartment from the rest of the clan's dwelling, forming a dramatic entrance. 

I came across a couple of good contemporary art galleries too – David B. Smith and Robischon – both near the excellent Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. So all in all a lot of good art to see in Denver and an excellent night-life too.

Larimer Street from 14th to 15th Streets in the historic LoDo district of Downtown Denver. 

Dozier Bell’s Drawings

By Carl Belz

Dozier Bell, Burg, 6:00, 2011, 2.5 x 5 inches.

Dozier’s Bell’s imaginary landscape drawings comprise a vision of nature that sweeps across vast plains and valleys, ascends into lofty skies, and reaches toward far distant horizons, its range seemingly boundless, its scale undeniably majestic. The vision often pictures nature at dawn or dusk, its light generally dimmed and pale or momentarily darkened by clouds, its expanse sometimes broken only by a first or last glimpse of the flashing sun, its temper otherwise solemn, even troubled, as if brooding. The drama we observe in these panoramic images is evident in the ever-shifting cloud formations and constantly changing light they record, their restlessness making visible the conditions that obtain when the atmosphere suddenly warms or cools, fronts collide, and weather threatens. 

Dozier Bell, Column, 2, 2010, 2.5 x 4.4 inches.

As beholders, we view Bell’s fictive worlds from an elevated position, as if from a parapet within a medieval castle or citadel--like the ones we see silhouetted on a ridge or stone outcropping in several of the distant landscapes spreading before us. We occasionally see a bird in flight, but no human figures. We hover above the landscapes rather than feeling planted within them; though emotionally gripped by the events we see, we feel detached from their physical thrust. And thus is a cautionary note sounded, for nature is here signaled as other, as a force unto itself, a force separate from us, and indifferent to us--a force from which we may withhold acknowledgment, but at a risk for which we alone bear responsibility. Fictive the landscapes may be, but the close observation that everywhere informs their realist impulse firmly secures their credibility and grounds their compelling artistic achievement within an equally compelling concern for their subject, the environment we precariously inhabit.

Dozier Bell, Field's Edge, Twilight, 2011, 3.5 x 4 inches.

Bell’s drawings--they’re all charcoal on mylar--are noticeably and resolutely small, on average between three and five inches on a side, small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, like a postcard, or a cell phone, or an iPod, or, even when framed, something still easily handled, like an iPad. All of which means size is purposefully a function of their content, as it’s been from time to time in art in the past. As it was, for instance, with the Abstract Expressionists who regularly produced oversized paintings, not first of all to express the might of American painting, a plausible suggestion, but to achieve intimacy--to physically engulf us in their worlds and thereby enable us to become one with them. Dozier Bell too seeks intimacy, but hers accrues to our holding close her miniature landscapes, rubbing our nose in them, not to control what we see, a possible but vainglorious fantasy, but better to absorb their content and to gain thereby a fuller understanding of nature’s scope and bounty. 

Dozier Bell, Flight, 2011, 3.5 x 4 inches.

In a world where we are regularly inundated by rapid-fire media images competing for our attention, a world where other worlds are routinely and instantly available to us via objects we hold in our hands and constantly consult in our urge to feel connected--social worlds of information and images and texts and entertainments--Bell’s diminutive worlds are exceptional in not actively competing or being social at all. Anchored in nature and observing nature’s rhythms, acknowledging nature as source and solace without reliance on media intervention, her worlds are secure with their autonomy. Theirs is a decidedly slow art, an art imaging nature stilled in order to enable contemplation, an art by which our response is patiently measured yet at the same time deeply rewarded--in the one-on-one intimacy shared in the tiny worlds’ embrace, in the abundant visual pleasures they offer our enchanted gaze. That so much can be said in so little space is a source of wonder--not at technology, but at art.

Dozier Bell, Flock, 6, 2012, 3.4 x 4.1 inches.

Art’s history echoes in these drawings. Shaped by feeling yet informed by fact, they resonate a strong awareness of the pre-Impressionist landscapes of the early 19th Century--the landscapes of Casper David Friedrich and John Constable, for instance, from which they seem remarkably able to have taken inspiration in equal measure. The hushed valleys, the shrouded light and the far away castles that momentarily focus our attention acknowledge kinship with Friedrich’s spiritual quest and the northern romantic tradition which his pictures quintessentially define. Likewise, the action in the skies that Dozier Bell has so clearly and closely observed and recorded is in kind the action that characterized Constable’s studies of nature and moved him to declare, “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment.” Moreover, we can track these dual art historical threads into the present, to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, to Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, for instance--to the former’s vaporous fields of elusive cloud-like color space, to the latter’s jagged and obdurately physical expanses of troweled pigment. Feeling and fact, romantic and classic, mind and body--the threads have been variously identified in modern art and thought, at times individually, as if in opposition to each other, and at times as necessary to each other, in mutual support. That they are vitally linked in Bell’s drawings is a mark of the drawings’ distinctive achievement, while their union may additionally tell us something about the way we live now.

Dozier Bell, Roost, 2012, 3.25 x 4.75 inches.

Which was not something we necessarily asked the art of Friedrich and Constable or Rothko and Still to do, nor did we ask it of modern and modernist art generally. Through the first half of the 20th Century we asked first of all about art’s formal originality, because that’s where the most compelling art of the time was focused. The formalist approach that in turn came to dominate art discourse was altogether understandable. Gripped by the pictorial exploits of Picasso and Matisse and their descendants, we regularly felt pressed to first make sense of what was happening right before our eyes, in the space and light and color we could see and point to, leaving until later whatever additional layers of meaning might be revealed when the dust initially stirred by their exploits had settled. Which already began happening during the 1960s, as art turned its attention outward with Pop and earthworks and photorealism, and the pattern continues unabated today, as art diversifies its practice and becomes global in its reach. In response we increasingly seek information about the particular times and places and people who make the art of our time in order to position it and them in some kind of cultural context. Thus has formalism yielded to sociology and art become measured by questions about how much it says about being alive here and now, then and there. 

Dozier Bell, Smoking, 2010, 3 x 4.25 inches.

Dozier Bell, Updraft, 2010, 3 x 4 inches.

Dozier Bell’s drawings answer those questions with couplings dynamically balancing passion with intelligence, form with content, and our cultural present with our cultural past, couplings informed by the vision of an artist who is also an environmentalist, couplings voiced with conviction and authority that spur thoughts about the natural world around us, about what our relationship to it currently comprises, and about what that relationship ought to comprise in order to sustain and allow it to be the best of all possible worlds in the future. For the way we live now her art, like all art of genuine consequence, spreads before us bearing urgent moral implications. 

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

More on my December Trip to Boston

By Charles Kessler

I’ve been busy with some family matters as well as some traveling. Sorry for the delay, but here's the second part of my report on Boston.

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) was strangely empty when I visited. There were times I didn't see another soul for several rooms – not even a guard – and it kind of creeped me out. I was told it was the time of year, and it's probably true since my hotel was pretty empty too. Everyone must have been in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Room 213, Art of The Ancient World.

Room 250 - a salon-style gallery at the MFA.

I don't know why I never noticed this before, but the European paintings are hung relatively high at the MFA, not just those in the salon style galleries like room 250, but everywhere. Why? It's not like visitors have to look over crowds of people to see. 

I discovered a pretty good place to eat at the museum – in the basement cafeteria. Not only is the food much cheaper and not bad, but there's even a nice view looking out at the handsome Calderwood Courtyard. 

Cafeteria of the MFA, Boston.

And it's the only place in the Museum that's open for breakfast. The cafeteria is used mostly by museum employees, and you can only get there via a stairway in the Contemporary Art wing near the entrance to the Foster Gallery. Don't tell anyone! 

I saw a lot of John Singer Sargent's art in Boston: his paintings at the MFA collection, of course, as well as his sparkling watercolors at both the MFA and the Gardner, 

John Singer Sargent, Corfu: Lights and Shadows, 1909, translucent and opaque watercolor and graphite underdrawing.

and his awe-inspiring if overblown mural, The Triumph of Religion, at the Boston Public Central Library. 

I highly recommend the free tour of this grand and historic McKim, Mead, and White, 1888-95 building. In addition to the Sargent murals, there are monumental ones by Puvis de Chavannes, and bronzes and mosaics by several American artist. Here's a link about the tour and what it covers. www.bpl.org/tours

SOWA - The Boston Gallery District.

The gallery scene moved away from Newberry Street — at least the more vital galleries moved. They are now mostly located in what's called by the embarrassingly unoriginal name SoWa (South of Washington — on Thayer Street Between Harrison Ave. and Albany Street, a short walk from the Broadway Station on the Red Line over the 4th Street bridge). There are only about a dozen galleries, but they're good ones, and they show local as well as international art. The ones I liked best were Acme, Steven Zevitas and especially Miller/Yezerski (where Howard Yerzerski was kind enough to spend a lot of time with me). But it's easy enough to check them all out.

Next post: Denver, and especially the Clyfford Still Museum's exhibition of Still's works on paper.