Jersey City Art News

By Charles Kessler

Mana Contemporary Art Center had one of its mammoth open houses last weekend – a combination of art openings, concerts and open studios.

Google street view of the Mana complex. 

Mana Contemporary is one of the largest private art institutions in the metropolitan area – 125,000 square feet and growing! Like Home Depot or Best Buy, Mana is what in retail is known as a “category killer.” They focus on one category and offer a wide range of services within that category. Mana's main for-profit activity is art storage, and, in that capacity, they provide storage for almost every museum in the area and for private collectors as well. But they also provide: art transportation, crating, framing, viewing galleries, studio space (they say for 70 artists),

Eugene Lemay's studio and viewing space, Mana Contemporary.

dance rehearsal space,

Shen Wei Dance Arts' rehearsal studio, Mana Contemporary.

office/exhibition and storage space for art foundations, foundry services, conservation and restoration labs and even what they call a "beer garden."

"Beer Garden" at Mana Contemporary – 200 plywood panels by Michael Zansky line the walls.

Mana, or something like it, should have been in the Powerhouse Arts District — ten-blocks of historic warehouses in Downtown Jersey City that was supposed to become an arts and entertainment district. Inexcusably the city not only allowed the demolition of 111 First Street (and 110 First Street – see blog logo photo), one of the most historic warehouses which, at one time, housed more than 200 artist studios, but they encouraged it by rezoning the area for 60 stories. Subsequently other parts of the district were re-zoned for high-rise, and other buildings were demolished, in effect destroying any possibility of a viable warehouse district.

This pile of rubble was the site of the historic Lorillard tobacco warehouses at 110 and 111 First Street in the so-called “Powerhouse Arts District.”

Victory Hall Drawing Rooms, a former convent turned exhibition space in Downtown Jersey City, has  happily re-opened after a six-month recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Their return show, Night & Day, is a beauty. Seven local artists (Tim Daly, Steve Singer, Michael DiFeo, Kay Kenny, Tomomi Ono, Heidi Curko and Sandy DeSando) were each given their own room to display work on the theme of, uh, night and day.

White Eagle Hall

A couple of weeks ago, developer Ben LoPiccolo presented plans for the restoration of a once-beautiful 1910 theater in the Italian Village neighborhood of Downtown Jersey City. The plan calls for the redevelopment of the theater into a black box theater with a seating capacity of 400 (or 800 standing), lounges, offices and two restaurants on the ground level. 

White Eagle Hall, 337-339 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, as it looks today. 

Unless they can divide the space with movable walls (which they are considering), it will be too big and too expensive for any of the local performing arts groups. Popular rock groups would probably be the only ones that could fill it. 

The Laugh Tour

The stand-up comedy show hosted by Rich Kiamco at Art House Productions is getting better and better. The headliner on April 27th was Mike Britt and he was hilarious – they all were. The next one won't be in Jersey City until September 28th – don't miss it. 

New Jersey City University's Big Band Concert Featuring Kurt Elling

Kurt Elling may be the best jazz singer around today, and this concert was as good as anything you could see in New York. NJCU, it turns out, is one of the best jazz schools in the country. Who knew? Their concerts are usually held in this classy 1000-seat theater, the Margaret Williams Theatre, which is worth the trip in itself. 

Margaret Williams Theatre, New Jersey City University. 

And finally, my favorite kind of performance art: a chili cook-off. The weather was dazzling this weekend, and the vibes were mellow at this amiable neighborhood event. Good food, cheap booze and free live music — it doesn't get better than this!

Update and correction:
The New York Times has an article on them today. The Times put Mana's total space at a more credible 1.5 million square feet on 35 acres, as opposed to my 125,000 square. I don't know where I got that number but it is obviously way off.

On the other hand, the Times accepted Mana's figures for the number of studio spaces they have: "About 120 painters, sculptors and photographers now have studios at Mana." But the literature they handed out for their open house claimed to have 70 artist studios, and I only saw about a dozen studios that were open, and only possibly another twenty or so other ones. So unless there are a lot of artist studios hidden on another floor, or in another building somewhere, something is wrong.

The Mega-Galleries of Chelsea

 David Zwirner's new five-story, 30,000 square-foot exhibition and project space at 537 West 20th Street. 

By Charles Kessler

I have mixed feelings about the enormous gallery spaces being built in Chelsea lately. On the one hand, they do some great shows. Gagosian (11 spaces worldwide, two large ones in Chelsea) just closed Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959, an exhibition any museum would be proud of; David Zwirner (30,000 square feet added to its already enormous space) is currently showing Richard Serra, Early Work; Hauser & Wirth (their new space is a former roller rink, and they've included a bar that overlooks the High Line) recently had an enormous Dieter Roth exhibition.

Hauser & Wirth’s new 24,700 square-foot venue at 511 West 18th Street – former home to the Roxy roller rink.

Bar over the entry ramp to the Hauser & Wirth Gallery – architect Annabelle Selldorf.

And there’s Pace Gallery with three spaces in Chelsea, two in London and one and Beijing; and even Sean Kelly, a mid-sized gallery, moved to a 22,000 square-foot space at 475 10th Avenue.

What’s happening, I think, is the top galleries are making so much money that not only can they afford these huge spaces, but it’s also an absolute business necessity if they want to compete for the billionaire market. It’s no big deal for billionaires to pay millions of dollars for an ordinary Gerhart Richter painting, but they're not doing it because they’re committed collectors who are knowledgeable and passionate about art. What they’re really buying is prestige, and this kind of conspicuous size and luxury is necessary to convince them that they’re getting it.

I know the art world has always been like that, but these mega-galleries flaunt it so much that, in spite of the high quality of some of their shows, I feel dirty even going into them.

Museum News

 By Charles Kessler

Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968, oil on canvas, 53 ½ x 133 ½ inches (collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC).

Art museums have been in the news quite a bit in the last month, much of it about the turmoil at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). First the Los Angeles Times reported that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which has its own problems) proposed a merger with MOCA. (A botched article by Carol Vogel about it in the New York Times resulted in one of the longest and funniest corrections ever.) Then MOCA board member and biggest donor, the billionaire Eli Broad, who opposed the partnership, announced a possible partnership with the National Gallery of Art (which turned out to be merely a possible sharing of programming) or with the University of Southern California. Ultimately the MOCA trustees decided to remain independent and, finally showing some responsibility, promised to raise the money needed to stay open. The Los Angeles Times has just reported that happily MOCA already raised $75-million toward their $100-million endowment goal.

I don’t think this particular fiasco should be blamed on Jeffery Dietch, MOCA’s controversial new director. Roberta Smith called it correctly when she wrote: “From the start, the Los Angeles art world and news media have heaped abuse on Mr. Deitch, who has certainly made some missteps. But his main mistake was to be the only person optimistic or naïve enough to take the job in the first place.” Stay tuned!

MOCA isn’t the only California museum in turmoil; the Fine Art Museum of San Francesco is also having problems, also due to an irresponsible board of trustees. You can read a good summary here.

For an object lesson on how a great museum can be destroyed, read “Pasadena's Collapse and the Simon Takeover: Diary of a Disaster,” John Coplan’s February 1975 article in Artforum now reproduced in PDF form here and republished here. It’s a well-written, extensively researched, very long and informative article by someone in the know.

The beloved old Pasadena Art Museum, located at 46 N. Los Robles Avenue, 1960s (courtesy of the Archives, Pasadena Museum of History).

Here are some highlights:

... Los Angeles is a highly urbanized but nonetheless diffused area. Unlike New York, common meeting grounds are virtually nonexistent. Consequently firsthand contacts across generations and professions are extremely rare. The museum’s openings were more than social events. They brought together a large array of people from all over Southern California who normally had little contact with one another, but a strong common interest. The openings engendered a rare intimacy, which broke down, if only for a single night, the sense of isolation that the L.A. art community felt.

... In spring of 1966, the plan and model for the new building was to be presented by the director and the president of the board of trustees at the museum’s annual general meeting. Hopps, exhausted, in the midst of a split with his wife, felt unable to face the membership and explain why the plan was a disaster. He had flown from New York for the meeting, but when he arrived at the L.A. International Airport, he wandered aimlessly, suitcase in hand. He felt himself about to have a nervous breakdown from the accumulated pressures and the difficulty of his relationship with Rowan. Phoning a psychiatrist friend, he had himself admitted to a hospital, and rested up for a couple of weeks. The new building was enthusiastically received at the meeting. Not long afterwards, Rowan told Hopps he doubted his capacity to handle the directorship, and fired the man who had virtually single-handedly lifted the little museum into international prominence.

... The history of the ambitions, and the decline and fall of the Pasadena Art Museum, reveals many of the problems that have retarded the development of effective museums in California. It is a history of compromises, conflicting goals, egomania, and private greed that has acted against the common good, and has ended finally in a violation of the public trust. This chronicle of pathology reflects more diffuse, hidden, and complex workings in larger institutions. But what has happened to the Pasadena is only an extreme instance of the outcome of predicaments that afflict museums from one end of the country to the other.

And one other bit of California Museum news: The Getty Museum, as part of its Pacific Standard
Time survey of Los Angeles art, has organized a massive exhibition called “Overdrive," a survey of Los Angeles modern architecture from 1940 to 1990.

Michael Light, Highways 5, 10, 60, and 101 Looking West, L.A. River and Downtown Beyond, 2004, archival pigment print, 40 x 50 inches (collection of and © Michael Light, courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica).

In other museum news, philanthropist Leonard A. Lauder gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art one of the best collections of Cubist art in the world, thereby single-handedly filling a major hole in the Met’s collection.

George Braque, Trees at L'Estaque, 1908 – one of Leonard A. Lauder's gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The donation includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris — in total worth an estimated $1-billion. Lauder’s gift was made without restrictions so curators can display it however they think best. Compare the philanthropy of a mench like Lauder with that of say … Eli Broad.

And there's more good news from the Met: beginning July 1st, they will stay open seven days a week — the first time since 1971. Not to be outdone, the Museum of Modern Art, beginning May 1st, will also open every day. Staying open an extra day is comparable to increasing their capacity by more than 14%. Given how crowded theses museums have become, it’s a wonder it’s taken this long. Can we look forward to more late nights?

And speaking of MoMA, they bought the adjacent American Folk Art Museum building which the Folk Art Museum couldn’t afford. The building was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and got rave reviews when it opened just 12 years ago. MoMA intends to demolish the building to make room for yet another expansion.

Interior of the American Folk Art Museum.

Needless to say this demolition is controversial, but I never thought the building was a good place to display art anyway. It was too narrow, too dark, and it had too many distracting architectural conceits.

The biggest museum news world-wide is the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum after a ten-year (not a typo) renovation costing almost half a billion dollars.

The fireworks and smoke bombs go off to celebrated the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (photo: Getty Images).

Originally built in 1885 to handle an estimated 200,000 annual visitors, they now expect two million visitors – double the number they had before the renovation. The renovation mainly restored the building back to its original Gothic-Renaissance state, doing away with the modern "improvements" that had accumulated over the years. They of course updated the lighting and climate control, but they didn't add much space. There’s a good article about it here, and you can see a good collection of photos here.

This isn’t really news, but I thought I’d stick it in anyway since I went there yesterday for the first time in years. The American Museum of Natural History, right off of Central Park West at 81st Street, has an excellent collection of Northwest Coast Native American art – some of the best, most dramatic art ever made – but it's displayed in shamefully poor, shockingly old-fashion, conditions.

Hall of Northwest Coast Indians, first floor, American Museum of Natural History. It really is this dark!

The High Line

SPRING!!!!

Billboard on the right right: Ryan McGinley, Blue Falling, print on vinyl, 25 x 75 feet (courtesy of the artist and the Team Gallery – until April 30th). 

Progress on the new High Line headquarters and the new Whitney Museum, obscured by spring in bloom. 

The Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum's 2004 new entrance.

By Charles Kessler

If it were in any other American city besides New York, the Brooklyn Museum would be recognized as the great encyclopedic museum it is. It's one of the oldest art museums in the country (McKim, Mead & White designed the Beaux-Arts building in 1893) and, at 560,00 square-feet, and with about one million objects in the collection, it's one of the biggest. Best of all, the Brooklyn Museum takes its educational mission seriously, and it’s a truly welcoming community institution that tries to make a diverse population feel comfortable.

One of the many seating areas – Luce Center for American Art, fifth floor.

And like Brooklyn, the museum has been getting better and better.

In 1993, they renovated 30,000 square feet of gallery space on the third, fourth and fifth floors of the west wing – the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing – where they house special exhibitions and their great collection of Egyptian art. They redesigned the galleries to be flowing, gracious and colorful.

Ancient Egyptian Art, Late Eighteenth Dynasty (beginning with Tutankhamun) – third floor.

Ancient Egyptian Art – third floor.

The very substantial space devoted to changing exhibitions on the fourth and fifth floors of the Schapiro Wing are various sizes — each evenly lit and pleasantly proportioned.

I saw several excellent shows this visit — two of the solo shows in particular impressed me, but in very different ways. I found the huge show of the African artist El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, surprisingly powerful. I didn't care for his work when I saw it a few months ago at the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. I thought, materials aside, it was boring academic abstraction. But those were all relatively flat wall works, while these are transparent, undulating, enormous hanging sculptures and reliefs, and are thrilling to see.

Installation view, El Anatsui, Gli (Wall), 2010, aluminum and copper wire (courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery) – fifth floor.

The other exhibition, LaToya Ruby Frazier/ A Haunted Capital, is much smaller but more poignant; it moved me almost to tears sometimes. Don't miss it. Here's a sensitive review by Karen Rosenberg that includes reproductions of some of Frazier's photographs.

LaToya Ruby Frazier / A Haunted Capital – second floor.

In 2001 the Museum refurbished their 10,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts Court (replacing the floor in 2007). Unfortunately European paintings from their collection are installed around the perimeter of the Court and are overwhelmed by it. I hope they find a better place for the paintings and a better use for the Court — maybe sculpture would work here.

Beaux-Arts Court with European paintings installed along the perimeter. 

With money from the Henry Luce Foundation, they beautifully renovated and re-installed their American art galleries,

The Colonial Period Galleries – fifth floor.

and, in 2004, they built the adjoining Visible Storage and Study Center, a 5,000-square-foot glass open-storage area providing public access to some 1,200 items from their American collection.

Luce Center for American Art, Visible Storage Study Center – fifth floor.

Also in 2004 the Museum redesigned its forbidding front entrance and added a new public plaza (see photo at the top). The new entrance is much more inviting and more in keeping with the Museum's mission: ... the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Another thing that distinguishes the Brooklyn Museum from other New York museums is the myriad ways they go about educating people about the art on view: videos, free brochures (I picked up six of them), an informative and fast website, a blog, and even a free app; and of course wall labels — each enlivened with graphics. (One of my favorites explains why the noses of Egyptian sculptures are frequently broken — it's not just accidents. Go to the Museum and learn why.)

One of many video areas — this for the exhibition African Innovations: Art That Moves – first floor.

And many of the installations of their permanent collection are instructive. The one photographed below, for example, demonstrates the variety of ways people were depicted in various times and places.

Installation view,  Connecting Cultures - Connecting People – first floor.

All is not perfection; some of the changes are disappointing. I was really looking forward to seeing Life Death and Transformations in the Americas, the new long-term exhibition of their renown collection of Northwest Coast Indian art and other art of the Americas. It was favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter ("The stuff is hypnotic, one spellbinding fever dream after another."), but the installation is so antiseptic  — white walls, rectangular glass display cases on gray stands — that this dramatic and gutsy art appears tame and precious.

Installation view of Life, Death, and Transformations in the Americas - a long-term installation – fifth floor. 

And the new (2009) gallery for their permanent collection of Contemporary Art, which should be outstanding given the vitality of the Brooklyn art scene, is a relatively small 3000 square feet, and it's ill-proportioned and drab. It has none of the beauty and warmth of the other new galleries.

Contemporary Art Gallery,  Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Kitchen Table Allegory, 2010 in foreground – fourth floor.

And to make it even worse, the Contemporary Art space is adjacent to about a dozen historic facades and period rooms and serves as an entryway to them — it's a disorienting distraction.

Entrance to the 18th-Century Period Rooms, right off the Contemporary Art Galleries – fourth floor.

As a footnote: It seems Joseph J. Lhota, who under Giuliani tried to censor the Museum's controversial 1999 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection by threatening their funding, is now running for mayor. Happily his past bullying is hurting his campaign (see the New York Times article about it). The Museum didn't back down then and, I am pleased to note, they still don't abide censorship, even self-censorship — the most treacherous kind. This delightful and funny sculpture was on display in the middle of one of the Egyptian art galleries — no separate room, no discrete covers, no warning signs — no big deal.

Erotic Composition, Ptolemaic Period, 305 - 30 B.C., limestone, painted, 6 ½ x 6 11/16 x 3 ¾ inches (Brooklyn Museum, 58.13) - third floor.

Bushwick Galleries Update

By Charles Kessler

Bushwick Art Galleries, Restaurants and Bars
This map, and detailed information to go with it, can be downloaded HERE and on the right sidebar.

Not one Bushwick gallery closed since my last update, two changed their names (Bogart Salon became ArtHelix, and Weeknights became Associated), and five new galleries opened — making an amazing total of forty-three galleries now. Here is a brief description of each of the new Bushwick galleries:

AuxiliaryProjects

2 St. Nicholas Ave., #25 (at Jefferson), Brooklyn, NY 11237

(917) 623-8374 or (917) 805-7710 (Sometimes you need to call to be let in.)

Email: auxiliaryprojects@gmail.com

Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Auxiliary Projects installation view of Michelle Forsyth's  Letters to Kevin (courtesy of Auxiliary Projects via michelleforsyth.com).

Auxiliary Projects is a very small space run by two smart and talented artists, Jennifer Dalton & Jennifer McCoy. The gallery has a unique and admirable focus. They only do solo shows of artists that have been working for a long time but who are under-represented. And they are committed to showing some work in every exhibition that sells for under $300. They say that they want to “facilitate the production and distribution of art that can be owned by the non-wealthy, a kind of entry point into the art world.”

Harbor

17-17 Troutman #258, Queens, NY 11385 (The numbers on Troutman change in Queens, the gallery isn’t as far away as the address suggests.)

(347) 460-7360 

Email: info@harborbk.com

Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Harbor is another of Bushwick’s many artist-run galleries dedicated to exhibiting and supporting emerging artists. They are in the same building with three other galleries: Regina Rex, Parallel and Bull and Ram. 

Schema Projects

92 St. Nicholas Ave, Brooklyn NY 11237 

(718) 578-3281

Email: info@schemaprojects.com

Hours: Friday, 1 — 5 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Email Mary Judge at: info@schemaprojects.com

View of the storefront of Schema Projects

Scheme is dedicated exclusively to all forms of work on paper — the first gallery in Bushwick to do so. They share a storefront space with Blonde Art Books.

TSA (Tiger Strikes Asteroid)

44 Stewart Ave, #49, Brooklyn NY 11237 (above Flushing, near Wyckoff)

Phone: (347) 746-8041

Email: newyork@tigerstrikesasteroid.com 

Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

Artist members of TSA

TSA has ten members, all artists, and is related to Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia. Their focus is on emerging artists.

Wayfarers

1109 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11221 

Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.

They don’t have a phone number or email address listed — but they have a good Tumblr blog.

Chelsea from 21st Street through 25th Street

By Charles Kessler

Maybe it’s to take advantage of all the collectors who came into New York for the art fairs, but there’s an exceptional amount of good shows to be seen in these five blocks. Foremost among them is
Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 - 1959, Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street (until April 13th).

Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1951, oil on canvas, 56 ⅓ x 84 ½ inches.

This is the first time the work of this period has been shown as a group since my co-blogger and mentor Carl Belz’s 1981 exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. (Belz’s catalog essay for that exhibition has been reprinted in the catalog for this exhibition.) The show is a revelation and should establish once and for all that Frankenthaler, despite being a generation younger, belongs along side Pollock, De Kooning, Still and the other great first-generation Abstract Expressionists of the 1950’s.


Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine (until March 23rd).

Installation view, Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine Gallery.

This 64-minute installation is composed of nine large videos of friends of the artist singing The Visitors, an old ABBA song. Each of Kjartansson's friends is shown on a separate screen, alone in one of the rooms of a beautiful old Hudson Valley farmhouse, each equipped to hear the others. At first they are setting up equipment or just waiting, but eventually one or two at a time start to sing or play an instrument. As they do so, people in the gallery walk around to watch the screens.

Eventually all of the friends sing and play both by themselves and improvising with the others. Toward the end, one screen after another goes dark, until the audience, gathering around the last screen, watches as all the friends leave the farmhouse singing together as they go for a frolicsome walk on a long field, their singing fading out as they walk farther and farther away. The work is sweet and surprisingly touching, perhaps made more so by the association of us as an audience/group with the group of friends in the video.

Installation view, Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine Gallery.

This show was packed when I went, even though Chelsea was pretty empty, so I guess word got out.
Update: Ben Davis has a good review here.


Andrea Rosen, Gallery 2, 544 West 24th Street (until March 23rd).
Like many of the big galleries in Chelsea, Andrea Rosen has expanded, opening a small but beautifully lit and proportioned space across the street from the main gallery. The show, what they’re calling a “shared installation,” is kind of lame though. Basically Olivier Mosset got approval from Lawrence Weiner and Jacob Kassay to hang a work by each on a wall Mosset painted yellow. Nice space though.


Two Feature Inc. artists are showing on 25th Street with other galleries: B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures (opens March 21st until April 27th) and Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone (until April 27th). Masullo looked better in the more intimate and less formal Feature Inc. space in the Lower East Side; the work gets lost in this vast space, and ganging them together makes no difference.

Installation view, Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone Gallery.

When are collectors going to wise up and buy the art of Feature Inc. gallery artists before they leave for Chelsea?

Al Held: Alphabet Paintings, Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street (until April 20th).

Installation view, Al Held, Alphabet Paintings, 1961–67, Cheim & Read Gallery.

I have a theory that, big as these paintings are, they’re felt to be even bigger because of their association with letters. I mean, that’s really big for a “D.”


Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street (until April 6th).

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981, acrylic, oil stick and pencil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
(© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013).

Gagosian’s huge space is filled with this work, most of it quite large. (I would have shown an installation view, but Gagosian doesn't allow photography, and their website has become stingy about providing images.) The work is bursting with ideas and energy, but at the same time it started to look all the same. Weird.


Thomas Nozkowski, Recent Work, PACE,  508 West 25th Street (until March 23rd). I'm happy to report that the PACE website has vastly improved.

Installation view, Thomas Nozkowski, Recent Work, PACE Gallery.

I’ve written before about Nozkowski’s work — here most recently. Typically, my initial reaction to one of his shows is the opposite of what I had with the Basquiat exhibition. Because the paintings are all the same size, and they’re usually regularly lined up like soldiers (I wish he’d stop installing them like that), the work seems all alike. But I always end up being blown away by how much is going on — how many quirky surprises and beautiful riffs there are.

Thomas Nozkowski, untitled (9-9), 2012, oil on canvas on panel, 22 x 28 inches. 

Note, for example, how a vertical rectangle is formed on the right side of this painting (above) by cutting off the circles and by making the green slightly lighter; then look how the rectangle continues down turning blue and dissolving into the darker blue shape (which itself has some of the adjacent pink showing through, as if the pink continues under it). Here's a close-up detail:

Riffs and tricks in themselves mean nothing, of course, but Nozkowski uses them to set up delightful, intimate, self-contained worlds that are a joy to behold.

Once More With Helen

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Seas, 1952, oil on canvas, 86 ⅝ x 117 ¼ inches (on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington).

By Carl Belz

(Writer’s note: The exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler paintings from the 1950s currently at the Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street naturally triggered memories of the Frankenthaler exhibition I did at the Rose Art Museum in 1981. I described the curatorial development of that exhibition in one of my Curatorial Flashbacks here on Left Bank a couple of years ago. What follows now is a brief description of my experience installing the exhibition, which turned out, not altogether surprisingly, to be a memorable collaboration with the artist herself. It was written in 1986 for a show celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum’s patrons and friends program, which sponsored an annual major exhibition and included “Frankenthaler: The 1950s.” I have edited it slightly for the occasion.)

Helen Frankenthaler,  Jacob's Ladder, 1957, oil on canvas, 113 ⅜ x 69 ⅞ inches (MoMA, Gift of Hyman N. Glickstein. © 2013 Helen Frankenthaler / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).

Helen Frankenthaler was a perfectionist. Her concern extended to every mark on every picture she made and to every detail of every significant project she engaged in relation to her work. Nathan Kolodner, a former student at Brandeis who became director of the Andre Emmerich Gallery, told me as much when we first discussed an exhibition of her 1950s work in the spring of 1980, and I learned it firsthand during the various stages that led to the completion of the show a year later. For me the culminating experience in the process was the installation of the 48 paintings and works on paper that comprised the exhibition, a selection of images that I had discussed at length with the artist, that I had visited in public and private collections throughout the northeast, and that I had come to feel I knew as well as the painter who made them. Armed with confidence, I spent a week arranging the pictures in advance of Helen’s arrival preceding the Saturday evening preview of the exhibition, though I didn’t actually hang them, for I anticipated she might suggest a few changes.

Helen Frankenthaler, Eden, 1956, (Photo: Robert McKeever/© 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York). 

We walked through the show together, Helen looking quietly at the pictures, remembering them, for in many cases she had not seen them in the flesh since they left her hand more than 20 years earlier. Certainly she had not seen them assembled as she was seeing them at that moment, and I began to realize that what I assumed was a triumph--the full spectrum of her first decade of achievement--was also her vulnerability, a laying bare of her initial urge in the direction of genuinely ambitious painting. She admitted as much, acknowledging the nervousness she had felt on her way to the museum, but she also said she was deeply satisfied with how everything looked, and she congratulated me for my knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the work, asking in conclusion if I would mind if we rearranged a few pictures.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mother Goose Melody, 1959, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 103 ½ inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis). 

During the next three hours we moved every picture at least once, many of them several times, and a show gradually emerged that I had not seen before. While I had tried to indicate subtly the work’s chronological development, Helen pretty much discarded that textbook approach. Treating the entire museum space like a stretch of raw canvas and each image like a gesture to be expressed within it, she created an environmental painting right there on the spot. And a wondrous painting it was, allowing each part to stand on its own but at the same time generating among those parts an internal rhythm that revealed each more fully. I received a lot of credit for that installation. That I could not accept it was fully compensated for by what I had learned in watching it happen.

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