(An Appropriate Distance)
FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP
by Piri Halasz

 

 

NO. 79.75: JUNE/JULY: CATCHING UP WITH SIX MONTHS’ WORTH OF GALLERY- AND MUSEUM-GOING; SPECIAL FOCUS ON ABSTRACTION......Dear subscribers to my print edition, this still isn’t Issue No.80. As it has no supplement to the DeLuxe Edition, it won’t count in your seven issues yearly, but I’ve got to take another break from prepping my book for publication. I’m making progress on the book: have received all the necessary permissions to quote my many sources; also, 23 out of 29 chapters are fact-checked, but since New Year’s I’ve seen about 40 exhibitions, and must discuss at least some. True, I haven’t checked out the latest frissons in Chelsea, and spared myself the Hudson River Armory Show this year, but I can report on some beautiful museum shows of historical art, some “fun” contemporary museum shows and, the real concern of this column, which is abstraction, primarily painting but also a bit of sculpture. Even after sixty years with Marcel and his far-flung school of object relations in the saddle, all sorts of artists – even neo-dada celebs and recent art-school grads – don’t seem to feel that they can rest if they haven’t tried to paint abstract. The good critics of the New York Times are much more at home with art for larger audiences, and can sometimes get a tad shrill when they feel obliged to review shows dominated by painting – but somehow, abstraction continues to enjoy a mysterious prestige, though that prestige doesn’t often enough translate into red dots in galleries for the best abstraction.

I focus on abstraction first, because I’ve seen so many shows featuring it, and second, because I’m particularly drawn to one of them: “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” at The Jewish Museum (through September 21); then at the Saint Louis Art Museum (October 19 to January 11, 2009) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo NY (February 13 to May 31, 2009). Billed as “the first major U.S. exhibition in 20 years to rethink abstract expressionism and the movements that followed,” this show has fifty works by 31 artists, but I was attracted to it originally because it attempts to view this seminal movement from the perspectives of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, two formidable art critics who admired most of the same abstract expressionist artists in the ‘50s, and between them played a major role in establishing the movement as the reigning avant-garde of that decade. Moreover, the show follows the critics on through the ‘60s, and includes some artists whom each critic celebrated during this latter period (when you can bet on it, there was no overlap). There are many wonderful paintings in the show as a whole, and four, maybe five top-quality sculptures, but also secondary and even mediocre works of art, many artists whom I was delighted to see but also at least three major omissions. The catalogue in some ways continues past the ‘50s, but in other, equally major ways it fails to do so: in fact, there are some holes that one could drive a truck through. Cogitating over these, I was able to come to conclusions that I might not have arrived at otherwise, so the show certainly deserves the title of “most thought-provoking.”

In this issue – as you may see from the Table of Contents below – I’ll deal with a) fine historical art, b) “fun” shows claiming to be contemporary, c) abstraction and d) out-of-town shows. I originally planned to discuss politics, too, but by the time I’d finished with the art scene, the column was so damn long & and had taken up so much time that I decided to finesse the politics. About all I have to say right now is that Barack Obama is looking a lot less liberal and correspondingly more Presidential every day.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

A) SOME BEAUTIFUL HISTORICAL SHOWS

PROS & CONS AT THE MET

Among the beautiful historical shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’d certainly include “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions,” organized by Keith Christiansen, curator of European painting at the Met, and Pierre Rosenberg, director emeritus of the Louvre (who now occupies himself with special projects and was instrumental in obtaining important loans from the Louvre for the show). I confess, I’d never been very enthusiastic about Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). I first read about him, or rather his followers, the Poussinistes, way back in 1969, in Lionello Venturi’s history of art criticism.  Their adversaries, in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, had been the Rubenistes, with Poussinistes standing for reason, line, and the Establishment French Academy, while the Rubenistes were the anti-Establishment upstarts, standing for feeling and color. Me, I was already passionate about feeling and color, seeing these as the essence of the abstract painting that I’d come to love. All my fellow writers on Time, I became convinced, were into line and reason, whereas Greenberg, whom I’d only just met, was one of those rare writers who could and did relate to feeling and color. My formal education did nothing to alter my negative take on Poussin. For an undergraduate art history course, taken in 1974, I analyzed his “Abduction of the Sabine Women” at the Met, (probably 1633-34), but it’s a cold and surprisingly static composition (despite the supposedly frenzied motion of its figures, acting out their little melodrama against an architectural backdrop). Nor was my imagination whetted by seeing reproductions of “Et in Arcadia Ego” (1637-38) accompanying several presentations at the College Art Association, perhaps because of the poor quality of the reproductions, perhaps because the speakers, with typical postmodernist negativity, always seemed to harp on the fact that the shepherds in the painting are finding Death even in their sylvan paradise.

All this, however, was changed by “Poussin and Nature” at the Met. For the first time, I could see why Cézanne so much admired Poussin (as did other great landscape artists like Corot, Constable and Turner, to say nothing of Matisse). It wasn’t a huge show, with only about 40 paintings, but the calm sweet beauty of the lush countrysides that were depicted offered a respite from too much literalism and the rational geometry of architecture. All these paintings were very carefully structured, and of course they were peopled by various figures (mythological, religious, or merely country folk), but none of these elements were overly intrusive or offensive. Almost none of the paintings depicted recognizable landmarks or scenery. Virtually all were ideal compositions, created in the artist’s studio upon the basis of drawings after nature (dozens of which were also on view). Nevertheless the blues and greens and soft shapes of trees and fields and mountains made for an illusion of naturalism that wears well – provided one sees enough of them together. By the time I got to the fourth gallery in the exhibition, where hung Poussin’s later “landscapes in a noble and heroic style,” I began to remember that I’d seen some of these paintings individually before. Still, it took the lot of them to convey a comprehensive vision, and the first, rather narrow gallery was still the most surprising. It was devoted to “The Early Years: 1624-28,” and displayed only a relatively modest number of mostly smaller, softer, darker paintings. Typically they dealt with mythological themes, and were characterized by compositions in which the human figures occupied proportionately larger space in relation to the landscape elements. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. The show after all was billed as “Poussin and Nature,” so I was expecting landscapes, but these early paintings had something even better: the thrill of a young artist’s discovery that made the whole group magical.

ANOTHER PRO: COURBET

Possibly because I know more about Gustave Courbet, I am going to be more critical of the retrospective in his honor held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized jointly by the Met, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, this show was seen at the d’Orsay before it came to the Met, and has since gone onto the Musée Fabre. It must have made a spectacular show in Paris, and for all I know it is equally spectacular in Montpellier, but alas there are two extra-large, extra-important paintings by Courbet that simply don’t leave France, the “Burial at Ornans” (1849-1850) and "L’Atelier" (1855).  Without those two, any Courbet exhibition has two gaping holes in it (same problem with Manet: no U.S. exhibition of his work is going to include “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” or “Olympia”).  As mounted at the Met by Gary Tinterow, curator, and Kathryn Calley Galitz, assistant curator, both in the Met’s department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, the Courbet show had a hell of a lot else to recommend it, filling as it did the Met’s largest special exhibition space with more than 130 oil paintings and works on paper. The oils were especially luscious and well-worth contemplating in their sensuous brushwork and luxuriant color.

Courbet was at once bigger and smaller than the show, itself characterized by a somewhat uneven selection and promoted in an irritatingly dadaist manner – not least by a poster that reproduced a really bizarre self-portrait in which the artist is seen with his eyes bugging out and his hands clutching his hair like a crazy person. The press release described him as “radical and rebellious,” saying that he “rejected artistic convention, challenged academic norms, and created artworks that scandalized the public” by “rebelling against tradition.”  Up to the last phrase I buy this, but nobody who wasn’t in love with the notion of shock for its own sake could have looked at the three splendid, remarkably varied self-portraits facing the entrance to the show, with their vigorous chiaroscuro, and not realized that here was an artist who was going back to tradition. He was taking his cues from Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velázquez and Goya instead of the feeble conventions of the French Salon painters–who had been producing work designed to appeal, as John Rewald pointed out, to nouveau riche collectors who “lacked any art education and were satisfied with whatever flattered their eyes and hearts: pretty nudes, sentimental stories, religious subjects, heroic deeds, flowers which one could almost ‘smell,’ patriotic scenes, and touching tales.”  The Met’s press release quoted a letter from Courbet saying that “when I am no longer controversial I will no longer be important.” Here is a sentiment that Andy Warhol might have expressed, but seems taken out of context when the speaker was capable of such moody, poetic landscapes and large-scale genre paintings dignifying the small-town and rural communities from which he came. If all this was controversial, it wasn’t because Courbet was trying to be controversial for its own sake, but because of the stale thinking and staler painting that dominated the status quo, and the extent to which he raised the level of discourse in art is his real monument, not the rhetoric with which he surrounded it. Perhaps whoever was in charge of promoting this show thought that making Courbet into a dada avant la lettre was the only way to draw in the crowds, and the exhibition was well-attended on the day I went through it, with plenty of younger people. But does this mean that such younger people will only turn out for a show which has been billed as “controversial,” or does it mean that they’re interested in great painting as long as it’s got recognizable subject matter?

Undoubtedly another come-on was the gallery devoted to “the modern nude,” whose walls were so covered with acres of sensuously painted flesh that it reminded me of a bordello. More space would have desirable for the two largest paintings in the gallery, “Sleep” (1866, depicting two female nudes twined together in repose) and “Woman with a Parrot” (1866, showing a nude lying on her back with the bird perched above her). Supposedly the body hair on these nudes rendered them “controversial,” but I couldn’t see much if any of it. In fact, “Sleep” struck me as a bit academic, all the bare flesh combined with the luxurious paint handling contributing to slight overkill. I found fresher and more likeable two of the smaller nudes in the same gallery, “Sleeping Blonde” (1849), once owned by Matisse, and “The Bather” (ca. 1866-68), whose unfinished loose brushwork put me in mind of Renoir. Courbet’s ultimate naughty-naughty was “The Origin of the World” (1866), showing a woman’s crotch. This was enshrined in a special little alcove with 19th century French photographs of nudes. The ostensible purpose of the photos was to show some of the artist’s sources. I suppose voyeurs found them irresistible, but as art they were second-class – as were the 19th century photographs of clouds and seas in a later gallery, likewise ostensibly intended to show the artist’s sources. For me, all this postmodernist “documentation” is a bore, though I daresay the kind of people who came to see the show in hopes of finding a second Warhol might even like the photographs better than the paintings. I myself was very moved & happy to see the quietly majestic “Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair” (1850-55), the ebullient :”Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet” (1854), the two silvery still lifes of trout (1872, 1873), and the textural interest of fur, snow-covered ground and grasses in “The Fox in the Snow”(1860). I’ve always enjoyed the Met’s own “Les Demoiselles du Village” (1851-52), but I could have used twice as many landscapes and seascapes as there were in this show, and about half as many portraits (especially of other people). The last two galleries were particularly spotty, but then how many artists can keep on maintaining the same uniformly high standard to the very ends of their lives? I’m extremely grateful that the great Courbet gave us as much as he did.

A THIRD PRO: TURNER

Although I was able to skate rapidly through “J. M. W. Turner” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last October, I have now been able to see it in a more leisurely fashion at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (through September 21). And what a pleasure it is! This stunning show, with approximately 140 paintings and watercolors, was organized jointly by the Met, the National Gallery, and the Dallas Museum of Art (it’s been in Dallas between DC and NY). In New York, it’s been mounted by the same curatorial duo who brought us Courbet: Gary Tinterow and Kathryn Calley Galitz. In overall organization, the NY venue resembles the DC one: both have been divided up into ten segments, each occupying a gallery, and, although the sequence is roughly chronological, the wall text in each gallery introduces it as a subject. The first gallery is still called, “Foundations,” but it’s more appealing than the gallery devoted to “Foundations” in the National Gallery, primarily I suppose because it’s a broader space. If I recall correctly, upon entering the “Foundations” gallery in DC, one saw a fairly narrow gallery, with a doorway in front of one leading to the second gallery. At the Met, one enters a much larger space, with a fine wide wall directly in front of one, upon which hangs a good-sized, model early Turner, “The Shipwreck” (first exhibited 1805). With its foamy white surf and angry sea, it epitomizes two of the artist’s lifelong predilections, for the sea and for the “sublime,” while to the right are smaller landscapes with dramatic mountains and to the left, smaller seascapes, all exquisitely done with the precision that marks so much of Turner’s early work. A number of labels point out the artist’s use of light and dark contrasts, high vantage points and low vantage points. I might call such comments “formal analyses” to the extent that they encourage people to look again – and more carefully – at the picture in question. I’d contrast them with the plethora of labels with gossipy information that so often irks me in museums, information that may be of interest in conversation after museum-goers have left the show, but don’t really help them get the most out of the work of art itself.

 (Abstraction)

As for the wall text in this gallery, I’m still not satisfied with it. Again, we have a mention of the “picturesque” and “the sublime,” the latter as articulated by Edmund Burke in his treatise on “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1757). Though I don’t recall seeing the name of Claude of Lorraine (ca. 1604-1682) on the wall text for this first gallery in DC, it is definitely here in NYC, with the added information that Claude was a “touchstone” for Turner. Still, neither here nor anywhere else is the name of Claude associated with Burke’s concept of “the beautiful,” nor is the name of Salvator Rosa introduced at all, even though Claude was in Turner’s day believed to be the apogee of "the beautiful,” whereas the much less well known Rosa was believed to epitomize “the sublime.” Elsewhere in the show, beginning in the second gallery with ”The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius, Restored” (exhibited 1816), one may see Turner’s many homages to Claude – stately Italianate landscapes with softly rolling hills, a serene, often rosy sky, sometimes a framing tree or trees, often a body of water in the center, and sweet little people (staffage) in the foreground (as with Poussin, a contemporary of Claude’s, though with Claude the figures are usually much smaller and the landscape elements correspondingly more dominant). Nowhere do wall texts or labels mention that these are a “beautiful” kind of landscape, and that therefore Turner didn’t concern himself exclusively with the sublime. Still, Turner’s more “beautiful” Claudean paintings are also on the whole tighter and rendered with more detail, while the “sublime” ones, with huge threatening storm clouds, mountains covered with drifts of snow and/or tumbling cascades of water, are on the whole looser and more freely brushed. Thus the emphasis on the “sublime” also serves to emphasize Turner’s kinship with 20^th century abstraction, also dramatized here by nine fascinating watercolor sketches of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, and by the much duller and less satisfactory unfinished canvases at the end of the show. Here is the first instance I shall adduce of the fascination with abstraction that continues to surface even today.

As I have so many other things to say, I won’t take you through the rest of “J. M. W. Turner,” beyond saying that I think you’ll have a very good time here, and I strongly recommend it. The only thing I want to add is my take on the gallery devoted to “Britain at War and at Peace, 1805-24,” since I commented upon it in DC.  Here again, as with “Foundations,” the hanging is far superior to that in DC, not only because the gallery is more spacious but also because the huge 1823-1824 version of “The Battle of Trafalgar,” commissioned by King George IV, now hangs on a long wall, with two other only slightly smaller nautical battle scenes on either side. To the right hangs an earlier version of the same subject, which Turner exhibited as an unfinished work in his own gallery in 1806, the year after the battle itself. While the sails of Admiral Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, in the later painting are just as startling and provocative as I remembered them being, on the whole the smaller and earlier version is more balanced and more successful in its entirety. Darker and more complex, it integrates the delicate, intricate patterns of furled and unfurled sails above with the human beings on the decks below and in the riggings at the midst of the picture. Meanwhile, “The Field of Waterloo” (exhibited 1818), which I had difficulty seeing in DC, gets a whole wall to itself here (between two doors leading on to the next gallery). You can really stand back and see the dramatic contrast between the darkness surrounding all the slain soldiers, the small cloudy moon above and the brightness of the lanterns carried by the women searching for the corpses of husbands, sons, brothers and lovers. Very effective, very moving.

CON AT THE MET: JOHNS

Considering that Jasper Johns (b.1930) rated a huge retrospective in 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art, it’s slightly depressing to find that The Metropolitan Museum of Art felt itself obliged to come up with a near-retrospective of “Jasper Johns: Gray” with more than 120 all-gray paintings, reliefs, drawings, prints and sculpture. Does this artist really need to be celebrated at such length by the Met, when he’s already been celebrated by MoMA, or is it simply that the Met worries about seeming old-fashioned and out of touch if it focuses on the truly great art of earlier years instead of feeling obliged to hike up its skirts and dance the tarantella with the monarchs of postmodernism? That said, I must confess that when I walked into this show, shortly after having seen the Whitney Biennial, I was confronted at the entrance by two Johnses,”False Start” (1959) and “Jubilee” (1959). These were two versions of the same image–paintings with color names stenciled on them, the former in color, the latter in grays and whites – and I jotted down on my note pad, “By comparison w. Whitney Biennial, looks like an Old Master – well-wrought art...except that not that well-wrought,” I added, “rather the messy look of de K[ooning].” One way or another, these are satires on abstract expressionism, the relationship expressed by the messy, supposedly-abstract expressionist brushwork combined with the lapse back from the multireferential imagery of abstraction and down to the uni-referential imagery seen in the stenciled words (the key to uni-referential imagery is that it can much more easily be described in words; with conceptual art – like these paintings – the work incorporates the words into the art). Even the press release to this show emphasizes the artist’s negativity. “In the late 1950s, Johns...used gray to suggest skepticism or ambiguity,” it says. “in later work, Johns’s use of gray may evoke an emotional coolness or suggest obfuscation, veiling or concealment.”  The obviously very busy Gary Tinterow was quoted referring to the work as “extraordinarily beautiful and enigmatic,” and adding that it continued to “astonish and disturb,” but the curators actually involved in putting the show together were Nan Rosenthal, a senior consultant at the Met, and James Rondeau and Douglas Druick, both of the Art Institute of Chicago (where the show appeared before coming to the NY).

I would imagine that if Robert Morris was as hypnotized by gray in the ‘60s as indeed he was, it may well have been out of admiration for Johns, but since I saw Morris’s gray free-standing minimal sculptures and gray conceptual wall-pieces before I’d seen much Johns, I always think of Morris when I see gray work. I also remember what Clement Greenberg said about Morris, shortly after I’d met him. He said that Morris’s work was “too tasteful,” and that remains my feeling about gray – not that it can’t be a scintillating color, if used with distinction, but with a nearly uniform shade of gray employed ad nauseam it begins to become something of a fashion statement. “Jasper Johns: Gray” was a fairly pretty show, not beautiful but tastefully pretty. The grays employed were mostlly a silvery, fairly light shade of it – I’m not familiar with the terms that a Mens’ Warehouse salesman might employ, but perhaps something in a lightweight gents’ summer suiting from Giorgio Armani would give the right idea – in any event, relatively uniform, not varied: we’re not talking the wide range of blacks, whites and many shades of gray that Ingres employed so brilliantly when he rendered his famous reclining odalisque in grisaille, or even the subtle gradations of Seurat and his admirer, Laurie Fendrich, as seen in their exhibitions of conté crayon drawings, respectively at MoMA and Perlow last year. Still, there were some very nice things about this show, most notably the little sculpture made out of Sculp-metal over plaster with glass and entitled, “The Critic Sees” (1961). This sculpture was even reproduced on the invitations to the media preview (attended by art critics – get it? A sly museological joke). “The Critic Sees” is a rectangular slab upon which sits the front part of a pair of eyeglasses (minus the ear pieces). Behind the lenses, instead of eyes, are two identical open mouths. I never can see that sculpture, a sarcastic commentary on esthetic values, without remarking upon how much both eyeglass frame and mouths resemble those features of the late, great Greenberg. I seem to recall somebody telling me that Johns once invited Greenberg to his studio, and that Greenberg wasn’t as impressed as Johns wanted him to be. I know that Greenberg considered Johns the best of pop and neo-dada, better than Rauschenberg and Warhol. Still, I imagine that Johns hoped Greenberg would find his art superior to that of Noland, Morris Louis and Olitski, too, and when Greenberg failed to live up to this expectation, took his revenge.

PAUSE FOR AN OBITUARY

Now that I’ve mentioned Robert Rauschenberg, I add that he died May 12, at the age of 82 (having suffered a stroke that paralyzed one side of his body some years ago and been in relatively fragile health since). The New York Times on May 14 gave his obituary, by Michael Kimmelman, a three-column headline on Page One, then continued the obit onto a full inside page. The same issue also included a half-page story by Roberta Smith itemizing the holdings of Manhattan’s four major museums of work by the artist (MoMA has more than 300 works, the Whitney nearly 60, the Guggenheim more than 30 and the Met, more than 60). Two days later, Alistair Macaulay, a Times dance critic, did yet another story on “Rauschenberg and Dance, Partners for Life.” There’s no doubt that Rauschenberg was extremely influential, but he never could have accomplished what he did without substantial public support. His most famous statement is undoubtedly “Painting relates to both art and life....(I try to act in that gap between the two).”  Only because so many other artists and would-be art-lovers also felt that there was a gap between the art of abstract expressionism and “life” (whatever life may be) were he and his cohorts able to achieve such enormous success. He may not be the single artist most responsible for demoting abstract expressionism from the rank it enjoyed in the ‘50s as the reigning avant-garde; that particular honor rather belongs to Warhol, but Rauschenberg was the one who started the campaign.

During the ‘40s, as I learned while doing my dissertation, the art scene was moving progressively further in the direction of more abstraction, as charted by solo exhibitions of different groups of artists, increasingly favorable press coverage and museum exhibitions and acquisitions. In the ‘50s, the trend was in the opposite direction, though throughout that decade the neo-dada reaction was still only a minority affair. Rauschenberg (& Johns) didn’t erupt out of the confines of the art world and become national figures until the arrival of “true” pop (Warhol, Lichtenstein, etc.) during the 1962-1963 art season. Still, if I had to name the moment of the original turnaround, I should choose the summer & autumn of 1951, when Rauschenberg created his “white paintings.”  These completely blank canvases weren’t exhibited until 1953, but represented a reaction against and satire of the “zips” that Barnett Newman had shown at Betty Parsons in early 1951. According to Ann Temkin, in her Newman exhibition catalogue, Rauschenberg had seen this show at Parsons when he was preparing for his own first solo exhibition there in the spring of 1951, but his pictures were made with rollers, and (unlike Newman’s) intended to be completely impersonal and manufactured-looking. This was taking abstraction to its logical but ridiculous extreme, a reductio ad absurdum that is the essence of most minimalism and just as sarcastic as it is in the works of Morris, Donald Judd and others too numerous to mention. After 1951, Rauschenberg moved steadily away from the multireferential and back into the uni-referential. In his case, this meant not representational but presentational art: “combines” and “combine paintings” made out of dingy objects and artifacts that also satirized abstract expressionism with their sloppy applications of paint, whether in the gory-looking “Bed” (1955) or “Monogram” (1955-59), the stuffed goat with a tire around its middle that is literally putting down and stomping upon the abstract expressionist brushwork smeared onto the platform it stands upon.

RAUSCHENBERG & JOHNS (THE DUO)

(Plus abstraction)

Rauschenberg’s later work was, on the whole, feeble; even Kimmelman admitted as much, in his otherwise laudatory (not to say fulsome) obituary.  But the earlier combines, especially those from the ‘50s, made a much more favorable impression on me when I saw the big show of them that the Met mounted in 2005-2006. Initially, their appearance was haphazard, but when I examined them more closely, I could see how much blood, sweat and tears had gone into their making. They must have created a very lively impression when originally exhibited, especially when contrasted with the acres of canvas with so much less pizzazz being exhibited by the many second- and third-generation abstract expressionists who disappeared when pop swept across the landscape like flies on the first cold day of autumn (to use a simile once employed by CG). Likewise with Johns: the early parts of this “gray” exhibition had crispness and vitality, even for somebody like myself who identifies with abstract expressionism and is accordingly not amused by jokes at its expense. One picture I noticed especially was “Gray Painting with Ball” (1958). It’s a sadistic image, since the canvas has been slashed horizontally across its middle and a little ball stuck into the center of the slash (my problem may be that I even identify with an abstract painting’s surface). Anyway, I wrote “irritating” in my notes, next to the name of this work – yet as I neared the exit, I was thinking back to it and remembering nostalgically how much livelier it had been than all the dim, weak stuff in the later galleries of the show. In the ‘70s, Johns experimented with abstraction, in his paintings with “hatch-marks.” Once he’d finished demolishing abstract expressionism, here he was, trying to prove that he too could paint abstract! Upon the basis of this show, any lasting fame he may attain will rest upon his earlier, more uni-referential work, just as Warhol will be remembered more for Brillo boxes and soup cans than for his attempts to paint abstractly, with those bland Rorschach blot images and blander “piss paintings.”  My point is that here were two pomo gods trying to recapture the magic of abstraction at which they once sneered.

ANOTHER CON AT THE MET: KOONS

The title of “priciest contemporary artist” probably doesn’t belong to Jeff Koons (b. 1955) but to Damien Hirst (b. 1965), who supposedly sold a human skull cast in platinum and covered with 8,601 diamonds for $100 million to a group of investors last summer, according to Carol Vogel in the Times for June 19. Still, when Koons’s “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” went on the block in London on June 30, it brought $25.8 million, which may be more than the $16 to $24 million that Hirst’s latest creation is expected to bring when it goes up for auction in September (this being a bull submerged in formaldehyde, wearing a disc of solid gold on its head and with hooves and horns cast in 18-karat gold. Talk about conspicuous consumption!). Koons’s work has been near the top of the money pile before now, of course. Last November, his “Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” went for $23.5 million at Sotheby’s in Manhattan, while his “Diamond (Blue)” went for $11.8 million (according to the invaluable Vogel for May 23). All of which meant it was just a question of time before The Metropolitan Museum of Art would invite him to install three of his large-scale, brightly-colored high chromium stainless steel sculptures, covered with transparent color coating, in its roof garden for the summer (until October 26, weather permitting). “Jeff Koons on the Roof” is (once again) organized by Gary Tinterow and Anne L. Strauss, an associate curator in Tinterow’s department.

(More abstraction)

On the afternoon that I visited the roof garden, I again admired the superb view, out over the treetops of Central Park to the piquant skylines of tall buildings surrounding the park. I noted “The Three Shades” of Rodin jammed up against the wall beneath the vine-covered trellis, ands the three Koonses enjoying premium space out in the open air. Koons’s 10-foot high “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” of 1994-2000 is actually shiny chartreuse, an attenuated toy shaped like the animals that clever people can make out of balloons to amuse children. “Sacred Heart (Red/Gold)” of 1997-2007 is nearly 12 feet high and looks like a candy heart wrapped in shiny red paper with a shiny gold ribbon around it (the brochure accompanying the exhibition says it also suggests “the potent Roman Catholic image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” but I pity any Catholic who thinks this flashy, shallow piece of tinsel is an icon deserving veneration). The third & tallest objet d’art is – would you believe it, boys and girls? An abstract! A flat shape nearly 19 feet high and covered with prettily mottled, incoherently organized & still shiny colors, it’s entitled “Coloring Book” (1997-2005). The brochure explains that it’s based on an illustration of Piglet from a Winnie the Pooh coloring book that Koons scribbled all over with magic markers, then cut out the drawing of Piglet when he was having the sculpture fabricated. Evidently, it’s not enough to be one of the most highly-priced artists in the business: he wants to be known as an abstract painter, too.

This seemed to be going over the heads of the tourists enjoying the fresh air & refreshments sold at the café. One baby was curious about the Rodin. “It’s a sculpture of three men,” her mother explained. One woman was having her photograph taken in front of it, but most people wanted to have their pictures taken in front of the Koonses. “Oh, that is cute!” said one. “Different!” said another. “Stand beside one of those things so I can take your picture,” said a third, to her companion. “Which one?” the companion asked. “I don’t care–you choose.” So much for discriminating taste. Well, it’s summertime, dears. Nobody wants to exercise their eyes or brains overmuch, anyway, so why not amuse the crowds of out-of-towners with a little child-level entertainment? Maybe someday some of these people will want to look at art for grownups. Then again, if the Met doesn’t make more of a stab at educating them, maybe they’ll never learn.

PROS & CONS AT BROOKLYN

There’s a neat press room at the Brooklyn Museum website: it has links to reviews of current exhibitions, not all of them but enough to get me interested in the respective receptions of two shows of Japanese art that I’d seen in the museum itself. The larger and better-known of these shows is “©Murakami” (yes, Virginia, with the copyright sign before the artist’s name). With more than 90 works, including variously-sized paintings and sculptures, videos, wallpaper, T-shirts, coffee mugs and a fully-operational boutique selling Murakami-designed Louis Vuitton purses and other wares, it’s installed in 11 galleries plus a video theater, for a total of 18,500 square feet of gallery space. This show was organized originally by Paul Schimmel of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where the show was seen before arriving in Brooklyn; from Brooklyn, it will go on to the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In Brooklyn, where the show will be on view through July 13, the presentation has been coordinated by Charles Desmarais and Tumelo Mosaka. I will have more to say about Murakami in a moment, but first let me mention the smaller and lesser-known exhibition (now alas concluded) that I also wanted to see. It was “Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900,” with 95 small to medium-large Japanese woodblock prints drawn primarily from the Chazen Museum of Art’s renowned Van Vleek collection in Madison WI. This show began at the Chazen Museum , where it was organized by Laura Mueller, an intern there and doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was presented at the Brooklyn Museum by Joan Cummins, and occupied the equivalent of maybe two of the Murakami-sized galleries, but hey, would you rather have quantity or quality?

Me, I know where I stand, though I took so long fighting my way through those eleven Murakami galleries that I had only a short time left to spend with “Utagawa,” not least because after I got to the museum, I was also told about “Japonisme in American Graphic Art, 1880-1920,” a mini-exhibition of about 25 works on paper drawn from the permanent collection & organized by Karen Sherry. I wanted to see it, too, and found it charming, but by the time I got down to “Utagawa,” it was only 20 or 30 minutes to closing time. All I could do was skitter around the galleries, pausing momentarily hither and yon to gaze in delight at the deft, clever workmanship, dulcet color, wit, warmth and poignance of these prints, with their vast, inventive range of subjects and techniques. Collectively, these prints are known as “ukiyo-e,” or “pictures of the floating world,” the “ukiyo” or “floating world” having been the entertainment districts in cities like Edo (Tokyo) where all the teahouses, brothels and kabuki theaters were located. But, besides courtesans, actors and scenes of revelry, these enchanting prints depicted landscapes and tourist sights, folklore and history, scenes from novels as well as plays, birds, animals, flowers, religious ritual, fishing, archery, even the Westerners beginning to invade Japan by the end of this period. It’s funny, though: glancing around, I noticed other people, including a fair number of younger ones, scurrying happily from print to print, just as I was, and I recollected that upstairs at Murakami, the movements of my fellow museum-goers had been rather sluggish. There hadn’t been that many people there, and the way they dutifully took notes or kept pausing to sit down made it seem as though they were feeling as though the show were duty, not pleasure. Isn’t this ironic, since Murakami was obviously expected to be the crowd-pleaser, while “Utagawa” was supposed to be only for people with special tastes (dare I say “highbrow” as opposed to “lowbrow” ?). If people were actually enjoying themselves at “Utagawa,” maybe this is something the museum should note.

Admittedly, in terms of the media (so conveniently accessible at that museum website), Murakami got a lot more coverage. The New York Times did three (count ‘em, three) sizeable & enthusiastic stories about the show (this shows you where their heads are really at, though Ken Johnson did one conscientious review of “Utagawa”). Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, even the Economist covered Murakami, too, but I guess my favorite bit appeared in the New York Sun, where Lance Esplund reported that when he went through the show, he “couldn’t shake that quintessential bit of dialogue from “The Graduate”: “Ben – I just want to say one word to you – just one word....Plastics.” I think “plastics” is le mot juste for this show: everything in it is slick & synthetic.

To be sure, Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), said to be Japan’s most famous contemporary artist, has the usual heavyweight credentials. According to the museum press release, he has a Ph.D. from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a 19th century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. A wall text at the show proclaims that he is “simultaneously interweaving deeply personal expression” and “high art” with mass culture and commerce. Labels on paintings suggest that he’s using motifs from Zen, the atom bomb, traditional Japanese art & other meaningful sources. Nevertheless, (as even the press release concedes) his real inspirations are manga (Japanese comic strips) and anime (Japanese movie & TV animation) because they’re so much more “representative of modern day Japanese life.” What a democrat (if you can ignore the prices of the Vuitton bags, which run from $650 to $4,950). Many people call Murakami the Japanese Warhol, because like Warhol he has turned art into business, but whereas Andy only had The Factory, which produced art films, art photography and “Oxidation” (piss) paintings, Murakami has a corporation employing more than100 people in New York and Japan. With it, he turns out not only T-shirts and coffee mugs, but toys, calendars, postcards, key chains, etc., what I once would have called souvenirs and now think of as tchotckes. Even so, the American artist to whom he owes most isn’t Warhol but Lichtenstein, who led the way in the ‘60s to making comic-strip conventions respectable enough for museums. Conventions, heck. Let’s be cruel and say comic-strip mannerisms or cliches, for any artist who uses them has to repeat them until the specific formula chosen loses whatever small claims to creativity it might originally have had. Lichtenstein’s success spawned hundreds, even thousands of imitators, though almost all were just original enough not to copy Milton Caniff, the specific cartoonist whom Lichtenstein imitated. Murakami’s many painted or sculpted little people or aliens are depicted with cliches from Japanese cartoons: big blank eyes (minus corneas or pupils) or “jellyfish eyes”, (with coyly-rolling corneas & pupils, enhanced by big spiky lashes), big boobs & long legs on the females, stylized flowers with happy faces in their middles, Disney-like mushrooms with sharp, jagged comic-strip teeth. Again and again, these formulae repeat. How can any artist claim to “deeply personal expression,” when his vocabulary is so firmly based in what is at best only a borrowed visual vocabulary?

(Yet more abstraction)

The most notable sculptures are the two most carefully calculated to be “shocking,” larger-than-life figures in this same cartoon idiom facing each other, the boy called “My Lonesome Cowboy”(1998) and the girl, “Hiropon” (1997). He is having a huge ejaculation that whips out of his erect penis and rises in a static stream to become a lariat that he twirls around his head. She has huge boobs that are similarly ejecting a static stream of milk which floats around her in a circle resembling a hoop or skipping rope. In the same gallery hang accompanying abstract paintings, “Cream” (1998) and “Milk” (1998). The label explains that the rippling, curling lines of the milk, semen and abstract shapes on the canvases go back through Japanese art history to a 17^th century master, as well as appearing in a late 20th century master of animation. I could see a vague kinship in the narrow, outlined curly strips on “Cream” and “Milk” with outlined figures and ocean spray at “Utagawa, “ but the resemblance to animated cartoons is far more apparent (as are analogies with poured paint, intimations of Pollock). My notes at this point say, rather defensively “Still, at least he’s making an attempt to paint. His ab-ex period. Reasonably graceful (the paintings, that is – statues TOO CUTE).”

In retrospect, the statues were the better part of that gallery, and “reasonably graceful” was being kind. The canvases of “Cream” and “Milk” are just a bit too large for the incident upon them, creating a slightly vacant feeling. This becomes even more of a problem with the other “abstracts” throughout the show, while the paintings with “subject matter”  – cartoony figures – are so busy with all kinds of things going on that they suffer from horror vacui. These mediocre paintings go on, gallery after gallery, large and larger. By the end of the show, they’ve become oppressive (although Roberta Smith admired them. This doesn’t speak well of her ability to distinguish between first- and second-rate abstraction, but then she is far from alone in this situation, of which I will say more anon). I hadn’t expected so much painting at this show. All I expected (even looked forward to) was the Vuitton boutique. It was what everybody I talked to about the show had mentioned, what the media had emphasized.. At least it was a fun concept, but when I stopped to think about all those empty near-abstracts, I realized that here is yet another neo-dada icon who wants to be known as a painter, even an abstractionist. It’s not enough to be a multimillionaire & a media darling; he wants critical approval, too.

PAUSE FOR REPRESENTATION:

AT THE MORGAN & ELSEWHERE

If I don’t write about representational art more often, one reason may be that I know people like it anyway and will go to look at it without me telling them to, but I too like good representational art & when the opportunity presents itself, enjoy taking it in. One opportunity that presented itself recently was “Illuminating the Medieval Hunt” at The Morgan Library & Museum, an exhibition featuring nearly 50 miniatures from “Le Livre de la Chasse,” a manuscript written by Gaston Phoebus (1331-1391), and dedicated to Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (through August 10). The original manuscript is now lost, but the Morgan’s copy of it is an extremely fine one, illuminated by a group of laymen in a Paris workshop ca.1407, most likely for John the Fearless, Philip’s son. It has been temporarily disbound for conservation and making a facsimile, so a lovely exhibition has been organized around it by William M. Voelkle, curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan. “Le Livre de la Chasse” deals with hunting, the sport of kings and noblemen in the late Middle Ages. The exquisite illuminations present the many different beasties to be hunted and the many breeds of dog employed in the hunt, as well as scenes of the hunt itself, conducted with dogs, traps, snares and the cross bow (Phoebus looked down upon the last three forms of killing animals as unsporting).  By the early fifteenth century, Paris was artistically into the early Renaissance, so the illuminations place the animals and people into fairly realistic little landscapes with blue skies, Giotto-like rocks and much greenery. The images of a few of the hunted animals reveal imperfect knowledge: reindeer, who were native to Scandinavia, have wooly coats like sheep. Other images are not without humor: one depicts a bear “having his way with the she-bear.” One may learn a considerable amount of dog lore: did you know that spaniels are called spaniels because they originally came from Spain? The blue skies and greenery get to be a bit repetitive, but there is such variety in the animals and so much enthusiasm for rendering them faithfully that I, for one, remained gratefully through to the end.

Three shows of contemporary representational art also deserve mention, though I’ve only seen the first. It was “Lolita Valderrama Savage: Paintings and Drawings” at Peg Alston. A native of the Philippines who now divides her time between New York and Florence, Valderrama Savage exhibited oils and watercolors, mostly of Italian scenes. The oils reminded me a bit too much of late Pissarro, but many of the watercolors were very attractive, modest but fresh. My favorites were No. 5, “The Vineyards” and No. 8, “Cypresses and Olives,” with runners-up No. 6, “Under the Pines,” and No. 7, “Tuscany Farmhouse.” A second representational show that I’d like to see, if I could spare the time, is “Painting in the Park” at Lori Bookstein (through August 1). The brochure that the gallery sent me displays an appealing selection of pictures made in or of New York parklands by artists ranging from Maurice Prendergast in 1902 through Nell Blaine in 1958 to 21st century figures like Kamilla Talbot, Richard Chiriani, Phyllis Floyd and John Goodrich.  Finally, I’d like to mention “Catherine Murphy: New Work” at Knoedler (also through August 1). The gallery sent me a copy of its catalogue, too. It showed that this artist is still producing the strong, evocative, not quite hyperrealist kind of paintings that first attracted me more than 30 years ago, when I was contributing articles to the New Jersey edition of the New York Times and Murphy was painting views of Hoboken junkyards and the Manhattan skyline from her apartment in Jersey City. I was happy to see that she still has my NY Times article in her bibliography.

If you want an illuminating review of the current Murphy show, read the one by David Cohen at artcritical.com, a webzine edited by Cohen to which I have very kindly been invited to contribute. Cohen also does reviews for the New York Sun, but even when he deals with the same artist in both outlets, he varies what he says, and most of the articles at artcritical.com have nothing to do with the Sun and vice versa. I may have to start buying the Thursday Sun, when most all of its gallery reviews appear. Not only did Lance Esplund of that paper find le mot juste to describe Murakami; he also did a fine job with the “Utagawa” show, and I’ve now seen enough gallery reviews from the Sun (by Cohen and others) Xeroxed at gallery reception desks to conclude that it deals with a fair amount of worthwhile art that the NY Times just can’t get around to, or stalls about reviewing. I still disagree with the Sun’s Tory politics, but buying it one day a week won’t take too much advertising away from the Times, and might even encourage the Times’s art critics to be a little more sophisticated in their coverage. It would do them a world of good to be reminded that they’re not the only game in town.

B) THE “FUN” SHOWS CLAIMING TO BE CONTEMPORARY

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT: THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL

In one of the panel discussions for “Action/Abstraction,” a scholar from Yale, David Joselit, described an essay by Hannah Arendt that contrasted “art” with “entertainment.” Art, she’d apparently said, was eternal and “the world,” while entertainment was evanescent but “life.” Art can’t be consumed; but entertainment can. Googling “art entertainment Arendt,” I didn’t find any reference that enabled me to nail down this discussion to a specific essay, but I did turn up a couple of references to an article by Arendt called “The Crisis in Culture,” and it seemed to be all about mass culture as opposed to traditional culture. This reminded me that until the ‘50s, and maybe even in the early ‘60s, intellectuals generally looked down on mass-audience culture. Although within the art world Greenberg’s essay on “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is particularly well known in this respect, not only Arendt but also Dwight Macdonald and I am sure many others joined in a disapproving chorus that abruptly ceased in the mid- to later ‘60s, when pop art started calling the shots and most people who considered themselves intelligentsia began to see how low culturally they could go (the wonder is that Greenberg’s article has survived as well as it has; maybe this is because it’s wittier and more perceptive than the others).

Joselit’s point, if I understood him correctly, was that the “art” scene today is all entertainment and no art – not that he necessarily objected to this (seeing as how his latest book is all about TV and video) but perhaps it was his mea culpa for not having much to say about abstract expressionism, which he evidently considered art. I myself wonder in exactly what sense Arendt was using the terms “art” and “entertainment.” Was she saying that “popular” culture was entertainment, whereas “high” culture was art? If so, my definitions differ. “Entertaining,” if you look in the dictionary, has as one of its synonyms “diverting,” without reference to a particular art form. In this sense, it might even be equated to “enjoyable,” and I find looking at good abstract art highly enjoyable. Nor am I alone in this response to “high” art. Even though “Murakami” took its cues from “popular” culture, and “Utagawa” was in the tradition of “high” art, looking around me at the happy people at “Utagawa,” I would have said that they were being vastly entertained, while all the glum faces upstairs at Murakami were those of people looking dutifully but unhappily at what was claiming to be high art.

I can think of another way of distinguishing between “entertainment” and “art,” too, this being the sense in which “Entertainment Tonight,” the TV show, and Entertainment Weekly, the magazine, define “entertainment.” What both show and magazine primarily concern themselves with are the performing arts as opposed to the visual arts: reviews of and personalities from movies, TV, theatre and the world of popular music, as opposed to reviews of what goes on in museums and galleries, and stories about people who call themselves “artists.” Show biz is also the primary definition of “entertainment” in the dictionary, and “The 2008 Whitney Biennial” was heavily into entertainment, in this sense of the performing arts as opposed to the visual arts. I didn’t take in any of the many movies and videos, considering myself a critic of the visual arts not a movie critic (I don’t think it wise to spread myself too thin). I did note that Spike Lee, who is primarily a commercial movie maker as opposed to an artiste, was exhibiting a 255-minute video entitled “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” which is about Hurricane Katrina and (according to the museum’s program guide) “a scathing indictment of the slow emergency response to the disaster.” Maybe Lee couldn’t get any commercial theaters to take this film, which at more than 4 hours could have been too long and too dull for general release, but obviously the Whitney was delighted to get it, and it was playing to a small but packed house when I poked my nose into the darkness. I didn’t get to the Biennial early enough to take in all the performances at the Park Avenue Armory, either, but they too seem to have been essentially performing arts, as defined by the use of human beings and taking place in four dimensions, not two or three.

I did look at quite a lot of the stationary work at the Biennial, which incidentally included work by 81 artists in toto, and was curated by Henriette Huldisch, Shamim M. Momin and Donna De Salvo, all of the Whitney, with the advice of Thelma Golden of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bill Horrigan of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, and Linda Norden, an independent who has since been appointed director of the gallery at the CUNY graduate center. The stationary work at the Biennial ran heavily to installations. Some were bona fide installations, which is to say all of their disparate elements were meant to illustrate a single idea–for instance, the various unattractive objects assembled by Alice Könitz in one semi-enclosed space were all related to a raffle whose winner would get to fly to Los Angeles in order to view an area of unfinished freeway littered with detritus and construction materials (not my idea of a sight worth crossing the country for, but a poster in the installation announced that interested museum-goers could buy a raffle ticket at the Whitney sales counter in the lobby). Some “installations” were simply groups of works by one artist, each work really with a separate existence––for example, the 13 items exhibited by Amanda Ross-Ho, of which the most egregious was a giant box of kitty-litter, trailing reminiscences of the giant hamburgers and other “monuments” by Claes Oldenburg in the ‘60s, along with those oh-so-common scatological implications that go clear back to “Fountain.” Even the rare examples of painting were often incorporated into “installations,” including four reasonably pleasant representational fantasy paintings of Karen Kilimnik (which must needs to be shown in a small “room” with a toy chandelier) and the sizeable number of well-done small still lifes showing items in an artist’s studio by Ellen Harvey (which again must needs be hung along one wall but viewed through another wall filled with empty frames; the whole depressingly titled “Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self – Portrait of My Studio”).

(And more abstraction)

This business of feeling so embarrassed at simply exhibiting paintings that one must needs bury them in an “installation” seems to be as catching as mumps or measles. One of the relatively few solo exhibitions that I’ve seen since New Year’s was “Amalia Piccinini: Wearing the Silence, A Painting Installation” at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York. I guess the last three words in that title kind of slipped right by me, as the last time I’d seen this artist’s work was in “UNDER-Current: an exhibition of abstract paintings” curated by Paula De Luccia Poons at the Asian-American Women Artists’ Association. Many painters in that show, including Piccinini, were or had been students of De Luccia and Larry Poons, and since those two are so much into painting, I just sort of assumed this show was going to be all about painting, too. Instead, when I got there, I found a combination of larger, mostly all-blue abstract paintings (about 4 foot square) and small, all solid-blue abstracts on paper (16" x 12") arranged high and low, hither and yon upon walls of an irregularly-shaped exhibition space and interspersed with chairs, sections of tables and items (books, desk drawers, etc.). All these de facto stage sets had been “unified” by rectangles of dark blue paint on the walls. Everything moveable (including the furniture) was for sale individually, but none of the paintings had names, nor was there any other way of referring to one as opposed to another (by numbers, for example). This was too bad, since some of the large paintings on canvas were quite likeable and worth mentioning individually (had there been any way for me to mention them individually). Though most were monochromatic, it was a very vibrant shade of blue, and there was just enough incident in how the paint had been applied to get away from the dead hand of minimalism & maintain the feeling that a living human hand had been at work. These abstracts had an esthetic sense about them, a feeling that the artist wanted to create something beautiful and moving. This put them head and shoulders above any of the minuscule amounts of abstract art I saw at the Whitney, including the photographic stunts that Sherrie Levine had dreamed up to try and reduce the “cloud studies” of Alfred Stieglitz to ultra-mechanical geometric abstractions, and the harsh, almost deliberately awkward paintings by Mary Heilmann (b. 1940), who according to the label is “the consummate artist’s artist.” This label, together with the prominent placement of these paintings, suggests to me that while Heilmann may be a cult figure, her work has never sold all that well and she herself is not world famous – yet here she was enshrined as one of the Biennial’s revered mother figures. How else to explain this, if not for the fact that the Whitney, even in the midst of its singularly gaudy circus, nevertheless felt obliged to pay at least a token homage to abstraction?

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT, PART TWO:

CAI GUO-QIANG AT THE GUGGENHEIM

We seem to be well-provided with star-quality Asian artists this year: in addition to Murakami, considered Japan’s most famous contemporary artist, we had the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum playing host to “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe,” and Cai (b. 1957) is arguably China’s most famous contemporary artist. The show itself was organized by Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim, and Alexandra Monroe, senior curator of Asian art, in close collaboration with the artist (Krens, incidentally, will be stepping down as director later this year, after a successor has been found, though he will remain as a senior advisor, particularly concerned with developing the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the organization’s largest satellite museum to date, scheduled to open in 2012). Having concluded its stay in New York, “I Want to Believe” will move on to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing (August-September 2008, during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games), then to the Guggenheim Bilbao (March-September 2009). Although Cai’s been based in New York since 1995, he spends time in Beijing, too, and is director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, ceremonies that (according to the Guggenheim’s 10-page press release for its own show) are “being designed as art spectacles of unprecedented mass outreach that will reach an estimated four billion television viewers.” If that ain’t show biz, I don’t know what is. Somehow it came as no surprise to me to read that Cai’s career began with the study of stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. But this artist (whose name is pronounced tsai gwo-chang) is also into entertainment in the sense of “enjoyable,” to judge from the more than 325,000 visitors who took in the Guggenheim show, and made it the museum’s second-most attended exhibition since the Frank Gehry retrospective in 2001. My second visit to this show was on the last Friday before its end, and when I arrived around 6:30 pm, the line of people waiting to get in stretched clear back to and up Madison Avenue (I should add that Friday evening is "pay what you wish," and that otherwise admission is $18 ($15 for students & seniors); also that when I left around 7:30, the crowd inside had thinned, and the line outside was gone).

Much of the Cai exhibition was good old-fashioned uni-referential imagery. As such, it was highly enjoyable in the traditional way that museums have profited from for decades (though naturally brought up to date with the requisite heavyweight labels emphasizing political and/or philosophical relevance of the work on view). The liveliest and most conspicuous artwork was “Inopportune: Stage One” (2004). This was a jumble of nine real automobiles hung in an ascending arc from the ground floor lobby up through the open center of the museum to its top ramp, embellished with tubes of blinking lights and intended to suggest the trajectory of a car bomb (political relevance). I also liked “Head On” (first “realized” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in 2006). This consisted of a pack of 99 life-sized and very life-like wolves stationed as though they were charging up the ramp until they reached a glass partition, against which the leaders were hurling themselves and then falling down dead. According to the label, this was meant to be an allegory of “the human fallibility of following collective ideology and society’s fate to repeat mistakes,” though if you were a 10-year-old, you could simply marvel at how fearfully real the wolves looked, with real-looking hair and glass or plastic eyes, reminiscent of the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, across Central Park..

Most fascinating for me was a large group of near-life-sized, extremely realistic but overly emotionalistic clay sculptures of Chinese people individually or in small groups and striking agonized poses. Some looked like laborers, some looked like prisoners being tortured, one was a woman with babies crawling on the floor, etc. The label said that this was “New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” originally a sculptural ensemble made by members of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1965, when the Chinese government still sanctioned only socialist-realist art. This ensemble was said to depict “the misery of peasants at the hands of an exploitative landlord” before the communists took over, and was so much admired by party ideologists that it had been reproduced and erected in cities throughout China. However, as “appropriated” under capitalism (first at the 1999 Venice Biennale, then for this show ) it was offered as a work-in-progress (or perhaps work-in-process-of-deconstruction would be more appropriate): at the beginning all the figures were complete, but as you walked up the ramp, they began to disintegrate, revealing the wire-and-wood armatures on which they’d been built, until the last pieces in the group were nothing but armatures. In recreating a work of “such emotional power,” Cai was said to have intended to “subvert contemporary Western notions of art by revealing the constraints of thought and fundamental lack of stylistic and creative freedom in the West.”  For this he (plus maybe the team which assisted him in reconstructing the ensemble) got the Biennale’s Golden Lion. Here’s a man who knows how to roll with the punches.

All this was fun, enjoyable old-style representational art that appeals to all age groups, though I suppose what the children liked best was the real little Tibetan yak-skin boat that a single person could climb into and navigate down a real little river. Children of all ages, from toddlers to the senescent, might also have enjoyed the videos of fireworks displays that Cai had mounted around the globe. To judge from the art-world spam that as an art critic I receive, such spectacles are paid for by museums and do-good organizations that don’t seem to have too many nickels to spend on good contemporary paintings and sculpture but will cough up thousands, even millions of dollars to give people who never go to museums something to amuse them for a few moments.

Cai gets a lot of mileage out of the facts that a) he uses gunpowder for his displays, and b) the Chinese are said to have invented gunpowder around 2,000 years ago, but from a purely visual standpoint, his spectacles bear distinct resemblances to the fireworks that Macy’s sets off every Fourth of July over the East River in the Big Apple, and that hundreds, if not thousands of other communities across the country also watch on the same holiday. I also imagine that Cai’s gunpowder displays belong to the same general family as the son et lumière shows that the French are said to stage at Versailles, and that have been held in other historical sites from Athens to Egypt, as well as to all the other fireworks displays staged in China for the past couple of millennia, and to all the fireworks displays in Europe ever since Marco Polo (or anyway, somebody in the late Middle Ages) brought gunpowder from China to the West. Then again, none of the spectators for such spectacles got or get to read high-class rationales for their fun, whereas at the Guggenheim, visitors were introduced to Cai’s show with a wall text explaining that his “inherently unstable” art forms deal “with ideas of transformation, expenditure of materials, and connectivity.” The wall text went on to maintain that the artist’s “social idealism characterizes all change, however violent, as carrying the seeds of positive creation.” That all depends on how you define “positive.”

(Would you believe more abstraction?)

Until Cai came along, nobody thought of such spectacle as the art of the museums, but in the Duchampian spirit of anything-can-be-art-if-the-artist-says-it-is, Cai has introduced the art world to gunpowder–and to the high art that he evidently thinks can successfully be made with it. Another major element of his exhibition at the Guggenheim were the “gunpowder drawings,” made by igniting gunpowder laid on paper. In fact, the top three levels of the Guggenheim’s ramp were devoted to a chronological exposition of these gunpowder drawings as well as the videos. The “drawings” were lightly colored, very mildly interesting, kind of speckled brown on white, completely haphazard abstracts. Occasionally they came off. Most of the time, they wouldn’t have rated a second glance if it weren’t for the novel means of their creation, but evidently here is yet another world-famous, multimillionaire neo-dada who would like to be taken seriously as an abstract artist.

NEVERTHELESS

(The best abstract art)

to be seen at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, during Cai’s multimedia extravaganza, was not his gunpowder drawings but a much smaller show, “From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim.” This comparatively limited display, with about 70 mostly small- to medium-sized paintings, works on paper and sculptures, was selected by Karole Vail, assistant curator at the Guggenheim, from the museum’s permanent collection, with the aid of Megan Fontanella and Tracey Bashkoff. The group consisted of work acquired from either the gallery or the estate of Karl Nierendorf (1889-1947). A native of Germany who began his career as a dealer in Cologne in 1920, Nierendorf emigrated to the U.S. in 1936 and re-established his gallery in New York. Here he seems to have found a community of interest with Hilla Rebay, presiding genius over the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with the result that he sold them many important pieces for their collection, and the further result that they acquired his entire estate after he died. Some work on view was familiar, especially the Kandinsky, nor am I particularly fond of Kandinsky’s later work, but the assembly of Klee was nothing short of miraculous, and there were fine pieces by Léger, Miró, Adolph Gottlieb, Ernst, Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Kirchner, Matisse, Lyonel Feininger, Albers and Grosz, as well as artists I’d never heard of. In this latter category belong Ernest Karl Mundt, represented by three marvelous little copper-alloy wire sculptures (ca. 1946), and Ewald Mataré, responsible for an amazingly abstract watercolor, “Finnish Rock Islands” (1933). Very little work in this show qualified as what we’d today call pure abstraction, and some of it was perfectly representational, but all of it was distinguished by an authentic esthetic vision realized through sure command of the media involved – a class act, in other words.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT, PART THREE:

OLAFUR ELIASSON

When I was little, I lived with my mother across from Carl Schurz Park, a small oasis that fronts upon the East River. At its north end was a pier where was moored one of the city’s fireboats, a vessel used to put out fires on ships and piers in the days when New York’s magnificent natural harbor made shipping a major base of its thriving economy. When a little boy or girl came to visit me, I used to take them down through the park and show them the fireboat. On holidays and other special occasions, groups of these fireboats would put on handsome displays of water spouting high in the air (after all, there’s a lot of water in New York harbor). Most of the goods and passengers formerly shipped through New York harbor have long since devolved to airports or other ports, and the fireboat next to Carl Schurz Park is long gone, but the city still seems to maintain some fireboats, and they are still used for festive occasions. As recently as June 14, 2008, eight fireboats staged a red, white and blue water salute at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, in honor of Flag Day. This event, however, rated only a brief announcement by Laurel Graeber, who writes a regular column for the Friday New York Times listing upcoming events that may be of interest to children.

What a contrast with the publicity blitz accorded to Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967), a Danish Icelandic artist who (with the aid of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) has managed to persuade the Public Art Fund, one of those do-good organizations I mentioned earlier, to underwrite “The New York City Waterfalls!” This updating of the fireboat type of spectacle is a manufactured but ephemeral installation consisting of four rigidly rectangular cascades of water, built on steel scaffolding & ranging in height from 90 to 120 feet. They are installed at sites along the East River, and will be there through October 13 (though water will be pumped up to flow down over them only from 7 am to 1 pm five days a week, and starting at 9 am Tuesdays and Thursdays). The price tag here was $15.5 million, and the publicity generated by inviting a boatload of reporters out to see the show included coverage in Newsweek, USA Today, and–since the story was picked up by the Associated Press – newspapers and networks across the country and in Canada (among the websites that picked up the AP story and that I picked up on google were the CBC and Seattle Times). Verena Dobnik, who covered the story for the AP, and Laura Bly, who covered it for USA Today, appear to be general reporters with no art credentials, but Newsweek sent its hippy-dippy junior art critic, Cathleen McGuigan, and Roberta Smith did the honors for the Times, leading to some choice analogies. McGuigan likened the spectacle to the pyramids of Egypt and a mammoth Roman statue of the emperor Constantine, while Smith (conveniently forgetting that all of Manhattan was swamp, field, rock outcropping and woodland almost up to the moment when Pieter Stuyvesant bought it from the native Americans) described the waterfalls as “the remnants of a primordial Eden, beautiful, uncanny signs of a natural nonurban past that the city never had.”

Most of the $15.5 million price tag was raised from private sources rounded up by but also including the Public Art Fund (which despite its name is a private non-profit outfit). A small amount was funding from NY State, but Mayor Bloomberg estimates it should generate $55 million for the city’s economy (this way he gets Brownie points for being a good businessman as well as a patron of the ahts). The $55 million will, it is hoped, come from tourists from out of town, spending money on hotels and restaurants; also from both tourist and locals who will spring for things like special tours of the installations by the Circle Line. The Circle Line is a company that runs regular boat trips around Manhattan, with guides pointing out all the city’s sights visible from the water, and I adore those regular trips. Any time I can talk a visiting fireman into taking one, I go along, but I don’t think I really want to go and look at any of Eliasson’s waterfalls. To judge from the many photographs of them in the Times and elsewhere, they are rather cold, heavy, mechanical and not terribly attractive. Even the tallest is only a twentieth as tall as Angel Falls in Venezuela, and, although I haven’t seen any statistics on the volume of cubic feet of water that pour over them, I suspect that it’s equally unimpressive when compared with Niagara, nor are any of Eliasson’s man-made waterfalls variegated and graceful and surrounded by rocks and verdure, in the way that almost any decent natural waterfall can be.

Then again, I don’t think “The New York City Waterfalls” is meant to compare with natural beauty. I think it’s meant to be a subtle intrusion upon it, irritating just as all art in the tradition of dada is meant to shock and irritate. Many people have been conditioned to accept anything as art, and to try and find beauty, even if it isn’t there, in anything defined as art, but I’m one of the few who still responds as Duchamp originally wanted everybody to respond, negatively – not that I get really angry, having seen so much of such art, but even mild irritation makes me truer to the initial ideas of dada than Roberta Smith! I went to Central Park in 2005, when Christo and his wife used it to stage “The Gates.” Their $20 million project supposedly brought in $250 million in tourist revenue, but for me it was like putting a sexy black nightgown on the Venus de Milo. She doesn’t need one. It was winter dusk when I went to see “The Gates.” The setting sun tinted the clouds with a subtle but glorious range of pinks and golds, forming the backdrop for exquisite lacy webs of bare black tree trunks, branches and twigs (Joyce Kilmer has nothing on me when it comes to passion for trees). That scene was beautiful in and of itself. It didn’t need acres of dully & obviously mass-produced monochromatic orange cloth.

Oh, I suppose that if I happen to be in Lower Manhattan next to the East River between now and October 13, and somebody points out one of Eliasson’s “waterfalls,” I might crane my neck to see it, but I have better things to do than make a special trip downtown. Quite aside from the unappetizing appearance of the photos of Eliasson’s outdoor spectacle, I was unimpressed by his recent indoor spectacle, a retrospective entitled “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson” at the Museum of Modern Art. In fact, I was so unimpressed that I couldn’t even bring myself to trundle out to P.S. 1, MoMA’s outpost in Queens, where the second installment of this retrospective was on view.

I more or less happened onto Eliasson’s MoMA show by accident, having originally gone to MoMA to see “Color Chart: Reinventing Color” (of which more anon). I’d also dropped in on “Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing,” a fairly nasty show of about 100 drawings organized by Connie Butler, chief drawings curator of MoMA, from its permanent collection (through July 7). It pairs self-taught artists and professional artists who, according to the wall text, share with the self-taught “an eccentric visual vocabulary or a unique approach to their medium that situates their drawings distinctly outside canonical art history.” Maybe it situates these artists outside the canonical art history of modernism, but they’re distinctly inside the equally-if-not-more-canonical art history of postmodernism, for this show is replete with pomo brand names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Currin and Richard Prince, celebrated pomo cartoonists like R. Crumb and Jim Nutt, and near-amateur dada and surrealist cult figures like the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven and Florine Stettheimer. The sole holdover from the dignified, colorful gallery of paintings by self-taught artists that I remember seeing at MoMA in my childhood was the sedate “Self-Portrait” (1929) by John Kane. There was nary a Douanier Rousseau in sight, nor the powerful “Manchester Valley” (1914-1918?) by Joseph Pickett, so I concluded that every school of art selects those self-taught artists which lend it credibility. There were modernist self-taught artists and now there are postmodernist self-taught artists, the former group (as Greenberg argued, many years ago) basing their styles upon reproductions of sophisticated or academic art, and latter group (as I argue) basing their styles to a much larger extent on commercial art and other forms of mass-audience visual culture, especially comic strips and books. The result (with the professionals, if not the amateurs) illustrates how dada has gotten backwards a passage that Greenberg must many times have wished he’d never written. Reviewing Pollock’s second solo exhibition in 1945, he said that Pollock was not afraid to look ugly, and that “all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” How many artists since have tried to be ugly, in hopes that it will prove they are profoundly original? This show suggests that the answer is, a lot.

To return to Eliasson, whose exhibition was circulated by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, organized there by Madeleine Grynsztejn, and staged at MoMA by Roxana Marcoci and Klaus Biesenbach. I first became aware of this exhibition when I charged out from “Glossolalia” into the third-floor escalator bank, and noticed that everybody around me, all the rapidly-moving swarms of my fellow art-lovers, looked like death warmed-over or so many moving waxworks from Madame Tussaud’s or Duane Hanson. Looking up, I saw why: what looked like yellow light from the ceiling was flooding down and washing out everything but yellow and black from the faces, hair, bodies and clothes of the people beneath. This installation was called “Room for One Color” (1997). Moving into the gallery labeled “Architecture and Design II,” I found a light box in the middle of a large and unfurnished darkened space, rotating so that it threw speckles of different colors on the walls and the people milling around. Sometimes the colors were pretty, but they went by so fast I didn’t have any real chance to contemplate them. This was “I Only See Things When They Move” (2004), and, as the moving gallery-goers cast their flickering shadows on the walls, it turned them into part of the artwork. Moving on out and down the corridor leading to the eastern end of the building, I passed a line of people waiting to experience the next Eliasson installation, “Space Reversal” (2007). I joined the line and was eventually able to step up into a three-sided tall narrow box with mirrors on the top, bottom and sides, so that you could see yourself repeated endlessly down, up and sideways. “Tricky!” I wrote down in my notes, and I did go on to see the other artworks in the show, but they were different without being distinctive, required more space to describe them than I care to devote to them – and anyway maybe you get the general idea already.

Though billed as “installations,” these were all really a form of performance art, in which the museum-goer doubled as spectator and performer. In the brochure accompanying this show, Marcoci and Biesenbach maintained that Eliasson was “pointing to the elliptical relationship between reality, perception, and representation.” He was also engaging “in an ongoing exploration of subjectivity, reflection, and the fluid boundary between nature and culture, revealing the degree to which reality is constructed and helping us to reflect more critically on our experience of it.” Very elevated, though relevant only on an intellectual level, not really helping viewers to look at and respond to the visual properties of the work on view, such as it was. The idea of art-lover doubling as art, however, reminded me of two childhood experiences of mine. The first was “Hellzapoppin’,” a theatrical performance that starred two veterans of vaudeville, Olsen & Johnson.  When you entered the theater, you were led backstage and then required to walk across the stage itself. In the middle of it, a spurt of air came up through a hole in the floorboards and blew the skirts of the women and little girls above their heads, revealing their panties. After you’d survived this ordeal, you were escorted to your seat and entitled to watch later arrivals being embarrassed. This was 1941, I was six years old, and I thought this show was hilarious (it still makes me giggle a little in retrospect, but then I inherited a Rabelaisian sense of humor from my mom).

The other experience that the Eliasson installations reminded me of were the fun houses I used to enjoy at about the same age in the amusement park at Coney Island.. Particularly relevant to Eliasson was the house of mirrors, where you (and everybody else there) could see your image distorted in various ways: ultra-short and fat, ultra-thin and tall, etc. Nowadays, Coney Island and the few other remaining amusement parks have long since been eclipsed in popularity by theme parks like Disneyland, Disney World, Six Flags and Busch Gardens. I don’t know exactly what goes on at theme parks, having only dim memories of my one visit to Disneyland in 1959, but I’d imagine that they still delight children, especially children of blue-collar parents, with rides & spectacles & other fun. I would also imagine that many blue-collar parent of yesteryear have sent their children on to college, and that college graduates are apt to feel that museums are more befitting than theme parks to their station in life. Still, even going to college these days doesn’t teach much of anybody to really appreciate good abstract painting. Rather, students seem to be taught that if they can dress up their fun with a lot of high-minded talk about “perception” and “subjectivity,” they can have their fundamentally lowbrow kinds of entertainment and pass themselves off as highbrows, too.

CANNED COLOR

The Museum of Modern Art wasn’t doing much of anything, either, to show its visitors top-quality abstraction with “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today.” This exhibition, organized by MoMA’s Ann Temkin, was intended to show how artists had capitalized on standardized, mass-produced colors of paint. It included some 90 works (paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, digital art, videos and films) by 44 artists, primarily ranging in date from the 1950s to the present, but leading off with Duchamp’s “Tu m’” (1918). This painting was there for two reasons: first, because it incorporates a string of diamond-shaped color samples inspired by a paint manufacturer’s catalogue, and second, because Duchamp personifies the machine esthetic, the assumption that a mass-produced product is as good as, if not better than, any object produced by the human hand. This may have been true in his case, too, at any rate as it relates to painting. Gazing at the dinginess of those diamond-shaped color samples, and the muddy browns that dominate the rest of “Tu m’,” I couldn’t help thinking (yet again) what a perfectly terrible color sense Duchamp had. The rest of the show was not much better, though it varied between the murky (Rauschenberg’s “Rebus”), the decorative (Ellsworth Kelly’s squares of color, Yves Klein blue) and the shrill (a whole mini-gallery of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes, and a multicolor version of Stella’s pinstripes, among many other examples). This fundamentally dismissive attitude toward color was all part of the philosophy which came into style in the ‘60s, with Andy Warhol opining, “I want to be a machine,” and Stella adding “Straight out of a can, it can’t get better than that.” Temkin argues that attitudes like these were all part of the “democratization of the realm of fine art.” This argument assumes that all rich people have a highly developed color sense, and are therefore the only people who care about the many subtleties possible if an artist wants to mix his or her own colors. The argument also assumes that all poor people are incapable of appreciating such subtleties. Aptitudes and income don’t correlate like that, but the net result of assuming they do was to eliminate from the show any artist who doesn’t come out of the canned tradition of dada. It’s too bad that all the young people who thronged to this show, presumably out of an interest in color, must have come away with such a limited idea of what color can be at its best.

It hasn’t always been like that. In 1989, the museum played host to the beautiful Frankenthaler retrospective that originated in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where it had been organized by E. A. Carmean.  In 1986, MoMA staged the beautiful Morris Louis retrospective that John Elderfield organized for it. Elderfield, however, having since risen to the position of chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, is retiring from that position this month. He’s been awarded the title of chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, and will remain with the museum in an advisory capacity, working on exhibitions projected for Matisse and de Kooning in 2010.

C) AT LAST, ABSTRACTION: THE NEW OLD MASTERS

1. NOLAND

I wish that at least some of those innocents who thought that MoMA was telling them all about color had gone to see “Earning His Stripes: Kenneth Noland in the ‘60s” at Leslie Feely Fine Art. Now, here is an artist who knows ten times more about color than any of the celebrities in “Color Chart.” Since he belongs to the same artistic generation as Warhol and Stella, I asked him whether the paintings in his show were made with paint straight out of the can. “Oh God no!” he exclaimed (as I reported in my review of this show for artcritical). He went on to explain that not only did he have to mix paints to get the colors he wanted, but also depending on how the paint was applied, different degrees of liquidity were needed as well.

None of the paintings at Lesley Feely screamed color. They were part of the series of horizontal stripe paintings that Noland executed in the mid- to late-‘60s, but that series began with brilliant colors and modulated into paler ones. The paintings in this show were mostly later, paler ones. For this reason, perhaps, they’ve never gotten the attention they deserve: Kenworth Moffett’s otherwise stellar Abrams book on Noland reproduces only three of the really pale ones in color, and Diane Waldman’s Guggenheim exhibition catalogue, at most five. I remember being a bit disappointed myself when I saw them for the first time, in early 1969. I’d scheduled a story for Time with a page of color reproductions of Noland’s work, timed to coincide with the show of this work at Lawrence Rubin (where a very young Leslie Feely was already on the staff). I did the story anyway, and in the process learned to love this work, nor has its strength diminished with the years. “Fresh as a daisy, still!” was the verdict of one talented fellow artist with whom I compared notes.

Then and now, these paintings impressed me initially with their elegance, but the longer I stayed with them, I also became conscious of their wiry resolve, and they got to me on a gut level, the way great art can & does. Everything in the show was memorable, but the first of my three favorites was “Flight Topic” (1969), a long, narrow painting with narrow bands of palest pink, mauve, yellow, blue, peach and pale blue. The second was “Silent Adios III” (1969), a dark painting, with the top half a very broad band of electric blue, the bottom half a very broad band of a deep eggplant purple, and complimentary, narrower bands of electric yellows, electric greens – plus beige at the very top. My third favorite was “Via Shimmer” (1968), that I saw before the show opened & that I described in my last column, with broader bands of beige and cream, plus narrower ones of mauve and baby blue.

More often than not, the bands of paint on these pictures were interspersed with narrow bands of raw canvas. The raw canvas gave the surfaces textural variety that softened and further humanized them. At the same time, those rigidly straight bands, created with masking tape and rollers, fitted in very naturally with the post-painterly climate of the ‘60s. People who didn’t look too closely even classed him as a believer in the Duchampian machine esthetic. One result was that his work was included in “The Responsive Eye,” MoMA’s big op art show in 1965.. He also won the endorsement of Leo Steinberg, in “Other Criteria,” the title article in Steinberg’s 1972 book, even though elsewhere in the same article Steinberg attacked Greenberg.

The forms in Noland’s paintings are usually dismissed as mere formal devices to enable him to explore color, but the lines and shapes of these horizontal stripe paintings have a basis in the natural world as well. Anybody who has tried to print from a computer probably knows that a horizontal format is called a “landscape” format (as opposed to the vertical, which is called a ”portrait,” both terms being long established among vendors of stretched canvases for painters). Horizontal stripes add to the feelings of harmony and serenity that these paintings project, while also suggesting unreeling straight narrow roads along which racing cars can zip at top speed. Steinberg even called Noland’s pictures of the late ‘60s “the fastest I know.”

2. JILAINE JONES

The second show I reviewed for artcritical is “Jilaine Jones: Sculpture” at the New York Studio School (through July 19). As I said on that occasion, “This show is dynamite. All four sculptures in it are excellent, but Wonder World (2006), the massive one that all but fills the entry gallery, is particularly powerful. Rising into three successive angular peaks, nearly eight feet tall, twelve feet long and four feet wide, Wonder World is built of hard steel rods, bars and sheet steel that interact with somewhat more malleable slabs and blocks of concrete and rock board. The whole is tough, hard, aggressive and muscular – yet also slender, graceful, sensitive and wise.”

While Jones isn’t yet famous, she’s not unknown to many of this column’s readers. Born in London in 1959, she’s long since emigrated to the U.S. and lives in Connecticut. Besides formal schooling, she’s been a studio assistant to both the American, James Wolfe, and the Brit, Tim Scott, but all of this was in the ‘70s and ‘80s; more recently she’s taught at the New York Studio School.

Central to her endeavors is the combination of two materials she starts with and has been inspired by: steel (welded in the constructivist tradition) and clay (shaped or modeled, then translated into more durable materials through casting or fabrication). Jones’s use of clay represents a break from the formalism of welded steel sculpture for its own sake. With its more organic outlines and evident workability, clay suggests the figure, and Jones has gone through an intensive period of working with the live model. As Susan Rosenberg explains, in her illuminating catalogue, during this period of study in 2003-2004, Jones instructed a model to move through an architectural scaffolding of her own making, and through a tripartite succession of poses.. Rosenberg quotes an email from Jones, explaining her intentions: “I wanted to capture such mechanics as radical shapes that the body is constructed to be able to make; the measured lengths of space it can traverse in one thrust; variations in speed in regard to the complexity of movement and weight carried vertically or horizontally; dramatic changes between the body’s expansion and compression; the negotiation of gravity, to push from, fall towards or acquire equilibrium.”

The most direct fruit of this preparation appears to be Wonder World, since its three elements could be said to correspond to the “tripartite succession of poses” that Jones’s model was instructed to take. According to the catalogue, these three segments of the sculpture can also be compared to sculpture’s three modes of addressing the viewer–floor, pedestal and monument–or as three stages of life–childhood, adolescence and adulthood, but being true abstractions, the human presence is implied not stated, felt not said. Should the viewer wish to play around with the larger theme of clay v. steel, it can also be interpreted as life v. art, nature v. culture, warm v. cool, lighter v. darker, and any number of other dualities–which, however, in the works themselves fuse into integrated wholes. One duality that doesn’t seem applicable would be “simple v. complex,” since both steel and clay are organized in both complex and simple configurations. In “Wonder World,” for example, the large and relatively simple triangular sheet of steel is complemented by a complicated framework of narrow rods of the same material.

Of the remaining sculptures, largest is Portrait of a Solitary Walk (2007), another floor piece 7 feet tall and 9 feet long. Composed of a complex open horizontal rectangle of thin steel rods and bars, with a spiky vertical concrete shape in the middle that encloses small rocks, it’s inspired by the country walks that the artist likes to take. While it looks somewhat surrealistic in the photograph on the invitation, it has real independence and gutsiness in the flesh One of two smaller works that have been mounted on pedestals is Five Cart Loads (2008), combining a relatively simple frame of steel rods with three softly, clearly modeled smaller shapes of Hydrocal (an extra-strong gypsum cement or plaster of Paris). Most intricate, intimate and charming is She is Like Her Children (2005), only 22 inches long and 18 inches high. It situates two equally yielding small modeled shapes of Hydro-Stone (another extra-strong plaster) within a fragile cage-like environment of silvery steel wires, with a third Hydro-Stone shape outside the cage, lonely but still essential to the composition.

3. FRANCINE TINT

One of the pleasures of February/ March was “Francine Tint: New Paintings” at Tria. Tint is such a reliable performer that it might be easy to take her for granted, were it not for the talent, enthusiasm and dedication she brings to her work, and the resultant sense of ease, control yet abandonment that it conveys.  This good-looking exhibition was marked by a deeper, richer palette than I have associated with the artist in the past, and there was an unusually thick, luxurious quality to the paint, mostly dragged horizontally across the canvas and incorporating many colors, often in the form of drips, spatters and other accent marks. Among the paintings I liked best was “Blue Ballet,” a medium-sized canvas (30" x 78") whose dominant colors were the three primaries of light (as opposed to the primaries of pigment): red, blue and green, but with a couple of areas of light purple over on the right: deeply satisfying. Another painting that really spoke to me was “Irish Smoke,” a long, relatively narrow horizontal (34½ “ x 105"). It was the most off-beat, predominantly soft greens (olive, leaf-green and mint), with muted touches of pinkish red, black and more mint. This for me was the best painting in the show, but I also very much liked “Savage Release,” a relatively small vertical (46" x 18"), dominated by a medium purple, white mixed with wine, with many small horizontal strokes. The layers of paint underneath were more familiar: flesh-colored, yellow and green, but the top layer was very fresh, very strong. “River King” was the largest painting in the show, at 45" x 240" really a whopper. The colors were majestically lovely, the dominants being deep blues and aquas, with dribbles, spatters and accent marks of greens, purples and mustard. I couldn’t quite make up my mind about this painting, thinking it was perhaps a tad too long, but a fellow art-lover whose opinion I respect told me emphatically that she thought it did came off.

4: POONS

Before I got to Jacobson Howard, I’d been prepared for the show I was to see by the dramatic title of the brochure announcing it: “Larry Poons: Throw, Pour, Drip, Spill & Splash, Paintings 1971-1980.” In the brochure’s eloquent statement, Darby Bannard told how in the late ‘60s, Poons began to evolve from very popular brightly-colored reductivist paintings with small, regular dots and ellipses into the far more speculative but also far more adventurous and exciting “GRITTY RIVULETS” of paint thrown at vertical canvases and allowed to course down them in regular patterns of runs. “There’s a primal aggressiveness to these BLURRED AND BLISTERED SURFACES which is an analog to the headstrong procedure,” Bannard wrote. “Like Pollock, Poons extended his “stroke” by flinging paint, but a classic Pollock looks almost dainty next to a Poons.” From all this I was expecting maybe a lunatic’s incoherent sweeps of paint? But when I got to the gallery, what struck me most about these ravishing paintings was not their impetuosity but rather their extraordinary control. The colors were deeper and more variegated than the misty marvels of gray, black, pink and golden tones that I used to see at André Emmerich in the mid-‘80s, when I was becoming reacquainted with Poons’s work after a decade away from it, and much of the paint had been thinner when originally applied, but the regularity of the descending rivulets and the harmoniousness of the colors was striking  “Serene, exceedingly beautiful,” my notes start out. “Induce a feeling of reverence, veneration.”  I wouldn’t deny that these qualities existed, but reviewing my notes, I must add that I think to some degree what I noticed represented a response to what Bannard had written, an overreaction in the direction of noticing control simply because Bannard had emphasized just the opposite. In retrospect, I’d say that what these paintings really conveyed was that mysterious combination of control and adventure, restraint and freedom that may perhaps be the hallmark of all truly fine art (to the extent that one can predict its qualities at all).

Looking over the rest of what I wrote, I find that I’ve given three stars to four of the paintings in this show, and although I practically never use four stars, I’ve given four stars to two. This column is too long already for me to discuss all six, so I’ll just say that I gave three stars to “Festinnoig” (1975), “Sheaves” (1978), “Vespers” (1980) and “Old Dominion” (1980). The first four-star one was “Wiseman” (1979), one of a number of steep verticals (108" x 61"). “Another serenity to inspire reverence,” I noted. “The height makes me look up to it, but also the colors – a Monet garden picket fence from near top becomes stalks of plants instead, w. red at the top vigorous poppy color and floating bits of what looks like leaves + petals – touches of blue for sky behind. “Stalks” = evenly blended, almost matte color but w. many hues – soft pinks and greens, occasional narrow streaks of red and green but whole area v. authoritatively BLENDED.” Not that these analogies are the only ones that could be made; they just happened to be what occurred to me, first time around. On another occasion, I might be reminded by the descending paint streaks of rain, as so many other people have been, or a forest of bamboo stalks, or what not. My whole argument for multireferential imagery is that an abstract painting isn’t just a fuzzy, indeterminate example of traditional representational painting, but a complex synthesis, unconsciously achieved, of many different images that the artist has stored in his or her unconscious (or memory), landscape being only one among dozens, even hundreds and thousands of others. My notes on the other painting to which I gave four stars indicates some of that wider range. The painting, “Tantrum 2" (1979), is a long and broad statement, 65" x 165" – “huge, but not offensively so, lower height makes width acceptable. A mountain vista here. At top of canvas to left, dark jungle colors–black, green, brown. Below it, with top side sloping down to right – pinks , with notes of blue, spiky shapes at top of this area, descending picket fence, descending row of mountains, descending musical scale, descends to occasional bottom level. Blips at far right, while topmost area has evolved into sunshine colors – flesh, chartreuse, lime, mint. Iron control here, however haphazard it may appear. GORGEOUS  –  my favorite.”

5. DZUBAS

On the same night that the Poons show opened at Jacobson Howard, Leslie Feely Fine Art was opening “Friedel Dzubas: Paintings of the 1970s &1980s,” one floor down in the same building. As the artist himself is no longer with us, none of his friends could be invited to the opening, and the brightly-lit gallery was almost empty, except for those few of us who took a break from the bustle and noise upstairs to come down, contemplate and meditate upon equally if not occasionally even more extraordinary beauty. This situation reflected the respective amounts of attention the two artists got, even during Dzubas’s lifetime. Greenberg once said of Dzubas to me,”He’s great, but nobody knows it,” and Greenberg himself was as much responsible for this situation as anybody. True, he contributed one catalogue essay to a 1977 show of Dzubas paintings in Germany, but that as nearly as I can tell is all he ever wrote about him, nor did he go around praising him and holding him up to younger artists as an exemplar, the way he did with Olitski. Admittedly, Greenberg didn’t write about or celebrate Poons, either, but Poons already had a reputation before he moved into the Greenbergian orbit; moreover, his close-valued palette and raised surfaces, especially in the ‘80s, established a kinship with Olitski that was cemented by the friendship between the two. I don’t think it’s coincidental that I used to see the same younger painters at Poons openings whom I’d see at Olitski openings in the ‘80s. I only went to one Dzubas opening myself, but I didn’t see a whole lot of people I knew there.

Another key fact is that Dzubas didn’t arrive at his mature style until the ‘70s. By then Greenberg’s endorsement no longer helped an artist to gain attention as much as it had in the ‘50s and ‘60s (Jack Bush is another artist whom Greenberg admired, but didn’t achieve his mature style until the ‘70s;, he remains all but unknown outside of Canada). Also, Dzubas worked like a more traditional painter, priming his canvases before he painted on them, and employing a brush, like Manet and Cézanne (“I never really saw the advantage of unorthodox tools,” he told Charles Millard, in the exhibition catalogue for his 1983 retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden). Dzubas made many detailed small oil studies for his larger canvases, just like Rubens or the Carracci. Many of these studies are delightful, but the show at Feely had instead, as its prime attractions, three of the huge paintings that were the artist’s special pride and joy. All employed the signature stylistic device that the artist had arrived at, after decades of experimentation: moderately long, moderately broad sweeps of color that feathered into paleness, then nothingness at one end, creating an Olympian sensation of weightiness blending into weightlessness, muscle into thin air. Of the three, my least favorite was “The Other Side” (1980), 55" x 174". Its bright blue field had red and green sweeps of paint swimming around on it, and was too underwater for me, but a distinguished curatorial type, also visiting from upstairs, seemed to be particularly moved by it. I respect his eye, but myself liked better “Journey” (1980), the second biggie at 70" x 204", with a procession of smaller shapes marching across the top of the canvas, floating in space but also blending: grays, browns, dusty rose, middle and mint greens, pink, medium blue, greige and olive. What a color sense that man had!  The painting that really enchanted me was “Foen” (1974), 84" x 206.” The title, if I mistake me not, is the name for a warm spring wind in the Swiss mountains (Dzubas was born and raised in Germany). A warm wind can start avalanches, since it melts the snow , and this painting’s feathered slabs of color reminded me of “rock slabs + winds, cave people, bolts streaking from Mars, prehistoric massiveness + power.” The colors were mostly deep, except for pale lime underlining to a blue slab: browns, maroons, grays, Kelly green. The Feely exhibition also had some very fine smaller canvases by Dzubas, particularly “Entrance” (1970) and “Antipode” (1980), but the big ones were what made the show as distinguished & ambitious as it was..

“ACTION/ABSTRACTION” .

 (My biases)

Before I begin, I must admit to a fact that most of my readers almost certainly already know, namely that I’m biased in favor of Greenberg. Therefore I’m obviously not the best person to discuss this show impartially, but I’m also more than willing to concede that without Rosenberg, abstract expressionism would have had much more trouble gaining the acceptance that it ultimately enjoyed. Yes, Greenberg was the first to publicly recognize and celebrate most of the abstract expressionists. He did this in the ‘40s, when he was reviewing shows regularly for The Nation, and contributing more general articles about contemporary art to Partisan Review. Rosenberg’s publications on art were pathetically few and unprepossessing throughout the ‘40s (I documented Greenberg’s publications during the ‘40s in my dissertation, and in the article for Arts Magazine that I published from the dissertation; that article had a footnote listing Rosenberg’s two nonfiction articles on art during the ‘40s ). Yet even during the ‘40s, Rosenberg seems to have been an underground figure with a following among artists, to some extent no doubt benefitting from the fact that some of these artists for one reason or another found Greenberg hard to take. Much as I admired Greenberg myself, I know that he antagonized quite a number of other people, from the ‘40s onward. I also know that formalist criticism doesn’t explain everything to everybody. Rosenberg’s role, especially after he published his famous article on “The American Action Painters” in 1952, was to offer artists and art lovers an alternate reason for accepting abstract expressionism. He showed that you could buy the movement without buying Greenberg. This was an offer that many artists and art-lovers found attractive, particularly because in person and in his writings, Rosenberg seems to have offered a more accessible way of appreciating the new movement, a focus on ideological aspects as opposed to purely pictorial ones. In other words, Rosenberg’s take on abstract expressionism was necessary without necessarily being desirable, and if I have some sympathy with this role, it’s because I play a similar one in relation to more recent modernism with my theory of multireferential imagery. Being iconographically-based, this theory is the opposite of Greenberg’s formalism. I don’t always apply it to living artists, but the point is, it places me outside the parameters of formalist criticism and (I like to think) offers an alternative to those many people for whom formalism is Greek. I think it’s important for any artistic movement to be validated from opposed directions.

In “The American Action Painters,” which appeared in Art News, Rosenberg argued that the canvas had ceased to be a place upon which a subject, real or imagined, was to be depicted, and become instead an arena in which to act, so that what went onto the canvas was not a picture but the record of an event. I read this article first in the summer of 1969, and remembered this passage from it particularly because its implications stretch far beyond the significance they are accorded in "Action/Abstraction," but the quotation from this article in the wall text of this show includes a further sentence that I’d never really paid attention to before, but which seems startlingly relevant now. “The gesture on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was a gesture of liberation, from Value – political, esthetic, moral.” “Political” and “moral” I can do without myself, but when Rosenberg also jettisoned the “esthetic,” he was in effect saying that it didn’t matter whether the picture itself was any good, whether it was worth looking at for its own sake, and here is where I really part company with him. To me, the method is of secondary importance, and what the picture looks like, the real issue. Is it good? Is it bad?

This was what mattered most to Greenberg, but people who couldn’t relate to abstraction at all found his position incomprehensible. They couldn’t tell better from worse abstractions themselves, and they resented having Greenberg tell them which ones were better, so they welcomed Rosenberg, who didn’t care. He felt that if the artist was expressing his “freedom,” recording his life experience, exploring “possibilities” and “making choices,” it didn’t matter whether or not the freedom and life experience were being wisely used, and the better choices made among various possibilities. Greenberg said he didn’t care whether or not a painting was abstract or representational, the issue was, it is good? But, since he generally found that the best new painting was abstract, people accused him of favoring abstraction for its own sake.

Expressing “freedom,” “exploring possibilities”and “making choices” seems to have come out of Rosenberg’s interest in existentialism, and the “action” of making the painting into an “event” was therefore termed an “existential geste” or gesture. It produced a whole school of second-generation abstract expressionist pictures in the ‘50s characterized by what was known as “gestural” painting. In terms of direct inspiration, their creators mostly took de Kooning as their model, but the rationale seems also to have been Rosenberg’s ideas about existentialism, and here I have another confession to make: I didn’t like existentialism long before I heard of Greenberg or Rosenberg. It happened when I was in college, in the early- to mid-‘50s. Vaguely, I knew that the bohemian set at Barnard was into existentialism, but I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Bohemia, its writers and artists. My father had been a writer who walked out on my mother and me when I was three. He moved to California, so I didn’t see him again until I was several years out of college. Thus as an undergrad, I wanted to date nice square pre-med and pre-law students, in hopes of marrying a man who’d stick around. The year after I graduated from college, I did read “The Plague,” by Camus. I liked it, too, but in the ‘80s, when I fought my way through “Being and Nothingness,” by Sartre, I got turned off all over again, particularly by Sartre’s cynicism about Freud, whose philosophy he described as “materialistic mythology.” Freud was at least as big in the ‘50s as Sartre was, in the art world as elsewhere, but you’ll find no references to Freud in the catalogue to “Action/Abstraction.” The psychoanalysts patronized by Greenberg, Pollock and other artists of Greenberg’s acquaintance were at least intellectual descendants of Freud, if not Freudians themselves. This applies to Jung and Harry Stack Sullivan, but of course all of this is biography not art criticism – Greenberg didn’t quote any psychoanalysts in his writings.

My final confession: I’ve never related to Rosenberg. He was writing art criticism for The New Yorker when I started to write the Art page for Time in 1967, and I tried to read some of his New Yorker articles, but found them unreadable. I know that many people have derived much pleasure and instruction from them, but to me, they wound around and around without going anywhere. I suppose the fairest conclusion is that his mind and mine worked different ways. At some point, I was introduced to him in person. I can’t remember where, but not too long afterwards, we were both at a Whitney opening (there were no media previews in those days; critics were invited to museum openings instead). A big cuddly-bear type, he was standing with a bunch of people around him. I walked by and he reached out an arm and tried to bear hug me into this group of people, but I pulled away. I don’t know why I had this reaction. It was long before I met Greenberg, so it had nothing to do with him. At that point, I didn’t know that he and Rosenberg were said to be rivals. I didn’t even know of the existence of “The American Action Painters”. Maybe I just didn’t like the idea of being pulled into a crowd.

(The good & even great galleries)

Now that you know my orientation, on to the show. First, we should all be grateful to Norman L. Kleeblatt, chief curator of The Jewish Museum, for conceiving and organizing this most original and thought-provoking show over decades. Only since 2002 has it been structured as a study in Red Mountain v. Green Mountain, but Kleeblatt’s idea of re-examining the period goes back long before then. He was assisted by curators from the two museums to which the show will travel, Douglas Dreishpoon of the Albright-Knox in Buffalo and Charlotte Eyerman of the St. Louis Art Museum. All three of these curators contributed essays to the catalogue. So did Debra Bricker Balken, an independent curator working on a book about Rosenberg; Morris Dickstein, professor of English at the CUNY graduate center; Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern; Caroline A. Jones, MIT professor whose book on Greenberg I reviewed something less than favorably in January 2007; and Irving Sandler, now an emeritus professor from SUNY Purchase and a visiting professor at Hunter College. Maurice Berger, a research scholar at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at the New School University, organized the “context” section of the show, with photographs, printed material and other memorabilia; he also contributed a “cultural time line” to the catalogue.

A second thing we should all be very grateful to Dr. Kleeblatt for is the single most beautiful gallery in the show, on the second floor, devoted to “Post-Painterly Abstraction.” I say this not because there aren’t elsewhere individual works of at least equal stature, but because this is one of only two galleries in which every work is of top quality. It’s the only one where the space allotted to each work is adequate, and the choice of works with browns and blacks in four of them harmonizes with the dark brown wall paneling and rafters of the gallery itself to create a quietly magnificent whole. Presiding over this gallery–queening it, I might say – is the large “Mountains and Sea” (1952) by Frankenthaler, with its softly-glowing swaths of pale blues, pale greens and pinks, a painting not only of crucial importance historically but also breathtakingly lovely. (As Kleeblatt notes in the Acoustiguide tour, this is a homecoming for the painting, as it was shown at The Jewish Museum in 1960, upon the occasion of Frankenthaler’s first career retrospective.) “Mountains and Sea” is joined by well-chosen companions: “Iris” (1954), a fine “veil” painting by Louis, “Whirl” (1960), a strong “target” by Noland, “Twenty-Four Hours” (1960), a strikingly flat painted steel sculpture by Caro, “Essex” (1962), a neat painted wooden column by Anne Truitt, and “Doulma” (1966), a vigorous spray painting by Olitski. By comparison, the adjoining gallery, with samples of work by artists whom Rosenberg either admired or might have admired, looks tacky. The work is by Saul Steinberg, Peter Saul, Philip Guston, Lee Bontecou, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Joan Mitchell, with messy brushwork common to several pieces, but all of it (except for the Mitchell and the Bontecou) representational, thus discussed with relative ease and apparently appealing to the smattering of younger gallery goers who were there when I went back to re-examine the show after having attended the media preview. The gallery on “Post-Painterly Abstraction” was relatively empty, alas. Such is the level of taste in New York today.  

The only other gallery in the show where all the work is of uniformly high quality is the second one on the ground floor, devoted to Gorky and Hofmann, with three excellent paintings accorded each artist. Gorky’s “The Diary of a Seducer” (1945) is a marvelous picture, though (since it’s owned by MoMA) not unfamiliar. Gorky’s “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944) is big and fascinating (it’s visiting from the Albright-Knox, having been donated to that museum by Seymour Knox, one of America’s great collectors). Hofmann’s “Sanctum Sanctorum” (1962) from Berkeley is an exciting example of that artist’s late signature style, but the gallery is really too small to accommodate these three major paintings plus three smaller ones, and the two artists are of such different sensibilities that their creations don’t go too well together. The reason they’re both in this gallery is because both Greenberg and Rosenberg wrote about them. Ideologically, this works fine; visually, less well.

The opening gallery is even more problematic, though even in its flaws, highly educational. Naturally, the show starts with Pollock and de Kooning, as the rivalry between Greenberg and Rosenberg polarized around these two. All of the four Pollocks & three de Koonings here are not without interest, but the two biggest are of greatest value because they set out a situation that, fifty years later, is still plaguing the art world. One of these two paintings is “Gotham News” (1955), by de Kooning. The other is “Convergence” (1952) by Pollock. Both paintings come from the Albright-Knox, too, and “Convergence” is an exceptionally good-looking painting, even if it wasn’t done during Pollock’s peak “classic” period between 1947 and 1950. At the media preview, I ran into Francis V. O’Connor, the distinguished Pollock scholar. He pointed out to me the row of heads sketched lightly in black across the top of “Convergence,” and the row of feet likewise sketched across the bottom of it, explaining that the picture had obviously started out to be in the more conventionally figurative manner that Pollock went back to after 1950. I had overlooked those heads and feet, since they’re pretty well covered up with skeins of paint; indeed otherwise the painting appears to be in Pollock’s classic abstract manner. The colors are vivid, too, being built around the three primaries, plus black and white, and it’s a well-organized and coherent painting – not the greatest painting that Pollock ever painted, but clearly demonstrating both the command he had over his medium, and the freedom that this command allowed him to enjoy.

If you want to know what’s well-organized & what isn’t, compare “Convergence” to “Gotham News,” hanging next to it. “Gotham News” has gotten much attention because of the few pages of newsprint embedded around its perimeter (put there originally to help dry out the paint). Newsprint is an example of what some people call pop culture or popular culture, and what I prefer to call mass-audience culture (it isn’t made by The People, merely consumed by them). Because of the newsprint, “Gotham News” is said to anticipate the way that neo-dada and pop would rifle mass-audience culture for subjects, objects and techniques. Fine, but can you honestly say that the de Kooning is as well painted as the Pollock? For my money, it falls away in the comparison: poorly organized, and with muddily-colored paint shoved back and forth all anyhow, up and down, diagonally, scrubbed onto the surface without any coherence or consistency. In the same gallery hangs one of de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings (this one officially dated 1949-50, though de Kooning exhibited none of these “Woman” paintings until 1953). Also sloppy and messy in its brushwork, “Woman” comes off slightly better than “Gotham News” because the figurative elements at least lend it some kind of underlying structure, but both seem to have been fine with Rosenberg, as the act of making them (the existential gesture) mattered more to him than what the paintings looked like.

According to Rosenberg, the “action painter” was “liberated” from esthetic value. This idea must have been very welcome to other painters in the early ‘50s, when the complete abstraction of Pollock’s classic poured paintings was being looked upon both as the new template AND as incomprehensible. These paintings were so radical that initially nobody could see how well-organized they were, or what good command Pollock had over his medium, so Rosenberg’s assessment of such paintings – that they depicted existential nothingness and had no esthetic value – was exactly what so many other people secretly thought (and I do believe that Rosenberg’s original model for the “action painter” was Pollock, not de Kooning, given the truly radical way that Pollock danced over his canvases while he was painting them, compared with the highly traditional way that de Kooning stood still in front of his easel, as painters had done for centuries, and dabbed away with a little brush). As I see it, Rosenberg’s “liberating” painting from esthetic value was like giving permission to every second-rate artist to take up his (or her) brush and paint abstractly, and for every second-rate art critic to praise any painting that looked like its creator had been “liberated” from esthetic considerations. If the art world is still plagued by quantities of second-rate abstractions, this attitude of Rosenberg’s must bear part of the responsibility.

(Entering the problem areas)

With the third gallery (after Gorky and Hoffman) this show begins to have problems. Instead of celebrating the great art that these two critics were associated with, it attacks them for not conforming to postmodernist “morality.” Instead of paintings that deserve inclusion because of their quality and relevance to the interests of Greenberg or Rosenberg, we get identity art, where who the artist was becomes more important than what the art looks like. This gallery is entitled “Blind Spots” and the idea here is that Rosenberg and Greenberg were prejudiced against women and minority artists, so we have two paintings by Lee Krasner, two by Grace Hartigan, and one by Norman Lewis. The Krasners are good, but not on a level with Pollock, Gorky or Hofmann. The Hartigans have nice colors but in organization and brushwork, they are confused, messed-up “action” paintings in the Rosenbergian tradition of never-mind-whether-it’s-any-good-or-not, as long as the artist was exploring her possibilities and exercising her freedom to make poor choices. The modest little Lewis practically fades away into nothing. I’m sorry about this situation, but if – due to the strictures of the society – there weren’t any more great women artists (besides Frankenthaler) or any distinguished black artists in either the ‘40s or the ‘50s, I don’t see why any first-rate critic should be castigated for not celebrating the second-rate. I’m not saying Greenberg didn’t have his hangups regarding women artists (and women art critics) but this display doesn’t convince me that he was missing anything much.

Next (after the first installment of Berger’s “context” displays) we get a gallery devoted to sculpture, by Ibram Lassaw, David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton and David Smith. The Lassaw especially and the Hare are quite decent, though I wonder whether any museum would normally have them on view as part of their permanent collection. One of the two Smiths, “The Hero” (1952), is also trenchant, but I’ve seen better Liptons and better Ferbers and the second Smith, “Black, White, Forward” (1961) isn’t particularly prepossessing. Apparently it’s here because (according to the label) it’s painted and even so, Greenberg liked it (will we ever hear the end of the mudslinging inaugurated by Rosalind Krauss?). Fortunately, according to the exhibition’s catalogue, both the St. Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox own fine Smiths from the “Cubi” series, so “Black, White, Forward” is only to be seen in New York.

The last gallery on the ground floor is devoted to Reinhardt, Still, Rothko and Newman. The alcove on Newman, with three haunting paintings and one commanding sculpture, can certainly be justified both by the excellence of the art, and the fact that both Greenberg and Rosenberg thought highly of Newman. The two Stills are also good-looking and justifiable in terms of the theme of the show, but the single Rothko is a dark, late and inferior example of this terribly important artist’s work. Again, it will be joined in St. Louis and Buffalo with better Rothkos owned by these museums, but the wall text creates the erroneous impression that Greenberg never wrote about Rothko (Greenberg told me that he didn’t review Rothko’s shows because Rothko asked him not to. As I discovered for myself, however, he did treat Rothko as one of the leaders of abstract expressionism in “American-Type Painting”). The most baffling inclusion here is the three paintings by Reinhardt. The only one that qualifies as abstract expressionist is the nearly-all-black “Abstract Painting” (1962). It deserves inclusion, but the first two, “Untitled” (1947) and “Number 15'’ (1952), don’t have the painterly qualities (in the Wöfflinian sense) or large, open forms that characterize the mature work of other, more prominent abstract expressionists. In fact, those earlier paintings by Reinhardt, with their busy, discrete little details, show that the artist had still not broken loose from the relatively hard-edged, often geometric warmed-over cubism of the Abstract American Artists in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Reinhardt exhibited in the ‘40s with the AAA, and Greenberg reviewed these group exhibitions. The only time he mentioned Reinhardt’s work in an AAA show was in 1947. Then he included him in a list of painters whose work was “respectable,” but added that “not one is bold, extravagant, pertinacious, or obsessed. Like American poets and critics, they are mortally afraid of making fools of themselves. Politeness covers all.” This is a far cry from the wall text at The Jewish Museum, which suggests that these earlier paintings “echoed Greenberg’s ideals.”

Greenberg was no more enthusiastic about Reinhardt’s “black” paintings. In 1967, he wrote of them as “familiar,” “slick” and “trite.” Reinhardt paid back the insults. In 1970, Artforum posthumously published In an interview with him in which he suggested that Greenberg was a dealer. He didn’t actually say that Greenberg was a dealer, but got across the idea with the kind of elliptical phraseology that I recognized from my years on Time, where company lawyers schooled me in clever ways to say things that might not be true without opening up the company to libel suits. Greenberg was furious. He threatened to sue Artforum, but, as nearly as one can tell from the correspondence in the Archives of American Art, the magazine refused to print an apology. Thanks to their clever phraseology, they most likely believed that Greenberg didn’t have a prayer of collecting, and probably couldn’t afford the costs of a lawsuit anyway. Greenberg had to content himself with a letter to Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum, keeping a carbon copy of it in his files. It’s quite a letter. In it, Greenberg described how certain words had somehow drifted into his consciousness when he’d listened to Reinhardt delivering speeches, and when he’d been introduced to Leider. They are not complimentary words. Is it perhaps because Reinhardt and Greenberg had such a poor relationship that Reinhardt rates as many paintings in this show as de Kooning, Hofmann and Gorky, and more than Rothko or Still? Or is because the all-black paintings didn’t really became popular until the ‘60s, when very similar postmodernist minimalism came into play?

(Overlooked Artists)

Meanwhile, there are some humongous oversights in “Action/Abstraction.”. How in the world, one wonders, is it possible to assemble a definitive exhibition of abstraction expressionism without Motherwell, Baziotes and Gottlieb? I don’t feel as strongly about Franz Kline, as he was something of a Johnny-come-lately anyway, staying in a very ordinary representational bag clear through the ‘40s, and only climbing onto the abstract expressionist bandwagon around 1950, but Motherwell, Baziotes and Gottlieb were all part of the original crew, and tremendous artists into the bargain. Greenberg wrote about all three with enthusiasm. I’m not familiar enough with Rosenberg’s writings to know how much he published on Gottlieb and Motherwell, but both of them, as well as Baziotes, were mentioned in a catalogue essay for the Galerie Maeght in Paris that was reprinted in “Possibilities,” a short-lived but extremely important artists’ magazine. All three artists were also included in “The Intrasubjectives,” a 1949 show at the Kootz Gallery in Manhattan for which Rosenberg wrote another catalogue essay. Rosenberg must have known Motherwell particularly well, since the two together had founded “Possibilities.” In Berger’s “context” section, at least six entries involve Motherwell: 1) the copy of “Possibilities;” 2) the copy of “It is,” another artists’ magazine with a painting by Motherwell on the cover; 3) the installation shot and 4) the catalogue of MoMA’s 1946 exhibition of “14 Americans,” in which Motherwell was included,. 5) the photo of the mural by Motherwell at the Congregation B’nai Israel, and 6) the copy of “Dada Painters and Poets,” which Motherwell edited. Rosenberg seems to have been unusually close to Baziotes, too. Not only does “Possibilities” also have an interview of the artist by the critic, but a poem that Rosenberg published in The Tiger’s Eye in 1949 is dedicated to his own daughter Patia but concerns a painting by Baziotes. Admittedly, the gallery space available for “Action/Abstraction” was limited, but the show could easily have done without those two fussy earlier Reinhardts and that whole depressing gallery of “Blind Spots.” The sculpture gallery may also take up a bit more space than it needs to, considering the relative unimportance of all but one of the sculptors on view.

(Now, for the interpretation)

So much for the art on view. Now for the interpretation, as conveyed by the two panel discussions, wall texts, Acoustiguide transcript and catalogue. I don’t envy the organizers of this show their task of making so many brilliant but still mysterious paintings understandable, even lovable in the current climate. What they are up against was amply demonstrated by the two panels, and/or by the audience response to them.

The first panel, “Art and American Culture at Mid-Century,” consisted of older commentators, mostly from outside the art world and meant to discuss the larger cultural and political context of abstract expressionism. The only art-world figure on the panel was Sandler, and although his catalogue essay cheerfully stated that he’d been a member of the de Kooning coterie, his straightforward panel presentation, accompanied by digital images, steered clear of favoritism and focused on art, not personalities. In fact, for the first time since I read what he wrote about Greenberg in “The Triumph of American Painting,” I found myself sympathizing with him. He seemed defensive, presenting abstract expressionism almost apologetically, as though he thought it was nothing that younger people cared about any more, and the reasonably but not excessively crowded audience appeared to substantiate his impression. Mostly older, it seemed mostly sympathetic to abstract expressionism, but in the slightly naive spirit of the “good old days,” when the art world was supposedly a high-minded, cosy little place where friends of the artist, including musicians and poets, set the tone and all the vulgarity of mass-audience culture was kept at a distance. Such dreamy nostalgia reminded me of an angry article that Thomas B. Hess, editor of Art News, published in that magazine in 1963, when pop art was taking over (I’d recently been reading this article for my book). Hess was inveighing against the fashion-conscious and crass commercial types who were talking up and buying up pop – but mainly because this was decimating the market for all the second-generation abstract expressionists whom he’d been so close to for so long. History hasn’t treated most of those second-generation artists kindly, and – upon the basis of this show, with my further discovery of Rosenberg’s ideas – I find myself wondering just how competent as artistic judges were all those dear friends of the artist in music and poetry. To judge from the overall tone of the “Action/Abstraction” catalogue, writers (as opposed to artists) have always tended to find Rosenberg more sympathetic than Greenberg, if only because nobody has to know much of anything about art in order to appreciate his grand, if perhaps somewhat vague and wooly, literary and philosophical ideas. But, if these writer types in the '50s were all reading Rosenberg and believing that art was now liberated from esthetic values, maybe those high-minded “good old days” were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

The one younger person in the audience who stood up and asked a question during the question period wanted to know why dada hadn’t taken over the art scene after World War II, the way it did after World War I – why Rauschenberg, the only artist in whom she was evidently at all interested – hadn’t been more famous. Myself, I might have pointed out the difference between New York in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and Paris and Berlin in the late teens and ‘20s. The awful destruction of Europe and appalling loss of life caused by World War I had had dreadfully embittering effects in those two still critically important European capitals (especially Berlin, since Germany had been defeated). New York in the ‘40s and ‘50s was riding the crest of national prosperity and pride of emerging as a world power. Yes, World War II had claimed between 50 and 70 million lives, but the U.S. had lost only about 400,000 of them, and none of the fighting had taken place within the 48 states. Instead of mentioning any of these reasons for a less cynical outlook, though, the panel had been emphasizing the glumness of existentialism, and the horror of the Holocaust, so my sort of commentary was obviously nothing to be expected from them.

The second panel, titled “Identity, Engagement, Judgment: Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg Then and Now” had a younger group of panelists and a correspondingly younger, larger audience. This audience applauded warmly at the end but asked no questions worthy of note. Though the panelists obviously respected Greenberg’s style of writing and his continuing reputation, they couldn’t understand why he hadn’t liked the same art that they did, postmodern as opposed to modern. Little of the discussion concerned abstract expressionism; instead, Linda Norden, who as I said earlier served as an advisor to this year’s Whitney Biennial, gave a digital presentation about Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Both she and Michael Brenson, the moderator, referred to Greenberg’s “meanness.” I’d hoped that Kenneth Silver, as junior advisor on my dissertation, might recall the nice things I’d written about Greenberg in that dissertation, but instead he recalled his own meeting with Greenberg in 1973. Seems there was a party at Noland’s studio, and Noland introduced him to Greenberg as an admirer of Warhol. Greenberg thereupon sailed into an attack on Warhol that seems to have soured Silver on Greenberg for life (what broad-mindedness he must have shown in dealing with my dissertation then!). At the panel, Silver suggested that Greenberg’s dislike of Warhol was due to “unconscious homophobia.” (If I thought that sexual orientation were the determining factor in esthetic preferences, I could suggest that Silver’s enthusiasm for Warhol might be due to unconscious – or even conscious – homophilia, but I don’t happen to agree with this line of thought, if only because so many heterosexuals also admire Warhol, and a proportionate number of homosexuals share Greenberg’s taste in art.)

Silver dismissed both Greenberg and Rosenberg as critics who served only to provide nouveau riche postwar Jews with a way to rise socially, but many Gentiles as well as Jews achieved greater wealth in the postwar boom years. My research suggests that, while such people were already starting to impact upon the art market in the later ‘50s, it was really pop art that they could best relate to, and commentators like Steinberg, Calvin Tomkins, Henry Geldzahler, Robert Rosenblum and Rosenberg – in his postmodernist phase–-who showed them the way to appreciate artists like Warhol in the ‘60s. To the extent that anybody on the panel had anything good to say about either Greenberg or Rosenberg, Rosenberg came out better than Greenberg, but Greenberg attracted more discussion, and the whole panel at the end became oddly nostalgic, too, not for abstract expressionism but for the day when critics’ opinions meant something, and people listened to them instead of letting the market pick the winners & losers.  

(Holes in Interpretation)

As I just indicated, I see Rosenberg as having moved into a postmodernist phase in the ‘60s. I’ve never read “The Anxious Object” (1964) but from descriptions of it, it sounds as though it tried to make sense out of object art like that of Rauschenberg and others – not necessarily approving such art, merely trying to explain how it had come to be. I know that Rosenberg played a major role in presenting pop as a major new movement to the wider audience of The New Yorker in the fall of 1962. Up until then, The New Yorker’s art critic had been Robert Coates, who’d lived in Paris in the 1920s, and seen the original dadan (in fact, he’d published a whole dada novel himself). In his opinion, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein and all the other top pop artists weren’t that original, merely rehashing European art from the ‘20s. People who admired these new artists might not have liked the way he would have reviewed “New Realism,” the first big group show that Sidney Janis was planning to unveil in the fall of 1962, but with the first issue of the fall season, The New Yorker announced that Coates was taking a leave of absence, and his place would be filled by Rosenberg. In this same issue, Rosenberg proclaimed that “Today it is felt that a new art mode is long overdue, if for no other reason than that the present avant-garde has been with us for fifteen years.” One month later, the Janis show had come along, enabling Rosenberg to report that this overdue new mode had “hit the New York art world with the force of an earthquake,” and adding that “Within a week, tremors had spread to art centers throughout the country.”

Rosenberg wasn’t the only critic to welcome this show, but the reputation he’d acquired as a critic of abstract expressionism made his assignment of pop to the role of “new avant-garde” doubly influential. By the following spring, even Time had to deal at length with pop, though neither the managing editor nor the Art writer of that moment liked it. Moreover, Rosenberg’s description of action painting as an event, in which the act was more important than the result, was consistent with (and may well have been derived from) the esthetic of dada (despite all the window-dressing of existentialism with which Rosenberg & others embellished it). To Duchamp, the act of taking mass-produced objects out of a household (or men’s room) context, and placing them instead into an artistic context, was essentially all that was needed to make them into art. With the pop artists of the ‘60s, the act of taking styles and images out of the context of mass-audience art and placing them in a fine-art context similarly made them into art. This linkage between “action painting” & dada isn’t original with me. I first read it in an article by Barbara Rose in Artforum way back in May 1969. The article said that “Rosenberg’s reformulation of the Dada notion of art made his celebrated article the main channel through which Dada ideology and esthetics entered the New York School.... “ This wasn’t altogether original with Rose, either. William Rubin may have been the first to introduce it into the art-world dialogue of the ‘60s, in a series of articles on Pollock that he published in Artforum, and the correspondence that followed, but he in turn cited Motherwell as his source –  Motherwell having thought that the idea occurred to Rosenberg while Rosenberg was reading proofs of the book on dada poets that Motherwell had edited.

By contrast, Greenberg disliked and resisted pop and all its related movements. To him, results mattered more than methods or intentions, and he expressed his opposition to dada and its descendants on many occasions . I’m not familiar with everything he wrote on this subject, but the first time I became aware of his existence was in 1967, when I read his article in the June issue of Vogue on “Where Is the Avant-Garde?” I was sitting under the hair dryer at the beauty salon, and irked by that article. It said that pop, op and all the related movements that I then considered the new avant-garde, were really only easy, familiar, middle-brow substitutes for the avant-garde. I think this position of his has antagonized generations of postmodernists, just as the same generations have been gratified by Rosenberg’s easy accommodation to postmodernism. I don’t think any comprehensive examination of the relationship between Greenberg and Rosenberg can be complete without recognizing this deep division between the two, this moment when they began to disagree not only on how to interpret art but on which art even deserved interpretation. This deeper division is terribly important, because it has influenced virtually everything written since about either of them, but especially about Greenberg – including the catalogue, wall texts and Acoustiguide narrative of “Action/Abstraction.” Even writers who may not consider themselves postmodernists have fallen back on the usual postmodernist ways of interpreting – or rather misinterpreting – Greenberg’s views on modernism. Had the scholars associated with “Action/Abstraction” taken into account the fact that almost all of the scholarship on Greenberg is skewed by its postmodernist bias, they might have avoided perpetuating this bias (assuming that’s something they would have wanted to do).

Instead, over and over the postmodernist idea is reiterated that Greenberg admired only art characterized by “flatness” and “purity,” that is to say, only abstract art. Furthermore, this argument runs, he maintained that modernist art had progressed and would continue to progress toward ever greater “flatness” and “purity,” in other words not only did he favor abstraction and ever greater abstraction, but also he had a teleological view of art – that it was inevitably progressing toward a predetermined end. Kleeblatt, Eyerman and Dreishpoon all buy into these fundamentally wrong-headed ideas, as do wall texts throughout the show, but they are most clearly reiterated in the Acoustiguide, where the anonymous narrator says, “Greenberg believed modern art should aim for ‘purity’ of form and abstraction....He wanted painters to remain true to their materials. Instead of creating the illusion of three dimensions, they should affirm the flatness of the canvas and the physicality of the paint with an overall design that showed no hint of perspective....” Note the words “should” and “wanted”, evidence that this speaker believes Greenberg only admired work that conformed to his own agenda, his predetermined criteria of “flatness” and “purity.” Such disinformation claims that it is primarily (though not exclusively) based upon “Modernist Painting” (1960), an article originally delivered as a lecture over the Voice of America, later widely reprinted and even more widely misinterpreted. Greenberg did what he could to counteract the misinterpretations in a postscript that he added in 1978. It’s included in O’Brian’s four-volume collection of Greenberg’s essays and criticism, and in the reprint of “Modernist Painting” at the Clement Greenberg website, but the only writer in the “Action/Abstraction” catalogue who seems to have read it is Morris Dickstein. Perhaps his willingness to expose himself to what Greenberg actually said arises out of the fact that he’s an English professor and not a blinkered art-world insider, yet even he is skeptical (referring to the mis-readings of “Modernist Painting” as “supposed.”)

In the 1978 postscript, Greenberg said that he had only adumbrated the course of modernism, not advocated it, and specifically denied the teleological argument: “The writer is trying to account in part for how most of the very best art of the last hundred-odd years came about, but he’s not implying that that’s how it had to come about, much less that that’s how the best art still has to come about....There have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be. The philosopher or art historian who can envision me – or anyone at all – arriving at aesthetic judgments in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into my article.”

The words “preposterousness” and ”shockingly” could have done nothing to mollify Greenberg’s critics. Rather, they would have exacerbated the ire he inspired, but the truth is that the people who didn’t (and don’t) read this article correctly are mostly those who couldn’t (and can’t) share Greenberg’s taste in art since the ‘60s.  Not being able to see for themselves that Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland and Olitski are better than Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and Lichtenstein, these people were (and are) forced to fall back upon the explanation that Greenberg must only have liked what he liked because of its “flatness” and “purity” (never mind the fact that from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, Greenberg most admired the paintings of Jules Olitski, which during that period were anything but flat). True, the art that Greenberg chose to write about was almost always abstract, but this was not because he favored abstraction per se. In conversation, he’d quite often say that actually he preferred representational art to abstract, but the unspoken condition was always “other things being equal,” and they only very rarely were equal: whether it made him happier or not, he almost always found that the best new art he saw was abstract. On the other hand, he also tended to find that the general level of traditional representational painting was higher than the general level of abstraction, and that it was far easier to paint really bad abstraction. One result was that when he was called upon to jury mixed shows, he was perfectly capable of voting for good-but-not-great representational paintings, and passing over the poor abstracts.

He always insisted that he couldn’t choose which art to like, that every painting was a surprise to him and had to be evaluated upon its own merits. If you knew him well enough to discuss specific art & artists with him (or for that matter, if you read some of the published interviews of him), you very soon learned that he didn’t automatically like abstract paintings or dismiss representational ones. I myself always found him full of surprises. I could never predict what he’d like or wouldn’t like. Over the years, I’ve come to have some ideas of my own about makes for a good painting (abstract or representational). I like to think that some of what I admire in a painting corresponds to some of what he admired, too, that ultimately (as he always said) a consensus develops over time as to what the best art is, but I also know that the artists born since about 1920 whom Greenberg admired were never as widely accepted and acclaimed as their postmodernist contemporaries. Nor did his explanations for why he liked what he liked convince enough of those people who couldn’t already see what he saw. Rather than admit that they couldn’t see it, such people were all too apt to dismiss his arguments and accuse him of bad faith (“supposed mis-readings”).

Charlotte Eyerman, in her catalogue essay, quotes “Abstract and Representational” (1954). In this article, Greenberg wrote that “No one has yet been able to show that the representational as such either adds or takes away anything from the aesthetic value of a picture or statue, “ but tellingly she doesn’t quote that particular sentence. She does quote the two preceding sentences, “What counts first and last in art is whether it is good or bad. Everything else is secondary,” but then she accuses Greenberg of being “disingenuous” because the claim that art be “‘good’ stacks the deck inexorably for subjectivity.” Had she pursued the matter further, she might conceivably have learned that Greenberg didn’t consider his judgments purely subjective. Instead, he maintained that there were objective criteria for determining better and worse art, but also that these criteria couldn’t be put into words. This point of view was (and is) antithetical to postmodernists, who make a cult of art that can easily be described in words, and accordingly satisfy what seems to be a need among most people for a “rational” way of looking at art (we can only think and reason in words, and Duchamp understood this need for the seemingly rational; it’s the secret of his success.)

(Good stuff in the catalogue)

As for the rest of the catalogue, I liked the essay by Mark Godfrey on the Jewish aspects of Greenberg and Rosenberg. Though I suspect that there is no one typically Jewish way of writing or painting, any more than there is a typical feminine writing style, I appreciated Godfrey’s argument that modernism wasn’t monolithic, coherent, and unchanging, but instead “always fluid and responsive to new developments in painting.” That’s more my experience of Greenberg. I was also fascinated to learn, in the essay by Debra Bricker Balken, that Rosenberg’s article on “The American Action Painters” wasn’t originally intended for Art News, but rather for Les Temps Modernes, a French quarterly founded by Sartre and edited by Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One suspects that the omission of names of any painters in the article was at least partially due to this original intention, as a French audience wouldn’t have recognized any of these names anyway, but Rosenberg got sore at Sartre. He thought that Sartre had plagiarized some of his ideas from an earlier article, and asked Merleau-Ponty to give him a chance to set the record straight in print. He was also angry with Sartre because Sartre had become a supporter of the French Communist Party and Joseph Stalin, at the height of the Korean War and long after Stalin’s bloodthirsty methods of running the Soviet Union had been exposed. Merleau-Ponty never got back to Rosenberg about his request, so Rosenberg showed the manuscript to Elaine de Kooning, with whom he was having an affair at that point. She had been writing for Art News, so she passed the article along to Tom Hess, who was looking for ammunition to counter the influence of formalism. The rest, as they say, is history.....

ABSTRACTION NOW

Folks, during the past six months, there’s been a hell of a lot of group shows partially or entirely of abstract art. The Times reviewed two of the biggest, and even illustrated them with color reproductions of fine modernist paintings, but this was only the tip of the iceberg. As this column is already far too long, I’m not going to say much about most of these shows, beyond pointing out that not all of the abstract paintings in them had my unalloyed admiration. Not long ago, I had supper with Daniel Larkin, whom I met a few years ago when he was still an undergraduate fine arts major at Fordham (we were both coming back on the bus from a CAA convention). Now he’s out of college, holding down a job with an art-materials supplier, and contributing reviews to a webzine called artcal.net. Larkin interests me. He’s very bright and very well-educated, but when I mentioned the Noland exhibition as one worth seeing, and indicated that the paintings had been done in the ‘60s, I got the impression that his interest in them diminished. I‘m not surprised, as I see myself in him. I’d have had that same response when I was his age, or even ten years older. I was already into my 30s when I started writing Time’s Art page, but even so, I was much more eager to write about contemporary art than older art. Larkin, it seemed to me, was also somewhat dismissive of pop art, though one review by him that I read at his website concerned a younger artist who (upon the basis of that review and its illustration) looked to me like a direct descendent of pop. Larkin also made a remark to the effect that the difference between modernist and postmodernist was “problematic,” and I found this extremely interesting & illuminating. On the one hand, I think he may feel this way because he’s been able to see so little top-quality modernism, while there’s so much postmodernist minimalism masquerading as modernism around. On the other hand, . I think he may be very accurately describing some of the recent art he’s seen, for it certainly describes the situation with some of the abstract art that I’ve taken in during this past six months. True, I haven’t gotten to every abstract show around (and was particularly sorry to have missed “Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings from Four Decades” at PaceWildenstein) but I’ve gotten to far more than I originally planned to.

During the ‘50s, New York galleries showed a lot of second-generation abstract expressionists, most of them born in or around the 1920s. Some of these artists were really pretty good (Robert Goodnough, Herman Cherry, Esteban Vicente and John Ferren in particular). But a lot of this work, especially by those free-swinging “gestural” painters who modeled their styles upon that of de Kooning, was not so good (unless you bought into Harold Rosenberg’s notion that it didn’t matter what the paintings looked like anyway). In the ‘60s, most of this sort of painting went into eclipse, but during the past few years, it’s been staging a comeback. One reason appears to be that some collectors love the idea of abstract expressionism, but don’t want to or can’t pay the going stratospheric prices for first-generation abstract expressionists. Such buyers furnish a ready market that encourages dealers and even non-profit galleries to stage shows of the second generation. Technically, I suppose these painters shared a modernist esthetic, but it wasn’t any guarantee that they were living up to the standards set by other modernist abstract painters, before and since. Three shows whose primary emphasis was on paintings from this period were “Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Abstract Expressionism” at the Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College; “Raymond Hendler and Artists from His “Avant-Garde” Circle (1950's-1970's) at Katharina Rich Perlow (through July 16); and “Milton Resnick” at Cheim & Read. All three of these shows had some very worthwhile paintings in them, but none were batting 1.000.

Another sort of abstraction that continues to claim a following is the hard-edged minimalist variety that came in during the ‘60s, has never been completely out of style, and figured largely in MoMA’s “Color Chart” show. There have been smaller shows that featured it, too. One such current exhibition combines a very few relatively modernist abstractions with many brightly-colored but completely or almost completely monochromatic postmodernist paintings; it is “Chromophobia: An Exhibition of Non-Objective Color Paintings” at OK Harris (through July 11, also September 2-6). Collectively, these paintings together made an appealing display; individually I doubt that I’d want to live with any of those boringly monochromatic panels for long. Among the few works in this show that rose above the level of the rest were those by Pat Lipsky, Doug Ohlson, Marthe Keller and Joanne Klein. An earlier show of 14 older artists, combining minimalist paintings with modernist ones in approximately equal numbers, and throwing in a dash of gestural-type painting for good measure, was “Abstractions” at Charles Cowles in January. “Open Road” (1971-72) by Ronnie Landfield in this show was stunning, best painting by him I’ve seen, while “Tidal Wave of Refugees” (1980) by Dennis Ashbaugh was also creditable. “Sacra Famiglia con San Giovannino” (1990), by Michael Goldberg, was interesting but fussy, overly busy.

FLAVOR-FREE ABSTRACTION

A few shows, I’m happy to say, have included at least some top-notch modernism by color-field painters from the ‘60s and/or more recent arrivals, but in these shows and in others less fortunate, I’ve also found paintings that for lack of a better name I might call flavor-free abstraction. By this I mean paintings that aren’t machine-tooled or otherwise irritating enough to qualify as overtly postmodernist, but also too bland and/or unfocused and/or just not good enough in other ways to qualify as modernist (in the best sense of that oft-misunderstood word). These flavor-free abstract paintings are neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, and thus well illustrate Larkin’s point about the difference between modernism and postmodernism now being “problematic.” The worst of the shows incorporating them is “Present Tense,” curated by Don Christensen and Mary Heilmann at Spanierman Modern (through August 2). Here I found so little to enthuse about, and so much of the flavor-free, that I hastily moved over to the adjoining Spanierman proper, which was showing “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Masters,” and there found a bit more to like. A somewhat better exhibition of almost entirely 21^st century work was “Shape Shifters: New York Painters,” curated by James Biederman. This traveling show originated at The A. D. Gallery of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and was on view at Sideshow in April-May. Sideshow (for the benefit of those few who’ve not yet been there) is in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which may be the closest thing to Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 30s still surviving in the Big Apple. “Shape Shifters” was all about abstraction, except for a carefully painted conceptual canvas showing an annotated map of Williamsburg, by Loren Munk, Williamsburg’s unofficial poet laureate. About one- third of the remaining paintings were gestural (though as I said painted recently), one third were hard-edged, and one third were somewhere in between(i.e. flavor-free). Looking at my annotated checklist, I see that I gave only one painting a three-star rating, but I did give one star to paintings (all done this year or last) by Don Voisine, Joel Longenecker, Mark Dagley, Peter Acheson and Thornton Willis. The best in show was “Red Car in the Country” (1996) by Richard Timperio, a lively and happily-colored (though quite small) gestural-type painting. Rich with reds and greens, it was different, nice, with quiet humor and self-assurance.

CORNUCOPIA IN WILLIAMSBURG

Besides being a painter, Timperio is, of course, also the proprietor of Sideshow. One of my top annual pleasures is his huge group exhibition of mostly smaller works of all kinds of contemporary art, with lots of abstracts and a number of Greenbergian artists, but lots of other kinds of art & artists, too. Originally, he staged this show between Christmas and New Year’s and devoted it to an antiwar theme. In 2008, it was called simply, “Peace,” held from mid-January through February, and included approximately 300 artists. How Timperio manages to assemble such a humongous assortment of talent, and get it up on the walls in a meaningful configuration, beggars the imagination, but this year he did an especially good job, both with selection and installation. Looking at my notes, I see that I’ve given one or more stars to only 22 of these approximately 300 art works, but I had only an hour or so to spend at the show. I’m sure that if I’d stayed longer, I’d have discovered lots more goodies, but I simply didn’t have the time, so here is a vastly condensed summary of my 12 pages of notes. 1) Peter Reginato, “Angel”, 3 stars, “large white Reginato w. tints of pink + yellow; looks even better than it did in his show;” 2) Randy Bloom, 2 stars, “oldie but goodie – 2 greens w. gray and ocher – Capetown? horizontal stripes;” 3) Margaret Evangeline, 3 stars, “old? new? Not shot full of holes...heavenly aqua, heavenly blue-gray-green figure (?) ....vertical series of glittery glistening ice-bloc lines”, 4) Tom Bevan, “Sceptre,” 1 star, “made with marbleized rod, ornate pieces of bras[s?], hung by green tasseled bell pulls;" 5) Paula De Luccia, 3 stars, “small sc[ulpture], arched rectangular pieces of multi-layered plywood – piled in a cornucopia;" 6) Fran Kornfeld, 1 star, “nice little red crayon scribbles;" 7) Mary Cunningham, 1 star, “nice little impressionistic landscape;" 8) Ann Walsh, 3 stars, “lovely medium-sized horizontal wall piece – horizontal bands of color, such bold, brave colors;" 9) Anthony Rubino, 1 star, “most creative – ceramic element looks like abs[tract] Burghers of Calais or Laocoon – on a cart – horizontal wood slabs held up by a pyramid and a sphere;” 10) Steve White, 2 stars, “selection of pencils w. totem-like faces carved into them. Clever, exquisite detail;" 11) James Walsh, 3 stars, “very unusual – flatter than most [Walshes], built around 3 vigorous primaries....touches of black on blue, red + white on blue;” 12) Darby Bannard, 3 stars, “small, v. sweet. Partly puddled w. clear shiny acrylic;" 13) Mike Filan, 1 star, “3 small panels, lots of dribbles downward, bright shining paint, mostly red + white complimented by assorted greens – attractive but maybe a bit disorganized.....”14) David Crum, 3 stars, “vertical dribbles – white field, black middle layer of dribbles, silvery gray top level. v. distinctive....” 15) Jim Klein, 2 stars, “nice small abs[tract] – swirling black lines atop mottled pinkish/greyish field;” 16) Paul Resika, 2 stars, “sweet little v. abs[tract] Paul Resika;” 17) Dan Christensen, 2 stars, “fine Dan Christensen, largely white squiggles on field of black;” 18) Jay Hutchinson, 3 stars, “neat....broken flower pots + other ceramics on wood base....:”19) Tim Casey, 2 stars, “tall, attractive, chatted w. me in gallery – if he was trying to hit on me, he had only mixed luck – I don’t do artists – 4 small vertical panels, all in shades of gray, blended colors – small discrete elements in hard edge floating on top, sensitive + haunting but not loud....:;” 20) Stacy Greene, 3 stars, “photo nice 2 panels in field;” 21) Timothy Whitsun, 2 stars, “2 shaped panels (ornate shapes) detailed paintings – one of field with old cars (junk yard) (“Tim’s Garage”); one of jungle paradise w. white cranes red parrots pond + trees;” 22) Sasha Silverstein, 2 stars, “strong nude back.”

NEW YORK COOL

Another show with abstract art in it that I can recommend is “New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection,” curated by Pepe Karmel (who teaches at NYU), and on view in NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (through July 19). Featuring over 80 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, this show will travel to university galleries at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park PA (September 16 to December 14); the University of Iowa in Iowa City (January 17 to March 15, 2009); and Bowdoin College, Brunswick ME (April 17-July 19, 2009); finally, to the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga TN (August 23-October 25, 2009). Almost all of the art in this show dates from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Most of it  – and especially the best of it – came to NYU in the mid-‘60s, often by gift but sometimes by purchase, during a period when Ruth Gurin (now Ruth Bowman) was curator. I daresay that lots of postmodernist NYU academic types have since bewailed Gurin’s apparent lack of interest in the trendier sorts of art that she could have been looking to acquire during this period, but I for one think that she displayed excellent taste. The two great jewels of this exhibition are a large and truly magnificent Frankenthaler, “Seascape with Dunes” (1962), given by the artist herself in 1963, and a large and truly magnificent Noland, “Spread” (1958), a gift of William S. Rubin in 1964 (Rubin discarded the S. after he became more famous, but it stands for Stanley). Personally, I ever so slightly prefer the Frankenthaler (particularly since I already knew & loved it; it was among the paintings that Time reproduced when we did our story on the artist in 1969). Some other people, I am sure, will prefer the Noland; but essentially, when you get to quality on this level, it’s a question of comparing apples and pears. The premise upon which this show is based is that the late ‘50s and early ‘60s were a transitional period of great artistic ferment that succeeded abstract expressionism but preceded pop and minimal art. God forbid that anybody should suggest color-field painting survived the onset of pop and minimal! I understand that a case is also made out for all of this art having been created within the artistic climate of Greenwich Village. This of course is complete nonsense as far as Noland in particular is concerned: a major reason that he was able to develop such a radical style was precisely because he was living in Washington DC & not listening to de Kooning’s siren song. Anyway, there is other work in this show also worth seeing, including good canvases by Gottlieb, Milton Avery and Esteban Vicente, plus an interesting welded-steel sculpture by Richard Stankiewicz, another gift from Rubin. The label on the Gottlieb is pretty inane, but otherwise the installation enables the viewer to get the most out of the art, in a space that isn’t always so well used.

THE NAM INVITATIONAL

Founded in 1825 by a group of artists, the National Academy of Design was modeled upon the Royal Academy in London, with the dual purpose of providing an exhibition space for its members and a school for up-and-coming artists. For the balance of the 19th century, its annual exhibitions were at or near the very center of American art, but sometime between 1908 and 1913, it began to have serious trouble adjusting to the latest artistic developments.  For the rest of the 20th century, it more or less dealt itself out of those segments of Western art history that included fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, constructivism, de Stijl, abstract expressionism, color-field painting, pop, op and minimal, etc. The NAD continued to accept new members, stage annual exhibitions and run an art school, but all these practices revolved around good, old-fashioned Realism. Now it is trying to catch up. Some years ago, it renamed itself the National Academy Museum, and began expanding its roster of members. Among these new kinds of National Academicians (entitled to write N.A. after their names) is an artist who expresses herself in a style that the Academy formerly looked upon with horror: Helen Frankenthaler, that is. The NAM has also begun to expand the kinds of art that it exhibits, but in both the expansion of its membership, and its exhibition policies, it is still perhaps a little unsure of itself, still somewhat like a baby taking its first steps.

To judge from its current exhibition, this is a fine situation to be in, conducive to the kind of genuine open-mindedness and willingness to explore the uncommercial that you won’t see at the Whitney, Guggenheim, MoMA or even the Met. The show is called “The 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art” (through September 7).  According to its press release, it includes (in alphabetical order) architectural renderings, collages, drawings, installations, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture and watercolors by emerging, mid-career, and well-established artists. None of the 130 artists represented are National Academicians themselves, but they were chosen by a curatorial committee of seven National Academicians from over 400 candidates nominated by their fellow N.A.’s. The catalogue, with reproductions of all the work and statements by the artists, was written by Nancy Malloy.

Certainly, this show has a contingent of the cute sort of stuff that litters up the galleries in Chelsea, but to a surprising degree, it is about painting – abstract as well as representational, less good as well as very good indeed. It has plenty of flavor-free abstract art, but only a minimum of the minimal, and only one offensively gestural that I saw. Karen Rosenberg, who reviewed this show for the Times, admitted that there was a lot of painting in her first two paragraphs, and tossed in a phrase suggesting that the evil geniuses of Greenberg and Rosenberg had been invoked. She (or somebody at the Times, maybe in their layout-and-pictures department) also saw to it that the painting by Eve Olitski was reproduced in color, but then Rosenberg carefully went through the exhibition and chose to mention little beyond examples of the kind of “trendy” art that you could just as easily see anywhere else. At the end, she suggested that the Academy was offering a “last line of defense against youth, attitude and the market,” but that this defense “might be strengthened by a tighter displays and a more relaxed definition of art.”  Translation: you old dummies, you still don’t know what’s hip, so you’ve stuck in a lot of old-fashioned stuff. Loosen up, you poor squares! Get in the groove! Let’s have more of the same kinds of warmed-over dada that I like and write about every week. If you ask me, it's the Times that's being a little old-fashioned & square. I say this not only because abstract painting, with its multireferential imagery, is more inherently radical than unireferential representation or presentation, but also because of the considerable amount of painting – and especially abstract painting – that I've seen around recently and discussed in this issue of my column. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a renascence, but somehow the climate for abstraction is better than it was.

My advice to the NAM is, don’t change a hair of it, not if you care about searching for – if not necessarily always finding – what’s really worth putting on view. True, I agreed with at most half of the prizes awarded, but otherwise, this show is almost equal to "Action/Abstraction” in its capacity to stretch the mind & esthetic spirit. There’s a freshness here which indicates creative thinking; you may lose that if you try to conform to the tastes of the Times. Don’t feel you have to focus on younger artists. There’s a lot of pressure among collectors to find and buy out the next new Warhol. They figure it’s a way of beating the market, but young artists aren’t necessarily original and older ones aren’t necessarily unoriginal. Basing one’s preferences upon the age of the artist is just as dumb as any other way of preselecting art upon the basis of who the artist is, as opposed to what the art itself is like. Don’t throw out representational painting. Although I can’t spare the space to discuss them in detail, I liked a number of representational paintings in this show (oh all right, I’ll mention two: “12th Street Entrance, IRT,” by Simon Carr, and Andrew Raftery, “Suit Shopping Diptych”).

I also liked a number of abstracts that I won’t discuss in detail, among them “Metaphor,” by Douglas Craft, but instead of going down a long list and tossing out a few comments on each, I’ve chosen in this case to focus on four very different abstract paintings that are outstandingly strong, and try to show how they were made, with the aid of the artists concerned. A lot of people will look at an abstract painting and think that it must have been just tossed off, very easy to do since it doesn’t depict anything recognizable. They don’t look at abstractions long enough or closely enough to be able to see how they’re composed or why some of them are more effective than others. In the notes that follow, I’ve jotted down first, my response to these four paintings when I saw them on June 20, 2008, then the correspondence I subsequently had with the artists who made them. My hope is that at least some people who read what I write will be encouraged to take a longer and more analytical look at the paintings.

In alphabetical order, then. First, David Crum, “Sky Over Roses,” 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 54 inches. My notes: “Lights up the space. Bright colors but not offensively so. Clear hues + compliment each other. Magenta field at bottom. Progressively higher layers of lime, white, copper, medium blue, light blue dripped from top, rivulets run down over the red at surprisingly regular intervals – descended from Pollock (but colors brighter – almost metallic). Pollockian in best sense – combo of free-flowing paint and CONTROL – decisive – built of contrasts but also allusive.”

Excerpts from email by Halasz, to Crum (June 26, 2008, 10:52 AM):

1) You call these strips of paint “runs” not “drips?” Correct? Or if not, what?

2) You worked from the bottom to the top, with the magenta at the bottom of the canvas going on first, then the different layers winding up with the light blue on top last?

3) Were you working on the floor, or did you have the canvas on a board, so that you could raise it and tilt it? Or if not how the heck did you do it?

4) At what point was the canvas stretched – before or after the paint was applied?

5) How did you get the runs so even?

6) Did you use paint right out of the paint pot of did you mix paints to get the color you wanted?

Email from Crum to Halasz (June 26, 2008, 7:29 AM)

Piri, I’m happy to answer your questions. Yes, I do refer to strips of color as runs rather than drips, more precise that way.

The color at the bottom is an overall ground color, then each succeeding color is laid on the previous color. I work on stretched and gessoed canvas, laid flat on sawhorses, and tilt the canvas toward vertical to achieve the “runs.”

Control of the runs, or rivulets, is done by varying the viscosity of the paint, and the amount applied. Thicker paint causes wider bands, and more paint runs farther. The painting is again laid flat to dry. I can add more paint while wet to extend selected rivulets.

Some colors are straight from the jar, others are mixes to get particular shades. All of the paintings you’ve seen were done by pouring wet paint onto dry....Thanks for asking; questions are better than wrong guesses.

Second, Judith Geichman (pronounced Guy-ch-man). “Herald,” 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 70 inches. My notes: “Pale, loose, iridescent colors, too, but glister only apparent up close except for couple fields of copper. Loose, free, gives feeling of looking up into a Tiepolo cupola – pinks, golds, grays + blue in center – sunlit clouds – again, well organized – top, top-like shapes, palest copper – balances darker copper shape at left, lower down. Spattering, wheeling feeling.

Excerpt from email to Geichman from Halasz (July 1, 2008, 3:00 PM)

1) was Herald a) made by laying the canvas on the floor b) on raw canvas, or if not how was it prepared to take the final coat of paint c) was the canvas stretched or unstretched while the painting was being made?

2) what specific tools were used – looks like sponges to me played a role but maybe it was also rollers or trowels? I didn’t notice any brushwork but maybe there was some?....

3) did you assume from the beginning that this was the way that the painting would be hung, or did you experiment with hanging it two or four different ways (i.e. with different sides of the painting on top)?

Excerpt from email to Halasz from Geichman (July 1, 2008, 3:20 PM)

Inspired by Baroque architecture and painters such as Fragonard, Tiepolo, along with my own experiences of being in dramatic landscapes, such as my travels to Iceland, the current paintings’ interests have been on the light, the air, the glorious, romantic spacial qualities you might find on a spring or summer day. Baroque, rococo structures, as well as Chinese Scholar Rocks, all have played a role in activating my imagination in making of the painting. I want to visually conjure painting events that one might experience by watching clouds, reading tea leaves, or interpreting an ink blot. I’d like my paintings to suggest that painted events may look like things, that seeing a flowing liquid form of paint can suggest multi-layered worlds that come to fruition ultimately in the visualization of the observer. In my own reading of HERALD, the large copper shape on the left side of the painting emerging from the painted mists reminded me of a herald from a baroque court with a trumpet making an announcement, a presentation. So goes the title of the painting.

In making the painting, the paintings are stretched (not cut from an unstretched piece and then stretched). The painting is made on the floor. I work with pours, stains, marks, and drawing (with paint). I am also using large Chinese brushes that are taped to long pieces of sticks of wood to extend them, and giving me limited control. In the lower portion of HERALD you can see a large silvery brush mark that was made that way. I also use windshield wipers, and scrapers that you clean glass doors with. I’ve used sticks from branches, and a large variety of tools that can be found in your local Home Depot....I’m using thin layers of paint, allowing me to build light layers. As the painting events are collected, edited, re-built, and constructed over time, a place, a space evolves in the work that then determines how the painting should be viewed....

Third, Pat Lipsky. “Cobalt,” 2007.; Oil on linen, 80 x 63 3/16 inches. My notes: “Lipsky won an award. Nicely restrained. 5 colors, 2 blues (medium + pale), black, olive, blueish green. 5 columns, bisected at different heights. classical and as lovely as always. Columns descending in center – rise at sides. Musical notes/Klee.”

Excerpt from email to Halasz from Lipsky, June 30, 2008, 12:49 PM (incorporating questions from email sent to Lipsky from Halasz, June 29, 2008, 8:29 PM)

Hi, Piri, I am happy to answer your very pro-technique questions, and look forward to reading your July column on the show....

Q: This is oil on linen. Why did you choose this ground & this medium?...

A: Linen, I find is a much better surface for oil paint than cotton duck, because of its sensitivity. This is a thin, fine portrait linen which is smoother than some – that is, it has relatively little texture. The ground is made of three coats of acrylic gesso (I’d prefer using lead white gesso, but after lead poisoning that isn’t an option)

Q: Did you paint on a stretched or an unstretched canvas. Was it hanging on the wall, standing upright, or lying on the floor?

A: I painted it stretched standing against the wall on two cans, to elevate it from the floor. As is my practice I worked on it from every direction.

Q: Did you use a primer, or did your colors go on raw canvas? Regardless of which of these two procedures you followed, what are its advantages?

A: As stated above I used a gesso primer. The advantage is to have a smooth and “pure” surface at the outset, one that I can relate to.

Q. How did you get the lines so straight? Did you use a pencil or charcoal or something like that on the canvas before applying the paint? How did you decide upon the respective widths of the columns (2^nd & 4^th wider than 1^st, 3^rd & 5^th). How did you decide where to bisect the columns across the middle of the canvas?

A: This is a very good question. First I drew a rough version of the composition, which I worked on in dark pencil. Then I put the first coat of paint on (rough draft). Then I continually used a 6B pencil to redefine the edges as I went along. The edges are still a main obsession (as is the color) that continues from my early work. I attempt to make the painting as perfect as possible, or as Alain de Button stated so well in his recent book, “The Architecture of Happiness,” “But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough that they can claim a measure of perfection unattainable by human beings....The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it.” This is a goal of mine.

The measurements are all by “feel.” I first learned about this from reading about Mondrian that he simply went by dimensions that “felt right.” I have developed this particular structure over a period of time. Sometimes I move the bisections up or down a bit, if they don’t look “right.” It’s simply a question of getting it all convincing and the way I have it in my mind which I eventually recognize on the flat canvas.

Q: Finally, how did you decide on the colors, & how many layers of paint did you use (seems to me I recall that you used a lot)?

A: Titian when he was asked what made his paintings so good said “thirty, forty glazes” (in Italian). (If he could do that many layers, so could I.) There are at least that many here, probably more, out of necessity. The cobalt was very hard to get “right” so I kept putting layer upon layer of it on the surface, hence the title. Again the colors are purely intuitive, an obsession, a need to use certain colors and not others, particularly that celadon green, and that indigo blue, and of course that cobalt (one of the most beautiful colors to my mind).

Fourth, Eve Olitski (elder daughter of Jules Olitski, elder sister of Lauren Olitski). “Warm Enfold,” 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 inches. My notes: “Why no prize? Why just for publicity? Chip off the old block. brilliant free colors + painterly shapes characteristic of father’s last period (‘90s-‘00s) but color scheme a lot simpler, v. decisive. stead of “orb” [shape favored by father during his last period] large framing oval of narrow yellow line green field (green on green – below lovely touch) area of blue near top w. raised sand-like accretions – iridescent turquoise + copper paint on it – subtle not obvious – vigorous contrast provided by bright red strip in center. beautiful combo: simple basics, complicated accents and details.”

Two emails from Halasz to Olitski (June 23, 2008, 5:22 PM and June 23, 2008, 5:24 PM):

Hi, Eve, I plan to discuss the NAM invitational in my column and yr. painting in it.. I wonder, could you tell me what are the raised elements in the upper part of the painting? Is this just dry pigment or is it sand or gravel or if not, what? Thanks very much. Regards, Piri

PS Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about the technique you used? Such as, how was the paint applied – by brush, sponge, roller? Or if not, what? Was the canvas primed, or did you start with raw canvas? Best, Piri

Excerpt from email from Eve Olitski to Halasz (June 23, 2008, 5:58 PM)

Dear Piri Halasz, Thank you for your interest in my painting, “Warm Enfold” at The National Academy. The raised surface was achieved by the application of coarse pumice interference paste, which I apply with a flat plastic utensil. I carve lines in some areas. The paint is applied with a brush, in some areas, I just apply from the bottle directly onto the wet surface. Some of the paint is mixed with an iridescent pearl for a luminous effect. Nothing is predetermined or planned the materials are just tools along the way, a means to an end. I have no idea what will happen when I begin and try to work with improvised spontaneity. I hope this is helpful.  

Excerpt from email from Halasz to Eve Olitski (June 23, 2008, 8:41 PM)

Dear Eve Olitski, What you’ve written me is very helpful but I need a little more clarification. ...I think interference is a type of paint that looks different when seen from one angle than it does when seen from another, but am I correct? And is there a simpler way of saying it, such as it glows or has a molten or metallic appearance? And is the coarse pumice paste mixed with the interference paint or does it come ready-mixed?....

You said you carve lines in some areas. With what? A palette knife or just the same flat plastic tool that you used to apply the pumice interference paste?

Finally, did you make “Warm Enfold” on the floor, or did you have it tacked up on a wall, or an easel, or what?

Excerpt from email to Halasz from Eve Olitski (June 24, 2008, 3:12 PM)

Hello Piri, I used coarse pumice interference this gives the pumice color it comes pre-mixed and has to be special ordered. It has a molten appearance, metallic appearance depending on the kind of interference color you get, such as blue black, gold black, green black. I applied this with a palette knife and made lines in it with a plastic knife. When the pumice is completely dry I begin to paint on the surface with acrylic paint usually with a brush and sometimes pouring paint straight from the bottle. I sometimes mix iridescent pearl paint in with the acrylic paint to give it a luminous glow. The painting was done on a table on a pre-stretched canvas that was primed with gesso and a coarse pumice gel, which gives the canvas a somewhat rough texture....

This painting is an abstraction from nature. Land, sky, sunset. I was inspired by a stay at my father’s summer house on a lake in New Hampshire. My interest is in making color, texture and composition work together in a spontaneous way.....

I didn’t create the painting, the painting created itself and told me what to do. In the end I hope I have done it right. Most of the painting is the painter’s impulse to follow some message that has no words or thoughts. This is for me an intimacy, a unique relationship, the artist’s secret world.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Three local shows of “summer selections:” 1)Ameringer Yohe Fine Art has a fabulous Frankenthaler, “Black with Shadow” (1961), an excellent Motherwell, “Whitely Triangle” (ca. 1960), and a wittily atypical Hofmann, “Snow White”: (1960); plus a hostile little Howard Hodgkin and an Alfred Leslie from 1956 that could be just the ticket for some collector who wants a de Kooning but doesn’t want to pay de Kooning prices (through August 22); 2) Adelson, in its spotless new town house at 19 East 82nd Street, is displaying comfortably representational (& correspondingly priced) paintings, especially by Wyeths, Andrew & Jamie; more importantly, it has 6–count ‘em, 6 – unpainted but burnished stainless steel sculptures by Peter Reginato. These are very impressive, especially the smallest, “Little Cool,” and two biggest and most majestic, “Vertical #1 (Stacked),” out on the little back patio, and “Vertical #2 (Curly),” in the center of the gallery itself. I was so sorry to miss Reginato’s show of such work last summer in Chelsea, and feel that this Adelson show plugs an important hole in my artistic education (through September 12); 3) though I haven’t yet seen what’s up at Jacobson Howard over the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, the announcement lists Bannard, Dzubas, Poons and Motherwell among others (through July 29)

News from abroad: The Gallery of The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, in the UK, exhibited “Big Paintings: Jim Hunter + Frank Bowling”... Bernard Jacobson in London has just concluded “Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings 1959-2002;” judging from the reproduction on the invite, it must have been quite a show... I received a handsome catalogue for “New Sculpture: Willard Boepple” at Broadbent, also in London... the Contemporary Arts Society of Rome is presenting “Roy Lerner: Clear as a Bell” at the Ex-Museo Civicio di Spoleto as part of the Festival Dei due Mondi (through July 30)....David Evison will exhibit new sculpture at Galerie Gerken in Berlin (September 5-October 10).

A sad email from Gina Medcalf in London advises me of the death of John Foster, the talented British steel sculptor who ran a series of sculpture workshops at his place in Hardingham, Norfolk. According to Medcalf, these workshops attracted many participants and visitors from the US and Canada as well as the UK, among them Peter Hide, Valentin Tatransky, Terry Fenton, Randy Bloom, Jay Hutchinson, Charles Hewlings and David Evison. I never knew Foster or his work directly, but I was able to appreciate both at least indirectly through the photographs and discussions in Tatransky’s fine 1998 book, “Sculpture.”

News from Canada: “Jonathan Forrest: off the grid” appeared at Peter Robertson in Edmonton.....The North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop is presenting an exhibition of 5 large-scale sculptures by Peter Hide at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton (through October 5)..... “Dorothy Knowles: Land Marks,” guest-curated by Terry Fenton, is on view at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery in Moose Jaw, SK (through September 7).

And in the US:: Randy Bloom and Paul Corio showed paintings at “Troy Night Out,” in the Ilium Building of Troy NY........ John Link had a solo exhibition at the James W. Kerr Gallery at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where Link taught until he retired last year....an email of the invite for “US Express” at Meredith Long in Houston reproduced what is almost certainly a delicious Darryl Hughto, done in 1980 at Emma Lake; other artists listed on the invite were Stanley Boxer, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Friedel Dzubas and Dan Christensen....  “Early Summer Nerves,” a non-narrative documentary by William Noland set in 21st Century Tokyo, was shown at the Athens International Film-Video Festival in Athens OH....  Cara London’s “Spring!” is on view at River Edge in Bridgeton House, Upper Black Eddy (through August 16)..... FINALLY, besides Spoleto, Roy Lerner is exhibiting 6 paintings with Gallery Sam, Evan Morganstien as part of ArtHamptons, art fair in Bridgehampton NY (July 11-13)..... . (©Copyright 2008 by Piri Halasz)

APRIL | HOME | OCTOBER