NO. 77-78: OCTOBER 15-DECEMBER 1 2007....A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR (WITH APOLOGIES TO DANIEL DEFOE & COMMENTARY BY JOHN DRYDEN) .....Greetings from – well, not quite The Great Beyond, thank God, but even major surgery can be scary. For those who have just tuned in to my ongoing soap opera, sometime toward the end of March the minor back problems I’d lived with for many years escalated into such pain that I couldn’t walk for more than a quarter of a block, couldn’t stand for more than five minutes, and couldn’t sleep for more than 1½ hours before being awakened by pain (though if I got out of bed, folded it up into its daytime sofa, and went to sleep on it sitting up, I could grab another four hours of slumber).

Surgery became necessary. On May 23, I had a laminectomy to relieve the pressure on my spinal cord due to stenosis. I won’t bore you with most of the details of my 7-week incarceration in 2 hospitals & a rehab center, but I will say that in the rehab center, the psychiatrist in charge switched me from thioridazine, a tranquilizer that I’d been taking at a very low dosage to help me sleep at night, to trazodone, another mind drug that also has sleep inducing properties – but which is actually an antidepressant. Since I was already taking another antidepressant, bupropion, the net effect of the two has been to catapult me into a state of mania that is largely (though not entirely) chemically induced. I say “largely” because I have also always been vulnerable to stress, environmental as well as occupational. Both kinds of stress are at a high level for me just now (for reasons you shall see below). In any event, my symptoms include talking too much, spending too much money, and (most importantly in the present context) a serious tendency toward hypergraphia, another medical term for the exact opposite of writer’s block. Though I am now back on the thioridazine, it’s taking a while to bring me back down to earth, so you, gentle reader, will be stuck with a hypergraphic issue of this newsletter. Hypergraphia (in my case) means two things: length and a tendency toward truth-telling that can sometimes be unpleasant.

My last hypergraphic issue was published in the wake of 9/11. On that occasion, the key unpleasant truth concerned the nature of the U.S. electorate. This issue deals with truths that some of my Artland friends may find nearer to home. All I can say is that I feel now as I felt in 2001: not all truths must necessarily remain true. Indeed, the shortest route to rendering some unpleasant truths untrue may be to expose them.

(This column does eventually end.  Part Three, with journal entries between August 17 and October 20, went online November 19, while Part Four, listing exhibitions seen or not seen but recommended for readers, went online November 24. To aid my readers in navigating a column more than a dozen times its normal length, a table of contents, with links and page numbers to many major segments, has been added.)

Not having given much thought to the whole state of the arts for the past six months, I do have a lot to say, and I don’t have time to boil it down into a more manageable length. In this, I resemble Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician & philosopher, who on Dec. 14, 1656 wrote a very long letter in which he apologized for its length by saying that he would have written a shorter letter except that he hadn’t had time to. (I’ve heard this line attributed to everybody from Demosthenes to Einstein and Lord Chesterfield but Pascal’s letter can apparently be documented, so to him I give the credit). I want to make this clear because otherwise people who read about my forthcoming book in this column may think that the book is just as long-winded as this column, and that ain’t so. I look upon the column as journalism, bulletins from the front. I whip it out as fast as I can, not troubling to condense it but just letting my often-involuted stream of consciousness take over. The book on the other hand is history and maybe (let’s hope) literature: to try and realize those ambitions, I have labored long & hard to better organize & condense it – which is not to say that it’s short, only that’s it’s much more concentrated, less diffuse.

I knew this column was going to be longer than average before I started writing it because I still had some summer shows to catch up with, and ideas that I wanted to explore, but I didn’t bank on so many new shows opening in the fall–good and even great shows that I wanted to write about, as well as other developments that needed to be covered. I don’t know why there is all this activity but I hope that I’ve conveyed some of its excitement in the pages that follow. People reading this on the web will be able to access specific segments via links. The page numbers are for the benefit of readers of my print edition, printed up by my browser. Anybody who accesses this over the web, then prints it up through their browser, may very well come up with a completely different set of page references.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE: MOOD OF THE MOMENT

(WHY IS THIS A PLAGUE YEAR - or not?)

As remarked above, even major surgery can be scary. In advance, I was told that I had little to worry about, but I still felt the need to revise my will & appoint a literary executrix in case I didn’t survive. I spent many hours writing a memo to that executrix about what would have to be done to get my book (of which more below) published & circulated to enough people so that it stood a chance of getting reviewed & as a result bought by some libraries, for the future to read even if the present, by and large, said nuts to you. We are all in the shadow of death constantly, whether we realize it or not. Younger people mostly don’t, at least in our current well-fed, well-doctored country, but even in America, anybody could step in front of a truck any moment, so I am taking this moment to share the name of my literary executrix: somebody very special, my first cousin, Rinda West. Rinda has lived in Chicago lo these many years, and is now a professor emerita of English at Oakton Community College there; she also runs Rinda West Landscape Designs, which specializes in finding and planting native plants in city gardens. Her second book is due for publication in November by the University of Virginia Press. It is “Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Stories, and Encounters with the Land.” This is not my area of specialization, but from our conversations I gather that the book combines her knowledge of literature with her love of nature, her background as a 60s antiwar & feminist activist & her experience of Jungian psychology. It can be ordered in paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (though the Barnes & Noble website tells you more about what the book concerns). If you want the hardcover, it’s available, too, at the website of Powell’s Bookstore (whose fabulous HQ are in Portland OR).

My personal afflictions are one reason I have chosen the title for this entire issue. It refers to a novel published in 1722 by Daniel Defoe, better known as the author of “Moll Flanders” (1722) and “Robinson Crusoe” (1719). I read what may have been an abbreviated version of the first as a child, and loved the swinging adventures of the second when I was in college--just the sort of raunchy Enlightenment fare that I battened on, thanks to having been raised by a mom with a Rabelaisian sense of humor – not very ladylike but then neither she nor I have ever been perfect ladies. Googling Defoe just now, to get the date of the “Plague Year” correct, I learn that Defoe was a noted Dissenter, and was in fact fined, put in the pillory and eventually sent to Newgate Prison for having outraged the Anglican Establishment with a pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1702). In it, he suggested that all Dissenters be suppressed (much the same sort of savage irony that motivated Jonathan Swift, 27 years later, to offer his own “Modest Proposal” for dealing with famine in Ireland, namely for the Irish to eat their own children). Dare I suggest that I too am something of a dissenter from our current Postmodernist Art-World Establishment?

“A Journal of the Plague Year” is really a novel, a fictional reconstruction of one man’s progress through the Great Plague that overwhelmed London in 1665, with bodies piled high everywhere & the stench doubtless overwhelming – but it was all swept away the following year by the Great Fire that leveled London in five days from September 2 to September 7, 1666, leaving the ground free for Sir Christopher Wren, among others, to build a new London (Wren himself having designed 53 new churches, including St. Paul’s itself). The events of 1665-1666 were commemorated by John Dryden, in “Annus Mirabilis,” a poem that argued that this year had in fact been a “year of miracles.” According to Wikipedia, “The miracle of the Fire was that London was saved, that the fire was stopped, and that the great king (Charles II) would rebuild (for he had already announced his plans to improve the streets of London and to begin great projects). Dryden’s view is that ...God had saved England from destruction, and that God had performed miracles for England...” Heavens! How these poets do run on...

Our good Queen Bess II pulled a switch on Dryden in 1992, when she said, in a speech commemorating the 40th year of her accession, that the year just past had been an “Annus horribilis” for her. Three of her four children had either gotten divorced or were separating from their spouses, and Her Majesty’s Government had been unwilling to pay for repairs after a disastrous fire at Windsor Castle, but Queenie pulled through all right, didn’t she? And at last reports still seems to be doing okay, though I see at the website of “Conspiracy Planet: The Alternative News & History Network” that Mohammed al-Fayed, the rich, rich owner of Harrod’s department store and father of Dodi, is still trying to convince a jury that Dodi & his lady-friend, Princess Di, were murdered upon orders from Prince Philip. Oh come on! If this isn’t the ultimate in paranoia, I don’t know what is – but I’m sure the London papers had a ball with it.... The way I feel is that I’m terribly sorry Diana had to die but, in a way, she brought it upon herself by being such a publicity hound in the first place. I see a dreadful kind of poetic justice that she should have died trying to escape a ravening pack of paparazzi. I thought Dame Helen Mirren did a magnificent job of showing how the Queen got through the ordeal that she had to endure as a result of Diana’s death, in the movie of The Queen. Mirren richly deserved her Oscar for such a fully-rounded, understanding portrait of the monarch, but for unladylike me the crowning touch came when Elizabeth is out driving on the highlands in her Range Rover or whatever it is and the vehicle stalls. After a fruitless struggle to get it going again, under her breath, she mutters a soft, unladylike “bugger.”

I cannot resist mentioning that the Wikipedia entry on “Annus Mirabilis” notes that a 1967 poem by Philip Larkin uses the phrase as the title for one of his best known poems, “regarding the onset of more relaxed sexual mores in 1960s Britain,” and quotes the poem:

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Which again reminds me of the fact that over the summer, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was an exhibition called “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” organized originally by Christoph Grunenberg of Tate Liverpool. Officially, it was supposed to document the summer of 1967, when all the world was being told to wear a flower in its hair if it was going to San Francisco, and Art Nouveau-ish posters in DayGlo colors for the Fillmore Auditorium were luring fans of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead there, but since the show originated in the UK, a portion of the show was devoted to 1967 in London, and in a glass case with a lot of hippie London magazines and jacket covers of old LPs was a copy of my own little book, A Swinger's Guide to London (1967) I am so glad I wrote that book! It didn’t do at all well when it first came out, priced at $3.95, but over the years it seems to have turned into something of a collectible – anyway in London, where a store called Beat Books, which specializes in mod/beat literature, sold a copy a few years ago for $50. I got the offer to write it originally because Ellis Amburn, an editor at Coward-McCann, spotted my photo in the issue of Time which carried my cover story on “Swinging London.” He called me up & asked if I’d like to do a little guide book to London. I leapt at the chance because after the story had been edited, it was some distance from what I’d wanted to say. “A Swinger’s Guide to London” was my take on the scene, not Time’s, yet if I’d listened to Otto Fuerbringer, the managing editor of Time, it might never have been written. I had to ask his permission to write it, because of the conflict-of-interest regulations at Time, but when I did ask him, his first response was, “What do you want do all that work for?”

To get back to why I’m calling this issue, A Journal of the Plague Year, besides my own complaints, seems that every time I pick up the phone, I hear that somebody I know and like is under the weather with some ailment. Here are five I’ve been most aware of 1) my great CPA, Fitz, who earlier this year developed a virus infection in her right ear that is threatening her hearing; seems the audio nerve is the most fragile in the body; once you lose it, it doesn’t grow back 2) the painter, Francine Tint, who suffered the worst sprained ankle that her doctor had ever seen when she tripped over a step coming in from her terrace while chasing her new all-black kitty, Valentine; 3) my literary friend Alison, laid up for too long with a damaged sciatic nerve, triggered by an over-energetic tennis game; 4) Randy Bloom, the painter, with a broken rib, due to an accident when a truck ran into her car head on (not wishing to follow the route of Jackson Pollock and David Smith, she’s now driving the safest make she can find, a Volvo); and 5) my darling first cousin once removed, Molly Anderson, MD, suffering from an ulnar neuropathy (numbness & weakness of the hand), also glass in her left foot, a damaged calf muscle & an injured right knee (and she has a cold). I would say (as I often do), Old Age Sucks, but most of these people are younger than I am, ranging in age from my near-contemporaries to as much as twenty years my junior.

The most depressing thing about 2007 is that already one great artist & one very fine person have departed from our midst: first, Jules Olitski, on February 7, then André Emmerich, on September 25. I’ve already written about Olitski, and I shall have more to say on Emmerich below, but right now the feeling that I’m assailed with, and that I would imagine many and maybe most of the art-lovers who read this column are also assailed with is the horrible feeling that Emmerich is very possibly not the last to go this year or even in the abominably near future. This is part of a far broader situation: a whole generation of artists was born in the 1920s and achieved star status in the 60s. Among the popular favorites, Warhol and Lichtenstein have already died, and I suppose Rauschenberg and maybe even Johns will hit the front page of The New York Times when they go. Every artist who shares my enthusiasm for Greenberg can probably name several lesser-known artists of his or her acquaintance, too, who are no longer with us (including Larry Zox, Dan Christensen and Isaac Witkin), but the reason I force myself to glance at the obituary page every morning is because sooner or later there will be three big, big names on it that I really don’t want to see but that I know I will. Who will be next, I ask myself unhappily. Will it (in alphabetical order) be Caro? Will it be Frankenthaler? Will it be Noland?

Personally, I prefer my artists alive. That may be just my quaint idiosyncrasy but if I were a dealer, maybe I’d rather have them dead. Look at the advantages: you don’t have to mount shows of the artist’s late style, which may or may not be up to the standards of his or her earlier work. Some artists do stay on top right to the very end; some even surpass their earlier accomplishments; but some don’t, and in any event clients will pay bigger money for paintings done when the artist was younger & more famous & and the paintings correspondingly more familiar. Even more importantly, the minute an artist dies, if s/he were famous during his/her lifetime, then prices zoom upwards – strictly according to the law of supply and demand, for now we can put Punkt to the supply & work on escalating the demand. A good way for a dealer, I suppose, to escalate demand is call in any clients whom he or she may have & who represent hedge funds. Then you tell them that a certain painter by the name of A is about to pass on, but that you can let them in on the ground floor by offering them a few specially sale priced items before the regular season begins (you know, the way department stores advertise special sales of fall clothes in August) That way, you’ve got the market covered both ways: great deals for insiders if A isn’t dead, great deals for the public if he or she is. One can almost hear carnival barkers shouting, “Get your A’s now! Get your red-hot A’s here!”

Of course, I must admit – speaking purely as a critic (as opposed to a human being) – that such grossly opportunistic logic can result in spectacular shows, exhibitions of paintings that (in the vernacular) one could die for. This seems to have been what happened with what may be the greatest show in Manhattan at the moment (or anyway may be the greatest solo exhibition in town by anybody born since 1920). In the weekly columnar ad inserted in Friday’s NYTimes by galleries who belong to the Art Dealers Association of America, this show has been called, “Helen Frankenthaler: Master Paintings,” at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art (through November 17). I’ve had to stick in all those “may be’s” because I haven’t actually seen this show myself; all I’ve seen is the catalogue, which is called “Helen Frankenthaler,” and it’s really a piece of work. The color reproductions of the paintings themselves are staggeringly beautiful, but the black-and-white photographs and the text itself I could do without. Opposite the title page there’s a black-and-white photograph of an empty chair in Frankenthaler’s studio. Got that (rather heavy-handed symbolism)? Next we turn to a page with a black-and-white photo of Frankenthaler in profile, with the left-hand margin cutting off most of her lower body and the upper part bending down to pour some paint from a can onto a canvas. With her face innocent of makeup, her hair swept back, and the graceful swoop of her body, she is made to look somehow like a disembodied Botticelli angel descending back down to earth with tidings of heavenly glory: opposite is a quotation from her about the perfect painting printed very artistically in funereal deep gray & purple lettering (the end papers are also a funereal purple). This is all a tasteful way of burying a woman while she’s still alive.

Following the 21 stellar reproductions of beautiful paintings (including several well-known ones from the early 60s like “Blue Form in a Scene,” “Buddha’s Court” and “Tangerine”), we get two pages with key quotations, one from Noland, one from Louis, both attesting to the importance of Frankenthaler for later generations of artists – and both in the past tense. The one from Noland: “We were interested in Pollock but could gain no lead from him. He was too personal. But Frankenthaler showed us a way – a way to think about, and use, color.” The one from Louis: “She was a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” At the very back of the book is the page with all the end notes and photo credits, facing a page with another heavily-symbolic subject (Frankenthaler’s empty studio). If you read the credits carefully, you can see how the entire catalogue could have been put together without Frankenthaler, Noland or anybody connected with either of them (or with Morris Louis) knowing anything about it. I’m not saying it was, just that it could have been – at any rate if none of the paintings came from Frankenthaler herself, and all were what’s called “secondary market.” By “secondary market” I mean paintings that have been sold at least once already, and are now being re-sold. In the secondary market, no money goes to the artist, but speaking as an author whose guide book is now available only through the secondary market, I’m delighted to see how much glory redounds to me – and who knows what further opportunities yet may come?

One likes to think that the triumvirate who now run that gallery – Will Ameringer, Miles McEnery and James Yohe – instead of rubbing their palms together and taking holidays in the Bahamas with whatever ill-gotten gains they reap from this show – will use at least part of their rakeoff to subsidize a show or shows of younger artists in the best modernist tradition that Frankenthaler stands for (and may I say that I am underwhelmed with the younger artists that this gallery has so far chosen to nominate for that role). Maybe younger modernists don’t sell all that much at first, but anybody who plans on staying in business for the next 20 years or so might want some living modernists to represent a decade or so hence.

I first heard about this show through Tint, who hadn’t apparently read the ad in the October 5 NYTimes, but had heard about the show through the ever-lovin’ art-world grapevine. If I recall correctly, she called me on that Friday, the day after the show opened, to report that it had opened; a little later, she called again, to report that she’d seen the show and to rave about it. “Mind-blowing,” was her adjective, to which she added that there were some paintings she’d never seen, including one huge one, “The Sound of the Bassoon” (1974). (Measuring 8½ by 21 feet, “The Sound of the Bassoon” must have particularly appealed to Tint because she herself loves to work large.) I was already hard at work on this column & couldn’t get down to see the show before I went to press. I’d certainly like to see it sometime, but I would be very surprised if every painting in the show I saw was one I’d already seen in the catalogue. Even the catalogue itself says that “only a selection of paintings from this publication will be on view in the exhibition,” and on previous occasions when I’ve visited this gallery, I’ve found paintings on the walls that weren’t reproduced in the catalogues accompanying the shows, while paintings reproduced in the catalogues were nowhere to be seen in the gallery. When I ask about such situations, I am usually told that this painting or that one has already been sold & its new owner can’t wait to hang it (or, alternatively, that a potential buyer wants to see how the painting looks in his or her home).

This reminds me of what I’m fairly sure Abram Lerner, first director of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, told me about a Russian-American painter called David Burliuk (1882-1967) who used to show at ACA back in the 1940s, when Lerner worked there as a young man. Burliuk himself as a young man had exhibited with the Blue Rider group in Germany and participated in early Russian Constructivism, but by the 40s, he’d adopted a more sedate & representational if still comparatively charming style, small paintings depicting Russian peasants & farm animals with elements of Chagall, humor, naivete, a dash of surrealism & heavy paint application, gobs of the stuff laid on in what the 40s called “expressionism.”

The belief in the 40s (as I stressed in my dissertation & some articles that came out of it) was that loose, free paint application (even in representational paintings) was considered more “expressive” of emotion than flatly-painted, hard-edged shapes like those of Miró, late Kandinsky, Mondrian and their eager and talented but far less original admirers who were exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists in the 30s and the 40s. It was because a) of this equation between heavy paint application and “expressionistic” and b) the fact that abstraction in the 30s and early 40s was still primarily associated with the hard-edged and flatly-painted that Robert Coates dubbed some paintings by Hans Hofmann in 1946 “abstract expressionism,” thereby taking an old term (formerly applied to early Kandinsky) and using it to name a new movement.

According to my dissertation, Lerner recalled how Burliuk’s ACA shows were held in November & December, the better to lure Christmas shoppers, and that the artist & his two sons used to trudge into the gallery with their arms laden with these cute little pictures. What isn’t in the dissertation but what I do recall Lerner saying was that as soon as one of these sappy little pictures was sold, the Burliuks would whip it down off the wall & substitute another, unsold one. Just like the folks at A\Y. Such a policy may be great for business, but it does complicate things for a reviewer like myself. How can I point to such-and-such a painting with pride, if my readers won’t be able to go in and see it for themselves? On the other hand, I must admit that my little column probably doesn’t reach enough potential gallery visitors to make it worthwhile for A/Y to risk offending potential buyers for my sake. I also know that as matters now stand, the odds are slight that anybody from any other larger publication will want to review the same shows that I’d chose to review. Sometimes, of course, this does occur with artists who were famous or anyway well-known in the 60s, and who are showing the kind of work that gave them such celebrity in the 60s. For example, I was delighted to see that Roberta Smith did eventually get around to reviewing the minimalist paintings by Darby Bannard at Jacobson Howard in the NYTimes for July 6, nearly two months after the show had opened – though her big conclusion, that Bannard’s “Minimalist Color Field style would have been anathema to both teams” reveals her all-too-typical ignorance of the way things really were in the 60s, and specifically the circumstances under which Bannard painted these pictures...

In any event, I can more or less visualize the kinds of shows that A/Y (and Jacobson Howard) are more likely to get reviewed by publications with bigger circulations than mine. For example, I would suspect that when A/Y stages a show of one of their tolerably hip artists, like Judy Pfaff, say, they might hope for a review from someplace like New York Magazine (to which Jerry Saltz seems to have graduated from the Village Voice while I was out of commission) or say Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker. If A\Y is displaying nice representational modernism like that of Wolf Kahn, maybe the good people at the New York Sun would bite, or the related crowd at The New Criterion, both of whom may also go for the better second-generation abstract expressionists, like Esteban Vicente – although I’m actually making all this up, as I don’t read New York with any degree of regularity, nor have I actually witnessed Schjeldahl writing on Pfaff. Moreover, the only times I see any reviews at all that originally appeared in the New York Sun or The New Criterion are when some gallery has Xeroxed such reviews and left the Xeroxes at their reception desks.

In this, I follow not the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” but another doctrine I associate with the late great Greenberg, specifically the primacy of life over art, often voiced as “all the art in the world isn’t worth one human life.” The way I see it, George W. Bush is squandering human lives every day, and so, although I can’t afford to give money to left-wing causes, I can refuse to give money to right-wingers who might see eye to eye with Bush. The Sun is a conservative publication that is taking advertising away from the Times, so I have never bought it. I used to subscribe to The New Criterion, but after it hired Robert Bork to defend the Supreme Court’s decision on Bush v. Gore, I let my subscription lapse. All of this doesn’t mean that I don’t admire Vicente. I would never hold an artist’s admirers against the artist, and ran a brief, favorable review of Vicente in March 2004.

In the 40s, Burliuk’s shows did get reviewed, because there were only about 90 galleries in Manhattan, to be reviewed by 4 daily papers that carried regular art coverage, two major art magazines, and a selection of consumer magazines. All published a cross-section of reviews on a weekly or at least a bi-weekly basis, enabling nearly every artist with a gallery show to get reviewed. Today, we have one daily paper in NYC, plus half as many consumer magazines interested in art. The latter publish either teeny tiny listings almost entirely devoid of comment, and/or single long articles usually devoted to only a single artist or show (the art magazines do much the same). This ratio of print to exhibitions is so appallingly out of whack that even if a new Jackson Pollock were to alight upon the scene in ‘07, it would be like a tree falling in the forest when there’s nobody around to hear it. Did it make a sound?

Before I’d heard about Frankenthaler’s show at A/Y, I’d been down to Washington to see three other special exhibitions. I’ll deal with them in their proper space, but as is my habit when visiting other cities, I also try to hit some permanent collections in the museums, to see what’s on view and what’s not. In particular, I was anxious this time to see what was happening in the National Gallery of Art, since Carol Vogel had reported in the August 3 NY Times that the group of eight Mark Rothko paintings that had formerly hung in the first room of its concourse galleries were about to be replaced with minimalist art. As of September 1, pride of place would be going to three versions of Dan Flavin’s “‘Monument’ for V. Tatlin,” a series of fluorescent light sculptures supposed to pay tribute to Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist. Along with the Flavins, the National Gallery’s director, Earl A. Powell, III, enthused to Vogel about his museum’s first sculpture by Donald Judd, a Plexiglas floor piece from 1963 recently acquired from PaceWildenstein. “It’s a seminal piece,” Power was quoted saying, adding that although minimalist art wasn’t one of the National Gallery’s strong suits, this was “a major first step” in remedying such an apparent defect. “We’ll need more work by Judd,” Powell had said, and what, I found myself worrying, will have happened to “Mountains and Sea” (1952) – this being in my opinion a far more truly seminal work of art?

As anybody with any claim to knowledgeability about modern art knows, this was the painting where Frankenthaler took Pollock’s black stain pictures of the early 50s, and showed how they could be more widely adapted, by thinning her paints & spreading them in washes over a canvas laid on the floor, using paint cans instead of a palette, a sponge as well as a brush, and her shoulder as much as her wrist. “Mountains and Sea” was the painting that so impressed Louis and Noland when they came up from Washington to see it (guided to their destination by Greenberg), the bridge between Pollock and the possible. For many years, it had been hanging in those subterranean spaces that lie between the East and West buildings of the museum, though the museum never owned it (the label always said, “Collection of the artist”). But would it still be there? Yes, praises be, it was, though admittedly one now has to get to it through that arid display of minimalist art, including the Flavin, whose bluish light makes everybody in its vicinity look like death warmed over, a piece of conceptual art by On Kawara, three large panels each with a single word written on them that struck me as reminiscent of 60s Joseph Kossuth, and (among much else) a large wire mesh square floor piece by Robert Morris with a square hole in the middle (whatever happened to Morris? He was much esteemed in the 60s). Still, if you persevere through this depressing display, you will eventually get to a large rectangular gallery where many of the Old Boys of the first generation of abstract expressionism hang together, with “Mountains and Sea” there as daughter to them all.

If you want to see Frankenthaler with some of her artistic progeny, one place I recommend in DC is a small but very worthy gallery in the recently renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum (or at least that gallery was worthy when I was there, although as Mandy Young, the public affairs assistant, pointed out, works of art are rotated periodically due to loans & conservation issues). This little gallery, on the third floor, was (to the best of my recollection) labeled "Color Field Painting." In it were displayed (counterclockwise from the entrance): Frankenthaler, "Small’s Paradise" (1964), Noland; "Split" (1959); Gene Davis, "Wall Stripes no. 3" (1962); Paul Reed, "#1D (1965); Anne Truitt, "17th Summer" (1974 – sculpture); Morris Louis, "Faces" (1959); and Noland, "Shoot" (1964). (Elsewhere, the museum also has currently hanging "color-field" paintings by Jacob Kainen, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing and Alma Thomas.) The G Street facade of the museum, between 7th and 9th Streets, has a large Grecian portico with a pediment supported by massive Doric columns. Between these columns, when I was there, were hung four narrow vertical fluttering banners, with details of works of art on each combined with words describing the subject. One seemed to deal with the performing arts, one with the decorative arts, one with American history, and one with ‘Modern Art;" this last-named one was decorated with a detail from Frankenthaler’s "Small’s Paradise." Long may she wave.

The label to the painting itself, upstairs in the gallery, has a detailed description of how the title came into existence. Since this description involves a Freudian set of free associations, I suspected that it had been based upon an interview with the artist. I knew she’d had a bit of psychoanalysis when she was young, and I’d read of other cases where she’d used free association to arrive at a painting’s title, so when I got back to New York, I called Knoedler’s, her gallery, to see if I could verify that she’d been interviewed in connection with that label. I was a bit concerned about her health, since she’d been in a wheelchair the last time I’d seen her, at the opening of her sculpture show last fall at Knoedler’s, but Knoedler’s was unable to provide me with the information I wanted, because the artist herself was not at home. She’d gone up to Bennington, her alma mater, to help it celebrate its 75th anniversary, and attend the opening reception of the same sculpture show in the college’s Usdan Gallery (through October 19). Still, Knoedler’s was able to tell me about a nice article about Frankenthaler by E. A. Carmean, Jr., in the October issue of Art & Antiques, with a huge reproduction of ‘Mountains and Sea,” together with a lovely color photo of the artist seated in front of one of her own paintings, “Blue Lady” (which is very much blue on blue). The brown-haired artist is wearing a dark pinstriped jacket with a soft brown scarf around her neck in what looks like a Paisley pattern. She also has on a string of blue beads that exactly matches & highlights the blues in the painting, whose title (for the benefit of those who weren’t listening to jukeboxes in the 40s or dancing in discos in the 60s) is a quotation from a melodic old song, addressed to a florist, “I want some red roses for a blue lady, send them to the sweetest gal in town....”.

While I’m on the subject of Helen Frankenthaler, I have a few further things I want to say – not because she’s necessarily in any immediate danger, but because I may fall under a truck tomorrow – and also because I don’t know at present when the next issue of FMD will be coming out. Therefore: to me, she is not only a great artist, but a great human being. It was her genius as an artist that made possible her great retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 which prompted me to want to do a cover story on her, and to learn enough about her past so that I also felt the need to interview Clement Greenberg about her. It was her insight into human nature, I like to think, that led her to decide that I was “simpatico” enough to merit an introduction to him, and she was the one who called him and asked him to see me. In retrospect, if I hadn’t met him, I don’t know what I’d have done, but because I did, my whole life took on new meaning. In other ways, too, Frankenthaler has shown me that she understands the need for fellow humans to come through for one another in a pinch. Though she & I lead & have always led almost entirely separate lives, hers was one of very few mailing lists I stayed on after I left Time. Two lunches with her in the 1970s again made me feel I might be worth something to somebody in the art world even though I could no longer offer 14.5 million readers to any story I might write about them; a third lunch in 1983 also steadied me at an anguished moment. Beyond that are two phone calls (one in ‘69, one in ‘83) that told me very sensibly how to deal with desperation, phone calls that only a friend could have made (as opposed to a shrink). And the postcards! I’ve saved them all.. Oh, I’ve heard about how nasty she once was to Jules Olitski, and somebody else once told me that she went through studio assistants like somebody with a cold goes through Kleenex, but she’s never been given the credit she deserves for making it on her own. True, she and Greenberg went around together for years, and she learned an enormous amount about art from him, but he got a lot out of the relationship, too. When they split (in 1955) , he was left SO unhappy that he could be heard to bitch about her for the rest of his life (despite the fact that he very soon thereafter met & married Janice Van Horne, whom he dearly loved).

The first time I met Greenberg (in 1969) he wasn’t bitching about Frankenthaler, because I was interviewing him about her for the story I was doing for Time on her. That time, he played it straight, saying that she was “a real painter” and that he’d been only her “sounding board.” He told me that back in the 50s, there had been these three women painters, Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, but that Frankenthaler alone had really developed. He understood some of the difficulties that Frankenthaler as a woman had faced: Frank Stella, he said, could go to uptown parties in paint-stained clothes, but a woman artist had to be “soignée.” I guess it was that bit about “soignée” which hit me where I lived, because for most of the nearly 6 years that I’d been writing for Time, I’d been the only woman writer on regular active duty there, & I’d made a cult of learning how to be as near to “soignée” as I could – knowing that I had to if I wanted to hang on to my job. Because of this insight of Greenberg’s, plus other aspects of my situation at that moment, I concluded that he was still in love with her. In the years since, I’ve decided that I exaggerated the depth of his feeling, but he still complained so much about her that I’m convinced some strong feelings for her lurked deep within. The sorry byproduct of all this complaining (in my opinion) was that a surprisingly large proportion of the male critics and curators who clustered around him didn’t write about her. She had to find her own rooters, her own support system; unlike Noland or Louis or Olitski, she couldn’t count on a team effort being made on her behalf. Ironically, this would eventually work in her favor, but it couldn’t have seemed like that at the time.

Anyway, here I am & I feel much healthier than I felt even when churning out my July 15 issue (by which time I was no longer feeling any of the pain that had driven me to the knife). At present, not only can I spend large amounts of time on my feet, evaluating art shows and/or charging around town, but – as of this writing – I’ve taken off about 12 pounds and I’m so thrilled that I can now get into misses’ sizes instead of women’s sizes! According to Dr. Herman Tarnower, titular author of the book on the Scarsdale Medical Diet (or more likely according to Samm Sinclair Baker, who “assisted” Dr. Tarnower in writing it), a researcher once asked women what three words they liked most to hear. Maybe you guessed “I love you?” Guess again – the correct answer was, “You’ve lost weight.”

This is not a diet I’d recommend, but whee, who cares! I only hope I can keep it off, and meanwhile I’d like to thank the wonderful people who helped me through this ordeal, starting with five doctors whose contributions to my well-being are appreciated with particular passion. In alphabetical order they are Dr. Mark Bilsky (neurosurgeon) Dr. Raymond H. Coll (neurologist), Dr. Kyriakos Kirou (rheumatologist), Dr. Michael Wolk (cardiologist) and Dr. Emily R. Yurberg (internist). Without Drs. Bilsky and Wolk, in particular, I’d be dead, but thank God for Medicare, because I never could have afforded their services otherwise. (I calculated that if I had to pay all the medical & hospital bills that I accrued over the summer, it’d take at least 20% of my total assets, the money I have to live on for the rest of my life.) I’d also like to thank all the great friends who visited me in the hospital and/or rehab (too numerous to mention, but among them all, Fitz stands out as the one person whom I couldn’t have gotten through without), the solicitousness of my neighbors after I resumed residence in my apartment (they know who they are and might be embarrassed by such publicity), and not least the staff of the apartment building itself, who took – and take – care of me as though I were a babe in arms: Jeff, Cecil, Victor, Henry, Miguel, Ephrain and Hector (especially Jeff & Cecil).

The rest of this column I plan to write as sort of a journal, slipping back & forth between tenses, also between formal prose of the sort you’ve seen so far and less formal quotations from notes I’ve taken, plus some insertions of passages from email correspondence, sort of a 21st century equivalent to an 18th century epistolary novel, such as “Pamela” or “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” I have much territory to cover, including a few summer shows as well as fall shows & even a few going on into the spring, but I’ve been fortunate in getting help for that, too. In addition to individuals who’ve offered me guidance but are not always credited with it in this text, I add that almost all the prose in the Supplement to the DeLuxe print edition is by Darby Bannard, whose painting, “Blue Parlor,” I reproduce in color but who is also well-known as a very classy writer. Sorry, folks, if you only read me online: this one’s not for you.

Monday-Tuesday, July 16-24. Having seen my pathetic little July 15 issue put online by my wonderful webmaster, John Kois, I am now mailing out the print edition, both subscription copies and complimentary ones. Those stellar people who subscribe to the print edition know that I use the income from their subscriptions to offset the expense of sending out the complimentary copies, but they may not know exactly to whom these complimentary copies go. Actually, the comp list for each issue is different, depending on the material in each.

1)  Every museum whose show I review or otherwise comment upon gets a complimentary copy, regardless of what I’ve said about that show/museum. I figure museums are like politicians: they don’t care what I say about them, as long as I get their names spelled right. These copies are sent to the public relations/communications departments of the museum in question, preferably to the individual directly responsible for the show/event covered, especially if I have actually talked with or emailed that individual. I have no idea what happens to these copies; occasionally I’ve heard hints that they’re passed along to the curators responsible for the show/event under discussion, though I’d imagine that this is only in concert with the dozens of other reviews that some of these shows get.

2)  With gallery exhibitions, it depends on the show itself and whether or not the gallery and/or artist is likely to be interested in what I have to say. If I’m lambasting the latest feeble latter-day dadaist attempting to make a splash at Gagosian, I figure they’re not going to care what I have to say anyway, so why waste Xeroxing costs & postage?

If it’s an artist or a group show that I respect, I will send a comp to the gallery where the show has been held. If it’s a favorable review of a solo exhibition, the artist is also sent a copy (c/o the gallery, if I don’t have his/her home address). If it’s a negative or ambivalent review of a solo exhibition, I normally send a copy only to the gallery, with a cover note saying that if the dealer feels the artist might be interested in reading it, then to share it with that artist.

I don’t as a rule send a comp with critical or semi-critical remarks to an artist having a solo exhibition because I know that artists can be awfully sensitive about such reviews, and are very apt to pitch them in the wastebasket (again, why waste Xerox costs & postage?). When I was working on my dissertation, I found that my painter-topic, Abraham Rattner, had kept seemingly complete scrapbooks of his reviews – until I realized that one decidedly negative review, by Clement Greenberg, was nowhere to be found in those scrapbooks. Interestingly enough, though, the painting that Greenberg had singled out for his most vehement attack had been kept & apparently treasured by the artist. When I came on the scene, after his death, the widow still had that painting in a place of honor in her home.

Artists who subscribe to my print edition get copies of my reviews of their shows as part of their subscriptions. I figure they’re big boys and girls, who can handle criticism & may even be willing to concede that they could learn something from it, but this doesn’t mean that they’re the only artists who know when I’ve published a review about their work that isn’t altogether positive. Sometimes a dealer may share his or her copy of my column containing a negative review with the artist under discussion – or hey, they can even see it for themselves on the web!

3)  Every complimentary copy is the DeLuxe print edition, with the color supplement reproducing a work of art by an artist whom I admire, and who is only rarely a household name. A short piece of writing, introducing the artist & explicating the work of art, accompanies the reproduction, and can vary from one to five pages (though as a rule I try & keep it under three). Usually this is my own writing, but occasionally I’m lucky enough to feature an artist who knows how to write and will do so for me. This is how I try & get works of art out of our very small circle and into what I like to think of as more general circulation.

Normally, the column itself goes online over the weekend closest to the date on the issue, and I try to get all the print edition copies into the mail in the next five days, but with the July 15 issue I am still semi-recuperating from my surgery, so the last of these copies doesn’t go in the mail until nine days after the column has gone online. Meanwhile....

Thursday, July 19 - Sunday, October 21. Thursday, July 19 – iced coffee and Hungarian pastry with Katherine B. Crum (better known as Katie) at Café André in Yorkville, a recent injection of Mitteleuropäische flavor into that otherwise almost totally gentrified neighborhood. I was introduced to Crum several years ago by Pat Lipsky at one of Lipsky’s openings at Elizabeth Harris, I believe. Since then Crum has been so enormously helpful and supportive to me & my book project that I find it hard to believe I deserve it. Certainly, she has much else to do as well, having been involved with galleries and museums since the 60s, when she was co-owner of Nicholas Wilder in LA; more recently, she’s been director of the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland CA, and chief curator at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island (meanwhile managing to pick up a Ph.D. in late medieval/early Renaissance painting at my alma mater, Columbia). At present, she is president of the Art Museum Partnership, an organization that on October 21-23 will be staging its annual “Directors’ Forum,” which allows museum executives from all over the country to gather in NY and engage in many enlightening activities. Crum has read the manuscript of my book all the way through, and provided me with a terrific blurb for it, which (in part) runs as follows: “Halasz was one of the first women elevated from researcher to writer at Time....this fascinating chronicle of an intellectual coming of age tells how.... she arrives at her current work as a passionate – and fierce – art critic, refreshingly free of the dour academic mentality that paralyzes so much writing about art...”

As we exit the Café André, I ask Crum if she has any ideas about how I might find a fact-checker to help me with that book. The problem is that I am way, way behind schedule with it. I do have a title for it: “A MEMOIR OF CREATIVITY: ABSTRACT PAINTING, POLITICS & THE MEDIA, 1956-2006.” I also have a manuscript that was 1600 pages long at its longest, several years ago, but has been reduced to a third of that original size. My book’s point of departure is the theory about abstract painting that I introduced in Arts Magazine in 1983 and have wanted to write a book about ever since.

Now, the first thing about my theory is that it contradicts the dictionary definition of abstract painting as being non-representational. I suppose I was a dreamer if I ever expected that a university press would want to publish a book that challenged the dictionaries on such a basic concept as abstraction, but one of the many things I learned as a researcher at Time magazine was that even the most standard reference books could be wrong. One favorite story that I picked up when I worked there was told to me by a researcher considerably my senior, Dorothy Haystead. Seems when she was younger (probably sometime around 1950), she was fact-checking a story (in the magazine’s Science section, I would imagine, since on another occasion she was called upon to help her writer explain this new thing called an atomic bomb to Time’s readers).

The lead paragraph in the story she was fact-checking upon this occasion concerned two hamsters (or some other small laboratory animal) which had been put in a cage together upon the assumption that both were of the same sex. They weren’t, so now there were little hamsters, too. The lead sentence in the story ran something like this: “Sometimes, a couple is not always a pair.” I gather this is a reference that any poker player would understand (not being a poker-player, I can’t explicate it further), but my friend Haystead, being a conscientious researcher, looked up “couple” and “pair” in the dictionary, and there she saw that the two were synonyms for each other. Since this apparently meant that the story had an error in it & had to be corrected, she took it in to T. S. Matthews, a graduate of Princeton, Oxford & The New Republic who’d started out as a books editor on Time & risen to become managing editor (only to be sent off later to England, supposedly to start a new UK edition, after he’d had the temerity to try and get a cover story favorable to Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, published when Stevenson was running against Eisenhower for President – in 1952, when Time was still staunchly Republican). “But, Mr. Matthews,” Haystead said, “A couple is always a pair. It says so right here in the dictionary.” “Mrs. Haystead,” Matthews replied, “The dictionary is the work of human hands.”

In 1993-94, when I started work on my current book, I at first envisaged a scholarly study about my theory to be published (dreamer that I still was) by a university press, but in order to help finance it (and not so incidentally to lend it credibility) I applied for grants to various grant-giving agencies & organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities. I got turned down everywhere, but since the NEH is a government agency, it will send you copies of the reports from readers which led to its turndown (with the names of the readers of course blacked out). I wrote and asked it to send mine to me. Once I read them, I realized that it would be impossible for me to get a scholarly book all about my theory published by a university press. These NEH readers, all of them presumably academics, not only didn’t get what I was driving at but didn’t even want to get it. Both the substance of what they had to say & the nasty snotty way they said it made the situation abundantly clear.

After mulling over this situation, and getting the same silly reaction when I proposed the book to a non-academic art book publisher in 1995, I eventually decided that my best shot at getting the book published was to take it out of the academic arena & try to make a memoir out of it, telling how I developed the theory, starting way back in my childhood and including my experiences at Time. Soon after I’d left Time, I’d written a non-fiction novel about the magazine and tried to sell that. I never did get it published, but at least editors for trade publishers would ask to see the mss. when I sent them letters of inquiry, so I thought maybe I could find a trade publisher who would want a book with so much stuff about Time in it.

Well, I started writing in 1995, and by the end of 2005, I had a manuscript that I thought was finished. As it’s turned out, the discovery of my theory regarding abstract painting only comes at the end of Part Two in what is now a three-part book. Although the theory is still very important to my narrative, the sociopolitical contexts in which abstract painting has or has not been able to thrive are also very important, both in relation to art & in relation to themselves.

I spent all of 2006 trying to find somebody who would at least pay for my costs of publication, and conceivably on top of that give me an advance. I sent proposals to the four university presses most likely to buy my book. No dice (according to one letter of rejection, my book didn't sound "scholarly" enough, though the mss. has 534 pages of text & 65 pages of notes).

I filled out & sent in the forms at the websites of a handful of so-called independents. No dice there, either – though I didn't expect much, not only because the indies are really only equipped to handle short books, but also because from what I've seen, all or virtually all of the indies continue to nourish the nearly-universal delusion that dada & surrealism are controversial and avant-garde, whereas abstract painting is conventional & old-fashioned.

I sent letters of inquiry to half-a-dozen trade publishers, all of whom had published books of some sort on art within the previous year or so. I knew that the market for books about art is a small one (regardless of how many artists believe that the world is dying to know what they're up to, it just ain’t so). But, as I've since concluded, even the books about art that do get published by trade publishers make it only because a) they're about celebrity artists b) they're by celebrity writers or c) they have lots & lots of pretty pictures.

Not yet having reached that conclusion, I sent my letters of inquiry to about 6 trade publishers. With each letter was enclosed a self-addressed stamped postcard with 3 boxes to check: 1) yes, I'd like to see the mss., 2) yes, I'd like to see a proposal, and 3) thanks but no thanks. 5 of the six came back with box 3 checked. One came back with box 1 checked.

The man who had checked that box happens to be the one whom above all I'd have liked to publish my book. As far as I'm concerned, he knows more about art than anybody else in trade publishing (maybe he has relatives in the business). He kept my mss. for three months, and then sent it back, with a gracious note, saying that in effect I'd achieved my two most cherished ambitions in writing it--first, in creating a single unified whole and second, in going some distance toward challenging the received wisdom on the subject of abstract painting – but that still, the book wasn't right for his list....the classic cliche turndown, except that I can perfectly well see why my book isn't right for his list – or at least I have a few theories.

For one thing, it's got a lot about Vietnam in the 60s, and the rivalry between Newsweek & Time during that decade over the coverage of Vietnam & lots of other subjects (including art), and from what I can tell, the formerly-thriving cottage industry of books about Vietnam is down the tubes since 9/11...if you want to deal with politics these days, it’s much more timely to be writing about the Middle East, or God & Government (in various packages) or the life and times of potential Presidential candidates in ‘08 (not that this publisher was involved in any such books, I’m just saying that maybe my Vietnam stuff looked a bit dated to him...).

On top of that, although I’ve tried very hard to give full credit to Newsweek for the great job it was doing in the 60s, I have in the past month had to accept the fact that my heart belongs to Time and always will. It’s not even the bland “centrist” Time that came into being in the wake of Vietnam, but the evil (and much livelier) old “hawk” publication that it was before its cleansing – and if there is one thing I have learned in the course of 13 years of research, it is that even those books which purport to tell the story of Henry Luce & Time are hostile to him, and virtually all the books on Vietnam take Time to the cleaners. Oh boy, can I ever pick my mentors! Well & I can see other reasons for why “A Memoir of Creativity” might not have been right for that guy’s list, but the short form is, when he turned down my book I decided that I was never going to get anybody to pay for publishing it, so I better pay for publishing it myself.

The publisher I’ve chosen is iUniverse, which seemed to be the best of the self-publishing outfits when I was shopping around. How well it will perform remains to be seen, though I know that the Authors Guild, of which I am a member, uses it to reprint books by members that have gone out of print, and I consider this a promising sign, but merchandising the book, once it’s been published, is really up to me. iUniverse will sell its authors a lot of handy-dandy kits and aids, but they don’t do any of the selling of it themselves. Things are not as bad as they used to be: with the old vanity-press procedures, the author paid the publisher to produce 2 or 3 thousand copies, which were then delivered to yr. doorstep for you to flog around to your friends. With the new “print-on-demand” technologies, it’s now possible to print only those copies that people have actually ordered, and they can order it online: iUniverse has arranged so that both amazon & Barnes & Noble online will carry it. The problem then becomes how to get the word out that the book exists and is maybe worth reading, so that people will order it. Self-publishing to the New York Times is only a euphemism for vanity publishing, so it won't review any self-published book, not even from iUniverse. I would imagine most other mainstream publications feel the same, but the art magazines seem to be more open & some other publications also (I called Art in America, ARTnews and Artforum asking whether they would consider self-published books for review & all three said they would).

I don't expect any bookstores to carry my book (unless by some wildly improbable scenario it becomes a big best-seller – in which case everybody will be screaming for it). Still, libraries may buy it if it gets reviewed enough, especially (needless to say) if it is well-reviewed (though some negative reviews can also carry weight). Although I would certainly like to make a billion dollars off this book, I am even more eager to get it into libraries. I have checked the databases of the following library systems: Columbia, City University of New York, The New York Public Library, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. Harvard & Chicago appear to be resistant to iUniverse, but the other five schools have between 28 (Princeton) and 57 (CUNY) iUniverse titles. These books cover a multitude of topics, from advice books for foreign-born law students to biographies of minor theater people or lesser-known leaders of ethnic minorities; what they apparently have in common is subject matter that can’t appeal to a sufficiently large target audience to interest trade publishers (or even university presses, who have to at least break even these days when so many grants have dried up). As I see it, iUniverse is doing what trade publishers & university presses & even independents used to do--but can't do any longer, what with escalating costs, pressure from the brass upstairs to minimize losses & maximize profits, plus gradually declining total numbers of customers – which is publish a few books for very limited audiences.

The hero of my book, one Clement Greenberg, is definitely a subject of limited interest – unless, of course, he is being portrayed as a fire-breathing dragon with spikes on his head (s) and tail (s). My take on the man is that he was a man – not a devil, but not a saint either. I’m hoping that such a balanced presentation may prove tolerable to his admirers & more acceptable to his adversaries than any attempt to portray him as a man who could walk on water –so I figure I have at least 2 firsts here, one being this may be the first book that is not a company history but still treats Time magazine sympathetically, and the other being the first book that does the same for CG....

The reason I am asking Katie Crum on July 19 if she knows of any fact-checkers is that the contract I signed with iUniverse back in February 07 gave me a year to turn in my mss. At the same time, I gave them a down payment of $1100. If I don’t turn in the mss. by February 08, I lose the down payment & my place in line. Last February, a year seemed like more than enough time to get the book ready, since all that had to be done was fact-check it and obtain the permissions I needed to reprint the quotations from books, periodicals, letters, etc. Since my first adult job was as a researcher on Time, and part of that job was checking stories, I figured I could fact-check my mss. myself (Looking over past issues of this column recently, I saw a number of gross errata, but these columns are written in a hurry & I don’t have time to fact-check them.) I did manage to get four chapters fact-checked & most of their permissions requests sent out in March, but then I got sick and nothing more has gotten done since – as of July 19. Since the book has 28 chapters in all, and I have three issues of the column to get out before Feb. 08 in addition to dealing with the book, I obviously need help with the fact-checking. The young woman whom Crum recommends turns out to be only one of four to whom I have – as of October 21 – submitted chapters for fact-checking. Although she did get much work done, the length of time she needed to do it made me realize that if I was going to meet my deadline, I’d have to hire other fact-checkers in addition to her. As a result, I’ve also utilized the services of one professional fact-checker, located through the Editorial Freelancers Association, and two more inexperienced fact-checkers who answered a listing I placed at the Columbia University website for temporary jobs, while meanwhile plunging ahead with the requesting of permissions myself.

I won’t trouble my readers with all the details of this experience. I will only say that as of Oct. 21, only 3 more chapters have been thoroughly checked – and rechecked by me. Maybe another 7 or 8 chapters are ready to go, though I haven’t been able to recheck them thoroughly myself yet. Also, only a very small portion of the full number of permissions that I will need have been received. I’m not discouraged. On the contrary, I’m getting a great deal out of this process. It’s really the first time I’ve submitted any of the book directly to people who haven’t been pre-selected upon the grounds that they like me as a person and/or share my taste in art, and who do belong in the age group of my target audience (which is to say, people somewhat to considerably younger than me). Their responses (whether or not they are actually checking my chapters) are telling me more than they know about what still needs to be done (in addition to winnowing out as many errata as possible). I’m coming to the conclusion that some fairly substantial revisions may be necessary, not because I’ve got my facts wrong, but because the way I present them can be improved upon. Whether I will ever be able to come up with a book that many members of my target audience find fully comprehensible, I can’t say, but then I don’t happen to believe this book is ever going to be suitable for large numbers of any kind of people. Still less do I think that simply because somebody is younger than I am, they automatically know more than I do or are better qualified to pass judgment on me than somebody my own age or older. It must, however, be fairly obvious to one and all by now that I may never get this book published if I don't buckle down and do it now!

Therefore, I am placing From the Mayor’s Doorstep on an indefinite hiatus until my manuscript has been turned in (subscribers, don’t worry; you will all still get the 7 issues you paid for with each 1 year’s subscription).

Exceptions will be made:

a) if I get letters to the editor (in response to my solicitations below), I might run a special issue to publish them; and

b) if I must write a major obituary. Please I say to anybody who might rate one, try and stay alive until I’ve got my book to press (though I realize you yourself don’t have too much say in the matter)

 BACK TO THE FUTURE

Thursday, August 9 – The Upper East Side. First day I feel really comfortable, walking without a cane. Lunch with my friend Alison at the Viand on Madison at 78th Street, famed for its supposedly superb turkey sandwiches (never had one myself). Next, strolled on down to “A Summer of Love” at the Whitney. Naturally I had to see my own literary creation, whose presence I’d been alerted to by Ann Lee Morgan, fellow member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and most recently author of “The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists” (2007)). Psychedelic posters very familiar. I had Time do a page of color photography on them in ‘67, although Henry Grunwald, assistant managing editor who had to approve them, couldn’t quite see differences between them and Art Nouveau of the turn of the century. In ‘67, I could see lots of differences; harder to find in ‘07. Also I saw some of what I once called “luminal art,” back when I was rawly new on the art page of Time: art with flashing or flowing or blinking lights. I was so eager to discover the latest new wave of the avant-garde that I persuaded my editors to do a big special article on luminal art, with an epigraph from Matisse (“Some day all art must come to light”). Ah, youth! I never did relate to the biomorphic surrealist cartoonery of Peter Saul, represented in this show by an antiwar panorama. Somehow political art dates faster than almost any other kind, unless you’re a master like Delacroix or Daumier. A number of the many photographs were quite striking, though, especially a black, gray and white 1971 wedding picture by Lord Patrick Lichfield showing Mick Jagger and his bride of that moment, Bianca; also I saw a long, horizontal & appealing painting by Paul Jenkins, but beyond that, the exhibition was pretty much a reconstruction of yesterday’s gone that normally rests in museum basements. Not that there wasn’t great art being created in 1967, just that you’d never have known it from this show....

SALANDER-O’REILLY: GALLANT SHOWCASE

Next stop on way downtown, summer selections at Salander-O’Reilly.... In tall, ornate Renaissance palazzo on East 71st Street. My acquaintance with this gallery dates back to 1979 or 1980, when for my dissertation I needed a photograph of a painting by Alexander Brook, a “studio painter” whose estate S-O’R was handling (Greenberg admired Brook back in the 1920s, for formal values not subject matter). At that time, the gallery was a modest establishment on East 81st Street, with the downstairs mostly devoted to more traditional and/or historical art. By the mid-80s, I was becoming more familiar with its upstairs, where it showcased younger modernist painters like Susan Roth and Kikuo Saito. During this period, William O’Reilly was still active in the business, though he has since moved on, and the gallery for years has been run solely by Lawrence Salander. It first moved down from 81st Street to larger quarters on East 79th Street, and a parade of memorable exhibitions ensued – of work not only by Roth & Saito, but also Noland, Olitski, Poons, Steiner, Boxer, Horacio Torres, Christensen, Griefen, Arnold Friedman, Courbet, Miró, Stuart Davis, Theodore Rousseau, Suzy Frelinghuysen, George L . K. Morris and so on.

Gradually, however, in the past five years, the gallery’s focus has shifted, away from modernism of the 19th through the 21st centuries and toward Old Masters, especially Renaissance & baroque paintings & sculpture from the 16th and 17th centuries. In this area, Salander scored some coups by rediscovering major works and selling them for millions of dollars. I’ve been happy to report his triumphs and review the Old Masters shows that he stages. One reason is that he still handles some few modernists, most notably Griefen; another is that I know that some of my modernist readers like to look at historical as well as modern art, and welcome the more intimate setting it gets at this gallery, so unlike the formality of a museum. The other reason is purely personal, I suppose, but Salander was one of my first five subscribers ten years ago, when I announced that I was starting the print edition. When I announced the formation of the DeLuxe edition, he signed up for that, too, and has regularly renewed his subscription every year since.

In 1998, Florence Rubenfeld published a scurrilous biography of Greenberg, which I did my best to rip to shreds here in FMD. It seems to have been one of my better efforts, and a lot of people said they liked it months or maybe even years later (it’s posted by Terry Fenton at his Greenberg website). But Salander was the one who called me up as soon as he read it and thanked me for it. That meant a lot to me, so I stroll through the premises of his vast palazzo, coming to rest in the smaller gallery facing the street on the second floor. Here are displayed three paintings that I’ve seen before, but always enjoy seeing again, a moody Titian self-portrait, Tintoretto’s luscious “Toilette of Venus,” and that strange long skinny Parmigianino nude lady accompanied by Saturn disguised as a winged horse. In the second-story hallway hangs an attractive large tondo showing the Virgin with the infant Christ and infant John. It looks something like a Raphael, and a young lady, suddenly appearing from an office within the complex, explains to me that she’s done some research on this painting. According to her, it is indeed a School of Raphael, and a copy of a lost but apparently once-famous Raphael, since at least a dozen copies are known to exist. Salander’s big show for the coming autumn season will be of work by Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio (1571-1610). Its centerpiece is to be an “Apollo the Lute Player” that was long thought to be a copy of a painting in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, but Salander’s scholars are arguing that it is the original, and the Hermitage painting, the replica. This show, I subsequently learn, is due to open on October 17, which will make it too late for my column, but I will certainly want to do an advance promo on it.

TWO MORE WORTHWHILE SHOWS

Final stop of the day (in my weakened condition), summer selections at Ameringer & Yohe. “Quiet, elegant,” my notes read. “Even Pat Steir, Judy Pfaff + Nancy Graves look relatively quiet and restrained but of course that’s not what I came for - 3 of pix I liked esp. seem all cut out for summer – best, Frankenthaler – “August Deep,” 1978, 94 ½ x 167 3/4 – green thought in a green shade (ck quote on web) broad horizontal strokes of brighter + duller greens + browns on a mysterious grey/blue on top - olive field at bottom” [later, I did check that quote on the web: “green thought in a green shade” comes from Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”] At A/Y, I also take notes on “Red Parable” (1964), by Hans Hofmann: “Vintage Hofmann – same summery feeling – firecracker shapes of red.” Two other paintings with summery feeling that I mention are Esteban Vicente, “Genesee” (1963) and a “less interesting “ 1997 painting by Wolf Kahn.... I make favorable comments on “Violet Scrimmer,” an Olitski spray painting from 1969, and on two Motherwell collages, find “less interesting” an untitled 1955 collage by Al Leslie, and conclude, “alas, can’t find a good word to say for bilious little Joan Mitchell.” In the midst of all of this, Jim Yohe himself strolls out and, if I recall correctly, says something about how nice it is to see me & they haven’t seen much of me for a while. I gesture toward the Frankenthaler and the Olitski and say, show me work like this & I’ll come to see it any time (or words to that effect). At this moment, it seems to me in retrospect, Mr. Yohe could very well have said, we’re having a Frankenthaler show in October.... After all, that catalogue must already have been in preparation, but did he say anything? Not bloody likely!

Friday, August 10 – Chelsea. Came to Chelsea primarily to see “Full Color: Painting and Sculpture from 1960-1980" at Paul Kasmin, according to invite supposed to feature Caro, Dzubas, Held, Louis, Noland, Olitski. Held gone by the time I get there, though not only painting sold, as nearly as one can tell from labels. Notes: “Lovely show!...Front room, 3 large pntgs, + 1 smaller Caro.” Small drawing I made here for “Gamma Omicron(1960), on the left, shows it’s a Louis “unfurled,” and what a painting it is! Note: “CG would have loved – unlike the stinker once exhib. here, now at Phila. M. of A.. giving students bad ideas – orig. featured in [Kasmin] ads” and praised, if memory serves correctly, by the NYTimes. To right, huge, majestic Dzubas “Other Side” (1980), 56 1/4 x 175 1/4, “mature style of feathered swipes but w[ith] very interesting, detailed little spiky feathering at ends, blue field, center - cool colors (greens, gray) at left, warmer ones (pink, lemon, mauve, red) at R, big horizontal...” and so on. You get the idea. Caro in the second room, especially nice: a neat little table piece, steel painted red from 1967; big Noland, center front room, facing entry, second room, 2 splendid Olitski, early stain painting on invite, + later 60s probably sprayed...

I suspect, to be brutally frank, that the main reason Paul Kasmin feels free to stage such a radical show is because it’s the dog days of August, & all the hot buyers of the more conventionally radical art that he more commonly exhibits are cooling off in the Hamptons or the south of France or wherever. This increases the minuscule proportion of art lovers, especially from out of town, for whom genuine beauty doesn’t draw knee-jerk denial. For the critics on the Times, however, it’s necessary to keep on serving up the same newsy sort of art that predominates during the rest of the year. God forbid they should review the Kasmin show. It might force them to face up to their own inadequacies, and reveal the corresponding inadequacies upon the part of their readers, so what they do instead is scrounge around to dig up what isn’t too much out of line with what they publish the rest of the year. Thus on August 3, Roberta Smith has highlighted the paintings of Peter Young, a holdover from the 60s who is having a big show at PS 1, and a smaller show at Mitchell Algus in Chelsea. By August 10, I’ve read the August 3 piece, and take in the smaller show at M-A. Both the reproductions in the Times & the Chelsea show suggest a kind of easy-listening Pollock, Pollock lite: shallow, superficial paintings in pretty colors. In the Times, bright paint (esp. red) spattered & dripped hither & yon, sits on the surface, poor compositional skills – just the thing, apparently, to capitalize on the more general 60s revival currently in full swing.....at Mitchell Algus, slightly different imagery but colors still obviously meant to be bright and instead looking dingy with passage of time....the “mandala” images here would have fit in perfectly with the Whitney’s nostalgic “Summer of Love.”

The August 10 issue of the Times has another Roberta Smith special, designed to make some sense out of the hodgepodge of group shows that a lot of Chelsea galleries have taken to staging in August. This is only a development of the last few years, I think. Until fairly recently, the Manhattan art world closed down during August, but hi-de-ho, if there’s the faintest chance that we can sell some art, galleries will stay open, and apparently the tourist trade is more “sophisticated” than it used to be (that is, if yr. definition of “sophisticated” is “interested in art.”)....Anyway, this Friday Smith has done a big roundup in the Times of a number of galleries w. group shows. It’s headlined “In These Shows, the Material Is the Message.” and argues that these summer group shows “are both test sites for new ideas and polling stations for aesthetic trends...” You ask me, I say this is desperation journalism, a whole weekly section that needs to be filled up & no headliners in town during this hot sweaty season. On the basis of Smith’s lead photo, an installation shot showing artworks in the Bortolami gallery, my note on the newspaper itself reads, “Or, Process Art Redux” but dutifully I go around & visit all five of the shows she’s reviewed: Bortolami, Wallspace, d’Amelio Terras, Petzel & Blum. My conclusion is that the show at Bortolami comes the closest to what Smith is talking about, and by the same token, most familiar to me – minimal canvases, reminding me of ‘67-‘68 in the Manhattan galleries, plus some fabric hung loosely, reminding me of the process art I saw in the galleries, ‘68-‘69. I don’t know whether Smith is aware of how deadly repetitive all this is, how barren of fresh ideas,,,, only wish it wasn’t so clear to me that it’s yet another case of “Everything old is new again...”

.

Coming out of Kasmin, who should I bump into but an artist whom I shall call X. I greet him with a friendly smile and a big hello because I like him. X is a good-looking guy, six foot four & INCREDIBLY skinny with long, wavy blond hair. We used to be on reasonably good terms – but apparently he is sore at me now, because instead of returning my salutation, he turns his back on me and stalks away. Rarely have I been so emphatically snubbed.

What have I ever done to X, I ask myself. I haven’t even seen him for more than a year, but it’s true that back in January or March of ‘06, I think it was, I did review a show of his that took place in a rather plush little upstairs gallery over on West 26^th Street in Chelsea — and it wasn’t an entirely complimentary review. As is my habit, I think I said whatever good things I could find to say, and I do feel that X has innate talent, but on the whole, with this particular show, as I’d seen it, he’d laid an egg.

I’m unhappy because he’s unhappy. Yet even as I watch his receding back, my unhappiness develops a second track. On the one hand, the feeling of unhappiness continues, and the desire to placate X, to try and find out why’s he hurting so and do what I can to alleviate his distress. But on the other hand, I also calm down pretty fast & find myself thinking about the whole situation and trying to understand what’s going on here. The first thought in what would eventually turn out to be a rather prolonged train of them was, Well it’s obvious that X has a very different idea about the whole nature of criticism than my idea of it.

The hurt part of me continues to worry & to think that maybe I should send X an email, saying I’m unhappy because you’re unhappy & I’d like to try & make you feel better. But before I send it, I discuss the idea with a man whose advice I’ve found helpful in the past. He says, well send it if you want, but don’t hold your breath, waiting for an answer. If this guy is as sore as you say he is, he won’t answer you.

All the while, this second track of my mind is busily exploring different ideas in relation to the whole subject of criticism, and by and by I think, well, the best thing I can do is expl