A Hard Act To Follow: Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (c. 1460-70), oil (and tempera?) on poplar panel, transferred to fabric on panel; courtesy the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute

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The following review appeared in the February 20, 2005 edition of The New York Observer and is reprinted here on the occasion of Piero della Francesca in America, on view at The Frick Collection (until May 19). My review of the Frick exhibition will appear in the April issue of The New Criterion.

Before I begin kvelling about From Filippo Lippi to Piero Della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, duty compels me to get the bad news out of the way. Contrary to the exhibition’s title, Fra Carnevale is no master–he’s a dud.

Actually, the key word in the title isn’t “master,” but “making.” What powers the exhibition is the scholarship leading to the recent identification of Fra Carnevale as the artist responsible for The Birth of the Virgin (1466) and The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (1466), which are in the collections of, respectively, the Metropolitan and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Placing Fra Carnevale within the milieu of Florence and, later, Urbino, the curators explore the sometimes bewildering trajectories of stylistic influence. In doing so, they pinpoint the achievement of Fra Carnevale, “the quasi-mythical painter from Urbino” born Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini sometime around 1420. (He died in 1484.) History has been clarified, but has it been vindicated?

The Fra Carnevale panels, coming at the end of the museum’s impressive feat of connoisseurship, are anticlimactic. The crazy-quilt admixtures of zooming spaces, overweening architecture, fussy passages of texture and disjointed arrays of figures are the handiwork of a skilled artisan incapable of articulating a coherent painting. Other examples of Fra Carnevale’s work–especially The Crucifixion and Saint Francis, wooden pictures both–evince an artist who couldn’t realize the human figure as an expressive component of pictorial form. The best Fra Carnevale painting on view, the silky and taciturn Madonna and Child (1440), may not be by him at all; it’s an attribution.

Fra Carnevale, The Crucifixion (c. 1450), tempera and oil on wood, 40.6″ x 26.4″; courtesy Galleria Nazionale dell Marche, Urbino

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The folks at the Met don’t pretend that Fra Carnevale is the equal of the painters with whom he shares title billing. The sharp and sensitive eyes responsible for organizing the exhibition know what’s what: Filippo Lippi, Fra Carnevale’s teacher, and Piero are headliners for a reason: They’re masters in every sense of the word. In the catalog, we learn that Fra Carnevale was “not [an artist] … of the very first importance.” Elsewhere, we read that his pictures fall under the “shadow” of Piero, an artist who “epitomizes the artistic culture of Urbino.”

Piero, as you might guess, casts some shadow, and it’s there to see at the Met. Directly preceding the gallery dedicated to Fra Carnevale, you’ll find Piero’s Madonna and Child Attended by Angels. In it, the Virgin has been transformed into an immovable–though not inhuman–presence,adivine slab of architecture. She towers over the angels surrounding her and the Christ child and, as such, serves as the anchor for a deeply eccentric composition. Symmetry is suggested and then offset, but in a sneaky, unnerving manner. The space of the picture, notwithstanding the strong directionality of the enclosing architecture, is sharply stunted. The painting’s iconography is reinforced and somehow deepened by Piero’s bizarre manipulations of pictorial form. You can scarcely imagine a harder act to follow.

Make that two hard acts to follow: The initial portion of the exhibition is dedicated almost exclusively to the paintings of Filippo Lippi, and it’s a knockout. Particularly strong are The Pieta, with an ominous outcropping of rocks being the arbiter of its gravitas, and the unstoppably gentle The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate; particularly strange are the jack-in-the-box elisions of space in Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement.

Fra Filippo Lippi, Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement (c. 1440-44), tempera on wood, 25-1/4″ x 16-1/2″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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If it’s name artists you’re after, look for Madonna and Child by Luca Della Robbia, a terra-cotta relief that’s more fully realized as sculpture than the attendant glazed terra-cotta of the same subject by the same artist. Other figures will be known primarily to specialists of Renaissance art, but are well worth getting to know for the rest of us. I was particularly grateful to make the acquaintance of Pesellino, whose Madonna and Child with Saints is a compacted yet remarkably coherent congregation of figures. A small crucifixion by Giovanni Boccati is similarly packed with imagery–if anything, it’s more ambitious and complex than the Pesellino–and has to be counted as the purest expressionism.

By the time you’re finished zigzagging through Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, you’ll be exhausted by its many and various glories. (Hey, no one said 15th-century Italian art was easy.) You might even grant that Fra Carnevale had his moments: Look closely, for example, at the supernal slice of life (the guy walking his dog) seen through a doorway just off-center in The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. You’ll be grateful, as well, to the Met for mounting yet another serious, scholarly and stellar exhibition.

© 2005 Mario Naves

Unlikely and Eccentric: The Art of Tom Uttech

Tom Uttech, Kikinowijiwed (2011-2012), oil on linen, 32-1/2″ x 36-1/2″; courtesy Alexandre Gallery

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The following review was originally published in the March 1, 2004 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Tom Uttech: New Paintings at Alexandre Gallery (February 23-March 30, 2013).

The paintings of Tom Uttech at Alexandre are steadfastly rooted in the local. He depicts panoramic scenes of densely wooded forests populated–at times absurdly overrun–by fauna. The forests are part of a protected wilderness area in Ontario, but the macro geography is less important to Mr. Uttech than his embrace of the particular: There’s no place he’d rather be.

He paints with the precision of a naturalist. We’re never in doubt that these often encyclopedic pictures are scientifically correct. The same goes for the depiction of light: Whether painting the sparest of rainbows or the northern lights, Mr. Uttech is true to the drama and sweep of the specific moment. Yet the paintings have been orchestrated with a decidedly unnatural theatrical flair. The animals loitering on the scene are acutely aware of themselves as objects of observation. At times, they look out at us resentfully, as if our presence were an encroachment on their territory. (Is there an eco-political moral buried in the pictures? The only animal not pictured is man.)

Tom Uttech, Mamakadjidgan (2011-2012), oil on linen, 91″ x 103″; courtesy Alexandre Gallery

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The gulf between viewer and image is unbridgeable, the distance emphasized by Mr. Uttech’s touch, which keeps us at bay. And there’s a mysterious recurring motif, also distancing: a lone black bear with a curious demeanor, standing on its hind legs. It’s too close to being a cute gimmick–and after a couple of cameos, it’s an annoyance. Not cute at all–in fact, arresting–is Awassabang (2003), which depicts the uniform migration of innumerable species of birds, all heading resolutely stage right.

Imagine pictures painted by the love child of Corot, John Frederick Kensett, John James Audubon, René Magritte and Jackson Pollock, and you’ll have some idea of Mr. Uttech’s unlikely and eccentric sensibility.

© 2004 Mario Naves

Abstract Repartee

A “curious cut” by Hans Holbein used to illustrate Erasmus’s treatise, In Praise of Folly (1515)

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In conjunction with Wit, an exhibition on view at The Painting Center, curator and artist Joanne Freeman will be hosting a panel discussion featuring Marina Adams, Barbara Gallucci, Doreen McCarthy, Stephen Westfall and myself–all of whom are included in the show. Subjects to be discussed are good taste, bad taste, “escape from taste”, ambiguity, anticipation, surprise and (ulp!) psychedelic drugs. The panel is scheduled to take place on Valentine’s Day between 6:00-8:00 p.m. Hope to see you there.

© 2013 Mario Naves

“Wit” at The Painting Center

Joanne Freeman, All Is Not What It Seems (2012), oil on canvas, 48″ x 36″; courtesy The Painting Center

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The following is an essay from the catalogue accompanying Wit, an exhibition curated by Joanne Freeman that was on display at The Painting Center from January 29-February 23, 2013.

Wit, huh? It seems an unlikely peg on which to organize an exhibition of abstract paintings and sculptures. We’ve been taught, after all, that abstract art is serious business. Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich, the holy trinity of modernist abstraction, scuttled representation in the cause of philosophical and sociological ideals–as a means of changing the world. The New York School, having seen how resolutely the world crushed their aspirations, redefined abstraction as a conduit for interiority–as a forum for primordial longings, universal symbols, that sort of thing. They did so to impressive effect—until, that is, the world went pop!

Ruth Root, Untitled (2009), enamel on aluminum, 24″ x 39″; courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery

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Here in the wobbly days of the early twenty-first century, abstraction is no longer viewed as a driving historical force or the necessary culmination of twenty thousand years of creative endeavor. Though you might hear otherwise from isolated outposts—variations on “my kid could paint that” being the most predominant—abstraction is pretty much a non-issue, and not a moment too soon. Shouldering the burden of tradition can occasion significant art, but it can also stifle artistic independence and skew perception, public and otherwise. Be grateful that abstraction with a capital “A” is over and done with. Painters and sculptors dedicated to the cause can now work with astonishing freedom. The King is dead. Now let’s see where we can go with this thing.

Stephen Westfall, Forest (For Franz Marc) (2010), 59″ x 59″, oil and alkyd on canvas; courtesy Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

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Eschewing the purity that was once abstraction’s sine qua non, the artists featured in Wit opt for an almost promiscuous inclusivity. No inspiration is suspect. High-flown ambitions–sure, we got ‘em; historical cognizance, too. But these artists are also characterized by a willingness to embrace a veritable laundry list of references: nature, narrative, comics, design, technology, science, representation and, not least, humor. Not that humor has been entirely absent from the history of abstract art: Malevich pranked Mona Lisa five years before Duchamp and Mondrian paid winning homage, in oil and canvas, to his beloved boogie-woogie music. Still, abstraction nowadays is more and more a repository of quirks, tics and pictorial double entendres, having as much in common with Buster Keaton, say, as Neo-Plasticism.

Mario Naves, Tart and Toff (2012), oil on canvas mounted on board, 20″ x 24″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

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Just don’t hold your breath expecting Marina Adams, Polly Apfelbaum, Joanne Freeman, Joe Fyfe, Barbara Gallucci, Phillis Ideal, Jonathan Lasker, Sarah Lutz, Doreen McCarthy, Thomas Nozkowski, Paul Pagk, Ruth Root, Fran Shalom, Stephen Westfall and myself to sign a manifesto of purpose. Making art is hard work and individual visions aren’t easily won; few of us like (or want) to be pegged. But the work here is unified and engaging in ways that are somewhat sneaky, maybe contrarian and decidedly offbeat. Watch as these artists juggle forms, tweak relationships, disassemble materials, cajole surfaces and elicit a staggering amount of allusions. It’s enough to make you think that abstraction, as a historical and artistic phenomenon, is barely off the ground. At the very least, we should be grateful that it’s being carried on with clarity, sophistication and, yes, wit.

© 2013 Mario Naves

Preening Disaffection: The Art of Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans, Me (2011), oil on canvas, 43-1/2″ x 53-5/8″; courtesy David Zwirner

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The following review was originally published in the November 7, 2005 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Luc Tuymans; The Summer is Over at David Zwirner (until February 9).

A well-known maxim advises us not to judge a book by its cover, but can you judge an art show by its press release? In the case of Proper, the exhibition of paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans on display at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, absolutely.

Mr. Tuymans’ recent efforts offer, we are told, “a critique of America that is intended to be subconsciously constructed.” Stop puzzling for a moment over how anything subconscious could be constructed intentionally and let the press release ramble on: “The exhibition’s title, Proper … refers to a seemingly requisite order determined by society at large [and] simultaneously suggests the opposite—improper—and therefore subverts …. ”

You already know you’re in deep trouble, and then the word “subverts” rears its ugly head. Here we enter the well-trodden path of transgression, wherein art is valued not for itself but for any number of extra-aesthetic ambitions. It doesn’t matter what’s being subverted as long as subversion takes place.

Reading further, we discover that Fred Astaire, Ann Miller and the Nicholas Brothers are—didn’t you just know it?—role models for flag burners the world over. What else are we to conclude upon learning that Mr. Tuymans’ ruminations on “a fragile America and the crumbling state of current affairs” have been “incited [?] by war-time musical films from the 1940s.”

If it seems unfair to dwell on the words surrounding Mr. Tuymans’ art, realize that the paintings are nothing without them. They’re barely anything with them.

Mr. Tuymans’ paintings are vaguely cinematic in composition and wan in coloration. His depictions of a table setting, a canopy bed, a bedroom mirror and—the sore-thumb centerpiece of the exhibition—Condoleezza Rice are characterized by a deadpan caginess, a knowing refusal to convey meaning or principle.

This indifference is reiterated by Mr. Tuymans’ cursory approach to painting: He completes each canvas in a single setting. This approach would seem to guarantee an alla prima spontaneity, yet the products are listless and fussy, bleached of life, incident and interest. True, they’ve been purposefully manufactured to “fully contest optimism,” but that’s a cheap out favored by artists with nothing to say.

Mr. Tuymans presumably has something to say; he’s garnered international attention for tackling subjects like the colonial history of Belgium and 9/11. But the vacuousness of the work contradicts that reputation. Is preening disaffection really the benchmark for major art? Mr. Tuymans is neither a herald of the failures of history nor a significant painter. He’s a symptom of the fecklessness of official culture and, as such, to be deplored.

© 2005 Mario Naves

“Wit” at The Painting Center

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The painter Joanne Freeman has curated an exhibition of contemporary abstract art that keys into how the disruption of “preconceived standards” can “alter assumptions, surprise, reinvent and communicate wit”:

“It is a mistake to polarize humor and intellect since they work best in unison. Wit suggests qualities of the human spirit in an overly synchronized world.” 

The artists who embody “the imperfection that identifies personality”? Marina Adams, Joe Fyfe, Barbara Gallucci, Philis Ideal, Jonathan Lasker, Sarah Lutz, Doreen McCarthy, Thomas Nozwkowski, Paul Pagk, Ruth Root, Fran Shalom, Stephen Westfall, the curator herself and your humble writer. Westfall has contributed an essay to the catalogue; so have I:

“Eschewing the purity that was once abstraction’s sine qua non, the artists featured in Wit opt for an almost promiscuous inclusivity. No inspiration is suspect. High-flown ambitions–sure, we got ‘em; historical cognizance, too. But these artists are also characterized by a willingness to embrace a veritable laundry list of references: nature, narrative, comics, design, technology, science, representation and, not least, humor.”

The opening reception takes place on Thursday, January 31, from 6:00-8:00 p.m. A panel discussion is set for the evening of February 14th–Valentine’s Day!

So much for love, but let’s hear it for Wit.

© 2013 Mario Naves

Unapologetic Good Will: Roy De Forest

Roy De Forest, A Man of the Country (2003), acrylic on panel with artist’s frame, 23-1/2″ x 21″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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The following review was originally published in the January 15, 2008 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Roy De Forest; A Simple Life: Small Scale Paintings from 2000-2003 at George Adams Gallery (until February 9).

Generosity of spirit and joyous excess are the hallmarks of Roy De Forest’s blissfully excessive art, the subject of a memorial exhibition at George Adams Gallery. (De Forest died last spring at the age of 77.) His paintings, drawings and sculptures were often classified as “California Funk,” a description foisted upon a group of West Coast artists who treated tradition with cheery disregard. No highfalutin intentions, please, we’re Californians.

De Forest wasn’t ignored by the Manhattan art scene, as numerous exhibitions by dealer Allan Frumkin attest. Nor did the artist turn a blind eye to the New York School: Its compositional strategies filter into De Forest’s kaleidoscopic arrays of cowboys, dogs and relentless ornamentation. Yet never would you have caught self-important standard-bearers of high art—Robert Motherwell, say, or Clyfford Still—indulging in such goofball fantasies.

Roy De Forest, A Bird in Hand (1965), acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 60″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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The thing is, De Forest’s paintings aren’t fantasies; they’re real. An artist’s responsibility is to create a fiction we can enter, experience and believe in. How convincingly it’s realized and how much the artist yields to its logic determines its aesthetic viability. The inside-out, every-which-way cosmos De Forest brought to life sprawls like a topographical map and bustles like the No. 6 train at rush hour. There’s not an inch of canvas unaccounted for. Forget horror vacui: De Forest’s all-over and exaggerated pointillism, characterized by blips of acrylic squeezed directly from the tube, aren’t obsessive; they’re a celebration of life’s bounty.

The rough-hewn vigor of American folk art informs the paintings, as does the unmediated nature of children’s art. But De Forest’s sophistication precluded sentimentality—the strong coloration, surprising and intricate narratives and general air of ecstasy recall non-Western art, particularly Himalayan painting.

The flattened, topsy-turvy landscape in Silas Newcastle Goes Down (1966) has a hallucinogenic fervor that upsets its symmetrical composition. Black Horse Meadow (2004-2005), with its drowsy haze of soft yellows, is as quaint and warm as the wallpaper in grandma’s living room.

De Forest got cute with his handmade frames—kitschy self-consciousness didn’t suit him—and the drawings are too wispy to invigorate their rolling landscapes and clustered doodles. But the paintings offer glittering proof that happiness, optimism and unapologetic good will are their own reward—and ours.

© 2008 Mario Naves

“Sideshow Nation” at Sideshow Gallery

Artist and impresario Rich Timperio has mounted another of his annual compendiums of, like, a zillion artists at Sideshow Gallery, his haimish venue in not-so-far-flung Williamsburg. This year’s model is dubbed Sideshow Nation and the exhibition promises to leave the casual viewer staggered by its dizzying multiplicity.

Am I wrong in thinking that Timperio’s overviews give a broader and, in many ways, truer overview of the contemporary scene than, say, the Whitney Biennial? Certainly, it’s a more generous endeavor and less prone to theoretical blather.

Would I ponder the question if a work of mine weren’t included? Given some of the artists featured in Sideshow Nation–to name just a few, Ken Butler, Joanne Freeman, Tom Evans, Tine Lundsfryd, Kim Sloane, Eric Holzman, Lauren Bakoian, Don Voisine, Thornton Willis, Susan Wanklyn, Jeanne Wilkinson and Laura Dodson–I’m inclined to think I would.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Mario Naves; Recent Paintings at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Mario Naves, Timpanogos (2011), oil and acrylic on panel, 24″ x 28″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

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I’m pleased to announce that my sixth one-person exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery will be on display from January 4-February 2, 2013. The gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The opening reception takes place on Friday, January 4th, from 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Painting, Cornered

David Rijkaert III, Painters Workshop (1638), oil  on panel, 23.2″ x 37.4″; courtesy The Louvre

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“The Four Corners of Painting”, Richard Kalina’s essay on the state of the art form, is as programmatic as his own works-on-canvas and, alas, considerably less quirky. Still, devotees of the medium will want to give the essay a thorough going-over. Anyone who can put a positive spin on putting brush to canvas in our “decidedly ahistorical” culture deserves a high five. Kalina writes:

“We are living in an age where various forces, primarily market-driven, but also critical, curatorial, and educational, are fostering a decidedly ahistorical attitude. A willed loss of historical perspective has a not-so-hidden implication—and that is that all work is perforce new and fresh, that it springs from the artist’s absolute individuality and therefore should not be questioned from the point of view of history, although it ought to be granted the very prerogatives accorded in the modernist past to ‘groundbreaking’ art. This does us all a disservice.”

“The Four Corners of Painting” can be found in the current edition of The Brooklyn Rail.

© 2012 Mario Naves