Hester Simpson, Lush Life (2011), acrylic on panel, 12″ x 12″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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The following essay is included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Hester Simpson at Ricco Maresca Gallery (until April 7, 2012).

Having followed the art of Hester Simpson for twenty-some years, I can, without hyperbole or equivocation, state the following about her abstract paintings: Beauty is guaranteed. “Beauty”, in this case, is a condition of an artist who has mastered her craft while remaining open to, and driven by, its challenges.

Simpson coaxes from acrylic paint a remarkable suppleness—remarkable because synthetic materials don’t inherently lend themselves to sumptuousness of tone and surface. Her patterned geometric shapes and calligraphic structures are luxurious in a way that seems incommensurate with the medium. The surfaces of Simpson’s paintings have a distinct tactility–a warmth and luster–that is akin to, if not flesh, then something close to it. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you longed to trace your fingertips over plastic? The paintings beg for an appreciative touch.

Through ongoing and thorough experimentation, Simpson has discovered technical means by which acrylic paint is both a sensual substance and the carrier of metaphor–of sensations that transcend the blunt physical fact of mere stuff. Big deal, right? We should expect the same from any painter worth her salt. But in an age when virtual wizardry can obscure material pleasure, Simpson’s achievement–a kind of alchemy, really–is worth elaborating upon. The pictures, though hushed in demeanor, are adamantly anti-virtual.

Hester Simpson, Green Links (2011), acrylic on panel, 5″ x 5″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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There is, of necessity, a prosaic side to life in the studio–stretching canvases, washing brushes, mixing pigments and allowing the requisite time for paint to gel and harden. Simpson can undoubtedly enumerate the recipes and procedures by which she creates her signature runs of pictorial incident. But if the images were little more than compendiums of expertly contrived effects, it’s unlikely they would be as absorbing. Creating fetching surfaces is vital, absolutely. But endowing them with metaphorical resonance is another thing–and no mean feat. Simpson has, with impressive consistency, proved up to the task.

The paintings offer a vivid rejoinder to those skeptical of abstraction’s ability to embody specific states of being and emotion. Highflown talk has surrounded abstract painting from its inception; Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian talked up a good—if, at times, specious–game. It is heartening, then, to learn that Simpson approaches her art with marked humility. The work (she writes) celebrates “the ordinary rather than the dramatic”, “acknowledging imperfection [and] reflecting the lived life.” Abstraction is as much, and perhaps more, a matter of the here and now than of metaphysical aspiration. Simpson is an abstractionist who keeps her feet on the ground.

Which isn’t to say the work elides the metaphysical. It’s just that Simpson’s approach is absent of portent and pretension. A degree of sobriety, of practicality and routine, inflects the paintings, and can be gleaned in the manner in which countless scrims of paint have patiently been layered. (The waxy accumulations of pigment on the edges of each canvas also testify to Simpson’s painterly tenacity.) But sobriety doesn’t define the art. Its rhythms are too hypnotic, the palette vivid-bordering-on-libidinous and the imagery palpably human in its heady embrace of “imperfection”. A Freudian could hold forth on the hard-won synthesis of id and super-ego—minus, that is, the ego’s supplications. The rest of us will marvel at the détente brought to the dialogue between chaos and order. That it’s barely a détente at all is what makes the pictures thrilling.

Hester Simpson, Rip Tide (2011), acrylic on panel, 12″ x 12″; courtesy Ricco Maresca Gallery

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Gallery-goers in need of a quick fix will find themselves unsettled by Simpson’s paintings; they don’t lend themselves to a once-over-lightly treatment. True, the work’s appeal is fairly patent–only a theory-addled curmudgeon could deny the instantaneous attraction of Simpson’s palette, with its lucid array of radiant reds, breezy purples, aquamarines and bottomless blues. But give this or that image the time of day and you’ll be pulled into a slippery, allusive and, at times, unnerving experience. Simpson’s looping skeins of color mutate and shimmy before our eyes, establishing connections, setting up rhythms, missing a beat and then righting themselves as if—well, as if by magic. Simpson the paint-handler doesn’t overplay her hand.

The ease with which the paintings announce themselves is an illusion, of course. (Simpson would be the first to admit as much.) That’s the point. Was it Fred Astaire who claimed “the trick” was in not letting the audience see you sweat? Much in the way Astaire defied the burdens of gravity and the limitations of the body, Simpson brings a profound calm to images that have been realized through a prolonged, sometimes exasperating and utterly necessary process. The work is nothing if it hasn’t encapsulated the sundry decisions that went into its making—in the application of a particular color, say, or the constant accounting for shifts in tempo and space. Simpson doesn’t advertise her labors. The painting is the thing—an entity with its own peculiar and independent life.

Simpson’s recent efforts are more of the same and a brand new thing—familiar turf that has been extended, made vibrant and, in the end, rendered altogether unfamiliar. Constitutionally incapable of coasting on her considerable expertise, Simpson has deepened the scope of her art even as she distills the particulars of its vocabulary. Paintings like Green Links, Seamless and the whiplash intricacies of Lush Life (all 2011), not only give a good name to the notion of continuity of vision, they give it body, truth and, yes, beauty. The latter is a rare and welcome entity, as recognizable (and undeniable) as it is impossible to define. That Simpson has embodied not a few of beauty’s many contradictions is ample reason to relish her hard-won and stunning achievement.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Andrew Lenaghan, New Stadium, Atlantic Avenue (2011), oil on panel, 24″ x 32″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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While looking at Andrew Lenaghan’s paintings at George Adams Gallery, I overhead a visitor exclaim, “New York has never looked so lovely.”

Really? There’s much to commend in the work, not least its crisp light and keen sense of place. But “lovely”? That’s such a mild adjective for pictures whose verisimilitude is inseparable from a pointed and, at moments, bristly animism.

Lenaghan has long been drawn to areas of Brooklyn that, when not mundane, are distinctly unlovely—a graffiti-laden building in Greenpoint, anonymous industrial structures in Williamsburg and the stained and mottled roadway bordering the Bedford Avenue Armory. Family is also a mainstay—in one painting, children watch Dora the Explorer; in another, a woman stands by the mirror in an unkempt bedroom. Geometry, as it informs the city’s infrastructure, our homes and backyards, is important, too.

Andrew Lenaghan, Sarah and Charlie Upstairs (2011), oil on panel, 24″ x 32″; courtesy George Adams Gallery

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In their details, the picturesque and domestic are rendered with a skittering line that accumulates—sometimes tenuously, always convincingly—into solid form. The cobblestone walkway at the bottom right of New Stadium, Atlantic Avenue (2011) is a particularly telling marker of Lenaghan’s pictorial abilities; the way in which arrant mark-making and fidelity to observation are navigated is emblematic of his bracing and flinty intellect.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the February 8, 2012 edition of City Arts.

Howard Buchwald, In or Out (2008), acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 120″; courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

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The paintings of Howard Buchwald, on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are as much a call to arms as an exhibition of art.

Listen to Buchwald tell it: “Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to, and independent of the specific work”. Momentarily commiserating with the aesthetically challenged, he does admit to “understand[ing] the anxiety that direct looking and feeling still produce.”

But? Any “attempt to overcome this feeling by supplanting what is right there . . . is largely beside the point.” Don’t come to Buchwald, then, with high-flown theoretical flourishes or pressing sociological agendas. Codifying art by means other than direct visual engagement stifles its integrity. Why don a straitjacket when you’re given free agency?

Howard Buchwald, Mapped (Large Red) (2010), acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 90″; courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

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A fixture of the New York art world, Buchwald believes in the eye above all. His rigorously choreographed arrays of wriggling, rubbery lines and declarative, eye-rattling colors couldn’t kowtow to extra-aesthetic imperative if they wanted to. The rhythms are too headstrong, the compositions too unpredictable, the sense of purpose fiercely independent.

The pictures have the graphic clarity of superhero comics—you know, KA-POW!—and recall The New York School in their scale and ambition, though Buchwald’s firm sense of humor is entirely his own. The black line muscling its way through Mapped (Large Red) (2010) would steal the show if it weren’t for the acidic tonalities of In Or Out (2008), a monumental canvas whose title is both plain-as-day descriptive and a challenge to the viewer.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the February 8, 2012 edition of City Arts.

Bill Jensen, Black Sorrow (I) (2010-2011), oil on linen, 53″ x 42″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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The following review was published in the March 11, 2007 edition of The New York Observer. It is posted here on the occasion of Bill Jensen at Cheim & Read (until February 18).

If Bill Jensen weren’t capable of making such awful paintings, his good ones wouldn’t be worth taking so seriously. His improvisatory method is inherently hit-or-miss. His scraped and scarred canvases often fail to distinguish between the grace note and the heavy hand.

Case in point: the forbiddingly dark canvases in the introductory gallery of Cheim & Read in Chelsea, where his recent efforts are on display. The paintings are reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s late attempts to channel an existential sublime. To Mr. Jensen’s credit, they aren’t as pretentious—if only because they’re hardly anything at all. They’re mainly comprised of barely perceptible fluctuations in patina. One gallery-goer, with a poetic flourish, dubbed them “19th-century landscapes engulfed in doom.”

The paintings do recall the moody scenes of Albert Pinkham Ryder, long a favorite of Mr. Jensen’s, but mostly the Ryders that have suffered catastrophic discoloration due to his notoriously blasé attitude toward materials. Sometimes subtlety is too subtle to bother with.

But that’s a handful of pictures. The rest of the 20 or so canvases, while uneven in quality, are less stark and earnest. They’re earnest enough, mind you, but Mr. Jensen’s labor-intensive resolve is bolstered by colors startlingly new to his work.

A painter for whom the natural world is less a recognizable subject than an ominous brew of portent, Mr. Jensen’s early palette was earthy to a fault. Its unimaginative tones tended to muffle, if not outright stifle, inventive arrays of marks, textures and shapes. Given Mr. Jensen’s desire to tap into nature’s grit and physicality, such a palette was appropriate. But sometimes mud is just mud.

So where did the shrieking primary colors come from? It’s as if someone turned on the lights in Mr. Jensen’s studio—or maybe the fireplace. Deep and lustrous blues, yellows and reds, remarkable for their relative clarity, burn with harsh intensity.

Bill Jensen, Dutch Rain (2010), oil on linen, 26″ x 20″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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That’s the most of it, but not all of it: Silky purples, fluctuating runs of rust and unsullied greens evince the exhilaration of a painter who’s finally getting a handle on the expressive capabilities of color.

Most surprising, because radically atypical, is the milky blur cascading through Luohan (Light Step) (2003-6)—a color that’s almost, but not really, whitish purple. Elusive and unnamable hues are an indicator of Mr. Jensen’s growth—at last!—as a colorist.

All of which would be meaningless if the palette were divorced from his process and rhythm. It’s not: Color thrives as an integral component of the whole. An admirer of Chinese calligraphy, Mr. Jensen’s canvases don’t achieve its elegance or fluidity (an attribute true of his works-on-paper), but his whiplash brushstroke does embody its slippery allusiveness.

Obscured behind abraded veils of color, Mr. Jensen’s trails of oil paint bristle and twist, at times with bracing recklessness. The signature small formats—37 by 28 inches is stretching it for Mr. Jensen—attain a monumental effect. Intuitively gauging the relationship between gesture and surface area, he creates a heaving internal scale that belies each painting’s modest size.

Mr. Jensen’s best pictures—Scorched Field (2004-5), Luohan (Persona) (2005-6), Bog (2004-6), The Red House (Jimi Hendrix) (2004-6) and the evanescent St. Sebastian (2005-6)—smolder as if they were lit from within; a glow, sometimes corrosive, emanates from beneath innumerable scrims of paint. It’s hard to know where Mr. Jensen’s densely layered paintings begin and end. Deciphering his tracks is pointless. The images can’t be unraveled; Mr. Jensen’s approach defies practical logic. The paintings coalesce in ways that mystify the audience and, as is evident from their spontaneity and momentum, the artist himself.

Bill Jensen, Luohan (Hungry Ghosts) (2011), oil on linen, 32″ x 28″; courtesy Cheim & Read

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In the catalog essay “The Elbow and The Milky Way,” the critic John Yau writes of how Mr. Jensen’s paintings “cannot be seen all at once … [and] must be experienced both visually and physically.” They achieve a “state of simultaneity, of a complexity that engages more than just our eyes.” So far, so good—but then Mr. Yau insists that Mr. Jensen shares a “philosophical basis” with Jasper Johns and Robert Ryman.

Say what? The stock in trade of Mr. Johns and Mr. Ryman, a drably pedantic literalism, couldn’t be further from Mr. Jensen’s scrabbled poetry. The pictorial seductions (such as they are) found in Mr. Johns’ and Mr. Ryman’s paintings are deracinated, banal and short-lived. Mr. Jensen’s paintings are full-bodied, bottomless and repay repeated looking.

Mr. Yau’s essay is otherwise clear-eyed and perceptive. Likening Mr. Jensen to Jackson Pollock is right, particularly given the urgency bordering on desperation that marks, if not outright defines, the oeuvres of both men. Mr. Yau sharpens the focus on the pictorial hurdles that Mr. Jensen sets for himself and, not least, his “maverick” status.

In that regard, Mr. Jensen is quintessentially American. He follows in the proud tradition of headstrong individuals, unapologetic eccentrics and outright loners punctuating the history of American art, such as Thomas Eakins, Louis Eilshemius, Arthur Dove, and peers like Pat Adams, David Fertig and Andrew Masullo.

Self-reliance may be the American way, but it’s not without social and political liabilities. In art, it’s less fraught with consequence, so it can provide a heady sense of possibility. The “wild, anarchic beauty” of Mr. Jensen’s art (the dead-on phrase is courtesy of Mr. Yau) underlines that truth and is evident—thrillingly, ineradicably—in the artist’s successes as well as his failures.

We shouldn’t ignore (or forgive) the frequency of the latter. Mr. Jensen wouldn’t have integrity if he didn’t risk falling on his ass. Nor would he make good paintings if he didn’t dust himself off and give it another go. Tenacity is the rule. Mr. Jensen is the real thing, and all the more rare because of it.

© 2007 Mario Naves

Martha Clippinger, Catty Cornered (2010), acrylic on wood, 12″ x 10″ x 7″; courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

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Artists attempting to gulf the divide between painting and sculpture are asking for it. Locating a coherent equipoise between pictorial space and sculptural space–between invention and actuality–invariably results in awkward (not to say “bastardized”) elisions of form. Even Donatello, the master of bas-relief, couldn’t pull it off on a consistent basis. Martha Clippinger isn’t Donatello–come on; who is?–but neither is she any one of scores of artists who make mixed-media their dead-in-the-water forte.

Clippinger’s amalgams of lumber-yard leftovers and modernist rigor, each of which sports a kid-friendly palette, tip-toe around painting and sculpture with disarming good will. The point isn’t how she performs this feat, but, rather, that the feat is rendered no-big-deal and, as such, beside the point. Imagine a down-home Ellsworth Kelly or a Richard Tuttle we could take seriously. Imagine caprice transformed into poetry and Post-Minimalism rendered humane. Then watch Clippinger make the theoretical concrete.

Martha Clippinger: Hopscotch is on display at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, until February 4.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Installation of June Leaf’s work at Edward Thorp Gallery

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The Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in post-modernism–as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs a broader berth than can be provided by Edward Thorp Gallery, the venue exhibiting her recent efforts.

Leaf’s art is included in the Whitney’s collection, MOMA’s too, but that’s not the reason she deserves a full accounting. Over the thirty-some years Thorp has been exhibiting the work, Leaf has proved consistently intriguing and hard to pin down. Though she makes Manhattan and Nova Scotia home, Leaf was born in Chicago and, during the 1950s, proved an integral player in shaping the city’s artistic identity. Since then, the gritty finesse and stern air of existential resignation typifying the work has garnered Leaf the sobriquet “The Best Artist Nobody Knows About”. How “best” is she? That’s where the Whitney should step in.

At Thorp, we have diverting dribs-and-drabs: scrabbled paintings of a post-apocalyptic Second Avenue; egg-beaters as signposts of mortality; anonymous figures, rendered in paint and tin, ascending staircases that lead nowhere; and Untitled (Figure Cranking) (2010-2011), wherein a vintage sewing machine is transformed into a parable about fate, all the while channeling Dante, Bosch, Giacometti and Calder. It’s an impressive achievement—one you’d think would make our culturati sit up and take notice.

Any credible accounting of American art will place an emphasis on intractable individualism—the hard-won visions of sundry loners, originals and eccentrics speak more to the country’s can-do spirit than any spit-and-polished category you’d care to name. (An example: Abstract Expressionism seems a false conceit at this late date–less a matter of shared stylistic interests than a convenient tag for a specific social subset.) 

Edwin Dickinson, Self-Portrait In Uniform (1942), oil on canvas, 24-1/8″ x 29-1/2″; courtesy Babcock Galleries

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Seen in this light, a contemporary like Leaf and a historical figure like Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) appear less marginal–though good luck convincing those sold on the received wisdom. The folks at Babcock Galleries, which is hosting an array of Dickinson’s canvases, know what they’re up against. When the gallery makes a point of letting us know that Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning admired Dickinson’s art, it does so as a means of conferring popular legitimacy on a painter who is nobody’s idea of “user-friendly”.

What, after all, are we to make of Dickinson’s dour meditations on the body, the landscape and dressing up in outdated military gear? That Self Portrait in Uniform (1942) is among the strangest self-portraits extant, sure. But mostly that Dickinson was incapable of putting brush to canvas without embodying the transitory nature of memory and, not least, evoking its burdens.

Modern without being modernist, Dickinson’s poetic reveries are closer in tone and affect to Ingmar Bergman, say, than to either Gorky or de Kooning. But don’t kid yourself: Dickinson is in their league—and maybe better. Here is a superlative chance to acquaint yourself with this vexing and allusive master.

June Leaf: Recent Work is at Edward Thorp Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue, until January 28th. Edwin Dickinson: In Retrospect is at Babock Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue, until January 27.

Originally published in the January 18, 2012 edition of City Arts.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Sherrie Levine, Fountain (Madonna) (1991), bronze; courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London, and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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The following article was originally published in the September 2009 edition of The New Criterion. It is posted here on the occasion of Sherrie Levine: Mayhem, an exhibition currently on display at The Whitney Museum of American Art (until January 29).

There was, by my count, one compelling work of art included in The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, an exhibition that recently closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paul McMahon’s Postcard Fan (Girl in a Bathing Suit) (1975) shouldn’t be lauded for its pictorial invention: Aligning seventeen copies of the same postcard in a circle so that the title figure kicks her shapely gam like a Busby Berkeley-style perpetual motion machine is, at best, art school clever. But McMahon captured collage’s capacity for the absurd in a winningly efficient manner. Squeaking by on kitsch appeal, Postcard Fan provided much-needed whimsy. If there was one thing that marked the cadre of like minds at the Met, it was a deadening lack of humor. This “generation” was no fun.

But, boy, did it think a lot. The Pictures Generation focused on a network of artists who came of age after Minimalism and Conceptualism had taken root in the academy—CalArts, the Disney-funded school for the temporarily outré, figured heavily in its purview. Taking as a given the notion that visual art had reached its culmination in the idea and the object, a group of heady young students dedicated themselves to commenting on the obsolescence of high culture and on the false promises of aesthetic reward. Poaching on mass media with icy disregard, they made “appropriation”—the wholesale lifting of “pictures” from Hollywood or Madison Avenue— an art-world mantra. “Post-” became the obligatory prefix, especially when referring to modernism or the studio.

You could blame the French: the anti-humanist philosophies of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva were gobbled up by American artists sold on the line that art was at a dead end. But any line of reasoning diverting art’s niceties from aesthetic pleasure to over-intellectualization was welcome. John Baldessari’s shambling Conceptualism, with its easy reliance on photography and glorification of the “deskilled,” inspired his CalArts students to further deracinate the scope of Conceptual art—an against-all-odds tendency that didn’t go unnoticed, even among theoretical fellow travelers. “It’s your fault, John,” a friend jibed at Baldessari about the work of his protégés, “you called them artists.”

An image from After Walker Evans, a 1981 series by Sherrie Levine; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery

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What resulted was insular and over-determined art, at first humble in means but increasingly slick in finish. Pop culture was the lingua franca of the Pictures Generation and its touchstone, but the line between high and low had already been blurred by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; any residual frisson resulting from breaking boundaries had dissipated and been codified. As a result, a been-there-done-that skepticism set the tone. “A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture,” intoned Sherrie Levine, “we can only imitate a gesture that is always interior, never original …” So what can a poor girl do except re-photograph photographs by Walker Evans and Edward Weston under the smug assumption that art is inherently a cheat?

Except the Pictures Generation—or, at least, notables like Robert Longo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Levine—got rich. This is, in and of itself, not a sin; an artist’s bank account shouldn’t be the litmus test for his art. But when the failings of commodity culture are your subject—and let’s not forget, please, that art is a commodity—what happens when the resulting work accrues significant financial worth and, in the long run, a stamp of approval from an august institution like the Met? Small ideas rendered large are hard enough to endure; small ideas collapsing under their own logic are intolerable. The period pieces on display in The Pictures Generation evinced a social set without either the gumption or the imagination to explore anything greater than its own cynicism.

As with the old quip that each generation congratulates itself on having invented sex, so, too, does every generation think the world as they know it will soon be at an end. What looked diverting twenty years ago—Longo’s monumental drawings of falling men, say—now looks tinny and overblown, expert and little else. But that’s not to say we should be pessimistic about future generations. When a group of art students visiting the Met was informed that the Pictures Generation was important for having confronted feminism, capitalism, mass media, and (pace Levine) “the uneasy peace … made between the reassuring mythologies society and culture provide and our wish to see ourselves as free agents,” their teacher later told me that they shrugged their collective shoulders and replied: “So what? The art is still lousy.” The Met has better ways of spending its time. So do the rest of us.

© 2009 Mario Naves

Installation of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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“One of the most audacious exhibitions in the Guggenheim’s half-century”—so reads the subway advertisement for Maurizio Cattelan: All, an exhibition organized by Nancy Spector, the museum’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, along with the Associate Curator Katherine Brinson. The quote is from a New York Times profile of the artist by Randy Kennedy. We shouldn’t necessarily expect critical insights from a puff piece, but even an arts journalist like Kennedy must know the bad faith he’s peddling. The most striking thing about the Cattelan exhibition is, after all, its lack of audacity. Nothing daring can be generated by an artist whose sole and defining impetus is playing to the audience.

By “audience” I don’t refer only to that vexing creature known as the “art world”—the denizens of which are schooled, to one degree or another, in its vagaries. I also include men and women who don’t rely on the latest edition of Artforum for intellectual enlightenment—curiosity seekers whose range of interests are broader, or different, than any one subculture will allow. (Some of them may not even care about art.) Even so, Cattelan will likely strike people as par for the course. We’ve reached a stage in world culture where artists are expected to be, you know, out there. When one or another doesn’t occasion a splash, it can be kind of disappointing. Art, as the sage Andy Warhol reputedly had it, is what you can get away with.

Mauricio Cattelan

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The artist as con-man and provocateur—it’s a cliché (and a profitable one, at that). The marketplace thrives on the type, however received or cynical his machinations, as do our tastemakers. The collective willingness to be suckered by the cheapest of impulses says much about the failings of contemporary art culture. But what about the theory-benighted folks filing up and down the Guggenheim’s ramp and taking in the oeuvre of this (or so the Guggenheim tells it) “provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet”? From all appearances, they’re approaching Cattelan’s willfully deadpan transgressions with good will. And why not? The exhibition is, as these things go, pretty clever, and, in the end, nothing to get riled about. Maurizio Cattelan: All is a non-event posing as a spectacle.

The primary thing to know about the show is that the galleries lining the museum’s rotunda are empty. No traditional chronology or accounting of output for the puckish Italian: the corpus is hung with cables suspended from an armature toward the top of the Guggenheim’s roof. Imagine a gigantic mobile whose constituent parts have been contrived by Madame Tussaud and the staff of Mad Magazine—with a Duchampian flourish, of course. As a feat of engineering, the installation—comprised, as it is, of 128 disparate pieces—is a marvel and, given the adroit sense of placement and interval, rather artful. Traverse Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp and you’ll see how the work has been choreographed. The effect is elegant, measured, and sculptural.

Just don’t mistake Cattelan for a sculptor. Though the work is, by and large, three-dimensional, it hasn’t been crafted with an eye toward mass, void, material, or space. Instead, each piece is a cartoon made concrete. The majority iterate tropes lifted from Dadaism, Surrealism, and Pop. Taking off from Miró’s Object (1936) and Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), with a pinch of Un Chien Andalou thrown in for good measure, Cattelan utilizes the remains of horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, elephants, and ostriches to mild comic effect. That’s not all. Here you’ll find an over-sized Picasso marionette; there, a distended shopping cart. The unifying element is a series of draped bodies, all presumably dead. There are effigies of religious figures, shapely babes, a dead JFK, a boyish Adolph Hitler, and, repeatedly, the artist himself. Say this much: Cattelan provides gainful employment for a raft of carpenters, taxidermists, and wax-workers.

Installation of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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The fifty-one-year old Cattelan recently announced his retirement from art-making, citing the decision as an “extra project that will complete the retrospective.” I have a suggestion for how he should while away his remaining days. A few years back, Pope Benedict XVI asked contemporary artists to enter a “dialogue between aesthetics and ethics, between beauty, truth and goodness . . . and daily reality.” The Holy See’s invitation—his challenge, really—was made in response to the Catholic-bashing that is a regular fixture of the contemporary scene. Cattelan established his own anti-Catholic cred with La Nona Oralso (1999), a life-size depiction of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteor. (It’s included at the Guggenheim.) Here’s my thought: What if Cattelan forsook funhouse self-aggrandizement and spent his golden years making art that embodied all that is true and noble about the church and, not least, “daily reality”? It’s a stretch, but imagine if he went ahead and did it. Now that would be audacious.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the January 2012 edition of The New Criterion.

Antonello da Messina, Portrait of a Young Man (ca. 1470), oil on wood, 10-5/8″ x 8-1/8″; courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The following article was originally published in the January 15, 2006 edition of The New York Observer. It is posted here on the occasion of the exhibition The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (until March 18, 2012).

Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings has left the Met, and not a moment too soon. Am I the only New Yorker happy that the tempestuous Dutchman has hit the road?

Whenever the Van Gogh name gets onto a museum marquee, you’re guaranteed an environment bereft of oxygen. I’m not talking about the crowds. It’s the biographical fog that both obscures and embellishes what is essentially a respectable, not spectacular, achievement.

Poor Vincent isn’t to blame for the hype, of course. Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, the artist’s sister-in-law and initial overseer of the estate; Irving Stone’s melodramatic biography Lust for Life, Hollywood hot on its heels; and countless museum folk with dollar signs in their eyes—all have worked hard to make the most of the all-consuming, one-eared myth with which we tussle today.

Some of us don’t tussle all that much. Every time I walked through the Met, on my way to Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings, the paintings of Fra Angelico, literally sublime, beckoned instead. At the onset of the Christmas crunch, I gave up altogether on seeing the Van Gogh show. A friend tells me I didn’t miss much. I hope he’s right.

We shouldn’t altogether begrudge the Met its forays into showbiz, though. Blockbuster box-office numbers ensure that the kind of exhibitions that promise uncommon scholarly and aesthetic pleasures—if not ready accessibility or huge profits—can still be mounted.

Take, for example, Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master, a tiny, rather specialized exhibition devoted to (as the introductory wall label has it) “arguably the first truly European painter.” Visitors to the Met aren’t exactly lining up for Antonello, but those who do chance upon his work—wedged, as it is, into the museum’s collection of Western painting—seem to be quite taken with it.

Antonello de Messina, The Virgin Annunciate (1475), 45 x 34.5 cm.; courtesy The National Museum, Palermo

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Why Antonello (ca. 1430-1479) might be the first European painter is less puzzling than how he achieved that status. Even on the slim evidence on display at the Met—two double-sided panels, four paintings and a drawing—it’s clear that Antonello was conversant with the meticulous pictorial traditions of Netherlandish oil painting. Not that it’s a given that an artist residing in Italy should be heir to all of his own country’s artistic glories. Antonello was a provincial—if not necessarily in achievement, then in geography.

Hard facts on his development and travels are in short supply. Hypotheses abound in trying to explain how this native of Messina and eventual citizen of Sicily—neither of which could be considered a cultural center—came by his sophistication. The curators wistfully conjecture that he may have had direct contact with Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus, painters of genius and near-genius respectively. The inclusion of Christus’ The Lamentation (ca. 1450), a staple of the Met’s permanent collection, among the Antonellos is an attempt to underline and amplify the Northern European connection.

It’s also something of a blunder, I’m afraid. There’s certainly much to like about the Antonello paintings, especially the irresistibly shifty character featured in Portrait of a Man. But if the curators really wanted to make a case for Antonello’s artistic primacy, better they should have left The Lamentation—and, for that matter, Jacometto’s steely Portrait of a Young Man—out of viewing range. The resulting comparison casts doubt upon Antonello’s status as Renaissance master. The Antonello pictures—at least those at the Met—just don’t scale the same heights.

Christus’ The Lamentation—with its saturated palette, impeccable orchestration of form, crystalline warp of space and cool, and devotional intensity—makes Antonello look timid and sluggish, serious but something of an also-ran. Odd elisions of anatomy and irregularities in compositional structure—the unconvincingly situated right hand of The Virgin Annunciate, for instance—don’t help. A more thorough accounting of the Sicilian master might make a stronger case—and could be thrilling. Perhaps the folks in the Met’s back room are working on it as we speak.

Robert Rauschenberg, Pilgrim (1950), mixed mediums with wooden chair, 79″ x 54″ x 19″; courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle

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Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, another exhibition on display at the Met, is surprisingly moving: Its trajectory is more genuinely sad than anyone could have guessed. The Met didn’t intend that its array of “daring and influential works by one of America’s great modern artists” would offer a parable on squandered artistic promise. But that’s exactly what it is. The exhibition highlights, with devastating accuracy, an artist who sacrificed a small but precious gift for the sake of overblown gestures and careerist ambitions.

The combines are constructions cobbled together from a surfeit of found objects—old sheets, a stuffed Angora goat, blinking lights, socks and a bed, to name just a few. They’re augmented with frantic passages of brushwork that refer explicitly to the conventions of Abstract Expressionism. Though the pastiches of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline aren’t unappreciative, Mr. Rauschenberg has never displayed an affinity for oil paint—he can’t pick up a brush without swaddling it in irony. Much has been made of the experiments in mixing media, but even at his most “far out,” Mr. Rauschenberg remains a pictorial artist—and a rather academic one. The combines never really go over the top; the flat ground of the canvas is their ball-and-chain.

Influenced by the collages of Kurt Schwitters and the anti-aesthetic theories of Marcel Duchamp, Mr. Rauschenberg isn’t a true Dadaist. Sympathetic to Dadaism’s flagrant, nose-thumbing ethos, Mr. Rauschenberg’s go-get-’em esprit and happy superficiality could never submit to outright nihilism. He’s an amiable guy. Still, it was Mr. Rauschenberg—more so than Jasper Johns, his lethargic coeval in Dada lite—who transformed Duchamp’s aesthetic from a curious sidebar of history to the predigested engine of culture it is now. It’s Mr. Rauschenberg’s example that’s largely responsible for flashy mediocrities like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Thanks a lot, Bob.

Nonetheless, there are a smattering of early works—Honeysuckle, Levee and an untitled piece from around 1955, in particular—that evince a sensitivity to the materials used in their crafting and hint at special correspondences that are more than the sum of their tatters. Had Mr. Rauschenberg explored this tendency on the intimate scale it called for, he might have made an unassuming and welcome contribution to the history of 20th-century American art. As it is, he became the Leroy Nieman of the avant-garde—an unapologetic hack ready, willing and able to reiterate a hugely successful, aesthetically empty formula.

Come back, Van Gogh; all is forgiven.

© 2006 Mario Naves

Postscript:  Jerry Saltz–New York magazine art critic, Bravo TV fixture and silly man–took me to task for this column here.

Roberto Matta, Untitled (c. 1983), oil on canvas, 74-3/4″ x 80-3/4″; courtesy Pace Gallery

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The Chilean painter Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren, subject of a dizzying exhibition at Pace Gallery, has a distinct hold on the history of 20th-century art.

Invited to join the Surrealists by ringleader André Breton, at the behest of Salvador Dalí and Federíco Garcia Lorca, Matta (as he is commonly known) became a direct link between European modernism and the American art scene. Matta was among the European artists who came to the United States at the onset of the Second World War. The Surrealist principles he espoused during a 10-year stay in New York, from 1938–1948, proved decisive for the developing oeuvres of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The New York School is inconceivable without Matta.

What is almost as inconceivable (at least, for some of us) is that Matta’s life and career extended beyond the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Not a few veteran art world observers did double takes upon learning that Matta died only a few years back—in 2001 at the age of 91. The 21st century! Matta’s hold on history is less fixed than we thought. The uncanny thing about his expansive brand of Surrealism has always been how it presaged virtual space before the notion became a commonplace.

Matta, Comment une conscience se fait univers (peut être) (1999), oil on canvas, 10′ 1/8″ x 15′ 4-1/4″; courtesy Pace Gallery

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Matta: A Centennial Exhibition is a rare opportunity to acquaint yourself with this discursive, eccentric and unclassifiable artist. The paintings are big—a couple are huge. Each is a slurry of pictorial tics gleaned from automatism, Futurism, graffiti, pictographs, high modernist dogma, post-modernist caprice and the loopier precincts of science fiction. Imagine Star Wars meeting Miró and Kandinsky in a back alley of the Aztec empire under the influence of hallucinogenics; then immerse it within a floating, fractured and bodiless space not unlike that which we encounter on our computer screen. A more quixotic painter you couldn’t come up with; Matta is a visionary of singular and contrary gifts. This is an exhibition that shouldn’t be missed.

© 2011 Mario Naves

Originally published in the November 28, 2011 edition of City Arts.