Too Damned Odd: The Art of Mernet Larsen

Mernet Larsen, Landscape with a Dirt Road (From Poussin) (2011), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 26″ x 54″; courtesy Vogt Gallery

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The following review originally appeared in the January 31, 2005 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Mernet Larsen: Three Chapters at Vogt Gallery (until October 27).

Upon receiving the invitation to Mernet Larsen:  The Geometric Figure Paintings, an exhibition at The New York School, I took one look at the painting reproduced on its face and promptly deposited it in the wastebasket.  How could the Studio School, that rigorous bastion of high sculpture, devote precious gallery space to out-and-out kitsch?  The depiction of robotic parents gazing at their equally robotic newborn, keyed to a bubblegum palette, looked to be some kind of retro pastiche combining Cubist impulses, hard-edge abstraction, folk art and futurism as practiced by DC comics circa 1963.

Having stopped by the exhibition on the way to pick up my son from school, I found myself dumbstruck by the paintings–and late to collect my son.  The Studio School invitation doesn’t begin to do justice to Larsen’s ambitious and impeccably crafted vision.  Desiring to “revisit the spirit of 15th c. Italian painting” and Japanese Bunraku puppet theater, Ms. Larsen creates tilting panoramas featuring tea ceremonies, cowboys and cowgirls, the hand of God and an interrupted erotic encounter involving two women, one man and a pair of kayaks.

Mernet Larsen, Contemplating Black Creek (1991-92), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 57″ x 61″; courtesy Vogt Gallery

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A stern vein of absurdism runs through the work, as do moments of surprising quietude (check out the expression, thoughtful and true, on The Writer (2000)), as well as the more predictable alienation of Handshake (2001-02). A certain remove is to be expected given Ms. Larsen’s stylized figures, which are depicted as if they were cobbled together from blocks of wood.  (The figures are often softened by naturalistic features.)  The pictures are graced by a methodology that’s hard to unravel:  Ms. Larsen integrates acrylic and oil paints, tracing paper, manipulated textures and oddments of string with beguiling seamlessness.

Ms. Larsen’s art puts me in mind of Richard Lindner, another painter who envisioned humankind as an unceasing parade of automatons engaged in ritualistic narratives.  Like Lindner, Ms. Larsen can’t be buttonholed–the work is too multi-faceted and individual, too damned odd, to merit a convenient peg.  It won’t appeal to those who like their art quick, slick and easy.  I’m not sure it will appeal to those who like their art slow.  The pictures aren’t to all tastes.  It’s almost as if that’s the point.

A couple of things are certain:  the probity of the artist’s vision, the consideration that is brought to bear on material means and the work’s deep-seated originality. Mernet Larsen is a find.

© 2005 Mario Naves

“Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960” at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Kumi Sugaï, June (1957), oil on canvas, 63-5/8″  51″; courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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Maybe it’s the Guggenheim or maybe it’s me, but Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960 seems a bore. “Seems” is used here as a critical hedge: The exhibition includes an inescapable array of artists and some stunning works. But the problem—or part of the problem—is how many of the works aren’t stunning, but merely diverting or symptomatic of the time. Art of Another Kind isn’t intended to be a definitive retrospective of an era—roughly speaking, the decade in which Abstract Expressionism achieved Grand Manner status. The curatorial focus, rather, is on one institution’s accounting of the avant-garde and, as such, is both defined and limited by the museum’s permanent collection. All the same, certain artists are conspicuous in their absence and too many of those present-and-accounted-for are represented by near misses, transitional pieces, or out-and-out failures. A Pollock drip piece from the late 1940s, a congested disaster of a painting, opens the exhibition and serves as an augury for the mishmash that follows.

Art of Another Kind charts the years during which James Johnson Sweeney became the Guggenheim’s director, following on the heels of Hilla Rebay, the original steward of “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting.” Rebay was pivotal in establishing the collection, but her volatile temperament and curatorial quirks garnered a wealth of ill will. (One critic stated that the collection would be better served by distributing it to other museums than to suffer Rebay’s eccentricities.) Sweeney was hired in 1952, ousting Rebay as the museum’s second director, and he proved more amenable to “paintings with an object”—that is to say, recognizable forms. Rebay had consigned Chagall, Delaunay, Seurat, Klee, and Modigliani to the storage racks for being insufficiently mystical; Sweeney dusted them off for public display. He saw to the inauguration of the Frank Lloyd Wright building in 1959—a project Rebay had set into motion. Upon the museum’s opening, “the unseen hostess” sent Sweeney a telegram berating him for the Guggenheim’s newfound emphasis on “aftermath trash.”

Alberto Burri, Composition (1953), oil, gold paint and glue on burlap and canvas, 86 cm. x 100.4 cm.; courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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The aftermath of what, you might wonder. The Second World War, certainly, but more to the point of Rebay’s ire, the “art of another kind” that gained momentum in its wake. The phrase comes from Michel Tapie, a French critic who sought to define and promote “antigeometric, antinaturalistic, and nonfigurative” art that emphasized “spontaneity, looseness of form, and the irrational.” The New York School was the locus of this phenomenon, but it had related currents the world over, including European tangents like CoBrA (an amalgam of painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), a loose federation of artists lumped under the rubric Art Informel and the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet. Tapie found a like-mind in Sweeney, who was eager to prove the Guggenheim more vital than the “cultish temple” Rebay had established. Even as Sweeney beefed up the museum’s collection of early Modernist art, he sought out new work, regularly visiting artists’ studios and taking note of developments beyond Manhattan.

Art of Another Kind skews toward the hometown team—given the New York School’s importance as cultural arbiter, how could it not?—but it also evinces the non-parochial nature of Sweeney’s eye. De Kooning is here, as are Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline; so, too, are lesser names (if not necessarily lesser talents) like William Baziotes, James Brooks, Jack Tworkov, Grace Hartigan, and Conrad Marca-Relli. But then there’s a considerable array of non-Americans, many of whom will be new to casual museumgoers: among them, Karel Appel from Holland and Pierre Alechinsky from Belgium; the Frenchmen Pierre Soulages, Alfred Manessier, and Georges Mathieu; Antoni Tapies from Spain; and Japan’s Kumi Sugai. Object-oriented wall pieces by Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and a pre-combine Robert Rauschenberg hint at how the conceit of Action Painting eventually led to Performance Art and Conceptualism.

Pierre Alechinsky, Vanish (1959), oil on canvas, 78-3/4″ x 110-1/4″ inches; courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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Not everything on display is gestural in nature—Ellsworth Kelly’s rarefied elegance is on display, as are the post-Matissean caprices of Carla Accardi—and there are sculptures here and there, though not in such abundance that you’d notice. But mostly Art of Another Kind is tepid and homogenous, at once overheated and underwhelming. Granted, one generation’s “tastebreakers” (as Sweeney had it) inevitably became the reigning taste. We can’t blame history for taming yesterday’s outrages. If the contemporary Guggenheim wanted to prove that Sweeney was ahead of the globalist curve, it doesn’t do so in a way that’s aesthetically convincing. If anything, insisting on the international nature of post-war abstraction only emphasizes how integral the American spirit was to “art of another kind.” Notwithstanding the calligraphic urgency of Alechinsky’s Vanish (1959) or the taut constructivism of Jorge Oteiza, the non-New York-based art at the Guggenheim works best, if at all, as period pieces—outer-borough period pieces, one is tempted to say. Turns out cultural capitals, however temporary, are for real. In its own inadvertent way, Art of Another Kind is an advertisement for the benefits of localism.

© 2012 Mario Naves

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

“Painting On Paper; Josef Albers in America” at The Morgan Library & Museum

Josef Albers, Color Study for White Line Square (not dated), oil on blotting paper with gouache, pencil and varnish; courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

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Painting On Paper; Josef Albers in America is exactly what we’ve come to expect from The Morgan Library: a precisely calibrated exhibition centered on a finite aesthetic compass, a specialist’s delight that nonetheless has tangible pleasures to offer the layman. It’s also a rare treat to witness Albers, that most pedantic of artists, let down his guard.

Josef Albers (1888-1976) embodied the principles of the Bauhaus, the influential German art school founded in 1919. Though he attended other institutions, Albers’s studies at the Bauhaus and, in particular, with color theorist Johannes Itten proved decisive. Albers began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1923 and became a full professor at the school’s Dessau outpost two years later. The Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime—the school’s teachings not being sufficiently Aryan.

Albers and his wife Anni subsequently left for the United States, both of them having accepted teaching posts at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. (“Germans to Teach Art Near Here” reads a December 1933 article from the Asheville Citizen.) But it was Albers appointment as Dean of Yale’s Design Department in 1950 and the publication of his seminal text Interaction of Color that codified his historical standing. Albers’s signature suite of paintings, collectively titled Homage to the Square, put into practice the goal of “maximum effect with a minimum of means.”

Josef Albers, Color Study for Homage to the Square (not dated), oil on blotting paper with gouache, pencil and varnish; courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

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Truth to tell, a little of Homage of the Square goes a long way–sometimes minimum means result in minimum ends. Seen en masse, Albers chromatic and compositional structures—always effective, invariably inflexible–lend themselves more to finger tapping and clock-watching than aesthetic contemplation. Still, among the surprises at the Morgan is the first of the series—a rarely exhibited panel rendered in, of all things, black and white. For aficionados of Modernism’s more austere outposts, this inclusion has to count as something of an event.

The majority of Josef Albers in America is dedicated to informal studies on paper. Covered with scrawled notations, flurried applications of color and grease stains, they reveal Albers’s rigorous methodology at its most approachable. No Platonic exegeses here, thank you; instead we have the remnants of work-a-day life in the studio. The Morgan show allows us to experience Albers as a man given to curiosity and play—and it prompts double-takes.

Did you know that this most stringent of pedagogues relied largely on colors used straight from the tube or that his insistence on “hands off” surfaces didn’t preclude experiments with varnishes? Contemporary sensibilities will relish the diaristic nature of Albers’s works-on-paper and, in the case of the lush tangencies of Variant/Adobe, Study for Four Central Warm Colors Surrounded by 2 Blues (ca. 1948), swoon to them. Elsewhere, Albers daubs to charming effect, toys with perspective and posits Mexico as “the promised land of abstract art”—all the while exemplifying one man’s “craziness about color.”

© 2012 Mario Naves

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

Bold Strokes and Dashes: Titian

Titian, Diana and Actaeon (1556-59), oil on canvas, 73″ x 80″; courtesy The National Gallery, London

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The following review was originally published in the May 2003 edition of The New Criterion and is posted here on the occasion of  Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, an exhibition at London’s National Gallery (until September 23).

With the exception of the museum personnel whose livelihood depends on them, nobody likes a crowd at an art exhibition. Aesthetic experience isn’t encouraged by peering over the shoulders of a half-a-dozen onlookers, the tinny squawk of audio tours, or waiting on what are often onerous lines. Looking at a painting or sculpture is a one-to-one encounter that benefits from an unimpeded view, an amplitude of time, and peace and quiet. That these attributes are absent from the typical blockbuster show doesn’t mean that a real engagement with art is impossible. Only a cynic could claim that the nuances of a Leonardo drawing couldn’t make themselves known through a thicket of gallery-goers. Nor do I want to insinuate that the glories of art should be the purview of a privileged few. It’s just that there’s no denying that the pedestrian traffic one encounters at a museum can make the solace we seek from art a hassle to obtain.

Which isn’t to say that the same crowds can’t tell us something about the art they are viewing. The exhibition I saw prior to visiting London’s National Gallery—where a retrospective of paintings by the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1487–1576), better known as Titian, is on display—was the Matthew Barney show at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Comparing the two shows might seem spurious work. What can such radically disparate events hope to tell us about the art audience? One answer is that no artist, not even a Renaissance master, is invulnerable to hype (though he is likely to be less dependent on it than the art scene’s latest culture starlet). Many people visit big museum shows because they are, as it is said, the place to be.

Another answer to the question is that the manner in which crowds move through an art exhibit can be a fairly reliable indicator of the quality of work on view. Visitors to the Guggenheim drift past Barney’s spectacle as if they instinctively know that it isn’t worth bothering with in the first place. Visitors to the National Gallery, in contrast, take their time and get up close to Titian’s paintings. The crowd I wrestled with in order to view The Andrians (c. 1523–1524) was hunched around it as if they couldn’t bear to leave the canvas until its last virtue had been absorbed. Given how various, abundant, and sexy its virtues are, one felt curmudgeonly begrudging them their concentration.

Titian, The Death of Actaeon (c. 1559-1575), oil on canvas, 70.2″ x 78″; courtesy The National Gallery, London

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Titian is the first of three exhibitions the National Gallery will dedicate to painters of the Renaissance; El Greco and Raphael are on the docket for 2004. If the museum’s current show is any indication, the future exhibitions are likely to enthrall and frustrate, at least a bit. Comprised of only forty or so paintings, a number that includes a trio of pictures by Dosso Dossi and collaborations with Giovanni Bellini and Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, Titian is less extensive an exhibition than one might have hoped for. One understands, of course, that matters of conservation prevent museums from lending—and possibly endangering—their treasures; definitive exhibitions are becoming less possible. And it should quickly be mentioned that Titian doesn’t stint on masterpieces—any show that includes A Man with a Quilted Sleeve (c. 1510), the aforementioned Andrians, Danae (1544–1546), Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523) and the charming Clarissa Strozzi (c. 1542) merits a stopover. So, one shouldn’t grouse too much.

Still, there are notable absences here, to name just a few: The Venus of Urbino (before 1538), Man with the Glove (c. 1520) and Concert Champêtre (1510–1511), a canvas whose attribution is, admittedly, in dispute. (Once attributed to Giorgione and then to Titian, the painting now has a third candidate proposed for its authorship: the little known Domenico Mancini.) As a consequence of these and other omissions, Titian feels curt and punchy; its abbreviation leaves one wanting more.

The artist that emerges from the National Gallery show is a monumental figure, but not an ingratiating one. Titian is, at least initially, distant and aloof; the paintings are, notwithstanding their mastery, resistible. The primary reason for this is Titian’s emphasis on surface. Even in the earliest piece on view, The Virgin and Child (“The Gypsy Madonna”) (c. 1511), the features of the painting—whether it be the title figures, the landscape or the various draperies pictured therein—are delineated more through value than texture. Texture, here and throughout the oeuvre, is predominantly the surface of the canvas itself, uniform and coarse. From the outset, a pictorial scrim is established between the viewer and the image.

Titian, Diana and Callisto (1556-1559), oil on canvas, 74″ x 80-1/2″; courtesy The National Gallery, London and The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

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Titian doesn’t readily invite entry to his paintings; he challenges the eye by throwing a roadblock in its path. This frankness about material means only increased as Titian grew older. The later pieces in particular—one thinks of The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570–1576) and The Death of Actæon (c. 1565–1576)—are enveloped in a fog of flurried oils. A colleague informs me that this quality has been linked to the subsuming haze of Venice. It can also be attributed to Titian’s wish for the physicality of oils to remain relatively unencumbered, a tack that did not go unremarked upon by his contemporaries. The artist’s friend Pietro Aretino, after commissioning a portrait from Titian, ultimately rebuked him for not suitably finishing it. Giorgio Vasari, writing in Lives of the Artists, stated that Titian’s “later work is done in bold strokes and dashes, and if seen too near, the effect is confusing.”

Vasari then went on to state that a late Titian, seen “at a distance … is perfect.” He was right, of course. To insist that Titian is all surface all the time is to reduce his art to the narrowest of painterly extremes. The more time one spends with the paintings the more perceptive, humane, and even cagey Titian becomes. The depth of feeling he brought to Biblical subjects like The Entombment (1559), Ecce Homo (c. 1570), and the enchantingly tender Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd (“The Madonna of the Rabbit”) (1530) is limitless. His ability to capture the psychology of his subjects—whether it be the unhealthy relationship that existed between Georges d’Armagnac, Bishop of Rodez, and his secretary Guillaume Philandrier or a Pope whose august demeanor could not disguise a parsimoniousness of spirit—inspires awe. Few artists have cut so quickly to the essence of their sitters. This is especially true of the late self-portraits. Unflinching in their honesty and cunningly self-conscious, they are the work of a man aware of his own mortality yet confident in how history will judge him—that is to say, highly. Late Titian, unlike late Rembrandt, did not lack in humility. It goes to the scale of Titian’s genius that we take pleasure in his arrogance.

© 2003 Mario Naves

Off the Cuff and On the Money: Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #83 (1975), oil on canvas; courtesy The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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This review was originally published in the January 1998 issue of The New Criterion and is posted here on the occasion of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, an exhibition currently on view at The Corcoran Gallery of Art (until September 23).

Long the bellwether of twentieth-century painting and sculpture, the Museum of Modern Art has had a substantial influence on how we view the modernist enterprise. Under the guidance of Alfred Barr, MOMA’s founding director, the museum rooted itself in the European avant-garde. Despite the many shifts—ideological as well as aesthetic—that it has undergone in recent years, the museum has, more or less, remained true to Barr’s vision. Which is not to say that MOMA is without important shortcomings. Who hasn’t bemoaned the rigidity of MOMA’s masterplan, one that compromises the complexity of history for a streamlined and steamrolling succession of -isms? Consider the situation of those artists whose work is hung outside of the galleries, in the hallways of the museum. Occupying a kind of limbo, half in and half out of the museum, they are nonetheless deemed significant enough for transitory acknowledgment. Museums can’t display every object in their collections, of course, but sometimes recognition is indistinguishable from condescension. It is worth recalling that until recently Max Beckmann’s Departure was installed in MOMA’s second-floor hallway near the restrooms.

Similarly, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 115 (1979) has been exhibited— when it is exhibited—in a stairwell on MOMA’s third floor. This is a thankless spot for any artist, but given a painter of Diebenkorn’s caliber, such placement is inexplicable. Shunting his work off to a nook following the galleries dedicated to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism makes chronological sense, given that Diebenkorn (1922–1993) did not reach his full artistic maturity until the late 1960s. But this relegation to “Oh, by the way” status is scandalous—especially considering some of the artists who are deemed fit to grace MOMA’s major display spaces. For Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings and related works on paper are among the artistic triumphs of the latter half of this century. Did Richard Diebenkorn ever paint a picture as dazzling as de Kooning’s Attic? Probably not. Yet after visiting The Art of Richard Diebenkorn at the Whitney Museum of American Art, no one can doubt the power and aesthetic accomplishment of this “California artist” at his best.

Richard Diebenkorn

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The scare quotes are deliberate. The label “California artist” dogged Diebenkorn throughout his career. Geographically speaking, it is accurate—California is where he spent the majority of his working life. Yet, because of its implied parochialism, the label is also misleading. It may seem ludicrous to maintain that Diebenkorn is undervalued—a full-scale, traveling retrospective is evidence of how seriously his work is regarded. But Diebenkorn’s achievement has been, one feels, only grudgingly acknowledged, particularly in New York. Although tied to the mainstream of modernist art, Diebenkorn always set himself apart. Consequently, his relationship to the New York art world and to Abstract Expressionism forms a curious tributary to the received history of postwar modernist art. Diebenkorn’s paintings have little to offer to anyone who embraces the contemporary clichés about the nature of the avant-garde. They are not, in short, fast, fashionable or profane. A prominent New York art critic once snidely dismissed Diebenkorn as a painter who made modern art safe for the middle class. Such baloney reveals more about the indigenous provincialism of the New York art world than it does about Diebenkorn’s art.

The show begins with the artist’s first mature phase while under the spell of Abstract Expressionism, follows him through his figurative period, and flowers fully in a generous sampling of the Ocean Park paintings. The narrative of the exhibition, if we can call it that, shows that Diebenkorn was not, as some would have it, given to stylistic caprice. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but the shifts of emphasis throughout his career were always well-reasoned responses to the aesthetic logic of his art. Their culmination in the Ocean Park series, while not preordained, is utterly natural. The Whitney helps us appreciate this logic by providing windows between some of its galleries, so that, for example, we can glimpse Ocean Park No. 128 (1984) while traversing the early portions of the exhibition. What at first seems a bit of museological gimmickry is really a confirmation of continuity. The Whitney’s installation of Richard Diebenkorn is (in the artist’s words) as “straight and simple” as the work itself.

For Diebenkorn the “straight and simple” was achieved through a process he likened to cultivation, wherein missteps and corrections are part of the act of painting. Is it any wonder that the young Diebenkorn was drawn to the tangled surfaces of Abstract Expressionism? His work from the early Fifties is typical of the time: brushy areas of color offset by spidery lines demarcating planes and establishing their own wiggly independence. His line owes an obvious debt to de Kooning—“The way he used that line,” Diebenkorn once exclaimed, “that was really it for me!”—but one can also divine the influence of Rothko, Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and William Baziotes. Each early painting reads as a distillation of Ab Ex stylings without becoming a blatant pastiche. Yet despite some irresistible passages, many of Diebenkorn’s Ab Ex canvases are predictable. They are, to be sure, handsome paintings by a sharp disciple of the New York School. But they are the paintings of a disciple, nonetheless. If there is a point in Diebenkorn’s career when the term “parochial” applies, this is it.

Installation of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at The Corcoran Gallery of Art

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By the time one reaches the Berkeley series of the mid-Fifties, Diebenkorn’s paintings flounder; they don’t enliven Abstract Expressionism as much as they give in to it. For Diebenkorn, anyway, the turn to representation was an aesthetic elixir. Almost immediately, his work gained in clarity. The landscapes, still lifes, and figures that came to populate his canvases anchor the work formally as well as thematically. The sense of overlooking a vista that was tacit in the abstractions becomes patent. Works like Cityscape and Cityscape I (both 1963), with their flattened and tilting spaces, show an artist learning to structure a composition in a way that mirrors its rectangular support. This explicit geometry reaches its apotheosis in the Ocean Parkpaintings, which Diebenkorn began making in the late 1960s. It must be conceded, however, that the weakest aspect of Diebenkorn’s figurative phase are the figures themselves. The human form, at least in the oil paintings, impedes Diebenkorn’s achievement of pictorial coherence.

The irony is that Diebenkorn was a master of figure drawing. If there is a complaint to be lodged against the exhibition it is that more figure and still-life drawings are not included. As it is, the show does include one magnificent drawing: an untitled ink and watercolor from 1967 depicting a seated woman, pitched just off of center, wearing a floppy hat. Here the figure has autonomy— it hasn’t been squished into a composition —and provides an occasion for focus and discovery. One can see Diebenkorn delight in the frumpy silhouette of the woman’s hat or the challenge of capturing an impromptu gesture. The pressure of the woman’s environment is still felt, but it doesn’t shut the picture down. With its intense blacks and ever so slightly modeled figure, Untitled is a masterpiece.

Whatever the limitations of Diebenkorn’s figurative paintings, it was through them that he came to realize the organizing framework which would engross him for the rest of his life. What is remarkable about the Ocean Park paintings is how their structural solidity coexists with an almost precarious translucency. In them, space is inferred and oblique. The stray diagonal or grouping of bars and rectangles toward the top or sides of the canvas suggest looking through a window or an aerial view of landscape. (Diebenkorn did, in fact, create a series of aerial-view drawings of Arizona as a project for the Department of the Interior in 1970.) They are paintings of distances— high and open—rather than settings we can enter. Nevertheless, the canvases themselves, almost always scaled slightly higher than they are wide, are proportioned to the human form. While the paintings often threaten to dissolve into a shimmer of atmosphere and color, they are held in check by a diligent scaffolding that is Mondrian’s gift to Diebenkorn. Because he applied oils thinly—obscuring but not obliterating previous states of the painting–Diebenkorn lets us see the painting built, so to speak, from the ground up. Each one is as immovable as it is evanescent. The Ocean Park series is the resolution, stout and sure, of architecture and light.

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #38 (1971), oil on canvas, 100-1/8″ x 81″; courtesy The Phillips Collection

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Matisse is the crucial source for the Ocean Park pictures. Not a few observers, after visiting the Matisse in Morocco exhibition at MOMA in 1990, remarked upon the similarity of the backdrop for Zorah on the Terrace (1912) to Diebenkorn’s paintings. It is a not adventitious historical rhyme, as Diebenkorn would have been the first to admit. Yet to claim that he did little more than finesse (and fret over) Matisse for almost thirty years is to mistake a profound engagement with tradition for accomplished hackwork. With their pensive harmonies and stoic elegance, the Ocean Park paintings divulge their antecedents without reiterating them. Indeed, the influence of Edward Hopper, with his stark light and plainspoken geometry, is present in these abstractions to a greater degree than formerly acknowledged. Something of Hopper’s astringent melancholy survives in these blocky compositions. Diebenkorn knew that the hurdle of tradition is not to recapitulate history, but to make tradition speak in a form that is as individual as it is contemporary. He also knew when it needed prodding. By transmuting his forebears into something personal and fresh, Diebenkorn claimed his status as an unapologetic modernist.

The Ocean Park paintings, commanding and unpretentious, constitute the main part of Diebenkorn’s legacy. That they were created in a culture so often antithetical to their deliberate rhythms says much about his mastery. (It also says much about the possibilities of painting.) This retrospective makes for a refreshing jolt of sanity—and, it should be added, beauty—in an art world given to excess and faddishness. Even the miniature version of the show in the lobby gallery is a tonic; the paintings on cigar box lids—off the cuff and on the money—are worth the price of admission alone.

© 1998 Mario Naves

Compulsion, Repetition and Innocence: Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration (Net Obsession Series) (c. 1966), photocollage on paper, 8″ x 10″; courtesy The Whitney Museum of American Art

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The following review was originally published in the October 1998 edition of The New Criterion and is posted here on the occasion of Yayoi Kusama, an exhibition opening this week at The Whitney Museum of American Art and continuing until September 30.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had the opportunity to liken an art exhibition to an amusement park funhouse. A lot of contemporary art—installation art, in particular—lends itself to such an unflattering analogy. However one configures it, installations eschew the nuances of high art for the spectacle of theater or, should one say, the theatrical. One leading practitioner of the form stated that his aim was to “control” the viewer, and the most telling attribute of installation art is its distrust of aesthetic engagement. In taking over “the white cube” of the gallery, installations overwhelm and, at times, harass the viewer. Given the desperation inherent in such endeavors, who wouldn’t prefer the attractions of a roadside carny?

The re-creation of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room (1965), as seen in the exhibition Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958– 1968, was like a funhouse but in a good way—diverting and silly. Inside a gallery lined with mirrors, the viewer confronted innumerable polka-dotted phalluses made of stuffed fabric; they were, almost literally, the “prizes” found in a carnival midway (albeit a peculiar one). Gallerygoers were allowed inside Infinity Room one at a time, and greeted it—and incoming visitors— with a smile that was equal parts mirth and embarrassment. The comedy of Kusama’s refracted priapism is not unrelated to the more outré tendencies of the 1960s and has a woozy charm. Could this mean that the doodads of a flower child are preferable to the jaded ironies of our current crop of art-world careerists? Perhaps, although it may be a distinction so fine as to be not worthy of scrutiny.

Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation (c. 1963), sewn and stuffed fabric, wood chair frame and paint, 35-1/2″ x 38″ x 35″; courtesy The Whitney Museum of American Art

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Love Forever was not a retrospective; rather, it covered a decade wherein Kusama, newly arrived from Japan, made her presence felt in the New York art world. During this time, Kusama explored in rapid succession a variety of media: painting, sculpture, collage, installation, performance, and video. Her art is characterized by compulsiveness, repetition, and, in an odd way, innocence. Toward the end of the show there was an enlarged reproduction of a New York Daily News cover with a photograph of Kusama’s staged “nude-in” at MOMA’s sculpture garden in 1969. Having one’s confreres skinny-dip in a fountain alongside a sculpture by Aristide Maillol isn’t just a publicity stunt but, in retrospect, kind of sweet. Likewise, when we read that Kusama’s art was inspired by her “fear of male genitalia,” we wonder why her lumpish fetishes, which are more absurd than appalling, are bereft of angst. In a culture where self-mutilation is considered a viable form of artistic expression, one almost pines for tame shenanigans such as these.

Are the virtues of Kusama’s art intrinsic to her vision or a form of nostalgia on the part of the viewer? By the time one reached the end of Love Forever, one knew the answer. Certainly the requisite video gallery, with its soundtrack of shapeless rock music, was less an evocation of the Sixties than an unintentional parody of it. Kusama’s work is too lightweight to be taken seriously, but Love Forever was disheartening nonetheless. The curators at MOMA touted her as a precursor to “the art of our time,” and they were not off base. Kusama’s obsessions and narcissism may, for some, be tokens of creative authenticity, but her art leads nowhere. Surely there are better role models for artists as we enter the twenty-first century.

© 1998 Mario Naves

Visionary Excess: The Art of Edvard Munch

Edvard Much, Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900), oil on canvas; courtesy Tate Modern

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This article was originally published in the March 12, 2006 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Tate Modern (until October 14).

Here’s an ironclad guarantee: Visitors to Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, an overview of paintings, drawings and prints by the Norwegian artist at the Museum of Modern Art, will snap to attention upon entering the second gallery of the exhibition.

The canvases that greet the viewer there—Despair (1892), Angst (1894) and Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892)—won’t necessarily be identifiable as individual pictures, though the latter two should be familiar to Munch aficionados. Rather it is their cumulative impact that rings a bell. Piece the paintings together—an undulating blood-red sky here, a gaunt figure there and a careening rush of space—and you essentially have The Scream (1893), Munch’s signature masterwork and one of the most widely recognized images in the world.

Is there anyone who hasn’t come across this painting reproduced in one form or another? Surely somewhere there’s an art history graduate student busy cataloging all the ways this stark vision of psychological terror has been co-opted. A purveyor of novelty items offers a life-size, inflatable version of Munch’s grimacing everyman—perfect for Halloween! A political button from 1992 asks the question “President Quayle?” with The Scream printed as a backdrop. The list goes on. The picture has become as enduring (if inadvertent) a popular symbol as the Pillsbury Doughboy or Andy Warhol’s Marilyn. Commercial culture, ever omnivorous, makes for strange bedfellows.

A measure of the painting’s hold on the imagination can be seen in its dramatic theft from Oslo’s Munch Museum in 2004. It has yet to be found (another version was stolen, then recovered, a decade earlier). Munch painted four variations altogether. The definitive one resides in the National Gallery in Oslo, an institution that is presumably unwilling to let it travel. Cultural patrimony is to be safeguarded, particularly if it involves a nation’s most significant painter.

In a recent news report, MoMA director Glenn Lowry pooh-poohed the absence of The Scream from their current exhibition, insisting that the curators never considered it indispensable. New Yorkers visiting The Modern Life of the Soul must settle for two lithographs of The Scream, one augmented with watercolor, along with the aforementioned rebus-like re-creation from three disparate canvases.

Edvard Munch, Ashes (1894), oil on canvas; courtesy Tate Modern

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All the same, the icon’s failure to appear does prove that Munch was no one-hit wonder. The Scream, however singular in terms of its reach, is just one part of the flow of anxiety that surges through the oeuvre. The Sick Child (1896), the hellishly erotic Madonna (1894-95), The Dance of Life (1899-1900), Vampire (1893), Red Virginia Creeper (1900) and, if you believe the curators at MoMA, Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-42)—each painting encapsulates the artist’s preoccupations with physical vulnerability, sexual avarice, emotional alienation and the futility of faith.

Munch’s work can seem prophetic. A line can be drawn from his nightmarish narcissism to Expressionist art, certainly, but also to a century preoccupied with Freudian theory and to contemporary figures like Matthew Barney and (I insist) Oprah Winfrey. Munch’s art helped to usher in a culture wherein an unapologetic celebration of self, however unsavory or amoral, is considered a societal good or, at least, a societal necessity. In this view of things, coherently realized artistic statements are hopelessly antiquated and beside the point. Self-expression is paramount, catharsis the goal. Letting it all hang out is Munch’s legacy.

Kynaston McShine, the exhibition’s curator, demurs. He argues for the universality of Munch’s art. “Through his own will and force,” Mr. McShine writes, “the narrative of Munch’s life and work somehow transforms his personal experiences into a far-reaching examination of … ‘the modern life of the soul.’” (The phrase is the artist’s own.) Yet how modern was Munch as a painter? He was knowledgeable about contemporary developments in art—Munch’s Impressionist pictures, though minor, aren’t unsophisticated. The later paintings, with their choppy, impatient brushwork, betray more than a passing acquaintance with the art of Paul Cézanne and the Fauves.

Yet the best work, dating largely from the 1890’s, draws its strength not from Munch’s sophistication, but from his remove from the radical artistic changes that came to be known as modernism. Isolation can limit an artist’s ability to channel tradition; it can make the work seem small or rootless. In Munch’s case, though, isolation was a boon—it compelled him to bring forth a world defined by its own cloistered logic. The resulting stylistic quirks are indelible and true.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (Fourth Version) (1907), oil on canvas; courtesy Tate Modern

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The land is morphing and liquid, the rhythms slow and agitated. Flesh is membranous and taut, as if it could barely contain the contents of the body. Shadows are rendered concrete. Color is reduced to a dour blur. Paint is slurred, wispy. The individuality of figures is subsumed by mood or symbolic portent. Metabolism (1899), with its cadaverous Adam and Eve, posits a world immune to good works. Fertility (1898) is a curse on spring, The Kiss (1892) a eulogy for love. The wonder of the paintings is not how effectively they embody dread, but how blithely they avoid looking ridiculous. Visionary excess, not pictorial skill, counts for a lot in them.

Munch’s paintings of the 20th century—and it is somewhat surprising to realize that he lived to 1944—form a disappointing coda to a decade that witnessed paintings as evocative as The Storm (1893) and Mystery of the Beach (1892). Indeed, modernism ruined Munch. The final galleries at MoMA overflow with the work of a 19th-century sensibility that couldn’t fully grasp the radical artistic transformations taking place around him. The results were a flurry of fractured surface effects and painterly affectations that fatally detract from the dark, unbounded poetry of Munch’s imagery.

The decline in pictorial authority is particularly telling in the part of the exhibition devoted to self-portraiture. Here the canvas isn’t a means for exploring the depths of character, but a mirror for preening. However spooked or existential he may appear, Munch the artist trumps Munch the human being. Display, not insight, is the chief attribute of these paintings.

You need only compare works like Self-Portrait in Bergen (1916) or Self-Portrait by the Window (c.1940) to almost any self-portrait by Max Beckmann or, especially, Pierre Bonnard to sense the emotional fraudulence and self-serving nature of Munch’s efforts in this vein. It is one thing to give body to ugly, confessional emotions. It is quite another to advertise them. Therein lies the distinction between Munch’s art of the 1890’s and the hasty pictures that followed in its long, all but negligible wake.

© 2006 Mario Naves

Awesome and Awful: The Art of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, La femme-fleur (Françoise Gilot) (1946), oil on canvas, 68-1/2″ x 26″; courtesy Gagosian Gallery

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This article originally appeared in the April 28, 2003 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris 1943-1953 at Gagosian Gallery (until June 30).

The work of a great artist demands something of us–a relinquishing of self, an affirmation that there are things we don’t know or, at least, don’t fully comprehend. Pablo Picasso was a great artist who asked us something no less difficult: to indulge his genius. This assertion doesn’t apply uniformly–certainly not to his great Cubist phase, when his friend Georges Braques helped whip him into shape–but it does apply to much of the rest of Picasso’s oeuvre . Fans of the artist know what I mean: Who, at one point or another, hasn’t had it up to here with his bullying caprices? Of course, few artists have employed their genius, flaws and all, with such awesome and awful power.

In The Sculptures of Pablo Picasso, an exhibition at the uptown branch of Gagosian Gallery, the sublime and the ridiculous don’t just co-exist; they feed off each other in ways that confirm Picasso’s Gibraltar-like stature. In the front gallery, a sculpture of a woman from 1930, primitivist in style and classical in its prudery, is placed next to Young Man (1958), a stick-figure effigy whose penis has, as they say, a mind of its own. The difference between the two can be chalked up to the way erotic fervor manifests itself at different points in a man’s life. The younger Picasso creates a work of sinuous malleability; the older Picasso makes a crass and lifeless joke. One is fueled by the heat of experience; the other by bitter reminiscence.

The passage of time wasn’t the sole cause of Picasso’s inconsistency–as the Gagosian show makes plain, he always was a roller coaster. So don’t head up to Madison and 76th hoping to see Picasso the sculptural pioneer, though he is in evidence. Expect, instead, to see a genius whose cup runneth gallingly over.

© 2003 Mario Naves

Additional thoughts on the art and influence of Pablo Picasso can be found here and here.

Thomas Demand: Ostensible Art

Thomas Demand, Control Room (2011), Diasec-mounted C-print, 78-3/4″ x 118″; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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This article originally appeared in the April 11, 2005 edition of The New York Observer and is posted here on the occasion of Thomas Demand at Matthew Marks Gallery (until June 23).

What do you do with a one-trick pony that specializes in exercises in futility? If you’re the Museum of Modern Art, you honor him with a mid-career retrospective. “A retrospective of what, exactly?” is the question likely to be prompted by the exhibition Thomas Demand.

The young German artist uses a camera to take sizable pictures, but he’s not a photographer; the camera is employed solely as a means of documenting the meticulous constructions Mr. Demand crafts from colored paper and cardboard. What does he construct? Orange peels, a forest, a field of grass, but mostly architectural interiors–anonymous spaces redolent of bureaucracy and, here and there, more intimate environs (a bathtub filled with soapy water, for instance). Mr. Demand gleans most of his subjects from mass-media sources.

Getting things straight, then: Mr. Demand appropriates existing images and makes them into life-size maquettes, which he photographs before destroying; after which he makes a big print of the photo and encases it under a glossy sheet of plexiglass. What’s depressing about this process is how it so consistently thwarts our interest. The elaborate, handmade maquettes must be amazing to see–but Mr. Demand won’t let us see them. The photographs, conversely, aren’t anything to see. (There’s more to being a photographer, after all, than pushing a button.) In point of fact, Mr. Demand doesn’t do anything–he’s too busy divorcing himself from the art he’s ostensibly making.

What we are left with is a brand of nihilism so predigested and cute that you could sell it to Fischer Price at a profit. As for the attendant literature, with its weighty allusions to Nazi Germany, the 2000 American Presidential election and other “fables of democracy,” it’s bullshit, plain and simple, that you couldn’t sell to anyone–except, it appears, to our premier museum of modern art.

© 2005 Mario Naves

“Three Colorists” at Lesley Heller Workspace

Eozen Agopian, Fading Away (2012), oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas with thread; courtesy Lesley Heller Workspace

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New Yorkers who remember SoHo before it became the Manhattan equivalent of The Mall of America, probably remember Michael Walls Gallery–a spacious venue located on (if memory serves correctly) Wooster Street and friendly to the art of painting. Since the gallery’s closing, Walls has been involved in the art scene in one capacity or another–like right now. He’s curated Three Colorists, a lovely exhibition at the Lesley Heller Workspace.

The title’s worth quibbling over–Alan Kleiman, Diane Mayo and Eozen Agopian are, in their respective use of oils, clay and fabric, more deeply involved with material. Which isn’t to suggest that color is ancillary to, say, Agopian’s painterly blurs of thread or that curatorial prerogative can’t steer the eye one way or another. When such a prerogative enriches the art at hand, you know the curator–take a bow, Mr. Walls–has done his job well.

© 2012 Mario Naves