“That Vermeer’s achievement was unheralded for almost 200 years after his death can be hard to square given his fame now. A new film details the preparations leading up to the current retrospective of his paintings.”
Kyle Staver, Study for Dawn; Courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York
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“Ms. Staver’s work is rambunctious in form and approach: her figures are gawky and cartoonish, and her use of oil pastel, watercolor, and other media appealingly direct.”
Installation view of ‘The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud/Alberto Giacometti’ at the Museum of Modern Art; Photo: Jonathan Dorado
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“Listen to this: ‘Sculpture as a created object in space should enrich, not reflect, and should be beautiful. Beauty is its function.’ Say that again, please: Beauty is its function.”
I will be participating in this year’s Open Studios event at The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Educational Center.
The Clemente is located at 107 Suffolk Street. The event takes place on Saturday, May 20th, from 4:00-8:00 p.m. and Sunday, May 21st, from 2:00-6:00 p.m.
“Shouldn’t the new generation of gatekeepers be on the lookout for positive role models–I mean, it’s all about doing the work, right? In that spirit, let me make two suggestions: Peter Paul Rubens and Jack Benny.”
Félix Vallotton, Étude de fesses (circa 1884), oil on canvas, 14.9 x 18.1″; courtesy LGDR Gallery
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“Even at its most restrained or inelegant, ‘Rear View’ reiterates that ‘no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling.'”
Rossy De Palma and Melissa Barrera in “Carmen”; courtesy Sony Classics
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“Carmen,” the quixotic new film by Benjamin Millepied, suffers from James Bond Syndrome. No, Mr. Millepied’s picture doesn’t include outdated language similar to that found in the unexpurgated Ian Fleming novels, nor does it trade in the arrant chauvinism typifying the behavior of Agent 007. Rather, “Carmen” opens with a flourish so arresting that the rest of the film has a hard time catching up with it.
Like any given director of a Bond flick, Mr. Millepied knows the allure of a spectacular set piece.We enter the film through an encompassing desert landscape. A woman of a certain age (Marina Tamayo) stands atop a weathered plank placed in front of a house that is both isolated and humble. She begins a zapateado, a Mexican dance that recalls tap in its syncopation and flamenco in its stylization. Her footwork is impeccable; her manner regal. Clearly this is a woman not to be dealt with lightly.
From a distance, we see a car careening along the road to the woman’s house. Two thugs exit the car brandishing weapons, asking for the whereabouts of a woman. The dancer responds, but not with words. Vociferously and with no little emphasis, she taps her heels, all the while gesturing flamboyantly. The gangsters are transfixed–as is the audience. When it becomes clear that no definite answer is forthcoming, the woman is shot in the head. Art is one thing, but business is business. Welcome to “Carmen.”
We’ve already spied the sought-after woman a good ways away from the back of the house–it’s the dancer’s daughter, Carmen (Melissa Barrera). She manages to avoid her pursuers long enough to bury mom, burn down the homestead and hit the road. Carmen is gorgeous, the landscape forbidding and her circumstances dire. Where will Mr. Millepied take her?
“Carmen” abruptly switches gears to a low-rent barbecue held, from all appearances, under an abandoned Texas viaduct. Working the griddle is Aidan (Paul Mescal), a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who later volunteers, rather reluctantly, to help patrol the border. He’s loved by his sister, hit upon by a close friend’s wife and suffers from PTSD.
Disaster and death follow that evening. The less responsible members of the border patrol take matters into their own hands upon encountering a handful of migrants, one of whom is Carmen. If these events don’t qualify as a meet-cute for Carmen and Aidan–their initial confrontation being marked by stark brutality–then it is a prompt, all the same, for two star-crossed lovers to go on the lam.
Through hook, crook and a cabbie named Angel, Carmen and Aidan make it to La Sombra Poderosa, a gritty back-alley L.A. outpost. It’s a nightclub with dark corners, ambisexual patrons, lush colors, doom and glitter–a venue redolent, in its many excesses, of Otto Dix’s grimy Weimer-era paintings and the moody dreamscapes of David Lynch. When the veteran Spanish actress Rossy de Palma shows up, another inspiration on Mr. Millepied’s cosmos makes itself plain: Pedro Almodóvar.
Ms. de Palma is, of course, a mainstay of Mr. Almodóvar’s films and her presence in “Carmen” is welcome, even as her character Masilda sometimes betrays desires that are decidedly unwholesome. But, then, “Carmen” is an odd and, in the end, not entirely convincing melange of dichotomies. The documentary and the fantastic, the political and the poetic, the grit and the glamor, the redoubtable and the illicit–all are molded into something resembling a musical.
A colleague at the press screening bemoaned the quality of the dancers throughout “Carmen”–with the exception, that is, of Ms. Tamayo. For my taste, the camera moves too frantically whenever a dance routine gets up-and-moving, as if the director didn’t altogether trust his players to pull off a given bit of choreography. The irony is that Mr. Millepied is a dancer and choreographer by trade, having been, among much else, a principal in the New York City Ballet.
“I approached this complete re-imagining of [Bizet’s] ‘Carmen’ in the same way as I approach dance.” But expertise in one area of culture doesn’t necessarily translate into another. Mr. Millepied’s movie has an abundance of flair–which is both its blessing and its curse. “Carmen” diverts and sometimes beguiles, but it never quite finds its footing.
“Given the level of painterly skill de Pareja achieved, it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that he trained a keen eye on what Velazquez was up to. That, and de Pareja’s travels with Velazquez, especially throughout Italy, allowed him direct and relatively rare contact with great paintings.”
Lisa Beck, Coming Together (2023), oil paint and mylar on two panels, diptych, 16 x 12″ each; courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York/photo by Charles Benton
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“Who on earth is crazy enough to mount a show with a title like that?”
Daniel Brown, Coil (2023), acrylic on board, 8 x 10″; courtesy 1448 Gallery and the artist
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“‘Idol Hours’ serves as confirmation that some of the most accomplished, puzzling, and rewarding contemporary art flies under the radar and flourishes outside of Manhattan.”
Installation of sculptures by Jim Osman in “Step By Step”; courtesy McKenzie Fine Art
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“Austin Ballard, Ron Janowich, Jim Osman, and Raymond Saá are the featured artists in ‘Step by Step,’ and it’s a testament to the gallery’s curatorial eye that four very individual talents come off like peas in a pod.”
John Mendelsohn, Dark Color Wheel 12 (2022), acrylic on canvas, 40 x 27″; Courtesy of David Richard Gallery
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“A gentle strain of irony filters through the pictures. A dab hand at color, John Mendelsohn proves peculiarly adept at black and white–tones that aren’t found on the color wheel.”
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Four Figures on a Step (c. 1655-60), oil on canvas, 43-1/4 x 56-1/2″; courtesy the Kimbell Art Museum
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Murillo: From Heaven to Earth, an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is, at its core, a cunning display of institutional braggadocio. How much better to amplify a mainstay of the permanent collection — that would be “Four Figures on a Step” (c. 1658-60) — than to mount a show dedicated to the artist responsible for it?
“Four Figures on a Step” is, if not Murillo’s masterpiece, then a distinctive painting all the same. It is distinctive because it is odd: though attempts have been made to peg the image as some-or-other lesson in morals, the canvas has consistently resisted explication. The title, a bland descriptor superimposed by an outside source, points up how the picture’s thematic basis remains firmly contained within its own peculiar logic.
What is there to see? Three figures situated on a ledge that runs parallel to the bottom of the canvas. On the left is a grinning boy who’s not quite a guttersnipe, but neither is he respectable; his demeanor is suggestive and aggressive. To the right is an older woman, seated, with heavy, black-rimmed glasses and a furrowed brow. She’s cradling the head of a small child, another boy, whose crumpled body is lying with his back to the viewer and whose buttocks are exposed because of a rip in his pants. A young woman, positioned a mere step back, is pulling a face. A sarcastic moll, this last character — and an associate, it would seem, of the ragamuffin.
“Four Figures on a Step” has the hallmarks of a genre painting, but not the context. The environment in which our protagonists are situated is devoid of specificity — an amorphous darkened space. Such a setting is typical of portraiture from the Spanish Baroque, and, for that matter, the starkly orchestrated still-life paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán, an older contemporary of Murillo’s. Still, the Kimbell picture is an outlier, being a composition with a decidedly theatrical tenor. Its actors acknowledge and, in fact, inveigle the viewer. What do these people want from us, particularly given the implied harm perpetuated on its most vulnerable player? Post-modernists pride themselves on their self-reflexiveness, but Murillo was “meta” before it was cool. “Four Figures on a Step” is a case study in impregnable signifiers. The painting is a flagrantly contrived provocation.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window (c. 1655-1660), oil on canvas, 49-1/4 x 41-1/8″; courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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“Two Women at a Window” (c. 1655-60) hangs adjacent to “Four Figures on a Step,” and comes as a relief, if only because it seems clearer in its implications. Here, again, Murillo depicts characters who directly address the spectator. As in “Four Figures on a Step,” they are life-size and situated within an architectural setting that aligns to the boundaries of the canvas. A younger woman leans on a windowsill and smiles at us in a beguiling, if somewhat cagey, manner. An older woman stands directly behind, tittering into her white headdress. We’re being asked to participate in a situation whose parameters are unsettled.
The rest of Murillo’s oeuvre has its share of quiddities, but “Four Figures on a Step” and “Two Women at a Window” are the most intently off-topic and, not coincidentally, most likely to appeal to contemporary tastes. The exhibition is, in fact, a feint to secularism. Murillo is broadly known as a painter of religious subjects, having achieved considerable renown for his devotional imagery; not least the Immaculate Conception, a subject he depicted several times over. Though the show does include Christian iconography, the primary emphasis is on the worldly and the mundane. Oh, and dogs. Given their abundance as bit-players, From Heaven to Earth establishes Murillo as a keen observer of man’s best friend.
From Heaven to Earth was organized by Guillaume Kientz, former curator of European art at the Kimbell and now Director and CEO of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York City. Writing in the catalogue, Kientz locates Murillo’s “moral compass” within “the religion, politics and the economic situation of the city.” That city would be Seville, the artist’s hometown and lifelong base of operations. Born in 1617, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was orphaned at age ten, and placed under the care of an older sister. (He died in 1662.) Not long after, Murillo entered the workshop of his uncle Juan del Castillo, a painter of some renown whom the young painter soon outshone in talent and reputation. Murillo’s first successfully completed commission — eleven canvases for a Seville convent — put him on the map. Not bad for an artist just shy of thirty years old.
How familiar was Murillo with the work of King Philip’s court painter, Diego Velázquez? Sources vary as to whether Murillo traveled to the Spanish capital. Kientz mentions a 1658 trip to Madrid during which it is suggested that Murillo saw canvases by Titian, Rubens and his fellow Spaniard. Whatever the case, it’s difficult not to think of Velázquez while viewing pictures like “The Young Beggar” (c. 1648) and “San Diego de Alcala and the Poor” (c. 1646). Granted, both men hewed to pictorial conventions typical of the age, and, as such, carried with them commonalities of national taste. But Murillo’s ability to turn a form, whether it be a foot covered in dirt or a scattering of acorns, is strikingly akin to that of Velázquez, as was his rendering of tactile surfaces. Zurbarán claimed Velázquez as a friend; perhaps Murillo gleaned trade secrets, albeit one degree removed, from his fellow Sevillian.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, An Old Woman Holding a Distaff and Spindle (c. 1655-1660), oil on canvas, 58.5 x 47 cm.; courtesy National Trust, Stourhead, U.K.
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An interesting byway of the Kimbell show is explored by catalogue essayist Ronni Baer, distinguished curator and lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. Seville, she notes, was a commercial center with a significant amount of trade occurring between Spain and Flanders. Josua van Belle, a Dutch shipping magnate based in Seville, not only commissioned a portrait by Murillo — it’s included in From Heaven to Earth — but also owned additional pictures by him. Clearly, van Belle was a fan.
Baer wonders whether van Belle had Murillo over to the house to look at the North European paintings in his collection. Playing “What If?” is a dubious pursuit for a historian, but I’m damned if Baer doesn’t make a strong case by likening “Old Woman with a Distaff and Spindle” (c. 1650) and “The Toilette” (c. 1655-70) to paintings by the minor Dutch Master Michael Sweerts. Caravaggisti — that is to say, followers of Caravaggio — may have been a dime a dozen back in the day, but the correspondences are uncanny.
As a selective grouping of Murillo’s art, From Heaven to Earth makes a good case for his painterly acumen, even as it divulges a congenital weakness for schmaltz. Cherubic youngsters, however grubby or divine, can be cloying over the short haul — especially when they punctuate the compositions with formulaic regularity. That, and the soft focus of Murillo’s mise-en-scènes — an affectation cadged from Rubens, I’d wager — admits an overripe strain of sentiment. Still, if the Kimbell exhibition doesn’t come on like a revelation, it does confirm Murillo’s place in the hierarchy of seventeenth-century Spanish art — a distinct step or three behind Velázquez, Zurburan and Ribera. Any painter who makes a mark given that kind of competition deserves not only our credence, but that of history as well. In that regard, the good folks in Fort Worth have done right by Murillo.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the December 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
Giuseppe De Nittis, The Races at Auteuil, Paris–On the Chair (1883), oil on canvas, 107 x 55.5 cm.; courtesy Pinacoteca Giuseppe de Nittis, Barletta
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Calls to revise the history of this, that, and the other thing have become so numerous in recent years that they’ve instilled a reflexive skepticism in those of us who place a premium on differentiating between discernible facts and elaborate fictions, between events as they occurred on the ground and the arrogance of contemporary mores. Even within that variegated entity known as the art world there is a stunning conformity of opinion among elites as to the necessity of reconfiguring the roll calls of art to make them more inclusive. Of course, “inclusion” isn’t necessarily a bad thing—that is, if it remains tethered to artistic worth. All of which is a roundabout way of suggesting that the history of art does, in fact, need revision so that it can now include Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–84). You mean, a cisgendered hetero-normative scion of patriarchal culture? Yes, and De Nittis was a damned fine painter. That he remains the purview of specialists is, at the risk of engaging in hyperbole, a cheat on our common humanity.
“An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis,” now on view at the Phillips Collection, is among the most bracing shows to come down the pike in some time. New Yorkers with some sense of cultural memory may recall De Nittis as the standout player in “Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Italian Painting from the Gaetano Marzotto Collection,” an exhibition mounted by the National Academy almost thirty years ago. Among a parochial array of Impressionist wannabes, De Nittis appeared a beacon of pictorial invention, an artist whose painterly brusqueness worked in conjunction with a finely grained attention to detail. Since then, De Nittis has been in short supply here in the States. The stray canvas can be cherry-picked from the Met’s nineteenth-century wing, but, otherwise, De Nittis is a local hero—if that. Renato Miracco, the curator of the Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis in Barletta, Italy, writes of how the painter has been “largely overlooked.” The retrospective Miracco has organized for the Phillips Collection, the first dedicated to De Nittis on these shores, is a concerted effort at putting out the news that, yes, here is an artist worthy of the canon.
De Nittis’s oeuvre is testament not only to the benefits that can accrue from working in a cultural capital, but also to the value of one’s friends in helping one overcome adverse circumstances. Born in Barletta, a city located on the Adriatic in the region of Apulia, De Nittis’s life was short and, at times, brutish and tragic. De Nittis’s father, a landowner of some affluence and a voluble critic of the House of Bourbon, was jailed for his political opinions just months after his son’s birth. After release in 1848, Raffaele De Nittis was never the same; his psychological state was rendered more fragile when his wife, Teresa Barracchia, died the following year. When Raffaele committed suicide seven years later, the eldest son, Vincenzo, apprenticed Giuseppe to a local painter in the hopes of remedying his brother’s “listless and distracted” ways. Much to Vincenzo’s chagrin, Giuseppe took to the “hopeless trade.” Hopeless, indeed: not long after enrolling in the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti in Naples, De Nittis was deemed talentless and booted out of school. He subsequently joined a cadre of plein air painters in southern Italy, among them Federigo Rossano. Rossano’s acquaintance Edgar Degas befriended the young De Nittis and later became his mentor.
Giuseepe De Nittis, Snow Effect (c. 1880), oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm.; courtesy Pinacoteca Giuseppe de Nittis, Barletta
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De Nittis could have been content with being a big fish in a small pond; in an irony surely not lost on the young artist, the Bourbons began collecting his canvases. But another meeting with Degas, this time in Florence, fostered his ambitions. At age twenty-one, De Nittis traveled to, and fell in love with, Paris. Among the artists he encountered were Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, a painter whose work De Nittis thought the world of. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of nineteenth-century French art will discern a disconnect between De Nittis’s attraction to artists typical of the academy and his friendships with progressive figures such as Degas, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Caillebotte. De Nittis straddled both sides of this seemingly contradictory divide, exhibiting both at the Salon and the Société anonyme des artistes. Indeed, De Nittis achieved some notoriety—so much that Monet and Renoir were livid at the Italian’s popularity and, out of spite, removed his canvases from the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874. The paintings were reinstalled a few days later at Degas’ insistence. Again, the quality of friendship can count for a lot.
Fans of Impressionist painting will feel at home upon entering the exhibition. Fashionable young women; breakfast in the garden; Parisian thoroughfares marked by light, leisure, and the unstoppable prerogatives of modernity: De Nittis’s subjects are par for the course. What he does with them is startling to behold. Here and there De Nittis yields to a Florentine rectitude that is often stiff in nature. The majority of the time he navigates, with breathtaking dexterity, between telling particulars and rough-hewn brushwork. A pair of canvases dedicated to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius conveys the drama of nature’s independence while attending to the minutiae of sightseers heading for safe ground. Elsewhere, De Nittis devotes a number of paintings to his wife Léontine, the brevity, bravura, and wit of which put Manet to shame. Pictures by Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte are included as context, and it’s worth comparing the bonhomie in De Nittis’s Return from the Races (1875) with that of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81), long a staple of the Phillips’s permanent collection. De Nittis was, in the end, his own man, a painter of supernal gifts whose life was cut short by a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-eight. What he accomplished up until that moment is presented with considerable splendor in “An Italian Impressionist in Paris.”
(c) 2023 Mario Naves
This article was originally published in the January 2023 edition of The New Criterion.
Amedeo Modigliani, Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes (1919), oil on canvas, 24 x 18-1/8″; courtesy the Barnes Foundation
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A curious exhibition, “Modigliani Up Close.” It’s worth a visit, of course: any event that provides extra motivation to travel to the Barnes Foundation is, by default, recommended. Even without the current show, the permanent collection offers a veritable bounty of works by Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920)—sixteen in all, including Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes (1919), a rare landscape. In the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, Thom Collins, the Neubauer Family Executive Director and President of the Barnes, pays homage to the foresight of the museum’s namesake, extolling the manner in which Albert C. Barnes “broke new ground in the history of collecting modern art.” As curated by a host of international conservators—among them Barbara Buckley, the museum’s senior director of conservation and chief conservator of paintings—“Up Close” seeks to break ground in another fashion, by focusing on Modigliani’s approach to materials and process. In underscoring technical matters, the curatorial team aims to bring some clarity to the smoke-and-mirrors legend that surrounds Amedeo, the Doomed and Tragic Soul.
Modigliani was born in Livorno, a port city on the western coast of Tuscany. His mother came from intellectual stock—the family claimed Baruch Spinoza as an ancestor—and his father was a businessman. The latter fell into bankruptcy the year Amedeo was born and was, at best, a peripatetic parent. Raised largely by his mother, Modigliani proved a vexing child. Prone to illness, he suffered from pleurisy, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. Nonetheless, he had the wherewithal to study art—in Florence, Venice, and, eventually, Paris. Notions of Florentine rectitude were forever altered by firsthand encounters with Post-Impressionism—Cézanne was a life-changer—and early Modernism. Modigliani became an integral component of the School of Paris. He painted a portrait of Picasso in 1915 and befriended Chaïm Soutine and Maurice Utrillo. Modigliani proved a wild child: whoring, drinking, drugging, and making a general nuisance of himself. He was dead from complications due to TB at the age of thirty-five.
Amedeo Modigliani, Self-Portrait (1919), oil on canvas, 39-3/8 x 25-3/8″; courtesy Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Universidade de Sao Paolo
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Dying young and staying pretty is the pop version of immortality (though reports do have Modigliani looking fairly dissolute toward the end). If all that weren’t enough, Modigliani’s common-law wife, pregnant with her second child by the artist, committed suicide the day after his death: myth feeds on calamity. Modigliani painted Jeanne (née Hébuterne) several times over, and three of the portraits are on display toward the end of “Up Close.” Those clued into the drama of Amedeo and Jeanne might divine (or impose) some kind of emotional frisson in this curatorial denouement. But there’s little to distinguish the portraits of Jeanne, even the canvas in which she appears pregnant, from most other Modigliani pictures. He was, in the end, too much of a mannerist to embody a sense of intimacy, friendship, or love. Subsuming a host of not entirely incommensurate influences—including Cycladic effigies, African totems, Botticelli, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pontormo—Modigliani was a canny synthesizer of style who operated within a notably constricted artistic terrain. Even before his untimely demise, the limitations of his art were making themselves plain.
Might it be too cynical to wonder if the emphasis of “Up Close”—with its nerdy talk of stretchers, strainers, “bland” canvas textures, and figure, marine, and paysage formatting—is simply a convenient rationale for mounting a crowd-pleasing exhibition dedicated to an artist of whom we know just about enough? The close-grained efforts of conservators should not be dismissed out of hand, and each generation that comes along will have a different take on a given historical figure. Certainly, there are Modigliani canvases many of us are pleased to discover or revisit. But the nuts-and-bolts information about his process isn’t particularly revelatory. Last spring, the Phillips Collection mounted “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” an exhibition that included three canvases that underwent significant scientific research, and the results were head-snapping, elaborating, as they did, on the transformative nature of Picasso’s genius. “Matisse: The Red Studio,” moma’s recent deep dive into a staple of the collection, did something related with another genius. The snag of “Up Close” is that Modigliani was not a genius. He’s a much-beloved minor light of the modernist canon. Sometimes distinctions matter.
Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (c. 1919), oil on canvas, 28-1/2 x 45-7/8″; Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, NY
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An odd fillip of “Up Close”—a characteristic that does, in fact, stem from the research of those hard-working conservators—concerns attribution. Reading the fine print on the wall labels, we learn that four of the almost fifty pieces on display may not, in fact, be bona fide Modiglianis. Is it just me or is potential hoodwinking a more compelling curatorial hook than the thread count of canvas? Be that as it may, the Barnes show confirms that Modigliani, in his prime, was a diverting talent whose signature stylings—all those pinched noses, empty eyes, and sloping necks!—are best appreciated on a piecemeal basis. (More than a few museum visitors commented that the stray Modigliani tucked away in the Barnes’s permanent collection benefited from the company of artworks by others.) His finest pieces are those devoted to the reclining female nude, erotic reveries made resonant by an Ingres-like attention to contour and a warm, rich color palette. An arrangement of twelve limestone effigies toward the front of the show makes for a striking installation even as it proves that Modigliani was born not to the chisel but the brush. As for the aforementioned portraits of Jeanne: each canvas buffets the other in a shared accumulation of pictorial tics, making for a striking end to a most quixotic and, yes, recommended exhibition.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the December 2022 edition of The New Criterion.
Morris Hirshfield, Inseparable Friends (1941), oil on canvas, 60-1/8 x 40-1/8″; courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
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“Hirshfield’s oeuvre is marked by the narrowness of vision that is typical of outsider art, but it does have focus and, most indelibly, form. Hirshfield considered the entirety of the pictorial field as a receptacle for painterly invention, and he didn’t stint on lavishing it with tender loving necessity.”
The full review can be found at “Dispatch,” the blog of The New Criterion.
Henrietta Shore, Trail of Life (c. 1923), oil on canvas, 30 1/8 × 28″; courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2022.13 * * *
What a difference a century makes. That’s the upshot of “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism,” an exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art culled from its own holdings. In-house ventures can sometimes come off as so much house-cleaning, an opportunity to air out the storage racks and take stock of inventory. Which is, in fact, what Whitney curator Barbara Haskell has done. But by adding select loans from other institutions and private collections, she’s put together a show that has its own gestalt. Though the fervor of artistic innovation has a limited shelf life, the work on display continues to radiate a klutzy, almost childlike audacity. There’s a naivete at the heart of “At the Dawn of a New Age,” and it is winning.
Maybe relevant as well. Taking into account the lead time for museum shows, Haskell had to know her overview of the stateside response to European Modernism would overlap with the latest iteration of The Whitney Biennial. The latter is, of course, the always anticipated (and invariably vilified) overview of American art that attempts to locate the pulse of the current art scene. The Biennial’s track has been spotty; reading the tea leaves of contemporary culture always is. Still, you have to wonder: How many of the artists in the 2022 Biennial will make the cut of the 2122 model of “At the Dawn of a New Age?”
The vagaries of history are, of course, substantial. Both the production and consumption of art are radically different now than they were in 1913—that would be the year of the Armory Show in New York City, the signal event that introduced Americans to modern painting and sculpture. The dribs-and-drabs by which the innovations of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism reached audiences back in the day seems a veritable trickle from our vantage point. Artists out to create a distinctively 20th-century vision were primed for change, but often halting on the uptake. Still, who’s to say that knowledge slowly accumulated isn’t more deeply absorbed than that gathered from a world in which (to paraphrase the title of a recent film) everything everywhere happens all at once?
As with most cultural endeavors of a recent vintage, “At the Dawn of a New Age” seeks to expand the canon by featuring work by artists who have been overlooked and undervalued. Haskell has located more than a handful of figures whose inclusion will warm the cockles of a social justice warrior’s heart. But there are other matters of redress afoot. When Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the museum in 1930, the overriding emphasis was on realism. Though more outre strains of art were acknowledged, they weren’t necessarily embraced. Haskell notes that it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the Whitney began to backtrack and acquire non-representational art that its founders had passed on.
“At the Dawn of a New Age” sets out to highlight “the capacity of abstraction to reflect individual responses to the . . . groundbreaking spirit of the age.” Haskell places a premium on a cultural optimism she attributes to progressive political campaigns and, especially, advances in technology: “nowhere else were cities so illuminated, manufacturing processes so efficient, or new forms of communication and transportation so pervasive.” Though the promises of the machine age had been tested by the carnage of World War I, artists continued to take inspiration from the streamlined forms and regulated rhythms found in industry. You can see them at play in Stuart Davis’s Egg Beater No.1 (1927), as well as in the rigorously applied geometries and lustrous patina of Painting (c. 1921-22), a still-life by Patrick Henry Bruce.
Pamela Colman Smith, The Wave (1903), watercolor, brush and ink, and graphite pencil on paper, 10 1/4 × 17 3/4″; courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mrs. Sidney N. Heller 60.42 * * *
The hiccup is that Davis and Bruce are pretty much the only artists who fit comfortably within Haskell’s thesis. If anything, the true basis of the art featured in “At the Dawn of a New Age” runs contrary to the machine-tooled advances of modern life. It’s not technology that’s the impetus, it’s the natural world. In piece after piece, we see the human form or, as is more often the case, the landscape serve as armatures on which matters of pictorial or sculptural form are explored.
Spiritualism, as well: nature long having served as a wellspring for those wanting to embody otherworldly longings. At the entry to the exhibition viewers encounter four paintings that are blatantly mystical in character. In them, Marsden Hartley toys with the astrological, Agnes Pelton immerses herself within a realm of fairies, Oscar Bluemner locates the Big Bang in New Jersey, and Georgia O’Keefe gleans the meditative in the microcosmic. The pieces are emblematic of a new age, all right, but not the one Haskell had in mind.
Any exhibition that includes at its center a deck of tarot cards has the future in its sights, but not necessarily futurism. The cards were commissioned in 1909 by A.E. Waite, the leader of the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn. Under his supervision, illustrator Pamela Coleman Smith delineated a full seventy-eight images for the tarot. The resulting array of symbols–charming amalgams of brittle medievalisms given a nouveau twist–aren’t the only thing by Smith on view. There’s also The Wave (c. 1903), a sinuous array of spirits rendered in watercolor, and not the only time we see the female form employed as a conduit for the transcendental. Others that did so include Arthur B. Davies, Adele Watson, Marguerite Zorach, Carl Newman and Richmond Barthé, whose African Dancer (1933), a haunting effigy rendered in plaster, is among the standout-out pieces in “At The Dawn of a New Age.”
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Congolais (1931), cherry, 16 13/16 × 7 7/8 × 9 1/4″; courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York * * *
Sculpture is in short supply, but what there is on display is strong. Along with the Barthé, there is Congolais (1931) a portrait carved from cherry wood by Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, an associate of W.E.B. DuBois and a figure who achieved a measure of notoriety in Europe. Gaston Lachaise, a sculptor best known for his balletic depictions of monumental women, is represented by the lilting bronze Dolphin Fountain (1924). Contorting themselves nearby are two Standing Female Figures (both c. 1925-26) by Elie Nadelman, an artist whose morphing of classical precedent and vernacular art looks more eccentric with each passing year. Isamu Noguchi is here as well, albeit fleetingly glimpsed with a gouache-and-graphite study of a hieratic form that is part-biomorph and part-mechanical doodad.
O’Keeffe is exhibited to clarifying effect, if only because the paintings are prime and few in number. If anything, both her strengths (composition & economy of shape) and limitations (color and surface) are put into relief by being in proximity to like-minds such as Pelton, Helen Torr, Loïs Mailou Jones, Joseph Stella, Arthur Dove and two painters previously unknown to me, Henrietta Shore and Edith Clifford Williams.
Shore’s Trail of Life (c. 1923) will keep Freudians busy comparing-and-contrasting its gynecological allusions to those found in O’Keeffe’s oeuvre. As for Two Rhythms (1916) by Williams: its sparsely applied color, carefully choreographed lines and sweeping arcs of space employs Surrealism as a springboard for something more allusive. Let’s hope our erstwhile curator has the moxie to place these two figures more firmly within our purview in future exhibitions. In the meantime, “At the Dawn of a New Age” proves itself a vivifying excursion. Would that all reappraisals of precedent were so gently applied and congenial in nature.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the November 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
I’m pleased to be part of this event. You’ll find more information below:
On October 27, the New York Studio School will hold its annual Benefit Auction. This year’s auction will feature the artwork of over 50 generous artists who have donated their work to support the School.
Online bidding starts on Thursday, October 20 and closes Thursday, October 27 at 12:00pm. Final bids will be placed in-person during the Benefit event.
Installation of “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color”; courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art * * *
“Who knew the Greeks had such bad taste?” This comment was overheard at the preview for Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, a head-turning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This slight wasn’t targeted at the current denizens of Greece, but, rather, their ancestors of yore. You remember the type: chiton-clad Athenians — let’s not forget the ladies in their peploi! — sauntering through the agora, pondering the nature of reality or, perhaps, the role of hoi polloi within a democratic society. They’re the folks whose aesthetic sensibilities were found wanting, at least to one denizen of twenty-first-century museum culture.
What most of us know about life in antiquity is, I dare say, as broadly conceived as the above description. What most of us know about art from antiquity has been gleaned from trips to specific sites or cultural institutions here and abroad. Donatello and Michelangelo, Renaissance men who looked upon the arts of Greece and Rome as models of emulation, are, in significant part, responsible for codifying our notions about the nature and import of antique sculpture.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the pioneering eighteenth-century art historian, pressed the point: “The only way for us to become great, yes, inimitable, if it is possible, is the imitation of the Greeks.” No one seems to read Winckelmann nowadays except for the stray academic eager to score points by pegging the glories of Western art as harbingers of any and all social ills including, most indelibly, “seas of lily white, spectacled and tweed-wearing people” (as University of Iowa classicist Sarah Bond puts it).
Installation of “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color” * * *
Chroma is blessedly free of such casuistry. The Met likely took a good hard look at its bread and butter — which would be, among much else, the stunning suite of galleries devoted to Greek and Roman art — and concluded that historical and artistic fact make for better box office than tendentious sermonizing. Or, maybe, the curators were just doing their job — you know, safeguarding the legacy of world art for the pleasure of gallerygoers.
Certainly, the efforts of Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, working in tandem with his wife Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, bear serious consideration. For over forty years, they’ve been knee-deep in the study of polychromy — that is to say, the application of paint on three-dimensional objects. The art world is filled with people who hate art but make it their business anyway. Vinzenz and Ulrike? They love their patch of multi-colored turf. Their eagerness is palpable.
It’s long been known, if not to the lay public then to anyone with more than a casual interest in the arts, that classical effigies were originally overlaid with color. Paint, being a less durable medium than marble or bronze, is incapable of withstanding the elements, let alone wear and tear over thousands of years. Historical accounts testify as to how colorful sculptures, having been unearthed through excavation, quickly lost their pigment after being exposed to sunlight and oxygen. The notion that (pace Winckelmann) “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is” — and, yes, you can see how extremists might exploit such a statement — has been a convention difficult to overcome. Faced with the preternatural beauty of the “Venus de Milo” as it is currently seen at the Louvre, the typical museum-goer can be forgiven for thinking that, yes, this is enough.
The Met show includes fourteen reconstructions of classical sculptures overseen and created by the Brinkmanns and their team. Utilizing a variety of approaches, featuring connoisseurship no less than high-tech gadgetry, they’ve managed to divine traces of color from, among other works, “Boxer at Rest,” a world-class masterwork at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, and a longstanding staple at the Met, a marble sphinx dated c. 530 BC. Most of the copies employ traditional materials — plaster and bronze, primarily. The Brinkmanns subsequently overlaid pigments and colors that were particular to the time and region. Rather than exhibit these colorized versions in a separate gallery, the curators have integrated them within the museum’s collection as a means of prompting contrast and comparison.
Installation of “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color” * * *
How do the replicas stand up to the monochrome standbys? A wall label would have us believe that “with the absence of color, ancient sculpture loses its original animation and full range of meaning.” But curatorial selling points don’t necessarily coincide with aesthetic experience. For all the dutiful research the Brinkmanns have done, their reconstructions are — well, they’re awful. I mean, really awful. Even allowing the necessary wriggle room for stylistic conjecture, there’s reason to doubt the taste of everyone involved in this venture. Blame centuries of conditioning for such an appraisal, and you wouldn’t be altogether wrong. But when the best of these pieces look like Conan the Barbarian after spending too much time in a tanning bed, and the worst like rejects from a Fisher-Price outlet store, you know things are ass-over-tea kettle wrong.
A supporter of colorization might point to how the famed portrait bust of Nefertiti hasn’t suffered because of its polychromy. Scholars can readily point to numerous examples of the genre that prove the viability of the medium. (The Spanish are especially strong in polychromy.) But, really, how does “The Nefertiti Bust” stack up against “Boxer at Rest” as a work of sculpture? Color garnishes the former, bringing a degree of specificity to the bust’s streamlined — let’s not call it “generic” — dimensionality.
In contrast, the burnished patina overlaid on “Boxer at Rest” obscures the attention that’s been invested in its making. Material integrity, anatomical nuance, specificity of contour and the sterling embodiment of tragodía are diminished by somebody’s overwrought notion of mimesis. Other colorized facsimiles at the Met are considerably gaudier, what with their glassy eyes, faint attempts at painterly illusion, and color palette seemingly poached from a package of Necco Wafers. A conspiratorial soul might wonder if the point of Chroma is to wheedle a feel-good correspondence between, say, the “Nike of Samothrace” or the “Jockey of Artemision” with kitsch-mongers like Jeff Koons, Charles Ray and Takashi Murakami — between an era of high artistic achievement and our own age of bewildered expectations.
Old-school aesthetes may have misread the purity of classical sculpture, but who’s to say new school conservationists aren’t overcompensating for a culture in which overstimulation is the lingua franca? Chroma is probably best considered a lone pit stop on humankind’s eternal journey to bedevil its own finest impulses. In the meantime, let’s give it up for Mother Nature and Father Time, both of whom worked collaboratively to fine-tune our greatest achievements by ridding them of their excesses.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article was originally published in the August 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
Owen Jones, Designs (1 of 51) for publication in Examples of Chinese Ornament (London, 1867) (Plates 10, 40, 56), 1866–67. Paper, gouache, gold paint, drawing, 13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (34.3 x 24.1 cm) each. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Purchased with the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, V&A Members and The Belvedere Trust, ⒸVictoria and Albert Museum, London. * * *
Pity the poor Drawing Center. Founded in 1977–or, rather, “born into the petri dish of the SoHo art scene in the 1960s and 1970s”–the Center was the pet project of Martha Beck, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She felt that the medium of drawing, being underserved by the arts establishment, needed its own specialized venue. Over the years, this downtown gallery has proved its mettle, mounting a variety of historical and contemporary exhibitions, as well as making a point of reaching out to working artists, some of whom later went on to greater recognition.
But that petri dish? It’s changed mightily since the heyday of industrial lofts rented on the cheap. Though painters and sculptors continue to work in SoHo, it’s no longer the fulcrum of the international art world. Real estate, as the truism has it, follows artists and, as a general rule, displaces them. Galleries are now few and far between in SoHo. As a result, the Drawing Center finds itself marooned among a bevy of luxury boutiques, high-end hotels, pricey eateries and, proving that some things never change, a noisome lineup of traffic going into the Holland Tunnel.
Will culture mavens think twice, then, about going to SoHo or, as an acquaintance put it, “the boonies?” It would be a shame if that’s the case, otherwise they might miss The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present, a knockout exhibition curated by Emily King, a London-based historian and curator. Bringing together more than two hundred objects that range the world over, King, along with co-curators Margaret Anne Logan and Duncan Tomlin, seek to underline how ornament can be not only “a means of exchange across geographies and cultures,” but the basis for “pleasurable disruption.”
Pleasure? Yes, you read that right. Notwithstanding the obligatory moment of extra-aesthetic harrumphing–the introductory wall text goes on about “power imbalances and exploitation”–The Clamor of Ornament is unapologetic in its emphasis on visual effusion and stylistic fecundity. The curators have assembled an impressive array of media: mostly drawings, textiles and prints, but also photographs, books and even a set of baseball caps originally hawked to pedestrians on nearby Canal Street. A set piece juxtaposing Martin Sharp’s psychedelic homage to Bob Dylan with “The Second Knot, Interlaced Roundel with an Amazon Shield in its Center” (c. 1521), Albrecht Dürer’s woodblock riff on a design originating with Leonardo, sets the stage for a free-for-all of no little resplendence.
Among the primary virtues of The Clamor of Ornament is how thoroughly it confirms the universality of the decorative impulse. Culture and chronology are given the heave-ho for an installation that favors commonalities of rhythm and color, intricacy and generosity of pictorial spirit. “Flowers of Edo: Five Young Men”(1864), a quintet of kaleidoscopic woodblock prints by Toyohara Kunichika, is seen near a tattoo pattern book by an unknown hand from the turn of the last century. Nearby is a 1953 study for eleven ornamental bands done by John deCesare, a work commissioned by that Medici of the supermarket, General Foods. What with its abrupt shifts of locus and intent, the show might sound like a bumpy ride. In fact, it flows like a river.
Which is appropriate, given that a majority of the work is devoted to artworks based, one way or another, on the natural world. Geometry is touched upon, particularly as an organizing principle, and symmetry is a constant. But it’s the sinuousness of organic forms, augmented by extravagant color, that predominates. Hirase Yoichirō’s sketchbook studies of seashells make the point clear, as does an unfinished watercolor, a blueprint for chrysanthemum wallpaper, by the estimable William Morris. The Welsh architect Owen Jones — whose seminal text, The Grammar of Ornament, serves as the exhibition’s lodestone — is seen to stunning chromatic effect in a trio of pieces elaborating on Chinese precedent.
Other notables include Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Louis H. Sullivan and Paul Klee. But star power doesn’t carry The Clamor of Ornament, not with showstopping pieces done by craftsmen who are unknown, anonymous or the purview of specialists. The craft, as you might imagine, is of a high order, and the work on display is, on the whole, put into shape with meticulous and sometimes mind-boggling virtuosity. Should you need a reminder of just how capable the human hand can be, particularly in our age of digital flimflammery, a visit to The Drawing Center is in order. But be warned: once the exhibition has been entered, you won’t want to leave. Splendor is addictive.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of The Spectator World.
Diego Rivera, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Irene Rich (1941), oil on canvas, 24 x 17″; courtesy Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), Northampton, MA * * *
The passage of time can be a merciless arbiter of reputation. Fashions evolve, sometimes double-back, and often peter out altogether. This is as true for art as it is for haute couture. Live long enough, and you’ll see how quickly The Next Big Thing turns into tomorrow’s Never Was, how this morning’s outrage de-evolves into this evening’s commonplace. All of which is worth taking into account when considering the fortunes of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886-1957).
Dial back the clock fifty- to seventy-years ago, and you’d discover that even the most cursory student of art would have recognized Rivera’s name. He was a star, a hard-charging bigger-than-life talent whose work was sought after by Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and other captains of industry. A luminary amongst luminaries, Rivera counted among his friends Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Leger and Chaim Soutine, and served as a link between the avant-garde and the Americas. He was passionate about politics, forever siding with the proletariado at the expense of any coherent social philosophy. And his ego! Forget fools: Rivera suffered no one gladly. His squabbles with all and sundry–the Soviet Union no less than the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, an organization predicated on a woolly brand of occultism–were the stuff of legend. Rivera played life to the hilt. The world paid attention.
But that was then, and this is 2022. Though Rivera isn’t unknown to contemporary audiences, his personality and accomplishments have been overshadowed by those of his wife, Frida Kahlo. Like Rivera, Kahlo was no stranger to celebrity culture, having famously posed for a 1937 photo-spread in Vogue. Still, no one could have predicted the extent of Kahlo’s fame almost seventy years after her death. Movies, books, exhibitions, umbrellas, restaurants, coffee cups and plush-dolls–how hasn’t that legendary unibrow been marketed? The beneficiary of historical revisionism and globalist outreach, Kahlo has become a ubiquitous and, for some, empowering figure–so much so, that not a few wags nowadays refer to Rivera as “Mr. Frida Kahlo.”
Diego Rivera’s America, a traveling exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is unlikely to stem the tide of Frida-mania. Still, it should do much to re-confirm Rivera’s place in the cultural firmament. Guest curator James Oles, a professor of art history at Wellesley College and a specialist in Latin American Art, has set a scholarly eye on Rivera’s “utopian belief in the power of art.” The exhibition focuses on a 25-year period of Rivera’s output spanning, roughly, from the 1920s through the ’40s. Not coincidentally, this time-frame captures Rivera at the height of his powers. It was during this phase, Oles writes, that the artist “reimagined Mexican national identity on a vast scale, embraced the industrial age in the United States, and conceived of a greater America in which unity, rather than division was paramount.”
Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier (1935), oil and tempera on masonite, 48 x 47-3/4″; courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art * * *
Oles has a significant collection to cull from: SFMOMA boasts among the world’s largest holdings of Rivera’s art. Along with loans from private institutions and public collections, America includes more than 150 pieces in a variety of media. Art historical staples like The Flower Carrier (1935) and Self-Portrait (1941) will be seen in conjunction with a host of preparatory studies, a smattering of documentary objects, and canvases that have rarely been on public display.
Context is provided by the inclusion of work by Rivera’s peers, including photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, and paintings by, yes, Frida Kahlo. Three galleries are devoted to video projections of murals done in Mexico and the United States. SFMOMA is touting America as the largest Rivera retrospective in over twenty years. Oles does the museum one better, claiming that the oeuvre hasn’t been as fully accounted for since 1949, the year Rivera was feted with a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Whatever the case, the point is clear: America is a big deal.
The artist christened Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was born in Guanajuato City, a municipality located in Central Mexico. His parents were affluent; his twin brother, dead at age two. Rivera showed artistic promise as a toddler, scrawling upon the walls of the family home. As it turned out, he was something of a prodigy: Rivera was accepted to the prestigious Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City at age 10. He worked with Santiago Rubill, a former student of Ingres, and, one feels, a decisive influence. Rivera’s skills garnered notice: the governor of Veracruz sponsored a European sojourn for the young artist to further his education.
It was during his stays in Spain and, especially, France that Rivera was transformed every which way. How could he not be? Paris, especially, was a hothouse of creative–indeed, revolutionary–fervor. Rivera absorbed the lessons of early Modernism with an enthusiasm that was nothing short of rapacious. He explored a variety of approaches, Post-Impressionism and Cubism in particular, and proved a deft hand at all of them. José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s newly installed Minister of Education, managed to woo Rivera back home, eager to have him take part in an ambitious new program for public painting. It is at this point in Rivera’s life that America begins the accounting of one artist’s attempt to (pace the catalogue) “radically transform the world.”
Back home, Rivera immersed himself in indigenous cultures, reveling in the people and paying homage to their traditions. In the sections of America titled “South to Tehuantepec” and “Daily Life”, we see Rivera depicting ordinary folk and everyday rituals all the while keying into a distinctly local range of colors. His palette took on a cast indicative of the surrounding landscape and climate. Dance in Tehuantepec and Tehuana (Aurea Procel) (both 1928) are suffused with ripe variations on orange and red, as well as exhibiting a fidelity to native costumery of forbidding complexity. Works like Pneumatic Drill (1931) and Hombre Fumando (1937) evince an eye as attuned to the documentary as it was prone to the exaggerations of caricature. Mexico’s people, Rivera intimates, are of the earth and, as such, immovable.
Rivera’s approach to form became increasingly concrete and weighted. The human figure was subjected to stylizations that hinted at Cubist precedent, but seem more inspired by the totemic effigies of Pre-Columbian cultures and artifacts from prehistory. The woman and child seen solemnly making their daily bread in La Tortillera (1926) are rendered with an uncanny sculptural fortitude.
Diego Rivera, La Bordadora (1928), oil on canvas, 31-1/4 x 39″; courtesy The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art * * *
La bordadora (The Embroiderer) (1928)–a canvas as iconic in character, if not renown, as The Flower Carrier–is freighted by an almost Giottoesque stolidity, its two women having been wedged within the canvas to emphasize their mass. Monumentality had its symbolic functions: Woman with Calla Lilies (1945), with its mountainous effulgence of flowers, confirms the primacy of the natural world as well as our modest place in it.
Notwithstanding the circumscribed focus of the exhibition, America is wide-ranging in how it touches upon Rivera’s interests and accomplishments. His gifts as a draftsman are in abundant evidence, no more so than in Study for Germination [Tina Modotti] (1926), as nuanced an essay in sensuality as one could hope for. And although Rivera forever thumped the drum of social justice, he wasn’t without a sense of humor. Among the delights–and surprises!–of America is a suite of graphite and watercolor costume designs made for H.P. (Horsepower) (circa 1927-32), a ballet and symphony organized by the musician Carlos Chávez. With their unlikely amalgams of flora and fauna, Rivera divulges a Surrealist bent and a welcome air of whimsy.
Rivera’s murals, by definition, are less amenable to travel, but a number of working drawings are on display–including a pair of gouache and graphite pieces featuring colorful and compartmentalized designs for the Paramount Theater. And towards the end of the exhibition, you’ll find Self-Portrait, in which the artist, surrounded by a field of luminous yellow, holds a note written in Spanish to the woman who commissioned the painting, actress Irene Rich. Clearly, Rivera’s political leanings didn’t override his communing with the rich and famous. Indeed, anyone familiar with Rivera the man knows that he was far too contradictory a creature to serve as a coherent role model for contemporary activists. But the artist? As Diego Rivera’s America makes plain, he’s a figure worth tussling with–the vagaries of reputation be damned.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article was originally published in the July 2022 edition of Art & Antiques.
The most shocking moment in “Pleasure,” a film that doesn’t stint on discomfiting scenes in its depiction of the adult entertainment industry, comes at the beginning.
In a preamble, director Ninja Thyberg and actress Sofia Kappel face the camera–and, by implication, the audience–to discuss the making of the movie.
Ms. Thyberg speaks of the process she underwent in casting the lead actress, and commends Ms. Kappel for her performance. Ms. Kappel talks about the working environment overseen by Ms. Thyberg, testifying to a set that had safety uppermost on its mind. Then the movie begins.
There’s a quip making the rounds that any film made before the last six months should automatically be slapped with a trigger warning. Such is the evolutionary speed of contemporary mores. “Gone With the Wind” has famously been tagged with a disclaimer about its presumed endorsement of values that (pace HBO Max) “were wrong then and are wrong today.”
“Pleasure” isn’t as out-of-date as all that, but it is a bit behind the curve. Filming began in 2018, and the picture’s trip to the box office has been bumpy, not least because of its explicit sexual content. Still, a lot can happen in four years. The much ballyhooed rise-and-fall-and-rise-again of Only Fans being one, as well as a world in which the puritanical diktats of wokery continue apace.
Whether Ms. Thyberg and Ms. Kappel felt compelled to defend “Pleasure” because of nervous theater owners or the wiles of the zeitgeist is moot; either way, they were strong-armed. What does it say about a culture in which artists are perpetually looking over their backs?
Given the travails encountered in “Pleasure,” perhaps a little puritanism is in order. The film is tough-going, clinical in its objectivity and often excruciating to watch. Ms. Thyberg brings us a fiction, but does so with the eye of a documentarian. She strives for verisimilitude–or, depending on how you look at these things, muddies the waters–by casting actual porn stars in supporting roles.
Among them are Revika Anne Reustle and Chris Cock. Ms. Reustle plays Joy, a veteran of the Los Angeles porn scene who befriends Linnéa (Ms. Kappel), a recent emigre from Sweden who now performs under the nom-de-plume Bella Cherry.
Mr. Cock is Bear, a man who works both behind and in front of the camera. Joy and Bear are among the few sympathetic figures in “Pleasure.” It’s not too much of a stretch to conclude that the vulnerability the actors bring to this picture is predicated on their own been-around-the-block experiences.
Ms. Thyberg, who wrote and directed this, her first feature, should, of course, be given credit. But it is worth noting that other porn world notables–I’m thinking here, especially, of super-agent Mark Spiegler–come off as crass operators, opportunists given to welcoming facades and deep-seated hypocrisy. They’re a curious bunch, this cadre of impresarios.
Our lead is no less curious. Bella is intent on becoming the next big porn star, but why is never made clear. She has no “daddy issues”–the subject of a chummy conversation with Bear–though her relationship with mom may be problematic. After a strenuous bout of filming, Bella calls home seeking solace, and is summarily rebuffed. Then again, mom is oblivious to the true nature of Bella’s “internship.”
The primary liability of the film is Bella. She’s not a fully-developed character so much as a gauge of the industry’s calculations and callousness. Admittedly, Ms. Kappel, in her film debut, is impressive. She invests her part with deeper currents of feeling than the script necessarily allows for, evincing a moral compass even as Bella capitulates to the stresses and duties peculiar to her career.
“Pleasure” treads an unflinching, and ultimately ambiguous, pathway between exploitation and exposé. It is, to put it mildly, not a film for all tastes.
Among my latest ventures is working as a film critic for the revamped New York Sun. Should you be interested, the website can be found here. In the meantime, I’ll be posting reviews of movies that, for one reason or another, didn’t see print. (I guess that should be “print,” given that the Sun is online-only.) You’ll find below my take on the much-anticipated picture from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Memoria.”
Tilda Swinton in “Memoria”; courtesy of Neon
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Rarely has a film needed the talents of Mel Brooks as much as “Memoria,” the most recent effort by director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Does anyone remember “The Critic,” the 1963 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Film? Over a screen populated with a compendium of Miró-like abstractions, we hear Mr. Brooks, very much in alte kaker mode, airing the opinions of a disgruntled movie-goer. He doesn’t think much of the filmmaker’s pretensions: “A fella like that could drive a truck; do something constructive–make a shoe.”
As a measure of art-house cinema, this criterion is a sound one. How many pieces of avant-gardist maundering are as good as a shoe? There have been more egregious examples of the genre than “Memoria,” and, to be fair, Mr. Weerasethakul has an impressive track record. “Cemetery of Splendor” earned its plaudits a few years back, and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” though an imperfect film, is, in many respects, the standard for world cinema. Clearly, Mr. Weerasethakul can do more than make a shoe.
Until now. In a statement accompanying “Memoria,” the Bangkok-born director writes that the film’s impetus were the hallucinations he experienced while traveling in Colombia. On a mission to collect “expressions and memories,” Mr. Weerasethakul began hearing a loud noise, usually at dawn and the country over. “The massive sierras . . . ,” he observed, “are like the folds of the brain, or the curves of sound waves.” Colombia proved a location where “delusion is the norm.”
Far be it for me to question an individual’s direct response to this-or-that phenomenon. Still, Mr. Weeasthakul’s declamations put me in mind of the old saw about other people’s dreams–you know, that they’re boring. “Memoria” isn’t altogether a bore, but the film’s longueurs, sodden as they are with a peculiarly recalcitrant brand of symbolism, can be a chore to sit through. Not a few people in the polite crowd with whom I attended the picture spent an inordinate amount of time checking their watches. When art becomes a duty something has gone awry.
“Memoria” centers on Jessica Holland, a specialist in orchids played by Tilda Swinton, and, tangentially, her recently hospitalized sister Karen (Agnes Brekke). Jessica and only Jessica hears a sound: a booming mechanical thud that punctuates her psyche–and the film–at random moments. She visits a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) who manages to approximate the noise on an audio board.
But, then, Hernán may not be real. When Jessica revisits the recording studio, she discovers that no one by that name works there. Packing her bags, Jessica heads up the Amazon. It is there that she meets a fisherman who is also named Hernán (Elkin Díaz), and spends a lengthy amount of time with him–as does the audience. At this point, “Memoria” slows to a crawl. At moments, Mr. Weerasethakul’s moving picture doesn’t seem to move at all.
As it turns out, Hernan No. 2 and Jessica share a kind of telekinetic connection. Then Hernan No. 2 up-and-dies, except he doesn’t, and did I mention the spaceship? Oh, and anthropologists; they’re here as well, looking into something or other. Ritualistic practices, maybe. Nothing is made clear in “Memoria.” It’s enough to make you think that Mr. Weerasethakul mistakes obscurantism for poetry.
Most of the film’s running time is devoted to Ms. Swinton sitting or walking. Here, she ambles through the center of Medellin; there, she’s ensconced by a window staring at the rainforest. Given that Mr. Weerasethakul moves his camera only reluctantly, the onus is on Ms. Swinton to hold our attention. Would that she were a more generous actress. As it is, her diffidence only makes an already difficult movie close to intolerable. And no one, not even Mr. Brooks’s critic, should have to sit through that.
Philip Guston with The Studio in 1969; photo by Frank Lloyd * * *
The painter Philip Guston (1913-80) likened the creative act to attending a party. “When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people there with you–your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics . . . one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out.” “Philip Guston Now,” a retrospective on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, could be seen as the reverse. Guston hasn’t left the party; he was disinvited.
The exhibition has recently opened after an eleven-month postponement. The organizing institutions–the Boston MFA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., London’s Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas–put a hold on the July 2021 opening date in response to events surrounding the death of George Floyd. “We are postponing the exhibition,” the organizers stated last fall, “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”
This announcement met with significant pushback among artists and collectors. An open letter sponsored by The Brooklyn Rail garnered over 2,600 signatures–among the signatories contesting the exhibition’s delay were the choreographer Bill T. Jones, performance artist Laurie Anderson, and Agnes Gund, President Emerita and Life Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. It’s likely the letter helped occasion the rescheduling of a show that had already been rescheduled. From a projected 2024 opening date, “Philip Guston Now” comes to us in 2022 having been framed within the context of “each viewer’s lived experience.”
What might Guston, a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty who cast a mordant eye on culture and politics, have made of this hubbub? He was no stranger to controversy during his lifetime. The young Guston was an ideological animal, a Social Realist who took a keen interest in the work of Mexican muralists like David Alfaro Siqueros and Jose Clemente Orozco. (Guston’s high school friend, Jackson Pollock, was also a fan.) In 1933, Guston’s painting Conspirators went on public exhibition and was subsequently destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan–not coincidentally, the subject of the painting.
Controversy followed Guston to the end of his days. After having established himself as a painter of luxurious abstractions, a body of work that carried him through the 1950’s and early 60’s, Guston returned to his figurative roots. When the resulting paintings were shown at Marlborough Gallery in 1970 visitors were puzzled when they weren’t shocked. What to make of these pictures of the KKK tootling around town in a boxcar sedan, smoking stogies or flagellating themselves with whips? The images were lumpy and cartoonish; the color palette, a garish range of pink, red and black.
Guston was vilified in the press; friends were lost. Only Willem de Kooning, his AbEx compatriot, took the paintings in stride, commending Guston for exemplifying the freedom inherent in the creative process. “Philip Guston Now” includes a section dedicated to the infamous Marlborough show amongst an overall count of seventy-three paintings and twenty-three drawings. A sharp light is being shone on a headstrong talent.
Guston was born in Montreal, Canada, the youngest of seven children. The family had fled Odessa to escape anti-Semitic persecution, later moving to Los Angeles to seek economic opportunity. It wasn’t forthcoming. Guston’s father committed suicide. Ten-year old Philip discovered the body. Philip’s mother encouraged her son’s interest in painting and drawing, and Guston enrolled in L.A.’s Manual Arts High School. He moved to New York in 1935, joined the Works Project Administration, and married the poet Musa McKim. Guston went on to achieve considerable success as first-generation Abstract Expressionist, but found himself increasingly frustrated by “all that purity.” He and Musa moved to Woodstock. Outside the social whirlpool of the New York City art scene, Guston got down to business.
“Philip Guston Now” traces an oeuvre that underwent a fair share of bumps even as it settled out according to its own ineradicable logic. Stylistic shifts that may have appeared capricious during the artist’s life reveal themselves to be organic and of a piece. That is, of course, the benefit of hindsight. The exhibition begins with Mother and Child (c. 1930), a monumental image that is barely contained by its modest format. In it, we see an attempt to reconcile the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico with the tight-lipped fortitude of Piero della Francesca, one of many Renaissance Masters Guston revered. The same impulse, albeit inflected by contemporary events, can be gleaned from Drawing for Conspirators (1930) a pencil study for the ill-fated painting.
Guston’s compositions became increasingly complicated during the 1940’s. Figures, objects and spaces became tangled, albeit choreographed with a steely attention to interval and edge. Children appear in the canvases, often seen battling on city streets. Guston’s love of vintage comic strips can be gleaned from the elasticity of form seen in Gladiators (1940). Dynamism eventually gave way to atmosphere. The children in If This Be Not I (1945), not-so-distant kin of Gladiators, line up and face the viewer as if awaiting judgment. Stillness reigns.
Guston found himself increasingly drawn to abstraction. The compositional underpinnings of the figurative work gave way to an infirm and cobbled geometry. The Tormentors (1947-48), a smoldering web of ratcheted forms, was a stepping stone from If This Be Not I to the magisterial “Abstract Impressionism” of canvases like Summer (1954) and Dial (1956). Touch took precedence during this phase, though not at the risk of structure. Imagine Monet meeting Mondrian in a post-Hiroshima milieu.
The 1960’s put paid to Guston’s relationship with abstraction. The era’s political and cultural tumult rankled his inner moralist. “I was feeling split, schizophrenic . . . what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.” For the first time in decades, Guston started painting objects and figures–or parts of figures, anyway. The compositions were blunt in their rendering, close to cack-handed. The signature Guston brushstroke–tha tenderly inquisitive slur of oil paint–took on a klutzy and comedic temper. Guston had always been a fan of George Herriman, the pioneering comic strip artist who created Krazy Kat. Herriman’s inimitable scratchiness came to the fore in Guston’s use of line. Sensuality was up-ended by agitation.
And then came the figures in hoods, galumphing pyramidal shapes that pick up where The Conspirators left off some thirty years earlier. These are the KKK pictures that gave pause to the organizers of “Philip Guston Now”–as well they should have: images are potent bearers of meaning. Certainly, Guston didn’t choose his cast of characters lightly; placing the KKK amongst them was, in no small terms, a freighted decision. It was also a provocation. Guston was never afraid to play with fire or, for that matter, ambiguity. Art was nothing without contradiction.
The Klan were soon overtaken by motifs that were alternately mundane (cherries, cigarettes, cities in the distance), personal (Musa, stuff in the studio), and bizarre (disembodied legs, cyclopean heads, bugs). The late work, in other words, isn’t altogether dependent on imagery that is potentially objectionable. All the same, the Boston MFA is skittish enough to provide an “emotional preparedness” warning for museum visitors. How that will skew the audience’s perception remains to be seen. In the meantime, “Philip Guston Now” offers an overview, circumspect and wary, of a profound and unruly artist.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
The article orignally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Art & Antiques.
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899/1906), oil on canvas, 28-1/8 x 49-1/8″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY * * *
The advance buzz on Winslow Homer:Crosscurrents wasn’t good. “Woke Winslow” — that’s how observers, online and through the grapevine, pegged the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of paintings and watercolors by Winslow Homer (1836-1910). The stalwart purveyor of maritime adventure and manly pursuits, woke? One glance at the enlarged black-and-white photo displayed at the front end of Crosscurrents–a blurred portrait of Homer in his Maine studio–makes clear that the fusty man with the impatient glare is no one’s idea of a social-justice warrior.
Looks aren’t everything, of course.Truth to tell, Homer’s art does touch upon important aspects of American history. But did the summer of 2020 really beg for a “diachronic focus on conflict and struggle in [Homer’s] production?” So promises Sylvia Yount, the Met’s Lawrence A. Fleischman curator-in-charge of the American Wing and co-organizer, along with Stephanie L. Herdrich, of Crosscurrents. Is it possible, in so many words, to reconcile “The Gulf Stream” (1899/1906), among Homer’s most iconographic canvases, with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter?
Consider “‘The Various Colors and Types of Negroes’: Winslow Homer Learns to Paint Race,” an essay in the exhibition catalogue by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Those familiar with Homer’s pictures of black life, whether as seen in the American South or the Caribbean, know they are characterized by a rare and carefully grained objectivity. Shaw knows this, but she’s not happy about it. So after commending Homer for “trusting his own instincts on coloring potently raced bodies,” Shaw puts him in his place for an “oblique reliance on the negatively stereotyped tropes of Black representation.” The professor giveth, and the professor taketh away.
The good thing about Crosscurrents is that it isn’t the catalogue. The begrudgery typifying our curatorial class is outshone at the Met by artistic fact. The show is the largest overview of Homer’s work in twenty-five years, containing eighty-eight pieces. “The Gulf Stream” is at its center, but there are other signal pictures on display. There are so many, in fact, that you begin to realize just how thoroughly Homer’s vision has been absorbed into the body politic. If anything, the work makes a case for the expansiveness of the American spirit. The old Yankee, bless his soul, does not go gently into that woke night.
Winslow Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a businessman prone to bad decisions, his mother an amateur watercolorist. The extent of Homer’s formal training was an eighteen-month apprenticeship to a commercial lithographer. A knack for the anecdotal and a clipped sense of composition, along with a daunting work ethic, led to a career in illustration. During the Civil War, Homer contributed on-site battlefield drawings for Harper’s Weekly. At the age of twenty-three, Homer packed his bags and headed to New York City, intent on becoming a painter.
Crosscurrents is divided into eight sections, each of which is devoted to a theme–the seaside of the Northeastern United States, for instance, or trips taken to tropical climes. “War and Reconstruction” opens the show, and the paintings featured in it are almost Tocquevillian in their perspicacity. Homer’s experience as a journalist, working amid the carnage of war and its aftermath, likely accounts for the sobriety typifying the imagery. Homer was no sentimentalist. The pictures are bare-bones dioramas endowed with almost Biblical portent: a foolhardy soldier taunts the enemy, children attempt to farm wartorn ground, and a pair of young women wander through a field of cotton.
A curator cares for and maintains the items that have been entrusted to her. Political activism–hell, political commentary–shouldn’t be a prerequisite for the job. But let’s not be naive. Politics haven’t just seeped into our institutions; they’ve inundated them. When Herdrich, the Met’s associate curator of American Painting and Sculpture, insists the work be viewed “through the lens of conflict,” you know that Homer is about to be dragooned into the intersectional hothouse.
Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers (1876), oil on canvas, 24-1/2 x 38″; courtesy the Lost Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA ***
Homer had a pointed, if subtle, sense of irony. “The Cotton Pickers” (1876) is swathed in a beneficent light, but it’s no Arcadian idyll. The women pictured are emancipated slaves; the cotton they carry a reminder of their servitude. It’s an uncanny painting, marked by quietude and suffused with intimacy. The author F. Hopkinson Smith, a friend of Homer’s and a capable painter in his own right, described the canvas as “the whole story of Southern slavery.” Hindsight endows the painting with a preternatural gravitas–a sense of history as a burden foretold.
The most renowned of Homer’s pictures are centered on the ocean and dramatized by storm. Skies are dank and gray; waves surge and then surge some more; boats capsize; and those who sail the sea or live by it–well, good luck to them. Nature is relentless and violent, unforgiving and ominous. Typical is the “Ship’s Boat” (1883), in which a cadre of men grasp onto the side of an upturned lifeboat. The murky distance to which they signal for rescue offers slim chance of hope.
Homer’s paintings of tropical climes are, on the whole, less roiling in character. Certainly, the clarifying Caribbean sun suited Homer’s gift for watercolor, wherein the barest swipe of the brush yoked a radiant sense of climate from the white of the page. Homer thrived on the immediacy offered by the portability of watercolor: “I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors. The thing is done without your knowing it.”
Which isn’t to say that life in the sunshine was without hazard. And here we circle back to “The Gulf Stream.” It’s a gripping image, for sure: a lone black man, shirtless and distracted, lies on a teetering skip, its mast broken off at the base. Blood filters through the surrounding waves; sharks are circling. Pitched on the horizon is a schooner sundering away from the crisis at hand. The canvas brings to mind a host of precedents, not least John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” (1778) and Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (1818-19). Homer’s painting is starker in its theatricality and not tied to a specific narrative– which may account for the consternation engendered upon its initial public display.
Viewers wanted a backstory. Homer did not suffer the public gladly. “The unfortunate negro,” he wrote, “will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.” Over and out! He went on: “I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times & I should know something about it. The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence.”
“Outside matters of very little consequence?” Nonsense. Artists are rarely the best interpreters of their own work. Contrary to Homer’s testy dismissal of narrative, “The Gulf Stream” betrays grim determination, a stoic refusal to grant credence to the most trying of circumstances. Homer’s moralism, like that of Melville or Conrad, is inescapable and weighted, stubbornly independent and elusive in its probity. Like the best art, “The Gulf Stream” resists ideological pigeonholing or the machinations of fashion. Homer will survive the distrust and condescension of our theory-besotted gatekeepers. In the meantime, Crosscurrents is filled with paintings that merit our puzzlement and earn our pleasure.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article was originally published in the June 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
Installation view of Jonathan Silver: Matter & Vision at Victoria Munroe Fine Art * * *
“Celebrity isn’t the sole litmus test of art, of course, nor should it be. But that an artist of Silver’s distinction remains unheralded is indicative of the benighted parameters within which our tastemakers operate.”
The full review can be found at “Dispatch,” the blog of The New Criterion.
Pablo Picasso, The Soup (1903), oil on canvas, 37 x 48 cm.; courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario * * *
What is there left to say about Picasso? This question, posed by a colleague apropos of Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, an exhibition on display at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, is inevitable. There are few cultural figures whose life and accomplishments have been as exhaustively accounted for as the man born–take a breath!–Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Innumerable exhibitions, books, scholarly tracts and films have been devoted to this relentlessly protean artist. Even after his death almost fifty years ago–Picasso died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one–he looms large in the public consciousness. Picasso’s stature in the upper echelons of the art world has, admittedly, been somewhat diminished by the promotion of Marcel Duchamp and his nose-thumbing progeny. Feminists have taken umbrage at the lionization of Picasso maltratador–which is how he was described last year at Barcelona’s Picasso Museum by a group of students protesting his treatment of women. Certainly, there are few artists less amenable to the unforgiving puritanism of our professional classes.
I mean, what might the woke-adjacent make of the subtext undergirding Painting the Blue Period–that Picasso was a socially conscious individual, an artist acutely aware of his proletarian status and an ally of the poor and the homeless, the underserved, incarcerated and marginalized? In late 1901, Picasso began visiting the Saint-Lazare women’s prison near Montmartre under the offices of Louis Jullien, the facility’s resident doctor and a specialist in venereal diseases. (Dr. Jullien went so far as to forge a medical identity for Picasso so that he could roam the grounds unaccompanied.) The young artist was, we are told, moved by “the struggles faced by poor women and their children in the modern world.” Twenty-first century sophisticates will snigger at this attempt to humanize Pablo the Perpetual Misogynist. And it is worth recalling the story, as related in John Richardson’s four-volume biography of the artist, that Picasso extolled the “models” at Saint-Lazare because they cost him not a centime. Still, human nature is nothing if not contradictory. The rest of us are defined by motives, ignoble and otherwise. Why not extend the benefit of a doubt to Picasso?
Truth to tell, the organizers of Painting the Blue Period have little truck with the moral soundness of Picasso’s moral probity. Co-curators Kenneth Brummel of the Art Gallery of Ontario and Susan Behrends Frank, associate curator of research at the Phillips, are interested in Picasso as–dare one say it?–an artist. Turns out that Brummel and Frank actually like art. Among the blessings of the exhibition is the absence of political posturing–guilt-mongering, really–that is all but de rigueur for curators nowadays. Instead, visitors learn how a given drawing, painting, sculpture or print was influenced by Picasso’s immediate environment or a particular motif (whether sacred or profane), and how it was realized through the accumulation of graphite, charcoal or oil paint. A significant part of the exhibition is, in fact, given over to process, conservation and scientific analysis. Three canvases–“The Soup” (1903), “Crouching Beggarwoman” (1902), and the Phillips’s own “Blue Room” (1901)–were subject to a variety of intensive imaging techniques. Painting aficionados will relish the opportunity to see X-ray photographs displaying how Picasso recycled canvases and imagery. Discovering how he upended a landscape painting and morphed it into “Crouching Beggarwoman” provides an especially telling sidebar. At the age of twenty-one, Picasso was already attuned to the power and possibilities of transformation.
Pablo Picasso, Crouching Beggarwoman (1902), oil on canvas, 101.2 x 66 cm.; courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario * * *
Which isn’t to say that Painting the Blue Period highlights a kingpin of the avant-garde. The artist whose radical innovations would reshape the traditions of painting and sculpture? He ain’t here. What we have is Picasso at his most–well, let’s not say “derivative.” Having left Spain in 1901, Picasso traveled to Paris, settling in a studio a stone’s throw from the Moulin Rouge. He shared the apartment (if not the expenses) with his agent Pere Mañach, a transplant from Barcelona and scion of a family of industrialists. “Self-Portrait (Yo)” (1901)–a hardscrabble picture done on cardboard–evinces a man of chiseled good looks and unwavering confidence, a temperament out to make a name for itself in the demi-monde. That, and it divulges a proud reliance on the stylistic mannerisms of Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. Lautrec died just a few months after Picasso’s arrival in France; from all accounts, the two never met. But Lautrec’s example weighed significantly on Picasso. He adopted many of the older artist’s subjects–cabarets, cafés and brothels–as well as the lifestyle attendant to them. “Catcalls and Capers” and “Lures for Men” (both 1901), comic illustrations Picasso did for the magazine Le Frou-Frou, could be touted as Lautrecs and few people would blink an eye.
Lautrec himself makes an appearance in Painting the Blue Period: his efflorescent “May Milton” (1895), a mixed-media depiction of the English dancer, is hung adjacent to “Catcalls and Capers” and “Lures for Men.” By placing these works in close proximity, Brummel and Frank underscore Picasso’s preternatural ability to absorb and integrate influences. Throughout the exhibition, Picasso’s efforts in oil, graphite, charcoal and bronze–including “Seated Woman” (1902), his first attempt at sculpture–are juxtaposed with works by historical figures, as well as those of artists within his milieu. “Nude Woman Standing, Drying Herself” (1891-92), a lithograph by Edgar Degas, and two sculptures by Auguste Rodin, “Eve” (c. 1881) and “Crouching Woman” (1880-82), are set alongside Picasso’s early explorations into the expressive potential ofthe female form. Elsewhere, Honoré Daumier, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Luis de Morales and El Greco amplify Picasso’s work in revelatory ways flummoxing ways, too. Who would consider mashing-up Puvis de Chavannes’s arid neoclassicism with the decorative contouring of Vuillard? It’s an endeavor that would strain most imaginations. But imagine Picasso most surely did, particularly with “The Soup.”
The gallery devoted to “The Soup” is among the most gratifying museum installations in recent memory. Brummel and Frank, with tremendous scholarly acumen and no little sense of nuance, set out the genesis of a simple image–a mother providing a bowl of soup for her daughter–and prove just how complex it it. Painting during a return trip to Spain, “The Soup” revisits a motif Picasso had touched on before: motherhood and poverty. Whereas “Science and Charity” (1897)–an earlier painting not included in the exhibition–was couched in nineteenth-century convention, “The Soup” is startlingly modern, if not strictly speaking Modernist. Writing in the catalogue, Brummel describes it as a “pictorial settlement” between Daumier and Puvis de Chavannes. That’s putting it mildly. What Picasso does is streamline Daumier’s muscular caricatures and bypass Puvis de Chavannes’s Hellenism to channel Third Dynasty Egypt. The accompanying studies on display–done in pastel, oil and ink–testify to the tenacity, grit and gravity with which he approached the picture.
The upshot is a painting whose modest scale can’t contain the monumentality of its forms. In point of comparison, the smattering of pieces that close the exhibition–presaging, as they do, the Rose Period–is small beer. Then again, some respite is in order after the intensity of mood that dominates Painting the Blue Period. It’s a great exhibition.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article originally appeared in the May 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
Installation of paintings by James Little at The Whitney Museum of American Art * * *
Before I begin this review of “Quiet as It’s Kept,” the latest iteration of the Whitney Biennial, let me cite two potential conflicts of interest. One of the artists included in the exhibition is a friend, another an acquaintance. Prior to meeting James Little, I was a fan of his carefully engineered geometric abstractions, proud elaborations on modernist precedent. Since meeting James, I’ve had the pleasure of his company, both in his studio and out on the town. A few years back, Jane Dickson and I shared a lively dinner in the Fells Point section of Baltimore after completing our duties as jurists for the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. (Crabcakes and beer, if memory serves.) James and Jane are veterans of the New York scene: they’ve pursued their art with uncommon persistence, having dealt with the obstacles, and enjoyed the rewards, of an artist’s life. Their inclusion in “Quiet As It’s Kept” is vindication of creative lives productively accounted for. Any artist featured in a Biennial, as the scuttlebutt has it, reaps professional rewards. If so, James and Jane have earned them. They’ve been around the block.
So, too, have the curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. Breslin, the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney, earned his wings at Houston’s Menil Drawing Institute and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Prior to her appointment as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, Edwards headed up Performa, a nonprofit organization dedicated to live performance, and did stints at The Walker Art Center and the Mellon Foundation. Breslin and Edwards are operators; they’re in the know. Which raises the question: why on earth did they want to organize a Biennial? Doing so is among the most thankless of tasks. If the exhibition isn’t subjected to a raft of political controversies, it’s bound to receive a critical drubbing. Charles Craven, writing for the New York Herald Tribune in 1932, started the ball rolling with his assessment of the first Biennial (which was then the Annual): “No more telling evidence of the deplorable state of American art has ever been assembled.” A glance at Twitter on the morning after the 2022 press preview saw one observer likening the Whitney to the Trump administration. (That’s not a good thing, should you be wondering.) Ninety years on, the Biennial still can’t catch a break.
Installation of paintings by Jane Dickson at The Whitney Museum of American Art * * *
“Quiet as It’s Kept” is mainly spread out over the fifth and sixth floors of the museum. The walls of the sixth floor are almost uniformly black, the walls of the fifth floor white. The artworks on the sixth floor are installed in a fairly traditional manner. The fifth floor is open and airy, subdivided by trellis-like structures on which objects are displayed. The curators have included a preponderance of videos (there are not a few darkened rooms to navigate) and a notable amount of abstract painting. Figurative painting is scant—unless one counts digital media as a form of painting, which some people do. Murmuring voices and other noises filter through the exhibition spaces, the accumulation of soundtracks from various filmed pieces. Artworks utilizing text are numerous. Extension cords, fans, lights, metalwork, lcd screens, and what appears to be plumbing punctuate the installation. Contemporary events and figures are touched upon: George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and covid. The past, too: Thomas Edison, the Constitution, and the Korean War. There are shelves full of books. On the morning I attended “Quiet as It’s Kept,” there was a battered Chevrolet roped off on the sidewalk in front of the Whitney. Was it part of the exhibition? Maybe. Maybe not.
“Quiet as It’s Kept” contains an abundance of political content, but you knew that. Contemporary art isn’t anything if it doesn’t address an issue—that’s the reasoning. Art does spring from a multitude of sources and sensations, that’s for sure. But the ideologies, grievances, and pronunciamentos typifying this Biennial? They’re depressing. The problem isn’t necessarily this or that theory. Rather, it’s the certitude with which the artists wield them. When did our radicals become such intolerant prigs or, for that matter, willing stooges of corporate interests? There isn’t a social malady, real or imagined, that can’t be winnowed down to its crudest component or expressed in atrocious grammar. One essayist writes about “diasporic Japaneseness,” another of how “in the afterlife all the museum’s (vestigial) wings will be unnamed in ceremonies young artists will perform by letting the dead sing through them in a continuous and uninterrupted tone that sounds like houselights [sic] dimming.” These excerpts, picked at random, are typical. The corresponding artworks are preferable if only because their tendentiousness is cleanly articulated. Sometimes a bumper sticker is preferable to a dissertation.
There’s art in “Quiet as It’s Kept”—some of which is worth communing with, most of which is negligible. But, really, this isn’t an exhibition about individual artworks. Though it’s foolhardy to take the installation aesthetic to task—I mean, the Giotto paintings lining the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel are, after all, “site-specific”—there is a difference between art as an elaboration on architecture and art as background noise. Breslin and Edwards don’t give their selections much credence. The funereal darkness, antiseptic artificial light, chug-a-lugging ambient sound, by-the-book outrage, and diminution of hard-won visions into fly-by-night decor: this is the least accessible Biennial ever, a migraine-inducing assault on the senses and a funhouse of preening elegance. Breslin and Edwards have done a thorough job, but, in the end, they’ve done the wrong job. After traveling extensively, visiting studios, speaking with all and sundry, and making tough decisions, what they’ve arrived at, basically, is a valentine to themselves. One doesn’t have to read their respective catalogue entries—letters to each other posing as essays—to intuit the self-congratulatory tone of “Quiet as It’s Kept.” Best wishes to the artists. Your work will survive the hostility to which it is currently being subjected.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the May 2022 edition of The New Criterion.
Charles Ray, Huck and Jim (2014), stainless steel, 9 ft. 3 . in. × 54 in. × 53 . in.; collection of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum
An abundance of ironies circulates around the sculpture of the Los Angeles–based artist Charles Ray (born 1953), none of which redound to the work’s benefit. Take the use of floor tape in “Charles Ray: Figure Ground,” a mid-career overview of an “elliptical, often irreverent” talent. We’re familiar with the means by which visitors to museums and galleries are reminded to keep a distance from a work of art, thereby avoiding potential damage to the object on display. At the Met, each of Ray’s sculptures is surrounded by floor tape that is gritty in texture and has been laid out to create a non-violable space measuring about three feet across. “Don’t touch the art”; we get it. Still, my curiosity was piqued. After exiting the show, I strolled past some large Rodin bronzes in the nineteenth-century galleries. They weren’t surrounded by tape. Later, I made a pit stop at two favorite pieces in the Greek and Roman wing: an Aphrodite, rendered in marble, dating to around the second century A.D., and a Hellenistic bronze of a man from about the same time. The courtesy of floor tape had not been extended to these mainstays of the collection. Some works of art, it seems, are more worthy of protection than others.
Lenders to “Figure Ground” likely stipulated that their loans be given adequate security. An internet search reveals that an original Ray can cost as much as $3 million. Given that kind of money, you have to sympathize with the institution or collector making demands. Investments, however, are one thing; art, another. The thing about a Rodin effigy or a piece of antique statuary is that their surfaces elicit a distinct pleasure—of sensuality and sensation, a longing for tactility. That is part of their enduring appeal. The sculptures of Charles Ray— what kind of person would want to touch one of those things? Figurative though they may be, and often nude, the works have all the bodily allure of a newly minted refrigerator or, and this analogy is more to the point, the stainless-steel tables used for autopsies and embalming. Ray’s predominant métier is, in fact, stainless steel—sometimes painted, often polished to a blinding sheen. The artist’s creative process combines “the analog and the digital as well as human and robotic hands.” Any tool or material is fair game; it’s what the artist does with them that matters. What Ray does, along with assistants and craftsmen, is render a given material simultaneously anti-septic and icky, slick and severe. This is an art that makes a fetish of the inhuman.
Ray’s supporters demur. In the catalogue, Brinda Kumar, the Met’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, lauds the artist’s “modalities of touch.” In Ray’s sculpture, “the potentiality of material, of matter, is made active, i.e., it is in mattering [emphasis in original] that the object is set into motion through time”—the sentence goes on. Kelly Baum, the museum’s Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, invokes the word “pattern”—as noun, verb, and theoretical cornerstone: “Ray’s patterns very often lead to other patterns; behind every prototype is another prototype to which it is related via a chain of signification.” There’s more about pattern in Baum’s essay, most of it murky in definition. Ray himself gives away the game with 81 x 83 x 85 = 86 x 83 x 85 (1989), one of the earliest pieces in the show. Anyone conversant with twentieth-century American art will recognize that it stems from Richard Serra’s “prop” series. In replacing rough-hewn steel with high-gloss aluminum, Minimalist showboating is transmuted into corporate kitsch. Ray, in other words, gilds Serra’s lily. Ever the faithful postmodernist, Ray passes off smug commentary as High Art. It’s enough to make one forgive Serra and his bullying ways.
Charles Ray, Family Romance (1993), painted fiberglass and hair, 53 x 85 x 11″; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation
Minimalism, with its brute insistence on the object and inherent hostility to metaphor, is, nonetheless, Ray’s jumping-off point: material obduracy sets the tone. Admittedly, the work is peppered with post-conceptualist fabulation, and you’d best believe that identity politics enter into it. Be thankful that Baum and Kumar did not include Oh!? Charley, Charley, Charley . . . (1992), a mixed-media piece in which eight life-size figures of the artist engage in a variety of sexual antics. Ray’s most emblematic work, Family Romance (1993), is featured at the Met: mom, dad, little brother, and baby sister are seen holding hands, each of them nude and equal in height and proportion. This not-so-happy family has been manufactured with a mannequin-like verisimilitude. Shifts in scale, particularly when it comes to the human body, are invariably disconcerting. But Ray doesn’t do much more than distort form in order to make a joke about—what, exactly? A wall label informs us that Family Romance “decouples the human and the ‘natural,’ disassociating sex, gender, and race from biology.” There is nothing more reliable than torturous circumlocution when obscuring an achievement of rank stupidity.
Race also figures into Ray’s art—kind of, sort of, almost. Sarah Williams (2021)—that’s right, the guise Huckleberry Finn adopted in Mark Twain’s classic nineteenth-century novel—proves particularly relevant in that it bears comparison with James Earle Fraser’s Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939). You’re familiar with the latter, of course: the bronze effigy of our twenty-sixth president recently removed from its perch at the American Museum of Natural History for its presumed endorsement of racial inferiority. Mores change over time, as do considerations of the body politic. Still, it should be noted that Fraser’s stated intention with the monument was to honor Roosevelt’s “friendliness to all races”—a fact worth reiterating at a cultural moment when intention is privileged over artifact. The intention fueling Sarah Williams is, we are told, a critique of “race-based relations of domination and subordination.” For right now, that will do. But how kindly will forward-thinking Americans esteem Ray’s overscaled depiction of a black man kneeling behind a white boy in 2122? History has its own wiles, and they can be humbling. In the meantime, “Figure Ground” is an exhibition of unremitting nihilism, staggering narcissism, and unapologetic pretension.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article originally appeared in the March 2022 edition of The New Criterion.
Joseph E. Yoakum Big Hole Pass Jackson Montana (n.d.), graphite pencil and black and blue ballpoint pen on paper 8 x 10″. Gift of the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation, Inc. 1173.2011. Photo: Robert Gerhardt.
Television isn’t a mainstay of these pages, but let me put in a word for reality TV. Or, rather, reality when it enters into this most manufactured of entertainments. A few years back, I regularly tuned into Project Runway, a hugely popular program in which contestants vie to become “America’s next top designer.” Aspiring fashionistas are put through a series of challenges—in budget, materials, and style—and the resulting finery is then judged by a panel of industry insiders. During the course of the season I watched, each contender had been supplied with a willowy model on which to hang their outfits. One memorable exception was the episode in which designers were assigned models who look like you and me—that is to say, moderately attractive people for whom adjectives like “svelte” and “leggy” aren’t quite the mots justes. The designers were aghast. Foreheads were slapped, teeth gnashed. A worldview defined by attenuation and abstraction had been upended by that most complex and contradictory of things: real life.
I was reminded of Project Runway upon reading the essays in the catalogue accompanying “Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw.” Curators, conservators, historians, academics, and artists ought to shed light on the topic under discussion, to employ their expertise in a way that elaborates on the work and details its parameters. The folks writing about Joseph E. Yoakum (1891–1972)—well, they did fine. Much of the writing is informative, some of it exhaustive, but, oh!, the hand-wringing. The directors of the host institutions—James Rondeau from the Art Institute of Chicago, Glenn D. Lowry at moma, and The Menil Collection’s Rebecca Rabinow—fret about “the power dynamics” surrounding Yoakum’s initial discovery and subsequent reputation. The artist Faheem Majeed can’t get around Yoakum’s absence of political motivation and lack of community involvement: “I want to believe that Yoakum was aware of the explosion of black art happening all around him.” As for Yoakum’s insistence that friends refer to him as “Nava-joe”: it only furthered “the othering and romanticizing of him as a naive so-called outsider artist.” A wall label at MOMA chides Yoakum for “a lack of understanding of a culture with which he purportedly shared a connection.”
Joseph E. Yoakum, Grizzly Gulch Valley Ohansburg Vermont (n.d.), black ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper, 7-7/8 × 9-7/8″;Gift of the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation, Inc. 1793.2012. Photo: Robert Gerhardt.
To which one can only respond: Mr. Yoakum, rest in peace. Not because he insisted upon a connection with a Native American heritage that may have been specious or, for that matter, his conviction that the king of England was responsible for the cultural foment of the 1960s. Rather, because Yoakum was a man whose opinions, pursuits, and peccadilloes mark him not as a cardboard cut-out mandated to represent this, that, or the other thing, but as an individual. This is, of course, true for the rest of us, and pray that our lives aren’t subjected to the puritanical dissections that are the modus operandi of our professional classes. And that is, in a roundabout way, the pull of Yoakum’s appeal: his unprofessionalism. Creativity wasn’t fostered by art school or a knowledge of history, but, instead, by a sore shoulder. After praying for the pain to subside, Yoakum settled in for the night. Upon waking, the pain was gone. A debt needed to be honored. At the age of seventy-one, Yoakum began drawing as a form of spiritual recompense. “I’m one of those that don’t figure they know everything,” Yoakum told The Chicago Daily News, “and what I do know, I don’t let it make a fool of me.”
Joseph Elmer Yocum—the change in spelling came later—was born around 1890 in Ash Grove, Missouri. Yoakum’s father claimed Cherokee descent; his mother was born a slave. Yoakum worked on his parents’ farm until he ran away to join the circus at age ten. A stint with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Sells Floto Circus had him traveling to a variety of destinations, including China. Yoakum was drafted in 1917 and became a member of the 805th Pioneer Infantry, a black regiment sent to Europe during World War I. His return stateside saw him through two marriages, familial estrangements, and a host of jobs, including in sales, cement, and mining. Yoakum ended up in Chicago, moving into a storefront apartment on the South Side. It was there that he began drawing and exhibiting the resulting pieces in his front window. Passersby noticed them, not least a group of young painters affiliated with the School of the Art Institute. The Hairy Who, as these artists became known, saw a link between their own Pop-fueled grotesqueries and Yoakum’s sloping, upended landscapes. They collected the work, found commercial outlets for Yoakum’s art, and did right by the old man. The drawings were exhibited at a variety of venues, including MOMA. Yoakum died at the age of eighty-one—a month after the Whitney Museum opened a retrospective of his work.
Yoakum worked with modest materials on modest surfaces at a modest scale: ball- and felt-tip pens of varying hues on cheap paper with oddments of colored pencil and watercolor. His landscapes, flat and frontal, are never truly specific, and they often border on the psychedelic. Surfaces were employed as repositories for a clarified set of marks. The inventiveness with which he rendered natural formations is odd and involving. Whether they be the Twin Crater Mts near Lima Peru (undated) or Mt Cloubelle Jamaca of West India (1969), Yoakum’s mountains contort, snuggle, and sometimes roil, their details set out in patterns that are bodily, rather than geological, in character. Trees are stylized in predictable terms, but what they lack in distinctiveness they gain in multiplicity—this is the case, at least, in the best drawings. Yoakum’s imaginative powers left him when drawing houses or people. Would that his undated portrait of Nat King Cole or Beulah Dudley 1st Negro Woman to Win Golff Record in Year 1927 (1970) were imbued with the flair of the pagoda-like UFOs seen in a pair of undated drawings. As with most folk art, Yoakum’s vision is narrow, favoring eccentricity and intensity over scope and depth. As such, one’s interest stifles before reaching the end of “What I Saw.” Still, Yoakum withstands the contemporary spotlight. His spiritual “unfoldings” will survive the machinations of our contentious cultural moment.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the February 2022 edition of The New Criterion.
Installation view of “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; all photos courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The paintings of Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) have never looked quite as good as they do, right now, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It’s worth mulling why that is. I mean, Kandinsky is old news, right? He’s a mainstay in the common consciousness of those who make art their livelihood, and the paintings remain on view at any institution that presumes to untangle the story of Modern art. Given the current vogue for politics and inclusivity, Kandinsky seems an unlikely figure for reappraisal: he’s a tough nut to enlist for this-or-that cause. As for excluding him from the canon–forget it. Dead white male though he may be, Kandinsky is immovable. Granted, his status as the first abstract painter has been called into question. A few years back, the Guggenheim mounted a survey of canvases by Hilma af Klint, the Swedish visionary who, we were told, painted the first abstraction in 1906–beating Kandinsky to the punch by a good decade. An interesting factoid, for sure, but making a horse race of history rarely tells us much about the quality of the work under consideration.
“Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle” was organized by Megan Fontanella, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Modern Art. As a peg on which to hang an exhibition, the circle is a no-brainer. Geometry is prominent throughout Kandinsky’s oeuvre, particularly in the later work wherein the principles of Constructivism and the Bauhaus figure prominently. (Kandinsky taught at the Weimar branch of the Bauhaus for over a decade.) Wise to the allegorical connotations of the circle–suns, moons, planets, like that–Kandinsky employed them as adjuncts of his mystical leanings.
Like many early abstractionists, he was prone to abstruse belief systems, and counted himself a devotee of Theosophy, a species of cross-cultural spirituality founded by the redoubtable Madame Blavatsky. Several Circles (1926), a canvas in which an abundance of circles float within milky patches of black, could well serve as a stoner’s riff on the big bang. Several Circles is a staple of the museum’s collection and, in fact, all the items on display–not only paintings, but watercolors, woodblock prints, and illustrated books–are culled from the Guggenheim’s holdings.
Vasily Kandinsky, Black Lines (Schwarze Linien) (1913), oil on canvas, 51-3/8 x 51-5/8″
Fontanella circles Kandinsky in another way: “Around the Circle” is, in significant part, an iteration of the museum’s original mission plan. Ambling amongst Kandinsky’s kaleidoscopic accumulations of glyphs, squiggles and biomorphs, one is reminded that this tourist-laden fixture of Manhattan’s Upper East Side was once something more marginal and considerably less toney. Founded in 1937, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (as it was then known) was the doing of two people: Solomon R. Guggenheim, a businessman who made a fortune in textiles and mining, and Hilla Rebay, his advisor and muse.
Rebay, a full-time connoisseur and sometime painter, left her native Germany with a purpose: to proselytize on behalf of advanced art. Kandinsky was her poster boy. Rebay had Guggenheim by the ear; Guggenheim took Rebay at her word. The industrialist purchased 150 Kandinskys, making his museum the world’s single largest repository of art by the Russian abstractionist. Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, with its vertiginous warp-and-woof, provides a happy environment not only for Kandinsky’s quixotic ambitions, but those of Guggenheim and Rebay as well.
Fontanella uses the museum’s distinctive architecture in a similarly quixotic way. Ascending the Guggenheim’s ramp–beginning at the beginning, as it were–we notice that Kandinsky’s art is set out in reverse order. Museum-goers start at the end of the artist’s working life, and are led up to his early experiments in Post-Impressionist facture and Symbolist form. The installation, we are informed, “reconsiders Kandinsky’s career . . . as a circular passage through persistent themes centered around the pursuit of one dominant ideal: the impulse for spiritual expression.”
How does this bassackwards approach succeed in its goal? Pretty well, I guess. Kandinsky, Fontanella insists, was ever thus. But the same could be said for any artist of note. The commonalities in Ribbon With Squares (1944), a bopping inventory of cartoonish shapes, and the sloping forms and encompassing spatial sweep of The Golden Sail (1903) aren’t made any more evident by up-ending chronology. It’s enough to make you think that some curators are getting a mite bored with their duties.
Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles (Einige Kreise) (1926), oil on canvas, 55-3/8 x 55-1/4″
Vasily Kandinsky was born in Moscow to a family of prosperous means: his father was a tea merchant, his mother a scion of the upper-class. After studying law, economics and statistics at the University of Moscow, Kandinsky did fieldwork amongst the Zyrians, a tribe located in North-Western Russia. That experience proved transformative. Upon entering the homes of the local population–architecture rich in color and decorative ornament–he “felt surrounded on all sides by painting.” It wasn’t until Kandinsky reached the age of thirty that lightning or, rather, Claude Monet and Richard Wagner struck. Upon encountering the former’s haystack paintings and the latter’s Lohengrin, Kandinsky felt the pull of art–it resounded, he wrote, like a “wild tuba”.
No time was wasted: Kandinsky packed his bags, bought a ticket to Berlin, attended art classes, and the rest is history. A messy history, to put it mildly, one that includes two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, being flagged as “bourgeois” by the Communists, and dismissed as “degenerate” by the Third Reich. Through daunting circumstances, Kandinsky persevered, longing for an art that would meld the natural world with the transcendental.
A nagging question remains: did Kandinsky achieve this synthesis? Is it true, in the artist’s estimation, that “the impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam”? In giving body and form to spiritual yearning, Kandinsky was only partially reinventing the wheel. We don’t know much about our cave-dwelling forebears some 30,000 years ago, but it’s a good bet their paintings of bison, bears and lions were freighted with metaphysical import. And God touching the finger of Adam? Yeah, Michelangelo was wise to art “animated with a spiritual breath.” In jettisoning representation, Kandinsky freed himself to pursue higher modes of knowledge and feeling–or so he thought.
Vasily Kandinsky, Decisive Rose (Entscheidendes Rosa) (1932), oil on canvas, 31-7/8 × 39-3/8″
But representation benefits from recognizability and, with it, a readier sense of empathy. Can a clean arrangement of ideograms placed upon an encompassing field of buttery yellow–that would be Decisive Rose (1932)–deliver anywhere near the same gravitas as Gerard David’s The Crucifixion (ca. 1945), a painting located a few blocks down Fifth Avenue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? A cruciform bereft of symbolic portent and a recognizable context becomes one sign among others. Decisive Rose is a splendid picture, but convert the wicked or unruly it won’t.
Kandinsky’s ballast-free compositions suggest the otherworldly; his palette evinces an aesthetic informed by Russian icons and stained-glass windows. Shape, space, line and color, in-and-of-themselves, can prompt a multitude of reactions. But does Kandinsky strike a chord because he taps into the divine or is it because the pictures are–how to put it, exactly–fun? Turns out, these world-changing abstractions are not a little whimsical and often downright goofy. From the early forays into fairy tale imagery to the not altogether coherent improvisations of his middle-period to the tightly plotted rebuses that ended his days, Kandinsky discovered a guilt-free reason to play. Much in the same way Piet Mondrian rooted himself in some dubious precincts of the occult so that he could boogie-woogie down Broadway, Kandinsky indulged airy-fairy theorizing in order to follow up on some rather promiscuous caprices. When the brush was put to canvas, in so many words, Madame Blavatsky was given the bum’s rush. Take note of the religious heavy breathing surrounding “Around the Circle”, but don’t let it obscure the way in which a troubled man who lived during troubled times discovered the means by which he could let his hair down. In the end, that may be the most spiritual pursuit of all.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This article originally appeared in the January 2022 edition of The Spectator World.
Vasily Kandinsky, Black Lines (Schwarze Linien) (1913), oil on canvas, 51 3/8 x 51 5/8″; courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
“The paintings of Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) have never looked quite as good as they do, right now, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It’s worth mulling why that is.”
At the beginning of each semester, I sit my students down, turn off the classroom lights, and have them watch Why Beauty Matters, a 2009 BBC documentary written and narrated by the late philosopher Roger Scruton. In the video, Scruton ponders the fate of art and architecture since the advent of modernism and offers counsel on how art can reclaim its purchase on the beautiful. The young artists in my class invariably dismiss Scruton’s opinions and ideas: the musings of an old white man—British, too!—are deemed woefully out-of-touch. The observations and prescriptions stated in Why Beauty Matters are open to debate, but students do find themselves taken aback when Scruton speaks about how “creativity is about sharing” and “art is a call to others.” Generosity of spirit is the last thing they expect from the presumably censorious Scruton or, for that matter, contemporary art. Attitudes that advocate for the generative instead of the rote or nihilistic are all but unheard of.
How likely it is that the painter Jennifer Packer is familiar with Scruton, I don’t know. But in an interview with Hans Ulbrich Obrist featured in the catalogue accompanying “Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” on now at the Whitney, the artist evinces a positivity and receptiveness that is, if not Scrutonian, nonetheless rare in a culture as contentious as our own. Packer’s thoughts on portraiture? “The important thing is that . . . [the sitters] are humans worth thinking about beyond their relationship with me.” How about realism and its relationship to pictorial form? “I’m interested in something that runs through the work despite what the image is.” Packer extolls the visual: “Our eye recognizes things more quickly than our brain.” An artist who doesn’t partake in the gratifications of narcissism and places a premium on her métier—can you imagine such a thing? Packer does bandy about acronyms like “BIPOC” as if they were organic extensions of the language, and she gets in the requisite knocks on colonialism. But she makes a point of abjuring the buzz-word “bodies”—an ugly intersectional trope that diminishes individual worth for theoretical grandstanding. Packer even has kind things to say about Clement Greenberg!
Installation view of Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing with Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020. Photograph by Filip Wolak
Well, okay, Packer mentions that she’s interested in Greenberg, but the light she shines is favorable. All in all, the interview reveals a painter who thinks hard about the medium, relishes its malleability, is conversant with history, and privileges the independence of her materials. And here we go beyond the catalogue and its accumulation of words, words, words to enter the exhibition itself. “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing”—the title comes from Ecclesiastes—is among the most heartening displays of contemporary painting seen at a major institution in some time. Packer first appeared at the Whitney as part of the 2019 Biennial; her canvases stood free and clear of the usual postmodernist folderol. Particularly memorable was Jordan (2014), a portrait of the painter Jordan Casteel seated amongst the clutter of an artist’s studio. Packer’s attention to attitude and body language was sharp: Casteel is corporally at ease, mentally not so much. To the right we see a figure in motion, but, then, the entire canvas is abuzz with painterly incident. Using a palette of dusky earth tones along with rough-and-ready brushwork, Packer managed to create a sense of intimacy that, though counterintuitive, was true and earned. The lone holdout in the vaunted Whitney Biennial made a lot of us curious about what else she might be capable of.
Jordan is included in “The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing,” an exhibition of thirty-five paintings and drawings that originated at London’s Serpentine Galleries. The earliest pieces are from 2011, during Packer’s time earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale University; a few portraits, rendered largely in monochrome, date from last year. From the evidence on display, Packer has been on some kind of ride over the past decade—in career trajectory, sure, but also painterly acumen. History gets in the way, of course. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) (2020) is an encompassing swath of unstretched canvas prompted by the death of Breonna Taylor in the spring of 2020. The painting is, to put it gently, acidic. Suffused in a bilious yellow-green, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) depicts a man, clad in boxer shorts, lying on a sofa. The surroundings are mundane—an iron, a fan and cabinetry, things like that—but the mood is meditative. The left portion of the composition is less tangible in its imagery, as Packer engages in some off-the-cuff mark-making. Symbolist portent is seen at top left: a bird soars through a tightly cropped field of azure blue.
Packer is a master of the telling detail. Take note of the right hand, the right foot, and the crook of the neck in Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!): they twitch and reach, the body’s tension having been rendered palpable and with no small amount of nuance. A person reclining, Packer tells us, isn’t necessarily a person at peace. Packer’s knowledge of the human form is estimable, and her ability to hold onto the rigors of likeness and anatomy without sacrificing interpretative brio even more so. The sizable charcoal drawings on view are supple in their transitions of mass, line, and volume, but oils are in Packer’s wheelhouse. The art scene is rife with artists who put brush to canvas as if it were a distasteful chore; Packer is an artist who actually likes her medium. The surface of each picture is a compendium of skepticism and possibility, in which gritty slurs of oil coalesce into sharply focused definition, and then devolve into patches of sinuous linearity. A handful of still-life pictures are less convincing, being greasy and cluttered. The figure is Packer’s compositional anchor— a moral anchor too, perhaps. The painterly freedom to which it gives license is bracing to behold, the depths hinted at impressive. “The Eye Is Not Satisfied” is an uncommon and most welcome exhibition.
(c) 2022 Mario Naves
This review was originally published in the January 2022 edition of The New Criterion.
I’m pleased to have a painting of mine included in “Magic”, a group exhibition at Metaphor Projects in Brooklyn. See the invitation above for more information.
There will be an opening reception this coming Saturday, December 4th, from 5:00-8:00 p.m.
Installation view of “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure”at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
“Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure” has to be the most genteel exhibition of art the Guggenheim has ever mounted. Not the most over-hyped; not the worst. Unlike the museum’s recently concluded show of photographs by Deanna Lawson, “Light’s New Measure” avoids overt politics. Nor does it place an emphasis on pictorial innovation like the concurrent show devoted to the pioneering abstractionist Vasily Kandinsky. The Adnan exhibition is just . . . mild. There’s no sin in that. Were contemporary artists inclined more toward gentility than provocation we might be better off. And Adnan’s art—the paintings, in particular; the tapestries, ditto; the videos, not at all—bears suitable merit to invite pause. Pause over what, you might ask? The vagaries of reputation, for one; the primacy of the painted mark, for another. The museum touts Adnan’s work as “an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world”—boilerplate PR, you might say, but it’s to the credit of Adnan’s color-saturated pictures that they capture some of that optimism.
Occupying the bottom two rungs of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, “Light’s New Measure” is the first of three exhibitions organized in conjunction with the aforementioned “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle,” an array of paintings and works on paper culled from the permanent collection. (The other shows will feature the artists Jennie C. Jones and Cecilia Vicuña.) Katherine Brinson, the Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art, and Lauren Hinkson, an associate curator, have set out to establish commonalities between Adnan and Kandinsky, painters who “explore the potential of abstract form.” Locating a shared purpose between artists living and dead is to be applauded, particularly at a cultural moment in which history is vilified or distorted—that is, when it’s acknowledged at all. Kandinsky would have approved of Adnan’s likening abstraction to music—Kandinsky insisted, after all, that color could convey sound—as well as the goal of creating “depth of meaning that has nothing to do with words.” Great minds think alike, right?
Etel Adnan, Untitled (1983), 0il on canvas, 29 × 29 in. (73.7 × 73.7 cm); courtesy Private Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Adnan’s partner, the sculptor Simone Fattal, extols the work as being reminiscent of icons or talismans, intimating that the paintings embody visionary longings. The pairing with Kandinsky would seem to reinforce the point. At the risk of indulging in semantic nitpickery, let me say that the paintings featured in “Light’s New Measure” aren’t talismanic or iconic. They’re grounded and concrete, predicated, as they are, on specific motifs and spatial relationships gleaned from observed experience. The basis for several of the pictures is Mount Tamalpais, a distinctive peak in the Marin Hills near Adnan’s home in Sausalito, California. Divining mystical portent from the landscape is an age-old pursuit. But notwithstanding some coloristic liberties, Adnan is less a mystic and something closer to a classicist. Structure is her bread and butter. She’s more in the spirit of Nicolas Poussin and Georges Seurat than Caspar David Friedrich or George Inness. A cynic might be forgiven for wondering if some of this supernatural heavy-breathing is an attempt to poach upon the afterglow of Hilma af Klint—the subject of a recent and hugely popular exhibition at the Guggenheim. Now there was a visionary. Adnan’s lack of hocus pocus is, in point of comparison, straight talk. Strong-arming the paintings in the service of their antithesis is the curatorial equivalent of fake news.
Adnan has lived life as a true multiculturalist. She was born in Beirut in 1925. Her father was a Syrian-born military officer in the Ottoman Empire and a non-practicing Muslim, her mother a practicing member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Adnan learned Turkish and Greek at home; in school, she was taught French. After studying philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, Adnan traveled to the United States to attend Berkeley and Harvard. After teaching at Dominican University of California from 1958 to 1972, Adnan returned to Lebanon to work as a journalist. She fled to Paris at the onset of the Civil War. That conflict served as backdrop for Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, a novel based on Marie Rose Boulos, a Syrian social worker who was executed by the Christian militia. The book went on to win a prize from the Association de solidarité franco-arabe but remains Adnan’s only prose work. Poetry is her primary literary focus. Included at the Guggenheim is Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut (1968), an accordion book that features the title poem as well as a surrounding array of watercolor drawings. “I write what I see,” the artist has stated, and “paint what I am.”
Etel Adnan, Mount Tamalpais (1970/2017), wool tapestry, 63 x 78¾”; courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
And what is Adnan? A ninety-six-year-old dab hand at buttery surfaces and ramshackle geometries, a genial temperament with a tart and sunny palette. Her canvases are small and simple: a few snug forms cobbled together and animated by gently bumptious rhythms. Adnan’s chock-a-block shapes and rich impasto have earned comparisons to Nicolas de Staël; her nudgy insistence on contour recalls Serge Poliakoff. A few years back, Adnan’s art was exhibited alongside that of Paul Klee—a pairing that is, on the whole, more propitious given Adnan’s off-kilter compositions and quirky distillations of shape. An untitled canvas from 1983—a centrifugal composition of staccato marks punctuated by cool greens and anchored by a clarifying white—is Adnan at her most engaging. When she settles for less—a line here, a circle there, a cursory swipe of pigment—the results are not more. The attendant tapestries benefit from an increase in scale, and, with that, greater complexity and dynamism. It’s worth mulling over whether collaboration—in this case, with various weavers—benefits a poet for whom painting is a happy sideline. Isolation can, after all, be limiting. Let’s hope Adnan invites more guests to the studio in the coming years. In the meantime, “Light’s New Measure” provides an amiable enough entry into one of the myriad outskirts of contemporary culture.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This review appeared in the December 2021 edition of The New Criterion.
Suzanne Valadon, Nude Sitting on a Sofa (1916), oil on canvas, 32-1/16 x 23-3/4″; courtesy The Weisman & Michel Collection
The woman christened Marie-Clémentine Valadon (1865–1938) earned a number of monikers, both during her lifetime and subsequent to it. History remembers her as Suzanne—a reference to the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders made by her sometimes lover Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Valadon, you see, began her career modeling for old men like Auguste Renoir and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Edgar Degas, a lifelong friend of Valadon and collector of her art, gave her the nickname “terrible Maria.” The historian Catherine Hewitt titled her 2017 biography of Valadon Renoir’s Dancer, based on Valadon’s having posed for Renoir’s signature canvas, Dance at Bougival (1883). The journalist June Rose referred to the artist as “The Mistress of Montmartre” in recognition of Valadon’s freewheeling lifestyle. The Barnes Foundation, which has mounted the first U.S. retrospective devoted to Valadon, is heralding her as a model and painter, but also as a rebel.
“Model, Painter, Rebel” includes close to sixty works, the majority of them oil on canvas, along with a handful of drawings and prints. The pieces we encounter upon entering the exhibition aren’t by Valadon, but, rather, feature her as subject. Paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Santiago Rusiñol, Jean Eugène Clary, and Gustav Wertheimer—whose Kiss of the Siren (1882) starts things off with impressive bluster—do much to establish Valadon as an integral presence in the Parisian art scene. Her biographical details are rich and varied and, given Valadon’s tendency for the fanciful, best taken with a degree of skepticism. Her formal education was minimal: she started working at the age of eleven to support her mother and sister. She joined the circus as an acrobat only to be sidelined by an injury. Around 1885, Valadon found employment as an artist’s model and, with it, a measure of financial stability. She wasn’t a passive presence in the studio. Valadon brought energy and enthusiasm to her poses; she also kept an eye on the what and how of art-making. Persistence and ambition led Valadon to become an artist of some notoriety and considerable success. Degas touted the self-taught painter as “one of us.” Given the source, that’s no small praise.
Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room (La chambre bleue) (1923), oil on canvas, 35-7⁄16 × 45-11⁄16″; Courtesy Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Limoges, State Purchase, 1924
The showpiece of “Model, Artist, Rebel” is The Blue Room (1923), a portrait of a clothed, reclining woman that serves as a tribute, of sorts, to Manet’s Olympia (1863). Like Manet’s consort, Valadon’s model comes across as blunt and aggressive, though less because of a one-on-one confrontation—the woman in The Blue Room looks away from the viewer, lost in a moment’s distraction—than in material physicality and coloristic punch. Clad in green-striped pajama bottoms and a pink halter top, the woman gives off a prole vibe, what with a cigarette cocked in her mouth and hands whose muscularity evinces hard labor. Valadon preferred models who were not Apollonian ideals. No sleek odalisque is our heroine, especially given the steadfastness with which Valadon’s brush pays heed to convex forms and optical weight. Couched within a deep-blue field of floral patterning and set against a backdrop of earth-toned hash marks, The Blue Room nods to Matisse and Gauguin, and, in some regards, is seriously au courant. You want body positivity and gender fluidity? Well, here you go. The reason we can entertain such notions is that Valadon the painter is in bravura form here. Would we be willing to do so were that not the case?
Suzanne Valadon, Black Venus (Vénus noire) (1919), oil on canvas, 63 × 38-3⁄16″; courtesy Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Menton, Gift of M. Charles Wakefield-Mori, 1939
As a marketable term, “rebel” is likely to generate some buzz and contains more than a modicum of truth—particularly given Valadon’s role in the demimonde and, eventually, the avant-garde. Certainly, it’s preferable to “racist”—which is a suggestion that figures in the literature attending “Model, Painter, Rebel.” The scholars participating in the catalogue roundtable do make a point of stating that “we cannot blanketly assume that Valadon was a racist.” Which doesn’t prevent them from “blanketly” assuming that Valadon was deeply suspect in terms of racial matters. The impetus for the discussion is Black Venus (1919), a close-to-life-size portrait of a nude woman of African descent. The model’s name has been lost to history, but Valadon worked with her on a number of occasions: at the Barnes, Seated Woman Holding an Apple (1919), another depiction of the same model, is displayed near Black Venus. Reading through the essays and wall texts accompanying the show, I became certain that Valadon’s sin was not racism—an accusation for which there is no hard evidence—but that she didn’t have a crystal ball into the exacting standards established here in the twenty-first century. Albert C. Barnes, the museum’s founder, is similarly taken to task for a lack of feminist bona fides in not collecting Valadon’s paintings—concentrating, as he did, on the work of her son, Maurice Utrillo. What’s largely absent from all of this pontificating is a discussion of whether Valadon was any good as an artist.
The works comprising the remainder of the show have difficulty matching the authority of The Blue Room or, for that matter, Black Venus. Though Valadon gleaned important lessons from mentors and peers, her paintings are, on the whole, chock-a-block in composition and halting in their navigation of pictorial space. Even with an enduring dedication to figuration, Valadon never fully mastered the human form. Like Gauguin and Van Gogh, she was a ham-handed draftsman with a gift for color, facture, and brio. Unlike her friend Amedeo Modigliani, Valadon didn’t synthesize stylistic tics within cohesive compositional structures. There are, to be sure, arresting images on view—my vote goes to the dour Marie Coca and her Daughter Gilberte (1913) as best in show, with the resplendent Nude Sitting on a Sofa (1916) a close second. What a contemporary audience will make of Valadon’s efforts remains to be seen. One gallerygoer, upon exiting “Model, Painter, Rebel” on the afternoon I visited the Barnes, remarked to a friend: “Now let’s go to the permanent collection and see some real painters.” This remark seems a mite harsh for an exhibition that does a solid job of introducing us to a singular character and her vital relationship to early modernism. For those interested in the quiddities of that heady era, a trip to Philadelphia should be in the cards. And, yes, there is the permanent collection.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This review was originally published in the November 2021 edition of The New Criterion.
Marisa S. White, Calling Up a Storm (2014), archival print on Canson PrintMaKing Rag paper, 10 x 10″; all images courtesy of Alex Ferrone Gallery
Surrealism, going on a 100-years old now, is as much a period style as any other art movement. Its antecedents–the theories of Sigmund Freud and a Europe devastated by war, in particular–are established to the point of being common knowledge. But surrealism with a small “s”–that is to say, a phenomenon definable not as a distinct style, but as an embodiment of invented worlds–has been with us for centuries. In the visual arts, any number of figures–Bosch, Böcklin, Fuseli and Arcimboldo, to name a few–dealt with images that had no direct equivalent in the observed world. Dreams, in their wildness, have been with us since Day One. Artists haven’t been far behind. Much of the time, they’ve been ahead.
Richard Aardsma, Palm Beach Diner (2021), archival pigment on Moa Entrada Rag Natural fine art paper, 14-1/2 x 14″
“Fictional Narratives”, a three-person exhibition curated by Alex Ferrone, asks the question: what might the surreal look like, here, in the twenty-first century? Technology plays a significant role in the answer. Marisa S. White, Richard Aardsma and Laura Dodson work with photography, but aren’t photographers per se. Their imagery is filtered through the camera’s lens, and subsequently manipulated by digital means. The documentary or the anecdotal—photography’s presumed stock-in-trade–is embellished through nuances in texture, light and juxtapositions of form that could not have been imagined by montage artists tinkering in their darkrooms during the last century. White’s poetic meditations on femininity and evolution, Aardsma’s quixotic mash-ups of retro Americana, and Dodson’s layered orchestrations of discarded snapshots and memorabilia are, as feats of technical acumen, seamless and even painterly. Their images–sometimes kaleidoscopic, invariably enigmatic–are rendered tangible, the stuff of here-and-now. It’s worth remembering that surrealism doesn’t deny the real so much as unmask and amplify it. And so it is with these artists.
Laura Dodson, It Was (2017), Archival pigment print (Hahnemuehle 100% Photo Rag Sating paper), 20-3/4 x 18-3/4″
The melding of fact and fantasy–the merging of materials and imagination, methodology and abandon–is, of course, an inherent part of the creative process. In White’s Calling Upon a Storm (2014), we see the natural world operating with a logic and precision that creates, and then sustains, an almost mystical lyricism. The ghostly zeppelin seen in the distance of Aardsma’s truck-stop diorama, Palm Springs Diner (2021)? It’s a harbinger from another time and place. In It Was (2017), Dodson suffuses high fashion within Renaissance abundance to create a talisman of unsettling effect and erotic undercurrent. In each case, the artist choreographs a set of motifs that are indicative of an idiosyncratic vision, but also, and not least, a world worth reckoning with. “Fictional Narratives” underscores the ubiquity of the dreamlike, and the pleasures to be gleaned from its caprices.
An online gallery talk with the artists from the “Fictional Narratives” exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 15th at 6:00 p.m EDT. Clear here to register.
Installation photo of “Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities” @ The Morgan Library Museum
“Painting is such an ordinary thing.” That was my initial observation upon entering the mid-career survey of the Pakistan-born artist Shahzia Sikander. This thought occurred without my having registered the “extraordinary” claim found in the exhibition title. As it turns out, the Morgan is right. Sikander is an extraordinary—or, at least, atypical—artist: a miniaturist in an age of multimedia showpieces; a painter during a time when art is embracing the virtual when it isn’t dominating a lot of square footage. Sikander has an uphill row to hoe in a culture of post-everything abundance. It’s understandable that an artist given to virtuosic fantasies that are hardly bigger than a sheet of printer paper should feel the need to make some kind of splash. Take the opening gambit of “Extraordinary Realities”: it isn’t a painting, but a sizable bronze sculpture reiterating motifs found in the paintings. The exhibition centerpiece is a floor-to-ceiling, back-to-front arrangement of paper, fabric, and ideograms. Sikander isn’t the first painter to capitulate to the installation ethos; it’s a run-of-the-mill tack. Do such nods to theatricality prompt genuine engagement with the accompanying pictures? That’s the nagging question.
An additional observation prompted by “Extraordinary Realities” goes to the wall labels accompanying Sikander’s paintings. Text has long been an adjunct to displays of contemporary art. “Didactics,” as they are known in the trade, are touted as an educational tool that provides context for audiences in need of a hand. The truth is that most contemporary art can’t be fathomed without a cheat sheet. Concept is king. The visual? A necessary evil when it isn’t nugatory. Sikander isn’t a conceptual artist, but she fits within the frame-work of an age in which Conceptualism is the smog-like oxygen we all breathe. Consequently, the Morgan show is festooned with didactics—copious blocks of verbiage that, in the immortal locution of Ricky Ricardo, ’splain the images on view. And, boy, are the images ’splained hard. The requisite hot buttons are pushed. Let’s reel them off together, shall we? Colonialism, gender, race, class, globalism, patriarchy, and—catch your breath!—“narratives [that] shatter expected hierarchies, norms, and stereotypes.”
Shahzia Sikander, The Many Faces of Islam (1997-1999), dry pigment, water color, tea wash, gold leaf on wasli paper, 14 x 18″; courtey of The Morgan Library Museum
Given this run of topics, it’s a wonder the museum extols Sikander’s work as “open-ended.” Can there be any room left for interpretation? The aforementioned subjects are fair game for artistic exploration, but what might happen if someone stole into the museum during the wee hours and removed the wall labels? Would an impartial viewer ascertain the true meaning of the rust-red stain obscuring Separate Working Things I (1993–95)—an image rendered in the manner of Mughal painting, a type of picture-making with roots in sixteenth-century Persia? Sikander’s superimposed gesture, we are informed, “shatters the trope of ‘ideal love’ . . . [becoming] the site for rupture, a destabilizing of the motif of heterosexual love itself.” Hermann Rorschach notwithstanding, that’s a lot to ask from a blot. With time, Sikander’s agglomerations of characters and symbols became less vague and more selective, even if one is hard-pressed to say they gained in clarity. There are exceptions: The Many Faces of Islam (1999) is a straightforward accounting of Muslim leaders, including Benazir Bhutto, Hanan Ashrawi, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein. The piece was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. Sometimes an editorial nudge can help an artist dot her i’s and cross her t’s.
Truth to tell, Sikander’s ambitions are sizable. Any artist worth her salt works within the parameters of a given tradition even as she explores how to question, broaden, and elaborate upon them. Admittedly, some traditions are more hidebound than others. Sikander raised eyebrows at the National College of the Arts in Lahore when she set out to pursue miniature painting. Members of the administration, as well as her peers, actively discouraged Sikander from doing so. Shrugging off the naysayers, she hitched her pedagogical lot with Bashir Ahmad, a figurative miniaturist of no small repute. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Sikander praises Ahmad for instilling “tradition at a deeply visceral level” and insisting on the primacy of skill and technique. The Scroll (1989–90), Sikander’s undergraduate thesis project, is on display at the Morgan; good luck trying to look at it. Even at the sparsely attended press preview, visitors crowded around the piece, attempting to unravel its cinematic flow and taking pleasure in its meticulously crafted minutiae. The Scroll is an astonishing accomplishment for a twenty-year-old artist. It would be an astonishing accomplishment for an artist of any age.
Shahzia Sikander, Detail of The Scroll (1989-90), watercolor, gouache, tea wash, gold leaf on wasli paper, 14 x 67″; courtesy The Morgan Library Museum
Sikander left Pakistan to pursue graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design—a shift in geographical context that was, in the artist’s estimation, a “pleasing dislocation.” (Subsequent stopovers were made in Glasgow and Houston; ultimately, New York City became home.) “Dislocation” is, in fact, the predominant theme of Sikander’s work. During the ensuing years, obeisance to craft remained a mainstay, as did an abiding stylistic grounding—the pictures never abandon their miniaturist origins. The compositions, however, took a turn, becoming increasingly fragmented and collage-like in their overlays of imagery. Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off—the title of a handsome 1998 accumulation of marks and materials—sums up the trajectory. The pictures are increasingly global in reach, with Sikander appropriating motifs from Botticelli, Greek mythology, Hindu iconography, Renaissance manuscripts, and the Texas art scene. All of which point to the vagaries of a full life lived by one woman—a woman of envious talents and significant accomplishment. Still, it’s worth mulling if that’s enough. Do the paintings pique our attention because, or in spite, of their cross-cultural markers? The challenge for any artist is to rise above the particular—the anecdotal and insular, the temporary and meretricious. “Extraordinary Realities” is testament to the contortions, artistic and otherwise, that can go into that vexing enterprise.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This review was originally published the September 2021 issue of The New Criterion.
Alice Neel, Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978), oil on canvas, 57 3/4 × 38″. Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Let’s talk real estate. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has allocated the same amount of space to the American painter Alice Neel (1900–84) as it did for the art and artifacts of Byzantium; the reign of Hatshepsut, queen and, later, pharaoh of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt; two outlays of tapestries from medieval and Renaissance Europe; and a career-spanning exhibition of the French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. However you might esteem the subjects explored in these shows (I’m fairly agnostic on Delacroix, myself), there is little doubt that each body of work merited the grand treatment, that they are subjects worthy of sweeping scholarly focus. But what about a second-tier talent whose aesthetic purview was nowhere near as encompassing as her meanness of spirit? Museums have galleries set aside for temporary exhibitions, and those galleries need to be filled. Square footage, when doled out by an important institution, connotes prestige. “Alice Neel: People Come First” will have repercussions. Notice must be paid.
Not that Neel’s work has been without an audience in the decades since her death; nor did Neel suffer inattention during her working life. Anyone invited to sit and chat with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show had, in one way or another, achieved a notoriety rare in American culture. For a visual artist, this kind of recognition—that is to say, the imprimatur of mainstream media—is all but unheard of. Neel’s fame came relatively late. As with most artists, she sacrificed much in terms of comfort and security to pursue her work. Neel did possess that most vital of traits: tenacity. Where would she have been without it? Painters who worked figuratively during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism had a tough go of it; the advent of neo-Dadaism didn’t exactly provide an accommodating context for an artist taken with the human condition and its many foibles (though Neel did locate a friendly toehold within the irony-laden precincts of Pop Art). Gumption propelled Neel’s art, as did gall. Johnny Carson couldn’t help but bestow his favors on the feisty old lady and her crazy pictures.
Alice Neel on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
Longevity became Neel; flattery followed on its heels. Few of us get to hear ourselves described as the best at anything. Neel lived to hear herself pegged as “the best portrait painter of the twentieth century.” Given her renowned irascibility, she likely cast a skeptical eye on the sobriquet, knowing full well how wheels are greased in even the most outré precincts of the art world. What, then, would the self-described “Mother Hubbard” make of the claims surrounding “People Come First”? The Met is, after all, touting Neel as “one of the century’s most radical painters.” What century might that be? Before you can say “champion of social justice”—which the museum does, in fact, say—you’ll know the aforementioned century is the current one, despite her death in the 1980s. “In an era of record income inequality, resurgent white nationalism, and xenophobia, Neel’s painterly advocacy of humanity in its multiracial and multicultural manifestations, her inclusive, democratic spirit, and her commitment to social justice all serve to enhance her posthumous reputation, making her art seem all the more relevant, even urgent.” Enter Alice Neel, Patron Marm of All That Is Woke.
None of which is surprising. Diktats and notions that were once the purview of a select group of academics have become part and parcel of everyday life. Joe and Jane Lunchbox are conversant, nowadays, with “hetero-normativity,” “cultural appropriation,” and “privilege.” Anyone who has cracked open an exhibition catalogue in recent years, or cherry-picked through any number of specialized journals, will recognize the type of writing that strong-arms art into the service of political fashion. Try taking a tipple each time the words “justice” or “identity” pop up in the essays and wall labels accompanying the Met show—inebriation will be achieved swiftly. Making light of the strained verbiage typical of our time shouldn’t mitigate its cumulative effect. Reading about Neel’s “female-lived experience,” the “gendered struggles” of her subjects, and the “intersubjectivity” of the resulting portraits is to realize how over-intellectualized argot can become run-of-the-mill. It’s depressing, and a disservice to the liberating capacities of art. Listen to Neel, during the advent of Feminism, tell it: “When I was in my studio, I didn’t give a damn what sex I was . . . I thought art is art.” Neel didn’t suffer ideological grandstanding gladly. Why subject her work to it?
Neel hailed from Merion Square, Pennsylvania, the fourth of five children born to Alice Concross Hartley and George Washington Neel, an accountant by trade. Neel attended the Philadelphia School for Women, purposely setting out to avoid the Impressionist-influenced curriculum fostered at the better-known Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. (Even at a young age, Neel knew her own mind.) While studying painting and drawing, she met and later married the artist Carlos Enriquez, a Cuban émigré of some means. The couple moved to Havana, but the relationship proved rocky. Enriquez left the marriage, taking the couple’s daughter with him. Neel subsequently had a nervous breakdown and was committed to the suicide ward of Philadelphia General Hospital. After having been placed in the care of her mother and father, Neel ended up in New York City, spending a formative period living and working in Spanish Harlem. She moved to Greenwich Village—a neighborhood Neel dismissed as “honky tonk”—and settled on the Upper West Side. Along the way, she worked for the WPA, fellow-traveled with Communist culturati, took a host of often troublesome lovers, and became a fixture of the New York art scene.
Alice Neel, Two Girls, Spanish Harlem (1959), oil on canvas, 30 x 25″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Barbara Lee
“People Come First” begins with a gambit that is partly a dare and definitely a grabber. Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978) portrays a nude woman toward the end of her term. The sitter, scaled close to life-size, is wedged between the top and bottom edges of the canvas. Evans confronts us with an expression that is both uninhibited and wooden—a mask that portends vulnerability. The posture is rigid, the belly alarmingly convex. Evans appears to be gripping the yellow footstool upon which she’s seated. Neel’s rendering of the hands and arms is awkward, and their tensions unclear. Does Evans hold on because the incipient responsibilities of motherhood are pressing upon her consciousness? Or is it because the floor tilts at an angle parallel to the picture plane? A mirror in the upper right hand of the picture reflects a different woman—or so it seems, anyway; the likeness is iffy. The mirror is, in and of itself, problematic: it’s out of sync with the overall composition. The more time spent with Margaret Evans Pregnant the more its glitches are revealed. Art should withstand the long look, not crumble beneath it.
All of which will strike fans of Neel as moot. Didn’t you read the exhibition title? People come first. “Paint your power,” the catalogue intones, “paint your politics.” In the introductory essay, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey—who, along with the curatorial assistant Brinda Kumar, organized the Met show—write of how “Neel embraced imperfection as intrinsic to the human condition” and how “we are wrong to assume perfection from her.” Neel’s lack of perfection, in this circumstance, lies in her independence as an individual and as an intellect. (Neel had some choice opinions that wouldn’t withstand the puritanical dictates of our internet overlords.) Forget, for a moment, the curators’ backdoor clarion call for conformity. What might be said about Neel as a painter—as a person involved in an art form with its own distinct history and attributes? It’s worth reiterating that a painting, before it is anything else, is a painting. Once that essential prerequisite has been engaged—once it has been complicated, questioned, and brought to resolution—viewers can move on to the work’s “embedded code[s]” and “innuendo.” Prioritizing theory over matter and political intent over aesthetic fact are convenient means for setting aside critical distinctions. Righteous obfuscation is no substitute for the real thing.
After the ice-breaker that is Margaret Evans Pregnant, the exhibition stumbles precipitously with a showcase of Neel’s early forays into Social Realism. Forever down with the proletariat, Neel depicted protest marches, dock workers, sundry members of the intelligentsia, and unsung corners of the urban landscape with an earnestness that is leaden when it’s not amateurish. Was there an unwritten law at the time that political art had to be awash in that distinctive and deadening brown? If so, Neel’s palette followed suit. Works-on-paper depicting vignettes of bohemian domesticity are preferable in their relative lightness of touch, though they are marred by an uncertain handle on caricature. Max Beckmann looks to have been an influence, along with Chaïm Soutine, the Soyer brothers, and van Gogh. Neel jettisoned the somber affectations of her generation round about the mid-1950s— particularly as she took increased notice of her neighbors in El Barrio. Georgie Acre No. 2 (1955) and, especially, Two Girls, Spanish Harlem (1959) signal a welcome shift—the everyday awakening potentialities of form. Neel’s chromatic range gained in brightness, her brushwork speed and vigor, and the compositions a measure of clarity or, if you prefer, bluntness.
Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965), oil on canvas, 60 x 40″; courtesy COMMA Foundation, Belgium
Neel’s signature attribute is unquestioned immediacy—you know: first try, best try. Eschewing preparatory drawings, she painted directly on the canvas and from direct observation. Beginning with a wiry under-drawing, usually keyed to a cool variation of blue, Neel applied flattened patchworks of pigment, juxtaposing warm and cool tonalities and surfaces that are constitutionally resistant to sensuality. Neel’s brusque treatment of the surroundings in which her subjects are ensconced is cursory-bordering-on-negligent, but it can be effective. The settee in Andy Warhol (1970) or the chaise longue upon which the subject of Pregnant Woman (1971) reclines are marvels of bare-bones delineation. Both pictures are, in their own flagrant way, arresting. The tension between painted form and diagrammatic notation is as rude as it wants to be, and adroitly choreographed. Over the long haul, however, Neel’s pictorial flourishes flatten the expressive intent of her art. She puts one in mind of Francis Bacon—another semi-Expressionist swallowed whole by exquisitely cultivated mannerisms. By the time we reach Black Draftee (James Hunter) (1965), a canvas displayed toward the back end of the exhibition, we are grateful to see Neel not take up her brush all that much.
Black Draftee (James Hunter) would make a striking centerpiece for a more concise and, I would argue, better exhibition. As it is, “People Come First” oversells Neel’s achievement and, in particular, her vaunted humanism. Really, who does come first? Notwithstanding an atypical and often eccentric range of sitters, Neel doesn’t do much plumbing of character. Miserabilist superficiality was her gig. There are exceptions: artists like Benny Andrews, Geoffrey Hendricks, and (not included at the Met) Faith Ringgold make themselves felt, as does Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978–79), a painting of Neel’s son in which he evinces an understandable level of wariness. Even then, it’s the Corporation that is Neel’s starting point; Richard is there as a type. And so it goes: New Yorkers, in all their multiplicity, are rendered goggle-eyed, pasty-skinned, and splayed like butterflies in a curio cabinet. Whatever the initial attraction or relationship between sitter and artist, the resulting paintings are peculiarly neutral in affect. They exist, primarily, as emblems of Neel’s nervy savoir-faire. Denizens of twenty-first century-America shouldn’t mistake representation for “allyship” or “anarchic humanity” for significant art. There are better exemplars for our fractious age than a painter endowed with a cruel and unlovely gift.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This review originally appeared in the June 2021 edition of The New Criterion.
Installation photo of “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor” at The Museum of Modern Art; courtesy MOMA/photo by Robert Gerhardt
When notice of “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented” arrived in my inbox, I gave the e-mail a cursory scan and promptly deposited it in my trash folder. Knowing that curators have a tendency to overlay contemporary mores onto historical precedent, I feared this MOMA show would have “Woke” stamped all over it. The exhibition title reminded me of the initial wave of political correctness some thirty years ago. At that time, “cultural worker” had been mooted as a replacement for the word “artist”—the latter carrying with it the gamey stench of elitism. Starry-eyed soul that I am, I thought “cultural worker” had long been consigned to the circular file of post-Marxist assaults on the language. A quick surf of the internet proved otherwise: “cultural worker” has become part of the lingua franca for the enlightened among us. There is, I learned, an organization dubbed Cultural Workers Organize—its stated mission being the fomentation of “collective responses to precarity.” It’s a hop, skip, and click from this kind of thing to engineers, agitators, and constructors.
“Precarity” was, in fact, my state of mind when I visited MOMA and wandered into “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor.” The first thing to be read on the introductory wall text is that “the title ‘artist’ is an insult.” The exhibition catalogue goes further, including what appears to be a snippet of free verse: “No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians . . . no more, no more, no more, nothing, nothing, nothing.” The “artist-proletarian,” we are duly informed, will usher in “the language of the masses, not the individual.” Should one have the stomach for pronuciamentos of this sort, they can be readily gleaned from any number of Twitter feeds, newspapers, and academic journals. The aforementioned quotes? They come not from a usual suspect like The New York Times, but from Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Louis Aragon, and Raoul Hausmann. Troublemakers all, for a time anyway, and integral figures—dare one say “artists”?—during a signal moment in twentieth-century art. Those with a sense of historical sweep will recognize the names. Or maybe not. Cultural memory ain’t what it used to be. Which is a significant reason “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor” proves to be a noteworthy event.
Valentina Kulagina, Maquette for We Are Building (Stroim) (1929), cut-and-pasted printed and painted paper, sandpaper, gouache, and pencil on paper, 22 5/8 × 14 1/4″; courtesy MOMA
The exhibition serves as a showcase for the museum’s 2018 acquisition of some three hundred works on paper from the collection of Merrill C. Berman, a financial advisor with a predilection for the graphic arts. The curatorial focus is on the international avant-garde—specifically, how it responded to and was shaped by historical events, chief among them World War I and the devastation of Europe, along with the Russian Revolution. The ascendance of mass media is equally attended to, as is its re-imagining by designers whose artistic agenda was no less radical than their politics. As such, “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor” errs on the side of reproducible materials. It contains a handful of paintings, sculptures, and industrial objects; a sampling of collages; and an abundance of brash and propulsive posters—maybe too abundant. The compositional strategies of the Russian Constructivists, as well as those of their followers, were contrived to arrest the passersby’s attention when encountered at a magazine kiosk or on a city wall. As museum pieces, one bullying tract on the Socialist Offensive followed by another (and another) tends to work against one’s powers of concentration. Artifacts this loud need space and context in which to echo. The installation at MOMA muffles their audacity.
“Engineer, Agitator, Constructor” begins with Russian Constructivism, touching upon its roots in Suprematism with figures like Kazimir Malevich and Lyubov Popova, and then glances upon Dadaism and Neo-Plasticism. Collage and photo-montage are given prominence, as they betoken not only the mixing of mediums, but a concomitant blurring of artistic disciplines. Organized around a discrete set of themes, the exhibition makes a telling shift from subsections titled “Artist as Agitator” and “Activating Data” to “Artist as Adman” and “An Expert in Publicity.” That design innovations predicated on the theories of Karl Marx would funnel their way up—or, depending on how one looks at these things, down—to Madison Avenue is a hindsight rich in irony. Still, the heady atmosphere of “agitation–propaganda” dominates, and the confluence of pictorial innovation and extremist politics is emphasized. In that regard, the MOMA show engenders consternation. The so-called Communist Experiment was an epic catastrophe. Can one commend artists who were in thrall to its illusions for pictorial know-how without making a hash of history?
Solomon Telingater, Untitled (1929), cut-and-pasted printed and painted paper on paper with gouache and pencil, 17-11/16 × 15″; courtesy MOMA
Not a few engineers, agitators, and constructors found themselves crushed by those they sought to lionize. Gustav Klutsis, a gift- ed artist hailing from Latvia and a Stalinist through and through, was summarily executed as “an enemy of the state” in 1938. (No utopian deed, it seems, goes unpunished.) Klutsis’s work is given a prominent berth at MOMA, as are other talents whose work merits consideration, including Natalia Pinus, Nikol Sedelnikov, Elena Semenova, Varvara Stepanova, Wladyslaw Strzemiński, and Valentina Kulagina, but not Lydia Naumova, whose posters commemorating the International Trade Union privilege bureaucratic didactics over visual legibility. The Tbilisi-born Solomon Telingater is a find—his nimble employment of collage brings a rare and welcome wit to the proceedings. Humor, albeit largely unintentional, figures into Bart van der Leck’s studies for an ad campaign commissioned by Delft Salad Oil. Van der Leck applied de Stijl principles to the image of a mustachioed gentleman surrounded by bottles of salad dressing. The corporate overlords were not amused by the resulting array of dancing geometric shapes. Van der Leck lost the job. The moral? Revolutionary impulses will only get you so far—the real world is obstinate in that way. This sobering lesson may not be the starting point of this ambitious and instructive exhibition, but it is the finish line for those with the eyes to see it.
(c) 2021 Mario Naves
This article originally appeared in the March 2021 edition of The New Criterion.
Mernet Larsen, Deliverance (after El Lissitzky) (2020), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 64-1/2 x 52-1/4″; photo courtesy of James Cohan Gallery * * *
“In their lack of a gravitational hub, the paintings touch on the hallucinogenic. Truth be told, their wibble-and-wobble can try the patience of the eye—and stomach. That our attention and equilibrium aren’t upset is testament to how thoroughly Larsen is in control of compositional vectors. Dislocated as they may be, the pictures hold tight. A line is trod between chaos and calm, rectitude and ping-pong. Incongruity is vital to Larsen’s vision, and she makes something of it.”
Peter Saul, Art Critic Suicide (1996), acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 66 x 84-1/4″; courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York * * *
“Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment” is a disappointment in that it omits my favorite Saul painting. Let me amend that: “favorite” is a strong word. Art Critic Suicide (1996) has proven memorable because of the response elicited from its subjects: Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s longtime art critic; and Hilton Kramer, the one-time critic for The New York Times and co-founder of The New Criterion. In the painting, both men are rendered with cartoonish hyperbole and set awash in a garish purple-pink, each firing not one, but two guns into his respective temple. In his review of this New Museum show, Schjeldahl mentioned his surprise at coming upon the painting some years back—in particular, having been paired with “an intellectual antagonist of mine.” This irony won’t be lost on anyone conversant with contemporary art criticism. It certainly wasn’t lost on Hilton. “Exactly why we should be linked for the honor of serving as Mr. Saul’s principal villains is a matter I can only guess at,” he wrote in The New York Observer in the year 2000. The artist is seen at the bottom of the canvas, a pimply faced homunculus gleeful at the turn of events. “Is it possible,” Hilton wondered, “that Mr. Saul objects to readable prose?”
Having followed Saul’s work over the years, I can report that objection is, in fact, his modus operandi. Objection to what, you might ask? Pretty much everything, and never are the objections stated mildly or shaded with nuance. The friend with whom I attended the New Museum show described the pictures as “ejaculatory,” and it would be difficult to locate an adjective more apropos to Saul’s over-the-top brand of grotesquerie. The targets of his ire are subject to torturous distensions. Physiognomies are stretched and kneaded to Silly Putty–like extremes. Imagine the sinuous distortions of Mannerism amplified through a Day-Glo prism, and then delineated with the pin-prick intricacy of outré cartoonists like Basil Wolverton and S. Clay Wilson. As a paint-handler, Saul pat-pat-pats at his sizable canvases with what appears to be a cotton ball. In doing so, he wrests light and lyricism away from pointillist facture, bringing squishy dimensionality to ballooning forms. The color palette? Josef Albers undergoing sugar shock. Saturated tones are the rule, eye-popping, acidic, and sickly sweet. Sex and violence, those old things, are constants.
Installation photo of “Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment” at The New Museum; courtesy The New Museum * * *
Contact with Saul’s paintings can cause nausea. A few years back, I toured the galleries on Manhattan’s Fifty-seventh Street with a group of students; among our stops was a Saul exhibition at the Fifth Avenue branch of Mary Boone Gallery. Shortly after entering the venue, I noticed that one of my charges went missing, ultimately locating her, doubled-over, on the avenue. “Why,” she exclaimed, “would anyone want to paint these things?” Art critics we know about, but what else has Saul seen fit to castigate? The list is long: capital punishment, serial murderers, presidents (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, especially), “Yankee Garbage,” Christianity, capitalism, racial inequity, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, classical antiquity, Manifest Destiny, the modern city-state, “woman’s arts,” spaghetti and meatballs, Andy Warhol, O. J. Simpson, Max Beckmann, and, not least, himself. How much you indulge the work depends on whose ox is being gored. Missing from “Crime and Punishment” is a self-portrait in which Saul is seen using Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain for the purpose it was originally intended–kind of. “Found objects ain’t worth a good shit” reads the caption. You get the idea.
Is it recommended that visitors to “Crime and Punishment” bring an air sickness bag? Saul would likely take it as a compliment, but he is, on the whole, a cheery figure—not hard to like, harder to take seriously. During the afternoon I attended the exhibition, visitors greeted the abundance of pictures, installed salon-style, with joyous exclamations, appreciative laughter, and then deadly quiet. The unrelenting nature of Saul’s vision—a temperament forever at its satiric boiling point—is, over the long haul, dulling. Notwithstanding the histrionics—or, rather, because of them— Saul’s art is resistible, even when you might be on the same page regarding this or that topic. “Consistency,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s also the pitfall of the exuberantly vituperative. All the same, one can’t help but wonder how the imagery might sit with younger audiences. Taking Republicans, law enforcement, and patriarchy to the cleaners is well and fine, but Saul’s depictions of the Yellow Peril, Angela Davis, and Native Americans are stridently unwoke. Maybe he’s the lone old white guy to get a pass on such things.
Peter Saul, Super Crime Team (1961-62), oil on canvas, 59 x 63″; courtesy the Hall Collection and The New Museum * * *
Subjecting “Crime and Punishment” to the puritanical requisites of Cancel Culture would only add to Saul’s reputation, of course. As it is, let me put in a brief for Saul’s early paintings–those ramshackle agglomerations of cartoonish glyphs and stray bits of verbiage, put into motion with hasty-bordering-on-slapdash brushwork and compositional strategies derived, albeit in a roundabout manner, from Cubism. Forget canny pasticheurs like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg: Saul is the real bridge between the New York School and Pop Art. His everything-and-the-toilet-seat commentaries on the ubiquity of mass media, the perils of consumerism, and the limitations of civil society retain their antisocial vigor some six decades after the fact. Saul is the rare painter who poaches upon the fly-by-night anarchy of graffiti and manages to retain its outlaw ésprit. (The scratchy appropriations of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Michel-Basquiat are, in comparison, polite conversation pieces.) Super Crime Team (1961–62), Girl #2 (1962), and Superman in the Electric Chair (1963) are as rude and ready as they want to be, employing scatology, iconoclasm, and overkill as a form of vanitas painting. Within these patchwork rebuses lie Saul’s contribution to the culture of our time. The rest is one man’s unrelenting misanthropy—pre-digested, prettified, and taxidermied to perfection.
Installation of “Jordan Casteel: Within Reach” at The New Museum; courtesy The New Museum * * *
Strolling through “Jordan Casteel: Within Reach,” I was reminded of my time as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, a moment when Neo-Expressionism was just past its peak and the vacuum-sealed truisms of Post-Modernism were gaining a toehold in the collective consciousness. Among the controversies of the time was whether certain artists deserved their reputations, given their relative youth. David Salle and Julian Schnabel—there are others, but these two are lodged in memory—were fêted with museum exhibitions at the respective ages of thirty-five and thirty-six. Serious Artist–types harrumphed at the audacity. How could a Young Turk survive, let alone carry, a retrospective when history favors late bloomers? Titian, Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Romare Bearden were settling into middle-age when they became the figures we now esteem. There have been Young Masters, of course: Raphael and Vermeer died before the age of forty, and their achievements were, to put it mildly, remarkable. Still, artists tend to gain in range and depth from prolonged experience with life. Posterity smiles, only occasionally, upon the whipper-snapper.
The Eighties were a signal time in the art world; strange, too. But the New York scene has become stranger still—political grand-standing coupled with a hyperbolic marketplace will do that to a subculture. Young artists are no longer frowned upon, and they are regularly (as a dealer of acquaintance put it) “cradle snatched” by curators, collectors, and critics. Are young folks more in tune with our kaleidoscopic world—as we are often led to believe—or are they more apt to latch onto it? The former connotes prescience; the latter, a chase after the bandwagon. Jordan Casteel is an interesting case in point. She has achieved astonishing success in a short span of time. Months after earning her MFA from Yale in 2014, Casteel had a solo exhibition in Manhattan, went on to a prestigious residency at The Studio Museum of Harlem, and was picked up by the art world macher Casey Kaplan. Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine, wrote that Casteel is “prepared to take a rightful place on the front lines of contemporary painting.” The New York Times? Casteel has received half a dozen notices—more recognition from our paper of record than most artists get in a lifetime. And since we’re keeping tabs: Casteel is thirty-one years old.
Jordan Casteel, The Baayfalls (2017), oil on canvas, 78 x 90″; courtesy The New Museum
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Good for Casteel: we should all be showered with attention and plaudits. Whether they are earned is another matter. Voluminous press, enviable sales, and the profile that inevitably accompanies them aren’t necessarily indicators of aesthetic quality or staying power. Art ultimately thrives on its independence and integrity, on how adroitly its requisite properties are shaped and how they embody and shade qualities we intuit as human commonalities. How good are Casteel’s paintings? (An impolitic question given the hierarchy-free nostrums of contemporary culture.) Fans of the terminally avant-garde will be taken aback by Casteel’s conservatism. Unlike the usual fare at The New Museum, Casteel doesn’t partake in installations of bric-à-brac or heady nostrums given bare-bones packaging. No bells and whistles, thank you very much: oil on canvas will do. Portraiture is Casteel’s métier: the sitter is the locus of, and inspiration for, the artist’s vision. Upon entering “Within Reach,” one can’t help but take note of the intimacy informing Casteel’s art—something of a paradox given its larger-than-life scale. Empathy and warmth are rare commodities in art as in life. Casteel’s best portraits are suffused with both.
In the catalogue interview, Casteel tells Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator at the Studio Museum, that “being a black artist painting people of color is a nonnegotiable, unchangeable fact.” She goes on to wonder if “it is possible to be a person from a marginalized community and still make ‘art for art’s sake.’ ” Casteel goes some way in answering the question with The Baayfalls (2017), a portrait of a Harlem street vendor and her brother, a recent visitor—or émigré—from Senegal. (The painting was recreated as a large mural adjacent to New York’s High Line on Twenty-second Street.) It’s an unlikely and ambitious inventory of pictorial tacks: representation vies with abstraction; vibrant colors are lodged within encompassing fields of gray, black, and white; volume and mass—that is to say, dimension— coexist with attenuated-bordering-on-blasé linework. The woman pictured, Fallou, makes a devotional gesture derived from the Sufi Brotherhood, but it is the presence of her brother, Baaye Demba Sow, that cinches the painting. Casteel renders his skin with a steely range of blue-blacks and captures a temperament—a moment, really—that is simultaneously world-weary and august. Romare Bearden aimed to “paint the life of my people as I know it . . . as Bruegel painted the life of the Flemish people of his day.” Casteel has accomplished something like this with The Baayfalls.
Jordan Casteel, Serwaa and Amoakohene (2019), oil on canvas, 90 x 78″; courtesy The New Museum * * *
Casteel isn’t up to the Bearden standard— few of us are—and it’s worth mulling if there are better role models for figurative painters than Alice Neel. Casteel is on record extolling Neel’s “freshness and sense of perfection,” and the influence is there to see. Casteel’s art is mercifully free of Neel’s cruel bonhomie, and her serpentine paint-handling is more generous in spirit and momentum. Like Neel, however, Casteel doesn’t carry her pictorial machinations throughout the entirety of the paintings. The backdrops for her subjects are, well, backdrops. Oddly crumpled in character, Casteel’s compositions are patchwork affairs, and the flattened light that defines them betrays too strong a dependence on the photographs that serve as source material. Casteel is liveliest when pattern and color are given a measure of independence: the red-and-green garment glimpsed in Her Turn (2018), for example, or the choppy run of textiles seen in Noelle and Serwaa and Amoakohene (2019). Casteel might take a look at Edouard Vuillard and his melding of portraiture and pattern—or Gwen John, a painter who did away with backdrops altogether. It’s enough to make you think that a bit of art-for-art’s-sake might transform “unchangeable fact” into something richer, wilder, and true. “Within Reach,” indeed: let’s see where Casteel takes us.
Thanks to Franklin Einspruch–artist, critic and brain trust of Delicious Line, an invaluable resource for mavens of contemporary art–for his review of my current exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.
Too Much Art 
