“It’s strange, we never changed ourselves….we are still doing exactly what we always were.” Claude Lalanne played her own bafflement with pitch perfect innocence; for how had this bohemian Surrealist, an artisanal craftswoman in her Chinese peasant jacket, horny-handed everyday metalworker, gardener and cook become a fabulously wealthy fashion icon?

For at her death aged 93 Lalanne was suspiciously close to being a celebrity, certainly a point-of-reference for anyone who wanted to prove their own status within that modish zone where fine art, design and haute couture mingle. “Claude”, her first name alone was a code word to a certain world, like using just ‘Jacob’ rather than Rothschild, proof of membership.

But even with all their recent retrospectives and books Les Lalanne, Claude and her husband the late François-Xavier, still remained a shared cult, clandestine secret. Famous yes, but only amongst the right people, their furniture, sculpture and jewelry traded and treasured amongst an international élite, the last exhausted fumes of the jet set, final crust of le gratin.

The paradox was that for decades nobody had been willing to take Les Lalanne seriously within the contemporary art circuit and yet their credentials were nonpareil; as young and poor artists at the fabled Impasse Ronsin they were friends of not only Brancusi but also such Surrealists as Ernst, William Copley and Dalí, with whom Claude collaborated. as well as an entire generation of emerging avant gardists from Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle to Jimmy Metcalf and Larry Rivers, even cooking steaks on their studio stove for Yves Klein.

If the Impasse Ronsin was the founding myth of the Lalanne cult their compound at Ury, outside Fontainebleau was where we devout disciples had flocked for decades, a simple farmhouse in the simplest of villages where behind a long stone wall Claude and François-Xavier maintained separate studios and an enviable communal existence. Having moved here at the prompting of Tinguely there was no shortage of local artist friends – Marcel and Teeny Duchamp and Jackie Matisse – nor adjacent grandeur whether de Ganay or Noailles, and the house soon became famous for its parties, a veritable flotilla of limos heading south from Paris in the night.

Les Lalanne were the ultimate exemplars of Picasso’s dictum to live as a poor man with lots of money, the modesty of their world being a lesson in the taste that wealth alone can never purchase, whitewashed walls, wonderful art, warm worn furniture and an entirely personal goût impossible to replicate. An anonymous wooden door opened up to this enchanted private domain, an alligator acrawling, a baboon standing guard in the courtyard, a little gate leading to an enfilade of gardens, each wilder than the last and inhabited by a menagerie of sculpted beasts and benches, cast flora and patinated fauna.

Since the death of François-Xavier in 2008 Claude had enjoyed a full decade in which to really blossom and come into her own, increasingly recognized as just as creative, inventive and industrious as her late husband and indeed perhaps the more ambitious and worldlier of the two, her energy and acumen seemingly redoubled as she hit her eighties.

This ferocious work ethic, heading into her atelier no sooner than she had risen to spend the day solving the practical problems of her latest chair, necklace, chandelier or staircase, was the core of her personality. But it was mitigated by a most honest and open hospitality, this perfect hostess with her home-grown fruit and vegetables and suitably good bottle of Bordeaux, her posy of garden flowers, every meal culminating with her own justifiably famous tarte tatin.

Some could find her altogether ‘formidable’ for she suffered fools badly and was easily wearied by the devious demands of photographers and hagiographers, capable of turning frosty at the slightest perceived slight, her full froideur being a winter unto itself and impossible to thaw by mere flattery alone. It was also probably true that she preferred male company, often homosexual and of deliciously old-fashioned bitchiness and took the slightest sadistic delight in teasing and tweaking, promoting and demoting, those within her private court.

Despite her petite presence Claude was a genuinely strong woman, physically, emotionally and practically and her beauty, still notable even in old age, was of another era. Likewise, her manner of speaking should really have been preserved like a rare threatened species, a mellifluous, high-pitched sing-song with an echo of vanished aristocratic diction, a voice designed for the telling of naughty stories and juiciest gossip, irresistible in its intimacy, “et alors, mes chéris…”

A highly attractive woman it was hardly surprising Claude had gathered a considerable fan club around the world for whom any invitation to Ury was achievement in itself. And her uniquely confident style, cowboy boots and Mao tunics, men’s white shirts with paint brushes in the hair, had always proved irresistible to her many friends in high fashion from Christian Dior lui-même to young ‘Karl’, her lifelong soulmate St Laurent and an entire subsequent generation of designers, from Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs to Maria Grazia Chiuri.

After lunch Claude would retire to her white sofa where with Texan heels crossed high, cigarette at a jaunty angle and devoted dog she would trawl for the latest tittle-tattle, speed dialing one of her infinitely indiscrete friends whilst toying with a precious broach or cuff link, lifting it towards one with a teasing twinkle, “do you think you might like…?”

One of my last memories of Claude was of her digging wild cyclamen from her garden to give me, she herself wielding the spade with a determination that belied her ninety something years, a clod of black sod with the prettiest white and purple flowers, costing nothing yet meaning everything. For surely it was a central metaphor of her personality that she took the natural, the soft and yielding, leaves, branches, flowers, and by a process of galvanization made them hard, strong and inflexible, her own admixture of the gracious and indomitable.

“Why not have this?” she might say and the generosity was not in the market value of the piece pressed upon one but in the initial generosity with which Claude had made it, the inherent act of ‘offering’ which is the essence of all art making, each artist’s ‘gift’ in every sense and one here accepted and acknowledged with suitable gratitude and admiration, and now, grief.

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February 16–April 21, 2019
various locations

The Québec City Biennial is exceptional in many ways: It is certainly the coldest Biennale anywhere in the world; it is entirely bilingual, often known better by its French name ‘Manif d’art;’ and it is indeed the only major biennale in Canada, at least for the moment, Montreal having collapsed and Toronto not launching until September this year.

For a city the size of Québec, its biennial, now in its 9th iteration, has always been unusually ambitious and this year pulled out all the stops by appointing as chief curator Jonathan Watkins, the highly respected director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. Veteran organiser of many previous biennials including Sydney and Shanghai, Watkins is tipped as the future artistic director of Venice itself.

His poetic title for Manif d’art, Small Between the Stars, Large Against the Sky, was taken from a song by Leonard Cohen – a favorite Québecois – and its broad theme was the interaction of nature and the city, which is particularly pertinent to this town perched above a vast empty landscape.

Whilst extremely international in scope the exhibition happily also included a judicious range of not just Canadian but French-speaking Canadian artists, acknowledging Québec as the heartland of a very specific and intense battle over identity politics. But the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec – which for only the second time ever gave the Biennale a whole pavilion – broke their own firm rule of only exhibiting Québecois- as opposed to Canadian- artists. Of some 100 artists included there, only 20 were Canadians and 6 from Québec itself.

In fact it was a local Québecois, the indomitable Claude Bélanger, who not only created the Biennale back in 2000 but is also largely responsible for transforming his city into a veritable web of contemporary art practice, transforming numerous buildings into a chain of alternative spaces. Most notable in this respect is the  Méduse, a complex of run down factories which he personally rescued and built into a large multi-purpose arts center for some ten organizations. The Méduse is the hub of a city wide regeneration. The Biennale is spread out all over town and if commercial galleries are relatively rare in the mix, by contrast there is a dense network of small non-profit organizations and performance venues. This is a pleasingly old fashioned and genuinely close-knit community of artists of every sort who all know, help and drink with each other, thus transporting one to a Gallic-accented version of the legendary New York art world of the 1940s. Impressively, Bélanger and Watkins decided to give space to twelve young Canadian curators who in turn chose and displayed some 40 Québecois artists, a show within the show. As Bélanger comments, “People are very serious about art in this city but unpretentious and quiet about their own work. Here once can be both modest and ambitious and most importantly everyone is very mutually supportive.”

The bitter cold helps to reinforce this sense of community and the Biennale opened amongst spectacular blizzards which made the public art projects all the more dramatic – it was actually freezing in contrast with another major art world opening of the same weekend, the inaugural Frieze LA. Having personally attended the Antarctic Biennale I can attest that Québec was much colder, indeed both featured a Tomás Saraceno ‘Aerocene’ but there was certainly not enough sun here to make this one fly, unlike at the South Pole.

But the weather only added to the exoticism of the locale, not least crossing the vast icy width of the St Lawrence river to visit Regart located in Lévis, a small arts enclave where Shimabuku was exhibiting his swan pedal boats all the way from Okinawa, Japan.

Watkins has a particular interest in indigenous artists, which is especially appropriate to this part of the world, and convincingly brought together embroideries by the Swedish Sámi tribal elder Britta Marakatt-Labba with work of local peoples including Nunavut artists Manasie Akpaliapik and Shuvinai Ashoona and such ‘First Nation’ practitioners as Marianne Nicolson and Meryl McMaster, the latter staging extraordinary faux-documentary photographs of her own performances. One of the most intriguing Biennale venues is the Huron Wendat museum, 15km outside the city, which is run by the tribe itself and featured installations by indigenous artists Hannah Claus and Sonia Robertson. Their significance was ably explained by the impressive Guy Sioui Durand, one of the few native sociologists and art historians and an expert in his own people’s visual traditions.

Likewise,Le Lieu, an avant-garde performance venue, presented an impressive film installation by Nadia Myre that brought together a panel of indigenous practitioners to talk about their heritage. In many ways Watkins has put together the first example on a widely indigenous Biennale, as groundbreaking in its own way as the groundbreaking 1989 Pompidou Center exhibition, Les Magiciens de la Terre, with a strong and logical emphasis on what is here called ‘autochtone’ practice. One cannot help ponder, nonetheless, the fate of those contemporary French-speaking Canadians who, with the notable exception of Jean-Paul Riopelle, remain one of the few true ‘minorities’ to never have their work included in any such international exhibitions.

Watkins also did well by his own particular minority, the English, with the world premiere of Reanimation a notably impressive new film installation by Oliver Beer; strong sculpture by Haroon Mirza and an exemplary exhibition at the very English Villa Bagatelle pairing paintings by George Shaw (including a brand new and very Canadian image of a man peeing against a tree) with prints by Thomas Bewick, the only dead artist represented. There were, of course, other stand-out works: a window suite of transparent photographs by Beat Streuli; a set of wood block prints by the Leipzig based Christiane Baumgartner; a spooky mise-en-scène of tiny terracotta figures by the Swiss duo Lutz & Guggisberg. There was also a delightfully upbeat display of specially knitted festive winter caps by Polly Apfelbaum, generously made to be given away to each of the other participating artists.

Watkins is well aware of the risks of ‘regionalism’ attached to such events, some artists assuming the Biennale would be in Montreal rather than the city of Québec itself and it remains a surprisingly, perhaps stubbornly, hidden corner of the world. But Watkins turned any such parochialism to his advantage, doing what every Biennale should do, revealing a whole strand of current practice, in this case the indigenous and ‘autochtone’, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the hidden cultural wealth of the host city.

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“Have you seen it yet?… It’s so amazing…we’ve been twice.”

The most debated and detested exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale has nothing to do with it—namely, of course, Damien Hirst’s double-bill blockbuster. What makes this interesting is that the Hirst-Pinault machine has deliberately snubbed and subverted the venerable Biennale with a series of lavish gala parties just weeks before the official event and not a single celebration during its opening week. This has a genuine significance beyond PR micro-politics: the suggestion that Hirst’s work is no longer dependent upon the blessings of the self-assumed “powers that be,” and that all art can, theoretically, liberate itself from this reigning apparatus of curatorial approval. For this is the first Biennale in which one can sense an actual aesthetic argument or “counter-argument” indicative of a larger shift within contemporary art.

There have long been two distinct parallel art worlds: those of the “fair” and the “biennale”—the former largely supported by the market and the latter by institutions and foundations, one “commercial,” the other “serious.” (I remember Jeffrey Deitch explaining this to me with pitch-perfect discernment, which made it all the more shocking to spot him this year on a humble vaporetto, rather than his usual private speedboat.) But though the 2017 Biennale (directed by Christine Macel) puts up a valiant defense, it is starting to look as if the battle has been won elsewhere. The very “fairest” of fair art—including the outrageously figurative, openly decorative, and scandalously kitsch—is taking over, leaving the highbrow conceptualists stranded very dry indeed. This Biennale may herald the first serious cracks in the established system, the beginning of an “eternal return” to what might be termed traditional art making: final throes of that long announced death of the avant-garde.

In this respect, the most significant show in Venice after Hirst is that put together by Wolfgang Scheppe to celebrate the founding of the Internationale Situationniste sixty years ago. Contrasting Hirst’s extravaganza, this is a private initiative, resolutely closed to the public and accessible only by invitation as the summa of clandestine chic. Scheppe, an academic, writer, and curator long based in Venice, has been responsible for some outstanding projects. But the aim of this exhibition, largely drawn from his own collection, is none less than to herald the end of art itself, to celebrate the Situationists as the final avant-garde movement, one that did away with such notions along with everything else. Entitled “Tous contre le spectacle,” one of Debord’s war cries, it condemns every sort of diversionary cultural entertainment, both the official Biennale and Hirst.

The Return of the Figurative

No, of course art did not end with the Situationists. This necessary cleansing led to a generational break, for the official last year of the IS, 1972, was precisely the same year most consider the official birthdate of “Postmodernism.” This was the year of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate, and the first inklings of a return to figuration in painting.

Indeed, one of the most lauded exhibitions in Venice, Philip Guston and the Poets at the Accademia, emphasizes precisely such work from just this period, the most important paintings from the first flush of his figurative comeback of 1970 until 1975. Despite some beautiful abstractions, including Untitled (1958) and The Tale (1961), the main theme is his varied approach to realism and art historical lineage. This included early drawings and even a direct comparison between a Bellini “Madonna” and his 1944 Young Mother, an unflattering double-hang in which Guston comes out the loser. Guston’s wise wall text seems a prescient herald: “I don’t want to die with the past, but to me the past isn’t the past. Signorelli could be working downtown.”

The return of the figurative, the traditional, and historical can be seen all over Venice, that city which has never really let them die, despite codes of contemporary practice. Their alibis are the allegorical and literary, smuggling in such representational content in guise of archive. This can be seen in Stephen Chambers’s rich paintings of the Court of Redonda at Ca’Dandolo, portraits of the imaginary aristocracy of an invented island kingdom—one which writer Javier Marías has long claimed as his own. Likewise, La Kermesse Héroïque (2017) by Lucy McKenzie at Fondazione Bevilacqua suggests an eccentric historicism akin to Marías’s own writings, a sort of neo-postmodernism suggesting ancient artifact without moral or aesthetic judgement. McKenzie gets away with every sort of technique, even trompe l’oeil, due to an emphasis on research and re-creation: these only happen to look like attractive decorative devices. Equally interesting was a conversation with artist Markus Proschek, whose interest in the aesthetics of Third Reich sculpture and painting provoke questions of ideology.

And such ideological issues are at the fore of Space Force Construction, the exemplary first exhibition at the Russian V-A-C Foundation on the Zattere. As smartly curated by Matthew Witkovsky of the Art Institute of Chicago, this brings together archival material and contemporary installations, with an emphasis on revelatory photography and ephemera. Here we can marvel again at when abstraction was synonymous with social revolution, when the avant-garde were indispensable as the Red Guard. On show are Soviet Constructivists whose practices questioned bourgeois artistic rubrics of illusionism and authorship such as Popova and Rodchenko.

Craft, Kitsch, and Cultural Politics

Extremely interesting in this context is Isasthenai, a new work by Tania Bruguera featuring rapid clay portrait busts, done from life and described as “traditional statuary technique.” Here the crucial fact was that Bruguera, a hugely successful international artist, could not create these sculptures herself but was obliged to employ another artist, Ekaterina Kovalenko.

Issues of authorship, and indeed of “Russian taste,” are central to the whole furor around Hirst. For whilst Hirst makes no pretense to have crafted these sculptures and antiquities himself—au contraire his charming pretense is that they have been brought up from an actual shipwreck—connoisseurs claim to be able to recognize whether they had been hewn in China, Russia, or Italy, to identify such anonymous national craftsmanship. And these works, which have apparently enjoyed great commercial success, are dismissed as being for Russian or Asian collectors—for the old-fashioned goût of precisely the same sort of people who have created them, suggesting the paradoxical redemption of practical skills by such emergent markets. There is also the amusing contrast of the Grenada Pavilion’s exhibition of the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, the artist who provided direct inspiration for Hirst’s current work (an example of Hirst’s brilliant, longtime implementation of Picasso’s maxim about “great artists stealing.” And more power to him.)

Sculptures with echoes of Hirst are to be found everywhere: Lorenzo Quinn’s Support (2017), giant hands holding up Ca’Sagredo hotel, or Shezad Dawood’s Where do we go now? (2017), a shiny resin 3D rendering. Likewise, the white horse in the Argentine Pavilion by Claudia Fontes and the axe-man panorama by Liliana Porter immediately recall their fellow countryman Adrián Villar Rojas on the roof of the Met. Within the official Biennale there is, as expected, a persistence of old-guard conceptualism, and a relative resistance to any younger, fresher movement towards every form of figuration. However, cracks can be detected, not least among Chinese artists, who have often embraced the continuum connecting contemporary artists, such as Hao Liang, with ancient traditions. In fact, among non-Western artists, various types of figuration appear more frequently—for instance, New Zealand artists Francis Upritchard and Lisa Reihana, whose work riffs on a marvelous 1805 Joseph Dufour et Cie woodblock wallpaper (pleasingly “purchased from admission charges” by the National Gallery Australia). Particularly interesting are artists like Peruvian Juan Javier Salazar or Philippines-born Manuel Ocampo, who are overtly political about the Western suppression of other figurative traditions: abstraction as imperialism.

The gigantic installation by Roberto Cuoghi which takes up much of the Italian Pavilion is as crucial to the argument of a new emerging traditionalism as Hirst’s Venetian magnum opus. Like Hirst, Cuoghi is a major star who is unafraid to deal with the most fundamental of figurative themes—in this case, sculptures of Christ himself, Imitazione di Cristo (2017), produced by teams of skilled artisans in a hellish assembly line. Religious iconography is here another way into a certain “image-regime,” a side door, a way of entering the historical continuum, as with Hirst’s appropriation of every sort of mythology, from Medusa to Disney. As such, Cuoghi’s serial versions of Christ can be rewardingly compared to Paul Benney’s Speaking in Tongues (2017) at the Chiesa di San Gallo. This installation, featuring a single large painting with special lighting and audio effects, conjures a richly dramatic environment portraying some sort of contemporary spiritual visitation worthy of Titian’s Descent of the Holy Ghost (circa 1545) at Santa Maria della Salute. The central panel of Benney’s work is flanked by his “Reliquary” series of paintings, stuttering candles in airless bell jars, staking a convincing claim for not only what he terms “the rigors of representational art,” but also an example of religious (Christian) art practice.

Virtual Versus “Real”

This Benney-Cuoghi aesthetic reaches its absolute apotheosis over at the Faurschou Foundation with one of the most shocking works to be seen in Venice, Christian Lemmerz’s virtual reality piece, La Apparizione (2017). This terrifying representation of the crucifixion pushes Christian iconography to the outer limits of kitsch horror, and may be the one work that Hirst wishes he had thought of first. In fact, virtual reality may well prove, at last, to be sufficiently workable to be the next frontier in contemporary art, as demonstrated by the other VR work at the Faurschou: a truly troubling, extreme scenario dreamt up by Paul McCarthy.

The other advantage of VR is that you have to pay attention. You have no choice. By contrast, the smartphone wreaks the most delicious revenge on those boring video makers who made us suffer in silence in previous decades; now as soon as anyone sits down in front of a video, they immediately get to work texting, turning the whole room into a sea of bobbing white blobs, like cigarette lighters at a concert.

The glorious idea that “real” art might eventually be allowed to return, overcoming all current orthodoxies and assumptions, can be smelled in the air this year in Venice: a sharp tang, a salty brine to refresh the soul. As the artist known as Andy Hope 1930 quotes Franco Berardi: “The future is no more.” There is still some work to be done—after all, it is still only really acceptable to employ others to make your traditional sculptures or realist paintings. But that may be changing. At Mark Bradford’s excellent American Pavilion, there has been much stress on the handmade quality, to quote the pavillion’s brochure, how the “artist and his mother worked side by side for decades,” and the “paper that the artist bleached, soaked and molded with his hands.” Just as abstract art proved to be merely a hundred-year blip, that admittedly attractive fad of the “long” twentieth century, so “biennale” art may prove to have an even shorter shelf life, and we may all too soon be bingo back to Bouguereau—albeit in state of the art Sensurround virtual reality.

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July 4 to August 2, 2015
4 Fulling Lane
Kent, CT, 917 270 8044

Everyone loves an art movement, and many may feel the lack of any major recent one. But the next best thing is a group of disparate artists all working in the same place — ideally bucolic or exotic. And just in time to quench our thirst for such geographical groupings, and to welcome the upstate summer, comes the exhibition “Cornwall Bohemia,” at James Barron in Kent, Connecticut. This is the first group show at the gleaming new space belonging to Mr. Barron, an infamously modish figure who shuttles between here and Rome, his international profile matching the storied elegance of many of these local artists.

This is a crew, a scene, of truly heady social stuff, whether the ultra-cosmopolitan Philip Taaffe; the reigning royalty of TriBeCa, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham; not to mention leading glossy magazine photographer Todd Eberle; Downtown superstar James Nares; and Duncan Hannah, dandy draughtsman supreme. But quite aside from any such cosmopolitan grandeur these are all artists of true importance, of global caliber, who also happen to have houses and studios in Cornwall, a group of quaint unspoiled villages in Litchfield County, where they spend some of their creative time and energy. No, of course there is no thematic coherence or identifiable shared method,but yes they all make for a damn rich group show, artists of world renown here operating on a smaller, more communal scale. The perfectly proportioned main gallery is not only ideally light and airy, but also deliciously cool — blasting AC always being an accurate socio-demographic clue to a dealer’s status. And the whole space is simply ablaze with local color, from Greg Goldberg’s zingy modernist motifs to Eberle’s outrageously bold mirrored flowers from his Cosmos series, or Speed of Heat (2012) a smooth trademark bright swoosh from Nares. The show seems to move across from a joyously breezy abstraction, including the kick-ass, mica-rich Portrait (Regal) (2015) by Jackie Saccoccio. There’s a sort of refined outlined figuration in Dunham’s comic biomorphic blobs and Brendan O’Connell’s tasty, melting supermarket products, juxtaposed with ideogrammatic Canal Zone cityscapes of Judith Belzer. As if coming into focus, the image itself then solidifies into the recognizable contours of Simmons’s perfect, solitary and spotlit photograph Brothers/Aerial View (1979) and Hannah’s two highly stylized and desirable untitled paintings of cars and buildings brimming with Brutalist chic.

In all this, Taaffe provides a sort of central fulcrum to the movement from abstraction to realism, with his Strata Nephrodium (2014), a thicket of primal pattern, whose fern shapes and bold brightness could be read as an homage to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/ Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

Kent is known for its widespread public sculpture – not least thanks to the notorious neighboring Morrison Gallery. But Barron has wisely included only one example, Nozedone (2013) — a sinister yet sensual work by Carl D’Alvia, a sort of Maltese Falcon built from cast resin licorice curlicues, looming in a back perch.

The Cornwall area has a long tradition of artist residents, including Alexander Calder, James Thurber, Marc Simont and Alexander Lieberman; and this exhibition is a welcome addition to such proud regional history and, ideally, perhaps an annual tradition. As Barron notes, “Cornwall has always enjoyed a rich intellectual and artistic heritage, which is especially remarkable given the town’s tiny population.” In fact, so creatively rich is this county that one could easily pitch a Litchfield Biennale, though this is no place to play the “why not so-and-so” game.

If there do seem some obvious omissions from this exhibition — such as watercolorist Adam Van Doren or sculptor Tim Prentice — clearly not everyone could be included without losing that generous, big, calm hanging that so distinguishes this show. The only two Cornwall artists one might have liked to seen together here are Seth Price and Emily Buchanan, a perfect pairing, ideal demonstration, of the town’s wide artistic diversity: a celebrated conceptualist and a renowned traditional landscape painter who recently created the White House Christmas card.

For any British critic, or indeed follower of European Modernism, there is the added irony that the original Cornwall, in England, was site of one of the St. Ives School, one of best known of the 20th century. This was a genuine movement. more than causal geographic coincidence, bringing together Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as well as several subsequent generations of artists, such as Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who all shared a distinct aesthetic approach to depicting their common landscape. Likewise, one does suspect that some of these artists in the “other” Cornwall up in Connecticut, should get together to work in a similar aesthetic vein, sharing studios, ideas and materials. Then at last we could have an actual new, live art movement. It only takes three to make one, as well as a welcome weekend country set. Perhaps they just need a name: the “Cornwall Oddballs” or the “Litchfield Color Field Crowd.” Something suitably snazzy can surely be found.

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Like any Venice Biennale, this year’s is not merely a curator’s egg (good in parts, rotten in others) but a veritable battery farm of them, with more ill and excellent specimens gathered together than one might wish to contemplate, let alone summarize in a thousand words.

The good news is that the signature event — the main exhibition, convincingly curated by Okwui Enwezor, divided between the Padiglione Centrale, in the Giardini, and the Arsenale — is carefully structured, intellectually engaging, aesthetically rewarding and, for so vast an exhibition, unusually coherent. The bad news is that the majority of the national pavilions are pretty lousy, only a handful worth the effort or long queues. Venice is also enlivened, as always, by numerous satellite events, group exhibitions, solo shows, performances — several outstanding, many atrocious, all providing added incentive to survey La Serenissima before the fun ends in November.

Enwezor’s exhibition title, ”All the World’s Futures,” sounds like the sort of waffle cobbled together by a committee and hardly suits a show more about the past than the future. Unless, that is, Enwezor meant “futures” in the financial sense, for his stated intention is to bring a Marxist analysis to bear on the current context. This “return to Marx” might be compared to Lacan’s “return to Freud,” an extension and elaboration of the franchise unrecognizable to purists. Such commitment includes a full reading of Marx’s works, every single word recited in architect David Adjaye’s central performance space, which even features a bearded lookalike dressed as the great man. The paradoxical contrast between this Marxist rhetoric and the billionaire collectors and well-heeled gallerists swarming the opening events was a source of bitter mirth to local anarchist groups who continuously heckled and attacked the proceedings, even launching physical protests against the Giardini and the Guggenheim.

A more engaging anarchistic intervention was the “Sinking of Venice,” performed by veteran Fluxus poet Alain Arias-Misson, who appeared on the Grand Canal in a boat towing the word “VENICE,” the giant letters inevitably sinking to the applause of enthusiastic onlookers. Throughout the main exhibition various soi disant Marxist figures lay out the territory, especially an older generation of radical filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub, Chris Marker, Chantal Ackermann, and Harun Farocki, whose works provide rigorous ideological backbone. And the extensive program of events scheduled for the performance arena, involving a dazzling range of thinkers, composers, performers, academics, show just how intelligent and sophisticated Marx’s theories remain, even if it is more about “the enchantment of the physical object” than class warfare.

“The trouble with the internet is that there is not enough Africa in it,” Brian Eno said a decade ago, and much the same might be true about the contemporary art world. Enwezor has rightly pushed a wider African (or at least black) participation, to a perfectly judged degree. While certainly not color-blind, Enwezor has engaged with a wide range of Diaspora artists whose varied practices are far beyond the banal rhetoric of previous “identity politics.” Among all this it is interesting to see how well painting fits the agenda, with key spots given to works by the likes of Ellen Gallagher — set next to the Aboriginal abstraction of Emily Kngwarreye — Wangechi Mutu and Chris Ofili, with the Arsenale culminating in a display of new towering canvases by Georg Baselitz, a man open in his loathing for “the revolution” (including, notoriously, the sexual revolution). Yet there is no sense that these paintings and sculptures (including many works by the late lamented Terry Adkins) are in any way token, obligatory inclusions, but rather embody a new level of sophistication in the art world, exemplified by Lorna Simpson’s latest work, paintings that extend rather then refute her conceptualist origins. In a final room of the Arsenale, Chinese laborers are working throughout the Biennale to craft individual decorated bricks, for sale for 20€ each, this being a work by Rirkrit Tiravanija, while next to them a paid actor reads out his book, gainfully employed by conceptual artist Dora Garcia. Adjacent to all this local art school students (half of them, revealingly, Asian) have signed up to create assembly-line monochrome paintings under the aegis of Maria Eichorn — some of which are actually quite beautiful. Global factory cultural production, minimum wage performance art thus providing a perfect Marxist dialectic for today’s pan-international economy.

Despite the seamless integration of painting into Enwezor’s theoretical argument, it was still shocking to see the Romanian Pavilion entirely given over to paintings and a few drawings, by just one artist, Adrian Ghenie, this most straightfoward display entirely radical today but standard practice for most of the Biennale’s history. There is no need to even mention the worst pavilions (France! Austria!) so let’s rather celebrate the few successes: the weird dark world of Fiona Hall in the Australian, the obsessive microlabor of Marco Maggi chez Uruguay, a sort of digital Gustave Doré by IC-98 at Finland’s Aalto-designed pavilion and that heady poetic hex cast by Joan Jonas on behalf of the USA. The Armenian Pavilion, titled “Armenity” was a rightful winner of the official prize, not just because this year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, but because the whole experience of visiting the island of San Lazzaro with its 18th-century Armenian monastery is a delight in itself. The beauty of the cloisters, buildings and historic collections are discretely, judiciously accompanied a range of current Armenian artists, and best of all there are no crowds. But in the end perhaps one outstandingly bad pavilion does warrant mention, the Italian, which is just so kitsch, as every year, that it may well be time that they had their Arsenale space taken away from them just as they previously lost their main pavilion in the Giardini.

Within the curator’s egg principle it is hardly paradoxical that one of the best group shows and the single worst solo exhibition should both come thanks to François Pinault. At the French collector’s Dogana there is the exemplary “Slip of the Tongue,” curated by Dahn Voh, so rich in contrasts and curios, whether medieval illuminated manuscripts next to Hubert Duprat gold maggots, or actual Bellini wooden panels and a wonderful assembly of all Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud. But over at Palazzo Grassi there is a stinkingly bad Martial Raysse show (even the poster is truly nasty), which undoes all the good of his recent Pompidou retrospective. Other painters are to the fore around town, not least a lovely floor of Twombly at Ca’Pesaro, (don’t miss the marvelous rare outing novocento magic realist Cagnaccio di san Pietro on the floor below, by the way) and an impeccably tight small show of recent work by Peter Doig at the low key Palazzetto Tito.

The issue of winners and losers, and whether one is allowed to make such judgments in the art world these days, is central to Biennale practice: after all, they give out Golden Lions, so national pavilions are in principle battling one another. The show that most perfectly sums up such cultural competition is the long overdue retrospective of Charles Pollock at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which grants as much visual delight as it does larger existential doubt. Here is the question: is it better to die at 44, a bald alcoholic, having enjoying five years of fame and then future immortality, or to live to 85 with a full head of magnificent hair making very nice abstractions, no money, and no reputation? It was through his older brother Charles that Jackson studied with Thomas Hart Benton, moved to New York, persisted in trying to become an artist. He owed Charles everything but wiped him clean off the map. All art students should be obliged not just to go and study the latest Biennale but also to visit the Charles Pollock exhibition and ponder its real meaning, to ask themselves exactly what they want in becoming an artist.

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L’avenir (Looking Forward), October 22, 2014 to April 1, 2015
Various venues, check bnlmtl2014.org for details

As every city on the globe seemingly has its own biennale these days, necessarily some are less well known than others. I am something of an expert in relative obscurity, having mounted the world’s smallest, the 195 Hudson Street, Apartment 2A Biennale in my own humble abode. La Biennale de Montréal is also among the less celebrated biennials, and in fact it was only by complete chance, spying a poster out of the metro window on my arrival in that city, that I was aware that it was taking place. But what it may lack in celebrity it makes up for in local vim and vigor, and indeed in many ways it also serves as a useful paradigm, a sort of perfect example, of the perils and pleasures of the contemporary biennale.

Just as the Venice Biennale remains notorious for its governmental politics, the Montreal Biennale does not disappoint on the front of bureacratic intrigue, and has gone through mutations and machinations to arrive at its current incarnation. Launched in 1998 by the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, the event has subsequently seemingly been merged with the Triennale de Quebec, devoted to largely Francophone practitioners within the state of Quebec, to slightly confusing effect. Thus what was originally an ambitiously international event, with two equally pan-international organizers including the celebrated New Zealand curator Gregory Burke, somehow gained two extra curators and a strong Québec quota of artists. As a result the show is now precisely divided between Canadian and international artists, of the 50 participants 16 being from Québec and nine from elsewhere in Canada. To confuse things further, a fifth curator emerged at the last moment, one Sylvie Fortin, the “Directrice générale et artistique” whose contribution as “Executive Director” remains entirely mysterious.

The fundamental difference between “gallery” artists and “Biennale” artists was once brilliantly explained to me by Jeffrey Deitch, and the Montreal Biennale certainly makes clear that it wants no truck with what might be considered more representative commercial elements, even symbolically opening right bang between the opening night of FIAC and the Toronto Art Fair. As a statement this makes clear that Montreal does not need either Paris or Anglophone Toronto and could never be confused with any such art fair. Thus while the staple fare of any fair, its bread and butter, remains painting, this Biennale has boldly blacklisted so old fashioned a medium. Indeed despite listing “painting” in its publicity material as one of its ingredients there are precisely three actual paintings in this entire large exhibition. As it happens these are extremely interesting, held together in an engaging architectural installation, a wooden box with weird traction sandpaper flooring, by local artist Nicolas Grenier, and one of them, Incoming Flux (2014), in oil and acrylic on wood, is among the most intriguing and accomplished paintings I’ve seen for a long while. But it is typical that these paintings are seemingly only considered acceptable for the Biennale because they deal with a subject matter, a topic, a social or intellectual issue, rather than just being purely visually or aesthetically rewarding. Grenier’s box construction is next to a long display of wonderful little objects laid out by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, but these are not allowed merely to be attractive and amusing tiny sculptures. Titled The Prophets, they are in fact “models” of various economic models — 3D renderings of statistics. It seems that you are allowed to make art that resembles “art” so long as there is also some weighty discourse or additional theoretical explanation behind it. This is true of several of the stand-out works of the show, whether John Massey’s strikingly dense black and white digital prints — apparently all about “language” — or Suzanne Treister’s wonderful coloured drawings and spectacular wall work, all of which detail alternative histories of the 20th century.

Even the best of the audio-visual works in the exhibition, Oleg Tcherny’s subverted travelogue La Linea Generale (2010) almost excuses its visual beauty with the voice of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Among the few works to just “be what they are” without extra-mural justification are Thomas Hirschhorn’s brutal four-minute video Touching Reality (2012) and the seemingly casually scattered stuffed animals of Abbas Akhavan, one of the real discoveries of this Biennale.

Like any Biennale, Montreal’s supposedly has a theme, “L’avenir — Looking forward“ which is, according to this classic example of a statement written by committee, meant to examine “recent developments in contemporary art in relationship to speculation, futurity and the history of future projection, and the currency of projecting into the future.” And like any biennial, the actual show only has the faintest possible connection to its ostensible theme whose interchangeable generic category headings immediately vanish from the viewer’s memory.

This vision of the future, as far as art itself is concerned, is very heavy on video and film and if I had obeyed my usual strict rule of not devoting longer than five minutes to audio-visual work I could have whisked through the whole show in an hour. The actual total running time for the assembled video runs over 10 hours by my calculation. One has to ponder who apart from the curators (if even they) actually sits through all of this stuff to the bitter end. And when you decide, just for once, to see an artist’s film all the way through to the last frame, chances are it will consist of live, real-time transmission, without beginning or end.

Essential to a gnawing sense of frustration is that the Biennale must be spread out over a vast array of locations. In this respect at least Montreal is relatively manageable, the majority of the exhibition being held in one central building, the renowned Musée d’art contemporain, although they have provided at least one venue which one cannot visit at all, the “ville souterraine” being entirely off the map, where “Adaptive Actions” are apparently collaborating with local workers in a project destined to be always invisible.

Trekking to the outlying venues has unexpected rewards in the non-Biennale-related art one sees by accident. Thus, for instance, the Arsenal Art Contemporain, a mind-bogglingly gigantic art hangar to make even the largest Gagosian space seem modest, introduces us to the astonishing gigantic “paintings” of Dominique Gaucher. The Arsenal is hosting a couple of videos for the Biennale, but it is Gaucher who is the revelation. Likewise at the gallery Parisian Laundry to which one repairs to see a new film by Edgar Arcenaux, one can instead discover the accomplished, sophisticated paintings of Paul Hardy.

Even at the Gare Centrale hunting everywhere for some site specific project nobody has heard of or ever seen, one is sent instead to see a wonderful show of shadow sculptures made from cut out boxes, all by some nameless artist.

But then, fundamentally, biennials of this nature are a public relations exercise for the host city, so kudos to them for enabling serendipitous encounters in their lost suburbs.

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Group show at (harbor) Regina Rex
Opening September 21, 2014
221 Madison Street (between Rutgers and Clinton streets)
New York, 347 460 7739

Material Way at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College
September 30 through December 1, 2014
81 Barclay Street (at West Broadway)
New York, 212 220 8020

A cult figure, a painter’s painter, the critic’s favorite, Paul Pagk is an artist whose import is whispered rather than shouted, a secret shared by connoisseurs, his name like a clandestine password amongst an entire younger generation now exploring abstraction. His appeal — for students, graduates, artists, and other initiates — is understandable because Pagk’s work is all about doubt as well as strength, about uncertainty and perhaps even a deliberate clumsiness, the chance of the marvelous in a mistake, the freedom to make a mistake and remake it. A painting by Pagk is almost an exercise in thinking aloud. They allow us to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like a giant ocean liner changing course, leaving the rich wake of its decision trailing through blue water, the long process of composition left as a physical presence.

Paris has always been a center of gravity for Pagk; as an itinerant Anglo-Czech child he attended the storied École des Beaux-Arts. He was a precocious young student and went on to live the full mythic bohemian life in a squat studio worthy of Louis-Henri Murger. Thus although he has been based in downtown Manhattan for the last 25 years, and is considered a quintessential New York artist, Pagk’s work somehow maintains a European resonance, a sort of Parisian “punctum,” which makes his exhibition of recent work here resoundingly right. His show at the generous Galerie Eric Dupont, in the Marais, is pure Pagk: both absolutely straightforward and oddly unsettling, off-kilter. Pagk’s work can also be seen in group show’s at Two Two One and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The artist hung the show himself, and has laid out with great care the relationship between the works, all the contrasts and continuities in his oeuvre. Their procession is established with a simple sight line from the entrance right through to the large back room, which contains the biggest paintings. To arrive there one moves through a small antechamber with a few smaller canvases. That room is followed by a long, luminous gallery with a wall of pinned, unframed drawings, some in pink gouache, others of graphite, and others with pure pencil or ink lines. They use many of Pagk’s common devices: geometric painting with a free hand and loose edges, occasionally employing reiteration of compositional elements in horizontal tiers across the picture plane. Many have diagrammatic compositions that resemble circuits or the lines of sports fields. Several of the untitled drawings have anxious hashmarks repeatedly scratched into their surface. They’re set next to a small oil painting, Untitled Yellow (2014), and face a large painting Untitled Yellow, Pink and White (2013). The varied works in these two rooms can be sensed at the same time as the dramatic final chamber with its imposing presence.

The two rows of drawings, challengingly asymmetrical, with eight on the top row and seven on the bottom, and Untitled Yellow, challenge any grand gesture, with their intimacy and hesitancy, their off-hand elegance, thumb marks on the white paper — all these accidents and accents which are perhaps carefully plotted, the secret “plot lines” indeed that run through this whole exhibition from beginning to end. This sequence is in fact infinitely subtly calibrated, like a musical composition, suggesting that all of its cumulative elements are contained in the last large works, even if we can no longer recognize them under the weight of their palimpsest of paint. We can make connections, if we concentrate, between the shapes and contours, the reversible geometry of these works, as they share a clearly connected language, a grammar not of ornament but intent.

The Pagk Paradox remains: work that is both seemingly casual, gestural, spontaneous yet also deeply pondered, solemnly crafted, weighted, freighted with their own history. The last room rewards us with heavily worked, multi-tiered large oil paintings (each 65 by 74 inches). The Meetin’ (2012), Untitled White Yellow and Grey (2013), High Tide (2012-13), and the bright fuchsia Once Above Once Below (2008-14) have delicious, glossy patinas built over months from layer after layer of hand-mixed paint, decision after decision, their white scumbled lines like contrails through the sky.

Pagk is not aiming for consistency but for a more challenging sort of complexity. He balances the sheer smoothness of certain surfaces (as in Once Above Once Below or The Meetin’) against the rough-hewn, clotted and dense presence of other paintings (such as High Tide or many small paintings like OGLS 128, 2011). He asks us to follow his path as if it were continuous, kept moving beyond the picture plane and extended invisibly, structurally, through the whole gallery space, a mesh of infinite, intangible perspective. Perhaps this is part of Pagk’s appeal to a young generation of painters: his work seems at first rooted in a long tradition of old-school abstraction (American AbEx and European movements from Constructivism to Support-Surface) but then reveals itself to be an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether appropriate to the contemporary digital environment. Even the sheer surface of Pagk’s larger paintings have something of the deep sheen, the reflective (in every sense of that word, giving space for reflection) smoothness of those screens before which many of us now spend our lives. But these are handcrafted, infinitely meticulous and altogether human screens porting the presence of all the many stages of their making.

Pagk plays between the “worked” and the provisional, mistake and certainty, the heroic and the throwaway, the build up and the letdown. As a result, his work contains a kind of layered time, a deep map of its own making, as if all the marks ever drawn between the Etch-A-Sketch of 1962 and the latest iPhone app were still extant, eternally present, tangible somewhere at some unfathomably distant, unlocatable level, within the surface of the very screen.

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Long assumed to be already dead, often confused with someone else, Dorothea Tanning managed to maintain the mystique of the true artist, muse even, whilst all her contemporaries fell victim to the obligatory museum retrospective and illustrated biography.

Yes, she was still alive, and all of 101, and no, she was neither Leonora nor Dorothea Carrington, but what Tanning maintained above all else was the grand patrician aura of the lover of arts, connoisseur and patron, the ‘amateur’ in the French and best sense of the word, for whom literature, music, theatre, civilised conversation were as important as her own work.

What made this the more refreshing was that unlike certain self-promoters and media darlings, unlike those who hustle to maintain their supposèd importance, Tanning had actually produced a handful of major, significant and influential art works.

Whenever I went past that rather noble corner of Fifth Avenue where she resided I thought with a discrete, private pleasure, “Ah, the last of the secret society of Surrealists is still hidden here, being herself, even in our own ghastly era” and would tip the metaphoric hat up at her curtains, chintz even I recall.

Thanks to that unusual name, and no Surrealist should be called ‘Smith’, every passing sunbed-emporium blaring TANNING would make me think of her, I hardly knew her, triggering a brief flow of pleasant associations, bus-musings, until the next shop should catch my eye.

She loved poetry – she wrote it and supported it, financially and more importantly morally, and actually actively read the stuff. She loved flowers and was expert upon them. She was witty, sharp, smart, had known ‘everyone’ and still knew a vast range of intriguing, important people. And I really liked her apartment.  Everyone loved to talk about her in terms that recall those Japanese ‘Living National Treasures’, whether America’s greatest contemporary composer, Robert Ashley, to whom she was somehow related, or the Filipacchi family who rightly treated her with utmost reverence.

The first time I went to interview her, after more than an hour of highly enjoyable dirt dishing she paused dramatically, “And now I think it’s time….” So I scrambled to my feet agreeing I certainly should be on my way, I could not exhaust her any further, after all she was already over ninety, “No, no… it’s time for the champagne!”

Two bottles and as many hours later I emerged onto the sparkling mica of the midsummer pavement, “drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue” filled with a bonhomie, an old-fashioned wellbeing worthy of Sedona, Arizona in 1947 or Paris in the early fifties.

She did not like being labeled a ‘woman’ artist and she did not like being branded a ‘Surrealist’ and she would have surely hated the boom in exhibitions, books, Phd dissertations and catalogues devoted to the theme of ‘Female Surrealists’, one of which, inevitably, is currently duitfully trundling round the institutions.*

Indeed Tanning had lasted long enough to already fall prey to a first flurry of such academic researchers coming round to prove their already-fixed assumptions, and had given them suitably short shrift, exploding their neat categories: “I am not even a woman, let alone a Surrealist!”

I had read her book Birthday (proud she signed it for me) which was incredibly good, an exceptional piece of writing quite aside from all art-historical interest, a book I remain surprised is not better known nor regarded as a ‘Modern Classic’ or whatever they call them nowadays. In fact, if she had done nothing else the creation of Birthday would have been achievement enough.

I also got her to sign a collection of poems that she had chosen and paired with her own paintings, many by her many writer friends, which made clear the literary affinities, the skein of poetic associations, within her own work, ‘Surrealism’ having of course been first and foremost a literary rather than visual movement.

To tell the truth I was never really interested in Max Ernst anyway, his looks, though obviously impressive, were too Aryan for my taste, and thus luckily I had no temptation to dwell on him.

Likewise Leonora Carrington, also Ernst’s lover and hence the occasional confusion, never struck me as particularly engaging. For she even shares her name with another woman artist, that Dora of Bloomsbury-fame (who even had a feature film, the eponymous Carrington all about her) and the first duty of any artist is to have a unique name that not one other artist shares. Dorothea Carrington’s work also seemed a bit kitschy and derivative, an impression confirmed by a recent exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, where such sketchy whimsy failed to awe.

By contrast Tanning’s work never seemed overtly indebted to Ernst, or any other artist, and her most famous painting Birthday of 1942 is a key Surrealist image, resonant, disturbing, long-lasting, and closely-matched by Eine kleine nachtmusik of the next year.

Anyone who knows about poetry knows that one only has to write one good poem, in terms of posterity that’s all anyone is likely to achieve, more than most of us will manage. Likewise one really great, really memorable painting is sufficient to go down in the annals of art-history, and with Birthday Tanning had won her immortality already. And in terms of her own poetry I would suggest that just one really good title is something, and no title was more appropriate than her perfect invention of ‘Sequestrienne’.

But that’s not all! For even if her later paintings are perhaps not quite one’s tasse, there was to be yet one more major breakthrough in an entirely different medium, namely the soft-fabric sculptures she started in 1969. These not only prefigure the work of Louise Bourgeois, who certainly saw them, but also that of Sarah Lucas, who had not seen them but was later astonished by their similarities. These are truly weird, utterly uncanny objects, especially when assembled in tableaux groupings, such as the installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73) at the Pompidou. And they broke completely new ground in their compound of corporeal presence and ‘women’s-work’, all that stitching, synthetic fur and sensual softness. With this clearly female concentration on the body, on sex, fatness, femininity, Tanning single-handedly kick-started a whole style, heralded an entire sub-genre of such work.

I would prefer to remember her as an elegant dilettante, an Grande Dame in eternal exile, a latter-day society hostess, the Dada Mrs Dalloway, one who never had to try too hard, but the truth is that Tanning was also a damn good artist, despite herself.

Just three of her major early 1940s paintings and a room of her early ‘70s sculptures should be enough to convince anyone of her continued importance.

The last time I talked to Tanning was on the phone and after that classic clatter of all nonagenarian telephonic openings, distant kitchen noises and female-helpers and several false starts, she could not have been clearer. “ I’m just too old to talk to anyone….I have to die, it’s been going on for far too long, I’m far too old, I’m sorry but I really have to die. It’s time I died now.”

Tanning has at last achieved her ambition and as she put it in that perfectly entitled poem for herself, Secret: “Why hear congratulations for doing nothing but live?”

* In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, January 29 to May 6, 2012.

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April 6 – June 18, 2011
10 River Terrace, between Murray and Barclay streets,
New York City, (212) 431-7920

Poets may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world but they also serve as the equally unacknowledged binding agents, conduits and couriers, if not social cement, of a larger culture, especially that of the visual arts. Grace of light baggage, worldly and literal; fleetness of foot and phrase; obligatory diplomacy allied to a natural penchant for poverty and sprightly sense of survival: the poet often plays a crucial, though naturally unpaid, role in the art world.

The very epitome of this position might be the life and career of Alberto de Lacerda, a Portugese poet whose friends and supporters included the widest possible swathe of painters, sculptors, publishers, editors, fellow writers and thorough bohemians, stretched across as many continents as professions. Born in Portugese Mozambique in 1928, Lacerda spent the majority of his working life in London, whilst regularly shuttling between England and America where he taught at several universities, including Boston to and Columbia.

This roaming existence traversed several particularly fertile decades of creative change, from the relative austerity of 1950s London, to the narcotic wonderland of  ‘60s America. Lacerda profited richly from these shifting times, places and mores, happily exploiting his obviously abundant talent for friendship.

Indeed, what is fascinating about the exemplary exhibition – entirely drawn from his Estate – at Poets House is the sheer range of his connections spanning such seemingly disparate cultures and cities.

Laid out in a series of vitrines is a selection of utterly delicious ephemera tracing his society trajectory, from a luncheon seating plan in the hand of Dame Edith Sitwell, along with a telegram inviting him to eat with T.S. Eliot and William Walton, to snapshots of Lacerda with such friends as Ocatvio Paz, Martha Graham and Stephen Spender.  There are manuscripts and dedicated books given to him by the likes of Anne Sexton, Robert Duncan andMarianne Moore.

On arriving in London in 1951 Lacerda began to work for the BBC but was soon publishing his own work, not least in the Times Literary Supplement.  His first book, 77 Poems, was translated in conjunction with none less than Arthur Waley, the fabled sinologist and expert on Chinese verse.

Amongst his other achievements, Lacerda drank with Dylan Thomas, introduced Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world, and traveled to the newly built Brasilia with its architect Oscar Niemeyer. Having, as it were, conquered postwar London, Lacerda moved in 1967 to Austin, to take up a position at the University of Texas. Here, to general surprise, not least his own, the entirely cosmopolitan sophisticate found himself equally happy, even if eventually moving back to his fabled abode at Primrose Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive where he died in 2007.

Through these peregrinations Lacerda maintained long associations with as many visual artists as writers, which thanks to these vagaries of time and place, resulted in his forming an eclectic and truly international collection, shown at its best throughout the generous length of Poets House. Part of this private collection was exhibited at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon in 1987, and its re-appearance here in Battery Park seems a fortuitous, if somewhat improbable, blessing.

Perhaps the most striking works are by two rightly celebrated Portugese women artists, Vieira da Silva and Paula Rego, both of whom are well represented here, with drawings and prints stretching from 1943 to 1997.

Likewise some of Lacerda’s more celebrated friends such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and even Henry Miller here make their mark. But there are equally impressive works by Arpad Szenes, Pavel Tchelitchew, Victor Willing, David Jones and Alan Davie, artists all too rarely shown in New York, and now making a welcome appearance in the city entirely, ironically, thanks to their poet colleague.

A good many of these works are, naturally, images of the poet himself, including a charming parchment portrait by the late lamented Rory McEwen, but there are also portraits that Lacerda collected of other poets by other artists, among them François Villon’s Rimbaud and Manet’s Baudelaire.

And here we understand Lacerda as part of precisely such a lineage, an archetype almost, the poet who knows everyone and everything yet always lives in the shadow of the wealth that threatens his artist-friends, a sort of ‘Zelig’ of the zeitgeist. They always have archives, saving every scrap of their possible posterity, and for some reason always make collages themselves, that medium being somehow specific to every poet. Lacerda is represented by one such work from 1990. If ideal exemplars might be Mallarmé or Eluard, then Manhattan is oddly well stocked with such characters, from Charles Henri Ford to Rene Ricard and Max Blagg, collector-collagist-catalysts of the culture all.

This welcome presentation of Lacerda’s collection makes clear the sheer continuity of the poet’s place amongst artists, at least since the Romantic era, an indefinable yet vital creative presence whose continuation is devoutly to be wished.

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