January 9 to February 8, 2014
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
Mixed Greens: First Floor, 212 331 8888
Zoubok: Second Floor, 212-675-7490

Co-presented and co-organized by Pavel Zoubok Gallery and its downstairs neighbor, Mixed Greens, this exhibition celebrates the effervescent and flamboyant swath that Holly Solomon cut through the art world. For some 30 years a succession of Manhattan galleries that she ran exhibited a stunningly eclectic roster of artists. Holly was, of course, a major queen bee, very frequently the subject of her artists as well as their promoter, agent, and mother confessor.

This stereophonic show, while only beginning to convey the width and exuberant breadth of her stylish career, reminds today’s industrial strength art world of her irrepressible energy.  She played a key role in ushering in stylistic pluralism, not to mention the return of content, recognition of emerging women artists, and the whole postmodern aesthetic that erupted in the mid-1970s. Holly and Horace Solomon, as a couple, helped break down the austere hegemony of minimalism, injecting some real fun into contemporary art.

While there now are and have been wonderful, intrepid woman art dealers, renegade individualists such as Holly (who was, after all, a classic Sarah Lawrence girl) are increasingly rare in the current celebrity climate of the art industry. Mixed Greens has installed many of the portraits of Holly, including Christo’s Wrapped Holly (1966), Arch Connelly’s Holly Sparkling (1988), Robert Kushner’s jazzy portrait of 1983 and Robert Mapplethorpe’s seductive triple photograph of 1976. Across the two venues there are individual pieces by more than 40 former gallery artists and artist friends, including Brad Davis’s Bird & Lotus Tondo #4, (1979), which always hung in Holly’s rose-patterned bedroom.

Holly’s youthful ambition was “to be a great actress,” as she emphatically told me in 1986.  That year we began our collaboration (with photographer John Hall) on the book, Living With Art, published in 1988, based on the then novel idea of examining the domestic environments of contemporary collectors who paired sophisticated understanding of furniture and the decorative arts with a passion for art collecting.  As to her thespian ambitions, the art world in fact became Holly’s stage. And she always had an audience. The galleries were basically a mom and pop store.  But Holly was after all, never a shopkeeper but an aspiring uptown socialite when she first arrived in Manhattan. Her early collectors were very often social friends. All it needed to get them to participate in our book was a phone call from Holly, who always talked fast, waving a lit cigarette in her right hand.

Holly’s own first contemporary art acquisition, she told me, was a Warhol Brillo Box bought from Eleanor Ward (an outspoken, pioneering female dealer of the previous generation who had opened the Stable Gallery in 1953). It had been delivered to the kitchen but Holly instructed that it go into the living room where she used as a coffee table in the Solomon’s Sutton Place apartment.

In short order she reupholstered Horace’s beloved 19th-century English and American furniture in day-glo pink velvets. Before long, a Christo wrapped storefront filled the apartment foyer. It would later be replaced by a wild Judy Pfaff exploded cubistic construction and then a Ned Smyth aquatic-themed screen. Led early on by Richard Bellamy, from whom she bought a Lucas Samaras on the installment plan, and then by Leo Castelli, the Solomons collected Pop Art in the 1960s. (Andy Warhol produced an iconic multiple portrait in pastel hues of Holly that not too long ago sold at Christie’s.)  Later, paintings and objects by Lichtenstein, Twombly, Rosenquist and Oldenburg were superseded by works from Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Dennis Oppenheim and Neil Jenney as downtown art dealer John GIbson expanded the Solomons’ knowledge of the avant-garde. The Solomons embraced conceptual art in the late 1960s.

Collecting was the pathway that would lead Holly to dealing. Aided by Horace’s moral and financial support (the money came from a New Jersey fortune based on a family-owned company making hair accessories) she evolved from aspiring actress to art collector in the 1960s, when contemporary art became the rage among a group of upwardly mobile Manhattanites that included the Sculls.  Back then the contemporary art world was really a rather small club.

The Solomon apartment (and later her smaller apartment on 79th Street) was always an extension of her pioneering, flamboyant taste and an example of how high art and décor could fearlessly co-exist. While the current shows give a glimpse of her wide-ranging eye, they cannot encompass the cheeky vitality of that apartment and also of the galleries as they evolved. Soon a shiny Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt centerpiece replaced the small fabric Oldenburg as a dining room table centerpiece and in the 1980s Patkin covered the dining room windows with a stunning, silvery grey rubber curtain (veil) embellished with fruit and flowers.. The Christo in the foyer gave way to a Ned Smyth aquatic-themed screen featuring lively fish, and later an ebullient Judy Pfaff construction. Doreen Gallo had transformed the kitchen, covering walls, countertops and furniture with a riot of mismatched colored and patterned tiles, glass fragments, and stones. The living room was a mad riot of patterns and colors created with artist made furniture and window dressing constructed by Brad Davis. And the frequent extravagantly generous parties at 57^th Street were like family celebrations, with Holly’s artists as the family members.

Always the actress, Holly wrote  (and performed in) a couple of plays and by 1969 the couple had opened 98 Greene Street, a performance and project space designed and built out by a very young, radical Gordon Matta-Clark, only one year after Paula Cooper had opened one of the first of the loft galleries that put SoHo on the map. It was here that Robert Kushner staged his legendary fashion shows and others exhibited work and read poetry. Many of the 98 Greene Street artists formed the nucleus of the SoHo gallery the Solomons opened at 392 West Broadway six years later, among them tinsel king Lanigan-Schmidt, Mapplethorpe, Brad Davis, and Izhar Patkin. When the Solomons inaugurated the strategically located street level gallery with a very lively, diverse group show, it was action central. The opening night crowd–a kind of proto-flash mob–jammed the West Broadway sidewalk drinking art critic white wine and champagne till all hours.

Many of the artists Holly took under her wing since have carved out substantial careers, among them William Wegman, Robert Kushner, Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Pfaff, Robert Barry, Yvonne Jacquette, Kim MacConnell and Joe Zucker. She also showed Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Peter Hutchinson, Nam Juin Paik and Richard Nonas as well as Jed Bark, who was an early participant, went on to become one of the most sought-after framer to museums, galleries and high-end collectors.

When there were very few women artist successfully showing at the time, Holly was quite proud to be a pioneer in championing work by women, including Laurie Anderson, Donna Dennis, Eliza Jimenez, Mary Heilmann, Yvonne Jaquette, Alexis Smith and Melissa Meyer. (She was a founding member of the woman’s organization, ARTable.) She is also still best known as the early doyenne of what came to be called “P & D,” as a new generation of artists renounced the austerities of conceptual art in favor of flamboyant color and shape referencing the patterns and decorations of fabrics, beading and cellophane.

After seven years on West Broadway, the Solomons moved the gallery uptown to 724 Fifth Avenue, a block south of 57th Street, where Holly once again was out front in her enthusiasm for the design and decorative arts. I recall, for example, her enthusiasm for Kim MacConnel’s splashily painted sofas and the Dufy’s designs that upholstered a set of French chairs she showed and the French provincial desk that she always sat behind in her small office (until some collector wanted to buy it) dressed in Chanel suits, her wrists dripping with her Seaman Schepps bracelets. Who else would have showed Izhar Patkin’s life-size gold-anodized aluminum horse and helmeted rider, Don Ouijute, Seguna Parte, (1989) in a toney midtown gallery? The last public gallery was a long, narrow space on Mercer Street.

Time inevitably tames radical art, incorporating it into the long-range history of culture. Some of the art Holly showed has since entered the mainstream but it was really new, fresh and even shocking forty years ago. And let me stress that Holly’s eye was always courageous. While she would have never considered herself an intellectual, her taste was almost always impeccable.

The post The Art World Was Her Stage: Holly Solomon, Actress, Collector, Dealer Extraordinaire appeared first on artcritical.

March 28 to April 27, 2013
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212-268-6699

Judith Belzer’s recent paintings careen between the vertiginous grandeur of her larger, blueprint-like compositions and the close-up, increasingly flat and microscopic intimacy of her smaller canvases. The cellular, gridded patterns of these latter paintings (each only 10 by 10 inches), derive from birds-eye views of fuel storage tanks and industrial sites that flank the freeways, often alongside the compromised wetlands of San Francisco Bay: those eight-lane highways packed with perpetually congested or rushing traffic that snakes far below the precipitous Berkeley highlands.

The artist’s move to the West Coast a decade ago had a liberating effect on her work, enlarging her painterly vocabulary and opening up her style. After living in Manhattan and Connecticut she found her visual thinking astonished and transformed by the fierce scale, sweep, and sprawl of this new and unfamiliar urbanized landscape.

While it is heady with visual drama, her newest work embodies growing disquiet at the relentless industrial invasion of the natural environment. Belzer’s previous series of paintings, in which she discovered within the internal patterning of wood grain and tree bark a mysterious, undulating abstraction, were uncanny, analytical, close-up compositions. Her “Edgelands” series expands to probe contemporary culture’s uneasy relationship with the natural landscape through sweeping graphic patterning and design rendered as a kind of cartographical shorthand. Line, rather than any overwhelming color, dominates these pictures, while a radiant sense of encompassing light is transmitted through Belzer’s use of a rich variety of whites. ( A passionate relationship with nature has underlain her art throughout her career. Belzer’s early work, first shown in 1996 at Berry Hill Galleries in New York, were realistically observed, yet quite expressionistically rendered studies of the forms of different flowers, fruits and foliage.)

These newest paintings are deliriously complex. The artist’s use of dizzying perspective may recall Wayne Thiebaud’s joyfully vertical San Francisco streetscapes and checkerboard constellations of fields, but Belzer’s tenser vision is distinctly more dystopian than his, breathless with speed rather than serenely static.  And though there is some romanticism about painting itself in her works, an emphasis on recording the impact of modern industrial realities represents an affinity with Rackstraw Downes’ scrupulous, reportorial realism.

Her Olympian, aerial perspective maps shifting layers of urbanized landscape where planners, with a heavy hand, have superimposed factories, storage tanks, warehouses and superhighways on the spectacular coastline. Alarm at this ruthless environmental damage finds an echo, in Belzer’s aesthetically compelling recent work, in her over-the-speed-limit trajectories of agitated line.  Belzer is an artist whose work grows ever more ambitious and distinctive.

This spring, concurrent with the gallery exhibition, Belzer’s work will be included in two museum group shows in New York: Against the Grain at the Museum of Arts and Design and Drawn to Nature at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York.

The post On the Edge: Judith Belzer at Morgan Lehman appeared first on artcritical.

September 6 to October 6, 2012
138 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th streets
New York City, 212-750-0949

A visual coup de foudre, this gem of an exhibition of masterful collages ambushed a skeptical critic on her Chelsea peregrinations. Defying expectations, what were these collages that owed such a graceful debt to Kurt Schwitters and possessed such intelligent and delicate affinities with the work of Anne Ryan while exhibiting a definite character of their own? Was this the work of an emerging artist and if so, how to explain the modest mastery and lack of self-conscious appropriation characterizing these quietly radiant compositions? A time warp touch of quiet authority and sure grasp of abstract shape and color juxtaposition seemed beyond the imagination and skill of the typical MFA graduate these days. Yet I had never heard of the artist, Henry Rothman, before this encounter.

The works in the current show were made over two decades, from the mid-sixties until the late 1980s. Rothman (1910-1990) was an artist’s artist: in what was then a much smaller and more intertwined art world than today’s five-ring circus, his collages were admired and snapped up by many of the New York artists who were his clients and peers. But recognition of his work was sidelined by his own modesty as well as by the relentlessness of aesthetic fashion, with its appetite for the always bigger and more spectacular.

Rothman, who had immigrated to America some time in the 1930s from Austria, where he had attended art school in Vienna, studied journalism at NYU after he got to New York. He began his career in the 1940s as a street photographer fascinated with urban decay, graffiti, and peeling fragments of posters. He also opened a small framing business on Manhattan’s 28th Street. This shop also doubled as a kind of casual salon for other artists, among them his photographer colleague Weegee, as well as Louise Nevelson, Jacques Lipchitz and even actor Anthony Quinn, then pursuing his fortunes as a painter. By the 1950s Rothman had begun making small collages that deftly incorporated shards of advertisements typography, combining scraps of color with orphaned lettering that visually echoed his earlier photographs.

The Jed Bark of his day, Rothman’s great skill as a master framer brought him many of the era’s most prominent artists as clients. Apparently they eagerly acquired his collages, which he would then frame for them. But reluctant to be seen as competing with his artist clients, he never pushed his own artwork. Instead their creation seems to have been an intimate and personal activity.

Like Robert Kulicke, artist and legendary goldsmith, whose prowess as an inventive framer (he pioneered the Plexiglas box frame in the 1960s) may well have initially obscured his excellence as a painter, Henry Rothman remained exceptionally modest about his own artistic achievements. Celebrated as a master of water gilding, (the refined technique of applying sheets of gold leaf over a carefully prepared layer of red clay), he was deservedly famous among professional framers. To this day his son David carries on the high standards set by his father in the framing business that is now on West 36th Street. At last, though, Henry Rothman’s exquisite collages are gaining recognition they deserve.

The post Beyond The Frame: Henry Rothman at Lori Bookstein appeared first on artcritical.

February 3 to March 12, 2011
525 West 22 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 247-2111

In January, DC Moore Gallery relocated from Fifth Avenue to more spacious premises in way trendier Chelsea. This was a savvy move on the part of the gallery’s principal, Bridget Moore: the new galleries, that look to be twice as big as the former gallery with ceilings twice as high, affords a grand and serious space.  Six recent paintings by Robert Kushner and a presentation of his amazing “Scriptorium” series, comprising hundreds of renderings of blossoms, plants and leaves inscribed on the pages of antique books, inaugurates the new space, along with a smaller show of Romare Bearden collages in the project room.  Kushner’s Scriptorium has occupied the artist’s complete attention for more than a year. It only serves to confirm me as a deep admirer of an under-celebrated artist often penalized for his devotion to beauty.

“Scriptorium: Devout Exercises from the Heart” takes its title from the room in medieval monasteries where monks copied out books by hand. The work provides compelling evidence that Kushner, for whom drawing is a spiritual as well as an artistic discipline, has become one of our most accomplished as well as original draftsmen. His study and practice of Chinese brush painting and Japanese calligraphy and his extensive, dedicated, seasonal observations of nature underlie the notable finesse of this of this delicate yet colossal work.  Hundreds of individual drawings and paintings are pinned simply to the wall with dressmaker pins. Never installed in the same way twice, this flexible tour de force of extremely varied approaches to depicting flowers and plants marries the diversity of the botanical world to antique artifacts of world literature.  The latter is represented by various pages from discarded and damaged books and manuscript pages—often foxed or even charred on the edges—retrieved from French Christmas poems, pages of Noh plays old, handwritten letters and other such sources.

On each sheet a flower, a branch or a leaf reanimates lost texts and forgotten images.  Healing the hurt pages, Kushner reminds us that nature remains the foundation of beauty. Each of the sheets is being sold separately—at reasonable enough prices, in my opinion, to allow a collector to reassemble a smaller version of this installation of their own choosing.

On the other walls, six large, recent paintings are unified through pellucid, melting backgrounds of cerulean blue, sometimes buttressed with panels of gold leaf or oxidized copper leaf. Each is a painting of different seasonal wild flowers. Observed from June through October, the arrangements seems to float against a perfect summer sky. From Hawkweed to Queen Anne’s Lace, Kushner has given his plants a gaiety and grandeur that such humble wildflowers and weeds are usually not awarded. Their radiance defied the cold grey light of a season of ice and snow.

Alexandra Anderson-Spivy is a critic who lives and works in Manhattan. She wrote the monograph, Robert Kushner: Gardens of Earthly Delight, published by Hudson Hills Press (1997).

The post Healing Hurt Pages: Robert Kushner’s Scriptorium appeared first on artcritical.