Of these two generously illustrated biographies of the wonderful mid-20th-century painter David Park, the first, from three years ago, is by the elder of Park’s two daughters, and the second, newly published, is by an expert historian of modern art in California. Read in tandem, they are distinct and complement each other perfectly.

Helen Park Bigelow’s is a family memoir, in which her father and the paintings of his that mean the most to her are central but not the only active characters. She has good stories to tell and zigzags apace from one to the next; she chats, surmises and casts a wide, sympathetic gaze on almost everyone within range. Her responses to the pictures are instinctive and often eloquent. About Park’s late-1940s abstractions, she recalls, “It was as if the colors took my gaze for a ride, made it travel all over the terrain with no guidance from me,” while the figures in the late-50s pictures, are “heavy with being.”

Nancy Boas’s book also is sympathetic, though more impersonal, a balanced and analytical account; her passion shows in how persuasively she argues for a wider recognition of Park’s importance as more than the locally esteemed leader of the Bay Area Figuratives, which now in any case seems on the way. (A couple of years ago, complaining of the New York art scene’s general shallowness and offering a number of suggestions for heightened perspicacity on the part of local curators, Roberta Smith wrote that Park “could do with another New York retrospective. He’s the kind of artist who can light a fire under a young artist and also teach the public a great deal about looking at painting.”) Boas moves readily from moment to moment of the life and work, her telling quickened on nearly every page by revealing quotations from Park’s friends and colleagues––viz., Elmer Bischoff ‘s description of Park around 1946, when he was in his mid-30s, having recently joined the full-time faculty at the California School of Fine Arts and a few years short of realizing his true originality as a painter: “He had a powerful, sculpted head and a large, Martha Raye mouth. . . . His eyes were prominent and bulged bit.” Park’s attire, Bischoff concludes, was “casual academic.”

Park was born in Boston in 1911 and died in his California home at age 49, in 1960. Both Bigelow’s and Boas’s narratives start from his childhood in and outside of the confines of a genteel Back Bay family, the “outside” part being his absorption–– inviolable from the get-go, it seems––in painting, playing the piano and wandering in “secret places,” those woodlands and waterways where he developed what soon would become manifest as his extraordinary skills of observation and memory. To Boas, Bischoff also passed along a joke Park liked to tell that illustrates how briskly he had separated himself from his upbringing––his father’s parlor-size Unitarianism, in particular––and something of his attitude toward art making, as well:

Some Christians . . . . died and went the other side and came to a fork in the road. One of the signs said ‘To Heaven,’ and the other sign said ‘To a Lecture on Heaven,’ and they all went to the second one.

By age twelve Park was producing drawings and watercolors of figures in idyllic settings, imagery that would recur throughout his career but most tellingly in the extravagantly lathered paintings of his last few years, those works Boas sees properly as “integrating people and nature and paint.” (Among Boas’s illustrations is a painting called Man and Woman Reclining, made when Park was twenty-six, that shows him already capable of the deep sensuality that is a major part of his late work’s power.) By the time he left for California, a seventeen-year-old prep-school dropout, he was pretty much a committed artist. (“The East was never my medium,” he said, in a characteristic word-choice twist.) In 1930 he married his friend Gordon Newell’s sister Lydia, whose vivacity and affection and all-out support for her husband’s art were subverted periodically by migraines and depression––a mix that, along with the heavy drinking that was endemic at the time, both Bigelow and Boas handle candidly while taking care not to overdramatize it.

A glimpse of how, on occasion, love and art could dovetail in Park’s sensibility comes from an interview by Boas of one of his lifelong friends:

He said that the night before, when Lydia was undressing, she pulled off her slip, and the slip was in that electrified stage that some slips sometimes get into, and that as she pulled it over her, suddenly the electricity, the light, flickered across, so that her whole body was outlined in shadow against the slip, and he was just overcome by how beautiful it was. The scene was tremendous to him––the light that showed off the figure. He spoke almost in a tone of reverence . . . .  I think it was partly that his love for her shone through. I always remember his speaking of it. It was a visual experience for him which had great emotion.”

Bigelow, too, tells how her father “collected light, like the thin cast of blue as he went up and down the steps of the house in Boston where he was born.” Park, she writes, “reached into his repertoire of light,” applying it to the work at hand. Right there the terms become clearer of that peculiar equation his astonishingly straight-ahead art proposes: Bodies plus light make life.

Helen Park Bigelow, David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back (Manchester and New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2009). Foreword by Richard Armstrong. ISBN 978-1-55595-320-1. 207 pages. $60.

Nancy Boas, David Park: A Painter’s Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012).  ISBN 978-0-520-26841-8. 357 pages. $49.95.

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Report from… San Francisco

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde, organized by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, Rebecca Rabinow and Gary Tinterow for the following venues: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (to September 6); Réunion des Musées Nationaux––Grand Palais, Paris (October 3-January 16, 2012); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 21-June 3, 2012).

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, organized by Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (to September 6); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (October 14-January 22, 2012).

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, organized by the Musée National Picasso and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. De Young Museum, San Francisco (to October 9); travels last to Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, November 12-February 19, 2012.

How great is this? In downtown San Francisco, within three blocks of each other, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Jewish Museum have concurrent, eyepopping and hugely detailed shows on the activities of Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, their older brother Michael and his wife Sarah, and, finally, Gertrude’s great love Alice B. Toklas, in furthering and collecting early twentieth-century art in Paris. And to top it off, across town, on the near edge of Golden Gate Park, the De Young Museum is hosting an equally astonishing set of 150 Picasso paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris. The contents of all three shows together should be enough to put some soul in anybody’s summer.

“Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” at the CJM is mostly just that. For those not already interested in Stein and how her looks, manner and the company she kept changed with age, the walk-through experience might feel a bit so-so. As it was, they changed considerably, and not just with age, but with her literary achievements and her own self views, as well as with how others saw her. Studying her strong face and massive physique, remarkable as they were, or the dust jackets of her books won’t help you enjoy her writings any better, although the recordings of her reading some of her work, as well as the electrifying footage of the original 1934 production of her and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, surely will. Curated by Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer, who also wrote alternating chapters for the accompanying book, “Five Stories” is more a procession of essays to be read––sumptuously illustrated and exhilarating at that––than a show to go see.

Under subheads like “Bohemian Stein,” “Matron Stein,” and  “Imperial Stein,” you find a person––insistently, by her own lights, a genius––alternately courageous and wary, endlessly (often haplessly) self-promoting, too regularly enthralled by her own pronouncements. She could be all smiles and warmly persuasive in her public appearances during her legendary mid-1930s American lecture tour, and yet long before then her demands on any self-respecting caller had become famously insufferable. In the book and wall texts, both Corn and Latimer stress as exemplary in its forthrightness and ardor the way she and Alice Toklas settled into their lesbian life together for nearly 40 years: “By 1910, Stein and Toklas had privately pledged themselves to each other as husband and wife. From now on, they used the language of conventional marriage to describe their love, calling each other hubby and wifey and dividing up domestic chores strictly along traditional gender lines.”

Stein may well have been the most portrayed writer of her era. The range of painters and photographers who sought her out as a sitter––from Picasso to Picabia, from Man Ray to Cecil Beaton––says something about her allure. By the late 1920s, her main artistic affiliations were with photography and sculpture (though strangely, despite the efforts of both Jacques Lipchitz and Jo Davidson, no sculptural image quite brings home the scale and force of her presence). “Painting now after its great moment must come back to be a minor art,” she declared in 1931. It was in light of such dim prospects that when she did buy pictures they tended to be works by lesser painters who came her way––most famously, the hyper-opportunist Sir Francis Rose, out of whose 130 works in Stein’s collection, only one on view, an atypical, Jess-like portrait hanging at the CJM, has serious merit.

“The Steins Collect” is epic. Besides delivering the goods in sheer density and depth, a plenum of marvelous objects to look at, the installation, a high-wire performance by SFMoMA curator Janet Bishop, allows healthy, albeit sometimes heated, dialogue between on-site appreciation and what has come to be advanced as museological significance. Late in life, Gertrude Stein confided what was first apparent in her approach to art and artists, that she had “always wanted to be historical.” The inevitable tension between how to historicize oneself as an artist and other, institutional ideas of history is implicit in her unqualified response to Alfred Barr’s attempts early on to get her to give her collection to the Museum of Modern Art: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”

“The Steins Collect” is historical as not just a telling array of art works but also the story of the people connected with them, who seem bent on being interesting in infinitely compelling ways. Combine this with the documentation of Gertrude and Alice at the CJM, and you get an aggregate saga in perpetually interweaving parts, not least of which are the adventures of some members of a well-off but not super-rich second-generation Jewish family from the San Francisco Bay Area in building collections of such magnitude. Gertrude and Leo took the lead, and Sarah and Michael soon matched them. In and around Paris beginning in 1905 and after returning permanently to California thirty years later, Sarah Stein lived out her special passion for the art of Matisse (who in turn dubbed her “the really intelligently sensitive member of the family”­­), while Michael tended to the financial end so that everyone’s income from the family businesses (street cars and rental properties back home) could be adequately maintained.

The early galleries at SFMoMA, as well as those at the De Young, serve as reminders of how hard-won were the glories of the avant-garde’s pre-World-War-I Golden Age. To contemplate what took place just within the first half of the decade leading up to 1914 is dizzying. It was in Gertrude and Leo’s salon in 1906 that Picasso and Matisse met and where, more often than not, over the next few years, each one saw some painting by the other, a shocker, deep within the terms of painting, that left both artists and their immediate audiences, too, wondering what turn the art would take next. In this brief epoch of largely abandoned or otherwise imploding masterpieces, it’s easy to imagine the two of them repeatedly scaring themselves and each other, courting catastrophe in a kind of delirious one-up-manship (the point being not to scare off or win but to further heighten the game). The most scarifying of all, of course, was Picasso’s “first exorcism picture,” Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, an abrupt, nightmarish inversion of the Arcadian dream––that dear sad fantasy of liberality and ease adapted from Cézanne by Matisse, who carried it over from his Fauvist-psychedelic phase to the classic grandeur of the pictures (Sarah’s and Michael’s Le Luxe I was one) done after summering with the Steins in Italy in 1907, the same year Demoiselles got started. The demoiselles may have no clothes on, but they are not in a grove by a stream; Picasso’s brothel concoction is a B-side enactment of an un-modern earthly paradise.

Would Demoiselles have been to Gertrude’s liking? Leo hated it and all of Picasso that followed from it; hated, too, Gertrude’s writings that ran close parallels to Picasso in invention, plus, he had zero tolerance for the fact of Alice in Gertrude’s life––so finally he moved out, taking his Renoirs and many choice Cézannes with him. In the Autobiography, Gertrude records Alice’s first impression of Demoiselles as of “something painful and beautiful there and oppressive but imprisoned.” By the time Picasso let the picture out of the studio, some nine years after stopping work on it, Gertrude couldn’t afford her old friend’s prices, and anyway it was too big, rough and imposing to be accommodated in any grouping on her household walls. Accordingly, the Demoiselles itself has no wall space in any of these shows. Instead, although physically absent, it haunts every one of them. What we see in its place at SFMoMA, are the related paintings and drawings that at one point formed a single line along the wall behind where Gertrude sat at her writing desk.

At some distance from the Matisse-Picasso agon, the most refined of the Arcadians––and the only one who brought the mode to flower in cubism proper––was Juan Gris. Softer and subtler than either, with what Gertrude Stein rightly called his “clarity and exaltation,” Gris achieved the serenity that Matisse frantically reached for and something extra that even Picasso never managed, the confidence that true mystery can come embedded in design.

“Sensitive” is not a word commonly applied to Picasso’s art but many early works here answer precisely to that description, among them the portrait of young Allan Stein, Michael and Sarah’s son. Matisse’s two depictions of Allan, two rooms later, are bold but comparatively impersonal exercises in picture making, although in the case of Boy with Butterfly Net, seemingly empathetic to the boy’s mad plunge into adolescence. Matisse’s best moments would occur soon enough; the great shorthand portraitist he would become is visible the images he made in 1916 of Michael and Sarah themselves, gems of SFMoMA’s permanent collection.

At the De Young you get a freshly impressive, quickstep survey of Picasso’s manifold achievement, affording, in the process, the chance to see many familiar works in a new light for being seen in a new place. (Given the pleasures of all that, it’s for the loveliness of small works, some unfamiliar and many still unframed as Picasso apparently preferred them, that one feels especially grateful.) Enough has been written about Picasso’s faults as a man, and even as an artist, his well-known monstrous side. There is far more to be gleaned from the deep humanity of his art, which, when it shows, is prodigious: this time around, for instance, for how, as a dramatist, he wrote the book on being and reflection, making them manifest in the simultaneity of pictorial form. In the Seated Woman of 1920, for instance, amazingly stately for all the systematic chunkiness of foreshortened body parts, and in the beautifully lost look of the couple in Village Dance (1922), how his characters’ eyes rest somewhere other than on the viewer (or other than, when accompanied, on one another), the whole gesture imbued with some large, slow turn in inner life.

“Picasso made me tough and quick and the world”––this line from Frank O’Hara’s “Memorial Day, 1950” echoes as I walk through the galleries. What a world: That no special theory emerges from any one or several visits may be part of what makes the serendipity of having all three shows here at once so happy and right. You look and look, and your sense of each picture and the next and the one across from that––or on yet another wall across town––gathers; together they click and make a constellation of shimmering details in and out of time. As Gertrude Stein herself said, concluding her 1923 portrait of her most constant artistic bedfellow, “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

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Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid
September 10 to November 29, 2009
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window  (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures.

Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties. *

Leaning gently into her task, this astonishing barrel of a woman shifts her weight away from the splendid, though nowise pristine, white wall, lips slightly parted in a smile as the earthenware pitcher releases a white skein from its rim. That smile holds its secret, murmuring, at one with the abundant presence it seems key to. Liedtke says the woman’s brawn and the vertically fluted folds of her skirt render her “like a caryatid,” although caryatids don’t bend or lean — but it’s true that, in terms of construction, the maid keeps Vermeer’s pictorial architecture aloft. The whole scene centers, subtly teetering, on her waist, and radiates. Hers is a type of big, blunt form we know in different guises and moods from the peasant women of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Piero della Francesca’sSinigallia Madonna and Mary Magdalen to Manet’s barmaid at the Folies-Bergère and de Kooning’sWoman I. No doubt encouraged by Northern-realist modes extending from Vermeer’s great precursor Jan van Eyck, Piero’s Sinigallia panel bears a special relation, with its slice of sun on bare wall and, in the forward chamber, (Piero’s only domestic scene) the hugely commanding frontal mass of mother and child.

Vermeer’s maid appears in the middle distance in the guise of some sort of lunar blessing. She is strength and help, appetite and caution, warmth and removal, modesty and intercession, decorum, daydream and delight, calm and a subtle shade of perturbation. (In no way is she about careless sex – no matter how many corollaries to that effect women of her station may have in the iconography of her time.)  It isn’t much of a stretch to align her activity as a mirror to the painter’s own, as he deposits colors onto a surface that then erupts with otherworldly incandescence.

It’s fascinating how at ease with one another, formally and then some, the maid and the little kitchen, with all its material life, can be, and at the same time how much implied motion the painting holds. Varieties of shape — domes, globs, granules, cylinders, perpendiculars and slots — refract one another, all of them spread at levels on or above a simple reddish brown floor. The hanging basket takes its angle from the maid, the pail from her pitcher; the two geometric flats of window and picture frame are elaborated in the foot warmer’s perforated box and the tabletop’s odd rhomboid.  There sly Mozartean touches, tricks like trompe-l’oeil nails and vacant nail holes, the popcorn-like pointillé breadcrumbs, the vaguely messy floor, and the incongruity of the line of tiles that forms a kind of predella – Cupid and bow, a traveler with his staff and two others less legible, like animation figures. The milk pour and a rectangular bit of unfiltered glare where a segment of window glass is missing — equivalents in plain whiteness — sustain and refresh. A third major white makes the sunlit sections of the linen cap, veering back in the air like a prow, while the far wall blushes with shadows, variegated. White calls out the song, and other brightnesses  respond in the artist’s preferred lead-tin yellow range. As ever, Vermeer’s infusion of sunlight galvanizes an atmosphere charged with implied, recombinant meanings. (“Deeds of light” said Goethe, perhaps with Vermeer in mind; and Liedtke himself ventures the thought that, beyond the visible fact, it is “as if meaning not milk were being poured from one vessel to another.”)

Most Vermeers have some forward, liminal impedence, a bulwark like a table, curtain or chair, to keep us at some remove, discretely parallel to the world his people occupy. Here, to preserve the discretion of the figure’s placement, it is the lead edge of the table, its coverings piled with still-life elements, leaving, in this instance, the whole of the woman’s frame still half open to view. As usual, too, in this pageant of particulars, the paint inspected up close is gruesome. The maid’s head looks uncomfortably mottled, the plumb line of milk a gloppy paste. At only a little distance, though, such details resolve: the head resumes its formal dignity and the milk streams (viz., James Schuyler’s line “Trembling, milk is coming into its own”) like the average sacrament it is assumed to be.

As she tends to these things, the maid and her effects are revealed as elements in the mythology Vermeer contrived for himself, out of what urgency we haven’t a clue. (The seventeenth century produced flurries of such wanton mythmaking – Poussin’s landscape allegories, among them.) So many details and their gists are left meaningfully uncertain. Does the maid, as old songs go, wear her apron high?  (Probably not.) What is that winged reflection in the shiny pail? (It’s hard not to see it as a sampling of Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch, itself long taken as a prime source for Vermeer’s technique.) For his part, Liedtke, who also wrote the most recent monograph on Vermeer, means to keep our understanding of Vermeer’s genius (he concedes it is such) and its topicalities well within what he calls “the Dutch field.” Understanding Vermeer means primarily understanding how he developed his mode of precision painting amidst the givens of art and life in the southern Netherlands of his time. Set on rescuing Vermeer from a century and half of esthetic flightiness of the sort generated by interloping enthusiasts, most of them writers from outside Holland, Liedtke wants him safely back in the professional culture that great Vermeers leave far behind. This is fine as long as it doesn’t exclude other, perhaps less demonstrable but no less real, forces at work in the pictures.

Liedtke limits his account of Vermeer’s milieu to that of the painters: no changeable Dutch microclimates (from whence the unreliable, by turns clouded-over, then suddenly amazing effects of the sun); no literature beside the lewd tavern rhymes (meaning no Descartes, whose “natural light of the mind” seems ever applicable, or Spinoza, who once remarked on the monstrous look of a woman’s beautiful hand when viewed under a lens); no furtive Catholic liturgy or Neo-Platonist whispers. Of course Vermeer was well grounded, and so are his pictures, which is literally the basis of their sublimities. And yes, anything one says in trying to account for the ultimate Vermeer experience is likely to be too much, but not to try is just as vain, because ultimately it is the only thing worth saying. The Met’s wall texts would have us see each of The Milkmaid’s attributes as a sign limited to one intensely local connotation, a Dutch in-joke projected by the doggerel, riddles and other oddments for which, everything else about him insists, Vermeer would have had little patience except that he saw how to transmute them, as his elevated patronage may have demanded, into the idiom of the spheres.

Vermeer was something of a visitor. It could be said that, sincerely devout as he may well have been, he envisioned humankind as specially designed to enter heaven, and made a kind of heaven analogous to that insight within the method of his art. How he raised the stakes of the painting culture he was given to work with can be explained, as Liedtke is wont to do, by itemizing his modifications of the various motifs and technical devices of other artists around him. But accounting for the impact of what he did is something else. He surmounted the low-style specificity of genre painting and Northern realism’s tendency to over-describe and stop the flow of paint and pictorial fluency altogether. Vermeer styled his interior views as purposefully as Rembrandt, but without the stagey folderol, inclined as he was (and Rembrandt wasn’t) toward an extra dose of idealization. Virtuosity is the least of him. Together with memory and invention (and with or without mechanical aids), direct observation of models arranged in a room went into sketching out a rudimentary image. This is realism based on immersion in the contemporary world but heightened beyond the burghers’ commonplace envisioning. More importantly, the pictures argue for an understanding of the sacred and profane as facing terms, converging, as one looks, with such intensity that each becomes more fully illuminated.

* Aside from wall texts accompanying the exhibition, Watler Liedtke’s recent writings on Vermeer include The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009, and Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, Ludion, 2008

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In the Teatro la Fenice or the Chiostro Verde of San Giorgio one likes everything a little bit more than one might elsewhere. – Igor Stravinsky, in Stravinsky & Craft,Conversations with Stravinsky

From the dais on the grass outside the U.S. Pavilion, at the June 4th press conference for Bruce Nauman’s exhibition, the State Department’s Maura Pally assures the crowd “Secretary Clinton and President Obama are true supporters of the arts,” and when pressed by a reporter on the question of government support for future biennales, “Secretary Clinton believes in this idea of Smart Power.” In place of support, let’s mount a campaign to put Nauman’s neon Vices and Virtues signs around the Capitol dome or Senate chamber much as Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection once held sway before the deliberations of his hometown councils. As it is, V&V ’s appearance along the pediments of the oddly cramped pavilion here puts Smart Power to the test. It is 75 years since the day in June, 1934, when Benito Mussolini, on first meeting Adolf Hitler, walked the Führer through the refurbished Giardini. (My parents, both on Biennale-related business slightly earlier that year, met each other for the first time in the Giardini, too – but that’s another story.)

In a small side room upstairs at Università Ca’ Foscari, two Nauman plaster “Smoke Rings” disks fairly glow in local daylight. Had the plaster surfaces – one greenish, the other dirty white – been repainted? The green one has a verdigris cast that either picks up or matches theintonaco of the far wall. In an exterior court on the ground floor sits a white marble Niobe. I’m told Nauman has visited Venice a few times before; for pleasure, for fun – he likes it. Things go better in Venice. The care and lightness of Nauman’s touch, always evident to those attuned to his insistent candor, finds broader definition here.  Contemplation of a bafflingly hurtful world does no harm itself but stands in brave relief, a beacon in fact — miss it at your peril. Another aspect of the same thing is how Nauman keeps to such a clear, tidy scale, implicating images and arrangements that almost always feel, even when they are not literally so, precisely life size. And the plain existential horrors they depict are life size, too. “Days/Giorni,” two enfilades of seven wafer-thin, white, square Panphonics speaker panels at the two separate Nauman show places away from the Giardini – names for days, in Italian at Ca’ Foscari, in English at the Università luav  di Venezia at Tolentini – make an efficacy splurge, a lesson in prosody imparted by male and female voices syncopated as to character from automaton to intimate. Pleasure follows from this, at once intense and subtle – the recondite pleasure of authenticity. Nauman will put himself inside a structure or situation as built or imagined as if to ask what might follow from living there full-time. For those who don’t get his veracity, Nauman must ever be a pain. Among my souvenirs, a subhead for Hilton Kramer’s notice of the 1995 MoMA-Walker Art Center retrospective: “Idiotic Curators Present a Contemptible Nauman Show.”

By Day Three (June 5) Nauman has won the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion. No contest; surely no runner-up came close, although the Pole Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Spainard Miquel Barceló (sole national entry of large-scale, ambitious painting), the Dutch entry Fiona Tan, and (even if hors de concours at the Quirini Stampalia Foundation) Mona Hatoum all are showing important work.  Spectacles are given in the Russian and Danish/Nordic pavilions, and by the Moscow Poetry Club, if they ever show up. But the best exhibits overall were Nauman’s and the late Robert Rauschenberg’s. Both are sculpture shows, and in Venice, as elsewhere, signs are flickering that sculpture as such counts anew in unexpected ways. (A retroactive exemplar in that much-confused, always confusing category is the – literal – glory of Lygia Pape’s ceiling-to-floor, multi-directional strung-wire piece in the anteroom of the Arsenale; other beauties-in-the-round are by David Hammons, Rachel Khedoori, and Anna Parkina.) Both the Nauman and Rauschenberg shows deliver plenty of verbal eventfulness, as well. Occupying fully half the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Rauschenberg’s “Gluts” (begun in the mid-1980s, with a few completed as late as 1992) are accompanied by titles  – Gooey Duck Summer Glut,Filter Fish Glut, Primary Mobiloid Glut are some – projective of his glee, evident in any case, in making them. First shown as a series in progress, the “Gluts” resurface here after twenty-plus years of ill-considered critical confinement. “They were pooh-poohed then,” the Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong recalls. “Yes, but not by me.”  “You’re lucky,” he says, “not to have been of the generation that had to put Rauschenberg aside.” A sad determination, at best. True, Rauschenberg’s impeccable four-square layout method on occasion spelled entrapment for him (especially in the overextended “Combines” of the 1960s), but not here. Here is what Gregory Corso liked to call “The Beauty Shot,” the goods delivered with refreshment, brio, intently brilliant hands. (A type of vitality notably inherited, among younger artists in Venice, by Rachel Harrison and Michael Day Jackson in particular.)

I need another world./ This one’s nearly gone

– Antony and the Johnsons, “Another World”

Intentionally or not, the big shows in the main official sites assume an art world in its ever timely fashion, now functioning – somewhat contritely, as it were — as a synecdoche of widespread ruin. The prospects look bleak. So much money has gone missing, and the new/old pieties taught in the schools aren’t working. Noticeably missing in Venice are  big photographs occupying spaces once reserved for big paintings, as well as, by and large, big serious painting itself. Gone, too, or in abeyance are the political-tourism videos and other documentary devices reliably seeing into and into every variety of far-flung human mess. By way of painting, aside from Barceló’s white abstract swathes and hulking gorilla glyphs, notable discoveries include Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies (an aging-process piece of cheap paint on thin paper) in the Espositioni followed by Martial Raysse’s astonishing allegories, after Balthus and proto-Neo Rauch, and a particularly elegant Mark Bradford, both at the Palazzo Grassi.

There are things the grandiloquence of the pavilions can’t gloss over; in one telling instance, apt décor for a dilapidated palazzo: Teresa Margollese’s canvas draperies soaked in the blood of those who died violent deaths in Mexico. Beyond that, it’s a strange inventory, the overstock of big ideas that don’t mean anything, beginning with Biennale Director Daniel Birnbaum’sMaking Worlds, which by default seems to have been jinxed by a lot of architectural models, light fixtures and globes –one  of those made of construction paper and hoola hoops – and  other things redolent of Fifth Grade classroom projects (“This week, children, we are exploring Ecuador”). The only genuine architectural achievement is Tadao Ando’s conversion of the interior of the Punta della Dogana into a contemplative jewel-box setting for much of Francois Pinault’s collection, more of which resides more raucously at the Grassi.

Along the peripheries are theme shows with titles peeled from vintage drugstore paperbacks:The Seductiveness of the Interval, The Fear Society, Unconditional Love, and Russia’s ownVictory over the Future. Generally, the pavilions succumbed to a mildness that at first seems to be breathing a sigh after many years of resentful harangues, rage, outrage, and institutionalized “institutional critique” — or is it all merely symptomatic of fatigue? Mild, but scarcely playful. Captivated, it seems, by the marketplace of ideas, even the gentlest of curators get caught out thinking too hard and looking too little; they judge their selections by ideas without bothering to see if the ideas they find attractive have taken any shapes worth looking at. A lot of festival art leaves just the impression of conspicuous effort, some person or persons having labored long hours to small, if any, effect. Two rooms side by side in the Espositioni showed how things could be otherwise: one, an anthology of monochromes by Pape, Blinky Palermo, Sherrie Levine, and Wolfgang Tillmans, with Philippe Parreno’s film accompaniment to a recording of Edgard Varèse’s one-minute composition Desert at the far end; the other, an exhilarating reprise of the sort of work that made the Gutai group of the 1950s and ’60s so enviable in their taking charge — not of style, but attitude and possibility, and then again of possibilities that are only urgent.

The animals enjoy structure; we only understand it.
– Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

In its own quiet way, Making Worlds indicates, perhaps with deadly accuracy, an ethos waffling between demolition and total – nay, ultimate – build out. There is nothing quieter, after all, than an array of architectural models in a room. Contemporary existence is seen, at one stage or other, as one enormous, flailing Potsdamer Platz. Coursing through the Arsenale, the Dogana, the Palazzo Fortuny are motifs of architecture “makeshift and imaginary,” city planning, interior design. With such tags in place there trundles along the keyword “infrastructure”made manifest in sufficient lengths of pulled-out rebar, excavated subflooring, not to mention obligatory fuzzy videos of airport and ground traffic systems, to awaken those presumed oblivious to what they’ll never guess is around or under them. There are many corridors. Nauman doesn’t “own” corridors, but it’s hard not to think “nauman.corridor” when you go down one in an art show; even the best shot in Fiona Tan’s Silk Road movie, a rhino squeezing into an alley, brings to mind his customary realization of space as absolutely germane to psyche. Art, we know, can be understood, partially at least, as a species of interior design, décor for city people, what is in the room that is neither the room nor those people.

Margollese’s bloody tarps could fit just as readily in San Giorgio Maggiore’s refectory, the site for which Veronese’s Wedding at Cana was commissioned in 1563, on three walls of which the master showman Peter Greenaway daily projects his film, animating Veronese’s figures, interpolating voiceovers in scruffy Venetian dialect. It was courtly Venice after all that turned faster and more definitively than most of the imperium from plainsong devotion to aggressions of the Marvelous, jamming space with aerial acrobatics and traffic control. Halfway through Greenaway’s film, the clouds break and a grisaille rendition of the picture,  with the giornati by which the artist and his team worked blocked out in white, gets drenched, much like our embankment the night before (or when the full moon brought high water up all across the campos). Nauman’s sign in a window has it almost right. Try it the other way around: The world helps the artist by revealing mystic truths.

The post The 53rd Venice Biennale appeared first on artcritical.

March 6 to 24, 2009
24 Spring Street
New York City, 212 965 9995

POETRY FOR ART presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates, responds, or is dedicated to the work of a contemporary artist on display in New York or elsewhere at the time of posting. Bill Berkson – who is editorial advisor to the series – is a poet and critic who lives in San Francisco and New York. His recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006; Goods and Services; Bill, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems just out from Coffee House Press. He was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Oona Ratcliffe lives and works in Brooklyn. She has participated in various exhibitions across the U.S., including a solo show at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, and recent group shows at the Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York,;the Bolinas Museum, California; Roberts & Tilton, California; and Geoffrey Young Gallery, Massachusetts. Ratcliffe received a Janet Sloane Residency Award from Yaddo in 2005.

Paolo and Francesca

after Dante Alighieri, from Canto 5, second circle Inferno, “La Bufera” –
the whirlwind where souls reside whose reason was overwhelmed by desire.

Smitten, I began: “Poet, I would speak
with that pair who go so lightly there
together on the wind.”
And he said: “You will see
when they come a little closer, ask
by the love that brings them on, they will come.”
So, when the wind swept them near us,
I raised my voice: “O breathless spirits! come,
talk with us, unless another forbids it!”
And as doves whom desire has called,
with wings poised and resolute, borne by their will,
come through the air to their sweet nest,
These left the company where Dido is
and approached us through that wretched air,
such was the power of my soulful cry.

“O kind and gracious being
who visits us in this perditious murk,
we who stained the world with blood,
If we could pray to the lord of the universe, we would,
to grant you peace, since you have pitied us
in our sad perversity.
Whatever you please to speak of or to hear
we will hear and speak of with you
while the wind, as here it is, is still.
The place where I was born sits
by the shore where the Po descends,
to be at rest with other lesser streams.
Love, that wakens quickly in the gentlest heart,
seized that one through this beautiful form
which then was torn from me – and manner still offends me.
Love, which excuses no one loved from loving,
fixed this man’s charms on me so firmly
that, as you see, they haven’t left me yet.
Love brought us together to this death:
Cold Hell waits for him who spent our life.”

These words carried from them to us.
And when I heard how doomed these spirits were,
I hung my head and kept it so long like that
until finally the Poet asked what I thought,
And when I could answer, I began: “Alas,
how many sweet thoughts, what great desire
brought them to this sorry place!”
Then I turned back to them and said:
“Francesca, your suffering makes me cry,
and I pity you terribly –
But tell me, in the days of those sweet sighs
how did love concede to let you know
your dubious desires?”
And she said: “Nothing is worse
than recalling the happiest of times
in utter misery; your teacher knows this well.
But if you really want to learn
our love’s first root, I will tell
although my misery in telling will be plain.
One day for pleasure we were reading
how Lancelot was struck by love.
We were alone and somewhat careless.
But as we read our eyebeams often met
and our faces lost their color.
One part alone was enough to undo us.
When we read how that lady’s lovely smile
was kissed by such a lover,
he, who is forever inseparable from me,
All trembling kissed me on the mouth.
That book and whoever wrote it was our Galeotto.
That day we read no further.”
As the one spirit spoke,
the other wept, so that, pitying them,
I fainted as if I were dying,
And I fell as a dead body falls.

1982/2009
for Oona Ratcliffe

The post Paolo and Francesca, with paintings by Oona Ratcliffe appeared first on artcritical.

POETRY FOR ART presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates, responds, or is dedicated to the work of a contemporary artist on display in New York or elsewhere at the time of posting. Bill Berkson – who is editorial advisor to the series – is a poet and critic who lives in San Francisco and New York. His recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006; Goods and Services; Bill, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems just out from Coffee House Press. He was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Oona Ratcliffe lives and works in Brooklyn. She has participated in various exhibitions across the U.S., including a solo show at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, and recent group shows at the Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York,;the Bolinas Museum, California; Roberts & Tilton, California; and Geoffrey Young Gallery, Massachusetts. Ratcliffe received a Janet Sloane Residency Award from Yaddo in 2005.

Paolo and Francesca

after Dante Alighieri, from Canto 5, second circle Inferno, “La Bufera” –
the whirlwind where souls reside whose reason was overwhelmed by desire.

Smitten, I began: “Poet, I would speak
with that pair who go so lightly there
together on the wind.”
And he said: “You will see
when they come a little closer, ask
by the love that brings them on, they will come.”
So, when the wind swept them near us,
I raised my voice: “O breathless spirits! come,
talk with us, unless another forbids it!”
And as doves whom desire has called,
with wings poised and resolute, borne by their will,
come through the air to their sweet nest,
These left the company where Dido is
and approached us through that wretched air,
such was the power of my soulful cry.

“O kind and gracious being
who visits us in this perditious murk,
we who stained the world with blood,
If we could pray to the lord of the universe, we would,
to grant you peace, since you have pitied us
in our sad perversity.
Whatever you please to speak of or to hear
we will hear and speak of with you
while the wind, as here it is, is still.
The place where I was born sits
by the shore where the Po descends,
to be at rest with other lesser streams.
Love, that wakens quickly in the gentlest heart,
seized that one through this beautiful form
which then was torn from me – and manner still offends me.
Love, which excuses no one loved from loving,
fixed this man’s charms on me so firmly
that, as you see, they haven’t left me yet.
Love brought us together to this death:
Cold Hell waits for him who spent our life.”

These words carried from them to us.
And when I heard how doomed these spirits were,
I hung my head and kept it so long like that
until finally the Poet asked what I thought,
And when I could answer, I began: “Alas,
how many sweet thoughts, what great desire
brought them to this sorry place!”
Then I turned back to them and said:
“Francesca, your suffering makes me cry,
and I pity you terribly –
But tell me, in the days of those sweet sighs
how did love concede to let you know
your dubious desires?”
And she said: “Nothing is worse
than recalling the happiest of times
in utter misery; your teacher knows this well.
But if you really want to learn
our love’s first root, I will tell
although my misery in telling will be plain.
One day for pleasure we were reading
how Lancelot was struck by love.
We were alone and somewhat careless.
But as we read our eyebeams often met
and our faces lost their color.
One part alone was enough to undo us.
When we read how that lady’s lovely smile
was kissed by such a lover,
he, who is forever inseparable from me,
All trembling kissed me on the mouth.
That book and whoever wrote it was our Galeotto.
That day we read no further.”
As the one spirit spoke,
the other wept, so that, pitying them,
I fainted as if I were dying,
And I fell as a dead body falls.

1982/2009
for Oona Ratcliffe

The post Oona Ratcliffe: Deep Forgetting at gallerynine5 appeared first on artcritical.