Larry Day: Body Language at Arcadia University, Woodmere Art Musueum and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia

Absent Presence, Arcadia University, August 30 to November 21, 2021
Silent Conversations, Woodmere Art Museum, September 25 to January 23, 2022
Nature Abstracted, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, October 8 to December 3, 2021

Unlike most realists, who celebrate the world’s material presence, Larry Day seems as concerned to capture palpable absence in his work: something unseen, yet powerfully implicit. His mature paintings and drawings expressed his singular ascetic reserve,  a sensibility that managed to juggle American precisionism and pittura metafisica. In such subjects as a quotidian back-alley, a charades party, a poker game there is an awareness that transcends the everyday in suspended moments of painterly reflection.

Day, who died in 1998 in his late seventies, was a doyen of the Philadelphia scene. A great conversationalist with a strong capacity for sustaining friendships, he was a beloved teacher, mentor and friend to more than four decades of artists. A selection of his astute, subtle writings on art is included in the catalogue of this three-venue retrospective of nearly 150 works, guest curated by David Bindman. Divided by theme between the institutions, the exhibition spans the 1950s to the 1990s with cityscapes at Arcadia University, figure compositions at the Woodmere Art Museum and abstract works at the University of the Arts, where Day taught for many years. Cumulatively, the exhibition explicates his dialogue with art past and present.

UArts presents Day’s Abstract-Impressionist work from the 1950s and early ‘60s when he was very much part of the social world of the New York School. The theatrical “bowing” of Ab-Ex painting was replaced in Day’s work by a deft, subtle pizzicato of interlocking color passages suggestive of foliage—as in Abstraction, (1958)—possessing a contemplative emotive presence. In a parallel body of abstract paintings Day’s work in this era employed a syntax derived from Willem de Kooning in 1949-50. The standout in this idiom is Landscape for St. John of the Cross, (1955).

Such works established his initial reputation, but by 1962 he was dissatisfied with what he was doing and began defining a post-abstract realism. This was not an abandonment of modernism, but an embrace of its contradictions. In the Arcadia show, Absent Presence, we see Day extending and deepening his interest in structural invention in the interplay of buildings in a back alley or a construction site, which could provoke a reverie of a miniature universe. This could be a view of an ideal city, but at other times Day could evoke a melancholy, nihilistic vision, as in Zone, (1976). There are affinities here to Mario Sironi’s paintings of desolate cityscapes and the Neo-Realist films of Antonioni. Through a surprising fusion of opposites, Day came into his own, rejecting expressionism and adopting something of Charles Sheeler’s emotionally cool, linear style. In these austere, unpopulated spaces, Day creates a poetry of the anti-poetic.

According to David Bindman’s catalogue essay, Nan Rosenthal, late curator at the Met, characterized Day’s work as “ironic realism,” the validity of which Day himself accepted. But what does it mean to call realism “ironic”? Realists coming of age since the advent of abstraction such as Lucian Freud or Philip Pearlstein work directly from life to avoid stylistic mannerisms, to create an authentic unity of experience out of the complexity of perceptual painting. By contrast, Day felt that such a funneled vision purity was insufficient to express the fragmentation of modern consciousness. He wanted his contemplative life as a painter to encompass all his interests, whether in philosophy, literature, or the traditions of European art. His process was to work toward pictorial wholeness without jettisoning the insights of fragmentation; a synthetic process akin, in actuality, to collage: teasing out an idea through drawings, partly done from life, or from photographs of friends, past art, and images in magazines. In this way, Day exercised his amused and sardonic sensibility to reveal our awkward moments of self consciousness and the contradictory aspects of our cultural beliefs, both enduring and moribund.

This new style was the result of a search for what really mattered to the artist. In wartime service he had faced death repeatedly during the invasion of Iwo Jima and came to realize that “Some of the things that move us most are the things we take for granted. How we dreamed of the ordinary as ideal, when we were in the army.”

A narrative of everyday life became his pictorial domain, but not in any literal sense. It was actually the planarity of late Cubism that led Day to his love of Renaissance frescoes. He exchanged thickly built paint surfaces for thin coats that affirm the flatness of the canvas. I believe that as he examined frescoes, with their often missing al secco paint layers and seriously damaged areas that reveal the drawing in sinopia, beneath, he found metaphors for the evanescence of awareness or limitations of memory.

Like R.B. Kitaj, Day incorporated images from advertising, photography, cinema, and snapshots of himself and friends, sources he used to droll effect. By contrasting our consumer culture to the culture of other times he revealed both a sense of continuity and the pastness of the past.

Narrative: To the Memory of Matteo Giovannetti, (1967), named for the painter of frescoes at the Palace of Popes in Avignon, is presented as a medieval mural –  yet it feels as much like an homage to Antonioni’s early films, contrasting post-war architecture and an ancient fortress in an otherwise barren landscape. Hipsters mingle with businessmen and middle-class tourists while the totality of the scene remains ambiguous. We are not in a traditional narrative but in a tableau of signs reflecting the artist’s consciousness of a turbulent period.

In paintings like Group, (1967) Day evidently believed that get-togethers could reveal inner states that lie beneath social masks. Day appears twice in this studio setting, I would contend, seated at the center in profile, pausing during a portrait-drawing session of friends and family, and again standing at the far left, head bent in contemplation. Here the use of degrees of unfinish suggests two contradictory states: those who are absent in their presence and those who are present by their absence. Like an emblem in a Hogarth painting, the unpainted canvas framing Day’s seated profile depicts young artist friends Natalie Charkow and Mitzi Melnicoff. Adding to this fictional melding of characters is the image of the film actress Monica Vitti, one of Day’s great infatuations.

Changes, (1982) presents an idealized, Platonic type of the nude. In the background we see images by two mannerist masters, Rosso Fiorentino and Joachim Wtewael. These original works are small, and yet they loom oversized in Day’s representation of them.  Day and an observing female student are separated by a large dark space from the naked model on the right, seeming to capture the gulf between the European past and a deflated, realist, American present.

Similarly, in Day by Day, (1991), from near the end of his life, he presents a room split by a receding diagonal ledge, dividing past from present as much as left from right. On the left, Day presents himself drawing alone, framed by a pale cityscape into which his presence begins to merge, suggesting  awareness of life’s transience, while on the right a mischievous youthful self contemplates a life of the imagination.

Throughout his life Day drew constantly and copiously. In his last years, his creativity bloomed in inventive drawing sequences. As Day turned from the marvelous Tempi Del Giorno drawings, 1992-93, he moved from an interest in himself to a meditation on the mythopoeic aspects of the physical and imaginative world. In the Caprice series, (1997), and the final Elegies (Homage to Rilke), (1997)  the art past is always present and melded into our daily lives.

Day wrote in one of his notebook jottings, that “to examine an object or an event, one, of course, also examines oneself.” An autobiographical reflex allowed Day to create a psychic landscape of outer forms that express self-awareness. In this ongoing pandemic, many people are re-examining their values and ambitions. This three-venue exhibition offers us the gift of one who was there before us, illuminating an examined life that evolves before our eyes. Day’s work invites us to resist fixed ideas and accept the ambiguous and challenging complexity of being alive.

The post Ironic Realism: The Larry Day Retrospective in Philadelphia appeared first on artcritical.

April 22 to September 25, 2020
744 Madison Avenue, at 65th Street
New York City, didonna.com

The paintings of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva exist in a perpetual ambivalence between an abstracted perspectival matrix and a figurative sense of place, often sliding between an interior and a panoramic urban view.  Both motifs are united by a cool spectral transparency; everything is an interiority.

Portugal’s most famous modern artist and a leading exemplar of Art Informel (Europe’s equivalent of Abstract Expressionism), Vieira da Silva was the subject of a rare traveling exhibition staged by three international galleries. Following its debut in Paris at Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in 2019 and Waddington Custot Gallery in London in 2019-20, this selected retrospective opened in the spring at Di Donna Gallery just in time to close under lockdown. It enjoyed a limited reopening this fall, which is when I was able to view it. Hard though it is to believe, this was the first exhibition of her work in New York since 1971.

Typically, as we gaze into her paintings, stage-like fields of latticework expand before our eyes until they become, in Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, an “intimate immensity.” We begin to notice subtle disturbances in the field of forces that allow us to detect hints of objects and personages or their absence; we are in a chrysalis of the shifting self.

Her use of projective geometry, specifically linear perspective, takes on any number of variations melded into one another. Often there may be a grid running parallel to the picture surface that opens up as a relief space, by shifts in scale and multiple overlapping planes. Many web-like grids are articulated with a chessboard’s alternation in white, blue, grey or umber tones. Some spatial constructs emphasize a discontinuous space, where through curving forces, we become disoriented and find our eyes swimming into a whirlpool.

Often Vieira da Silva’s works are modestly scaled for intimate contemplation. A superb exception is The Monorail, 1955, a 63” x 86.6” mural in the Nordrhein-Westfalen Art Museum where it easily holds its own in a room of masterpieces. In the show at Di Donna, the most complexly polyphonic work and the largest is Memoire, 1966-67, 44 7/8” x 57 ½”, an elaborate ‘memory palace’. Such a mnemonic system relies on spatial relationships to establish order and recollect information and experiences. Here the cubist grid multiplies into an ever-expanding map defined by delicate lines and touches: melodious, delicate but hesitant. Gradually, I felt a subtle feeling of anguish, as I sensed the signs of remembered experiences retreating in all directions. I only began to absorb the complex music of this work after long viewing.

More easily comprehensible and seductive is La Ville nocturne ou les Luminières de la ville, 1950. On a cobalt blue-grey field of space floats a constellation of glowing, colored lights, with yellow, red-orange, and cerulean punctured with discrete passages of black. Here is a rainy night vision of a truly disembodied city, where the lights hold spatial positions, opening corridors—passageways for our eyes to flow through—returning on the gyre of a swooping black or red-orange curve. The whole is a rare performance of sure, adroit touches of paint, emphasizing its materiality. By their seeming formlessness, each spot, daub, or spindly streak half conceals an intricate architectural network. I see this as a work in conversation with Vieira da Silva’s contemporary, Wols., 1952, is an unusually luminous work for Vieira da Silva, who is essentially a tonalist. The painting is a fugue in oranges, modulated by red-violet, chrome-yellow, yellow-ochres, pink-purple and ultramarine. It glows with an anti-materialist essence, like that of a stained-glass window, which gives it a close rapport with the spiritual qualities of fellow painters Alfred Manessier and Roger Bissière. Fully in the morphology of cubism, this picture is filled with a shifting grid of shelf-like units that recede on a central vertical axis, as if to suggest the corner of a room, or the opposing pages of a medieval codex.

This is the sort of spiritually evocative work that may have influenced Loren MacIver in works like Votive Lights. Similarly, another unusual picture on an airy field of white, Untitled, 1955, parallels an oceanic figural processional space explored by Norman Lewis.

In an essay in the show’s catalogue, Kent Mitchell Minturn dislodges her from the nationalistic ‘jeune’ École de Paris, and the gestural, anti-geometric Tachism, re-labelling her a late cubist. While this does make some sense, it does her no historical favors to cut her off from interaction with her contemporaries in this bid for uniqueness. Indeed, a number of works in the exhibition contradict this volte-face, as I have shown above.

While I have doted on several of the works that employ color as a pictorial dynamic, much of the other two dozen works in this exhibition function with a cubist tonality, even when a single strong color or two are employed. It worked for Picasso and it works for Vieira da Silva too. Her “Teatrum mundi” was also a way to create a unity between tradition and modernity—not exactly “the tradition” but a personal one that follows partially unconscious emotions. In a Vieira da Silva, there is no certainty.

The post “Intimate Immensity”: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva appeared first on artcritical.

July 13, 2019  to February 23, 2020
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115

This thematic selection from the work of Hyman Bloom, subtitled  Matters of Life and Death at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on some of the artist’s most controversial works, his deeply disturbing studies of human corpses and medical cadavers, contextualizing them with other subjects to flesh out his spiritual investigation into the mystery of being.

The work on view is mostly from the 1940s and ‘50s, the period of his early fame following his highly successful representation in the Museum of Modern Art 1942 exhibition, Americans 1942. Bloom went on to represent the United States at the 1950 Venice Biennale along with John Marin, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Both his 1954 and 1968 traveling retrospectives came to the Whitney Museum. But after the first retrospective, he withdrew from showing new work in New York until 1971. Bloom was always more committed to his art than to his career, which he actually considered a distraction.

Interest in mysticism was rooted in his orthodox Jewish upbringing. As he drifted toward a secular life, his life-long interest in the mysteries of the soul led him to the writings of P.D. Ouspensky and Helena P. Blavatsky—a similar trajectory to the paths to the absolute of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, despite Bloom’s preference for the figurative idiom. Through readings of ancient texts, Bloom went on to explore eastern religions, psychic research, philosophy, psychoanalysis, LSD, and Chassidic mysticism.

During the late fall of 1939 Bloom had the first of what he came to consider two transcendental experiences. “I had a conviction of immortality, of being part of something permanent and ever changing, of metamorphosis as the nature of being. Everything was intensely beautiful, and I had a sense of love for life that was greater than I ever had before.” Although reluctant to make statements about his work, his remarks about these events speak to the heart of his artistic vision.

Entering the exhibition, we are confronted by a triptych-like display of a life-sized flayed figure seen from behind, Self-Portrait (1948), flanked by two equally large charcoal drawings of dead trees (both 1962), one dark and the other light. In the painting, what could have been a gruesome depiction of flesh, muscle and bone is, rather, in Bloom’s thick and feathery strokes of saturated color transformed into a flaming apparition.  Stepping back to compare the three works, one notices that the bare spiky limbed tree trunks echo the central figure’s spine. Going in closer, we see the bony branches begin to transform into other living things. This is curator Erica E. Hirshler’s key to the show: Bloom moves from the phenomenal subject, transforming the language of its description to reveal an otherwise invisible essence: the spirit in the body; new life regenerating from the dead, a continual metamorphosis.

Christmas Tree (1944), in the next room, evokes a child-like fascination with the light from reflective glass ornaments and candle lights. Painted under the rhythmic and gestural spell of Soutine, the tree is pressed into the picture surface, its golden hue occupying the space between the canvas and the viewer five or six years before Mark Rothko would use the same co-extensive spatial idea. As I gazed into the work, I suddenly became aware that the tree had taken on another identity: It had become the burning bush, a pictorial depiction of the voice of God.

Similarly, elsewhere in the exhibition, we encounter the large Chandelier No. 2 (1945), framed by the golden walls of a synagogue, its molding, lined in red and green, shaping the chandelier into a double image by suggesting the shoulders and torso of a figure. Studying the glass crystals, we see that the top of the fixture becomes a skeletal head — another numinous presence–with eyes staring out at us. Such an Arcimboldo-like double image would also be found in works by Jean Dubuffet and de Kooning later in the decade.

The Bride (1941) is at once a symbolist interpretation of Jewish marriage motifs and a personification of the Sabbath. Ambiguously hovering between life and death, the female figure cloaked in a luminous veil strewn with iridescent flowers is a mysterious sign of transformation. Rising above pictorial antecedents in Redon and Chagall, Bloom’s painting  exudes a power all its own. Standing before these early works I realized that I was in the company of an ecstatic.

A few years later, The Bride and its less compelling sister of the same title from 1943-45 would prove to be the source of some of his most disturbing but empathetic works: Corpse of Man, (1944); Female Corpse, Front View, (1945); and Female Corpse, Back View, (1947). All three figures are life size or nearly so, lying in eerily luminous shrouds unfurled on a table or slab but presented vertically like icons. The gruesome decomposition of the bodies, their bloated bellies and iridescent bacterial growths are ultimately transfigured by Bloom into jewel-like incrustations. In Corpse of Man, an everyman, the pushed-up shift covering his neck and shoulders is suggestive of a sacred mantle or prayer shawl.  The symbolic centrality of the corpse’s exposed, bloated genitals can be read as another emblem, of new life after death perhaps, for the soul. As we contemplate the richly painted body, light from behind seems to permeate the figure with ineffable immanence.

We sense the woman’s soul still present in Female Corpse, her head tilted upward, as if, in a moment, she might come back to life. Female Corpse, Back View is more remote as the figure is turned away from us. Her back and legs glow with a multi-hued pearlescent luster­ suggesting the sort of magical topologies employed by Dubuffet in the following decade. The swirling shroud seems to open a path for the soul’s journey after death. Bloom’s paintings allow us to move past a horror of death and observe the sacred mystery taking place, without any loss of death’s harrowing nature. Here, as before, color is central to his expression of awe and wonder.

As if in need of release from confronting death so forcefully, Bloom began to shift from the human body to the earth, and from the soul to cultural memory in a series evoking rediscoveries of the distant past. Archaeological Treasure(1945), the first map-space evokes a medical cross-section of a spine and womb-like space but filled with ancient amphorae. Treasure Map (1945) details the excavation of a Neolithic Greek settlement at Dimini. Buried Treasure (1947) has a treasure site guarded by a specter who looks out at us, another double image. And The Stone (1947) returns us directly to Bloom’s animistic belief in the soul being manifest in everything, even a stone, which may also be a cosmic eye. Each of these works are broodingly beautiful, radiating inner color-emotions. Looking at them I had no desire to walk on. (Unfortunately, these works are hung in a gallery which is annoyingly underlit, as if they needed theatrical help from a lighting designer). These complexly textured, gestural, and all-over compositions parallel the formal ideas of postwar European artists Wols, Dubuffet, and Jean Fautrier, as well as de Kooning and Pollock who saw Bloom as the first Abstract Expressionist when they first encountered his work at MOMA in 1942–an appellation he would come to refuse.

Nevertheless, Bloom’s harrowing 1947 mythological picture, The Harpies comes closest to Pollock’s dithyrambic drip painting, Number 10, (1949) hanging in the museum a few galleries away. At first, we see a thickly painted inchoate web of black shapes swarm over and under an equally shapeless red mass of barely discernible human flesh. The blue-black forms become harpies, the whole scene suspended in air: everything is rising and falling in a demonic feeding frenzy: a nightmare on the Astral plane. This painting seems to have led Bloom to his flayed cadavers in the years immediately following.

Within another preciously darkened gallery, four of the medical cadaver paintings are displayed along with three monumental drawings. The vehemence of their initial impact immediately calls up a comparison with Francis Bacon’s use of the same imagery, (Slaughtered Animal, 1953), but for Bacon there is no transcendence—we are all just meat. As I tried to make sense of Bloom’s liquid, nacreous bodies, I had to fight off the comparison with Bacon.

Refocusing on the iridescent polychromatic flesh, (Cadaver on a Table, 1953), I realized that Bloom, who loved and collected butterflies, had made an analogy between the death of the body and the emergence of the soul with the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or moth, which are traditional symbols of the soul. This certainly fits with Bloom’s belief in the immortality of the soul.

By contrast, the drawings are rendered as powerful tragic forms in red Conté crayon and maintain a sense of the deceased as a person, with their head thrown back or to the side, after the manner of martyrs depicted in Baroque paintings. An exception to this is Autopsy (1953), where the focus is on the hands of the medical examiner. The drawing accompanies its famous painted variant, The Anatomist (1953), in the adjacent room.

For me, these works are the core of Hirschler’s argument for Bloom’s importance and the best of the works are truly compelling. They demonstrate Bloom’s currency with the most advanced pictorial ideas of mid-century. It took courage, perseverance and a great depth of spiritual feeling to produce these works, which live in us by the emotions they communicate.  As I left this exhibition I was filled, with a sense of doubt that a true history of American art of the last seventy years has been written.

The post In the Company of an Ecstatic: Hyman Bloom in Boston appeared first on artcritical.

Experiencing this marvelous show of works by Andrew Forge (1923-2002) at Betty Cuningham Gallery, the second they have organized, something of an epiphany brought composer Morton Feldman to this visitor’s mind. I am not suggesting a co-extensive relationship between music and visual art – even Kandinsky, in his correspondence with Schoenberg, refuted that notion – but there are parallel qualities and ideas explored by Feldman and Forge that sustain this connection.

It is notable that both wrote on their respective fields. A polymath, Forge was also an articulate and insightful writer and teacher. His extensive, as yet uncollected writings include books and essays on a diverse range of significant artists: Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. Feldman also wrote on painters and poets who had influenced his development and those pieces have been collected in Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Central to both were the examples of John Cage and Rauschenberg on how to escape from the binding aspects of their respective traditions.

At the Cunningham Gallery we have been offered a selection of three types of work: watercolors of floating and touching dots and dashes, some coalescing into fields of color; watercolor grids of shifting columns; and oils of densely worked color fields opening into ever changing networks of shimmering atmospheres, telegraphing to our eyes Forge’s sense of mapped sight and motion.

Seen broadly, the watercolors offer a way into Forge’s thinking process. He created them as a release from the dense complications of his oils. In the four works of strictly gridded columns, thin quivering strokes slide laterally across the vertical columns, sometimes partially overlapping others and playing against the rigidness of the interval. This mosaic-like tessellation of color notations carry melodic movements, punctuated by accents of dark or opposing saturated colors. All of these works are in dialogue with Klee’s magic squares, and the North African rugs that inspired him.

Feldman also expressed an interest in Near and Middle Eastern rugs: “Music and the designs or a repeated pattern in a rug have much in common. As a composer, I respond to…a rug’s coloration and its creation of a microchromatic overall hue…for most artists the structural concerns are uppermost and out of it comes content….” (Crippled Symmetry (1981)

For Forge, the objective process of making a painting by following a set of rules for structural development was a means of paralleling nature’s ways of forming. Writing on Klee (1954), Forge quoted from the latter’s essay, On Modern Art (1922): “With the gradual growth of such a structural image before our eyes an association of ideas gradually insinuates itself which may tempt one to a material interpretation.” This quote would become key to his mature process and it is telling that it was used in a discussion of Klee’s Classic Coast (1931), one of the great mock-mosaic works employing only dots and bars of color in an extensive, shifting, asymmetric grid. In his struggle to find a satisfying relationship between looking, making and meaning, Forge ultimately discovered that the notational marks were charged with an expressive quality that ultimately “generates … subject, not the other way around,” as he later wrote in the brochure for an exhibition he curated at the New York Studio School, Observation: Notation (2000).

This relationship with Klee and other artists is what Forge referred to as his “internal audience” where work speaks to work, across time, space and culture. Seen this way, a work of art is part of a greater whole. Each new work may change our sense of the past, even as the past may change the present. This continual restructuring can also manifest within the history of an artist’s work. This kind of thinking is what Forge thought “distinguished an artist.” (891, 1985)

A small vertical landscape of heavy atmosphere is titled Aurélia (1985) in allusion to Gérard De Nerval’s famous Romantic account of his descent into madness. This seems to parallel Forge’s desire to form a method of mapping the world that was objective in process and subjective in affect, all while not being representational. Two works from the same year conjure Roman torso fragments portrayed as spectral emanations appearing or dissolving into simple notation.

Where Forge moves further away from recognizable forms, his landscape titles allow us a way into the work even as it may suppress our access to his inner dialogue. In Willow (1999) Forge synthesizes Monet and Jules Olitski into something unique and radiant. In both versions of the dark Heavy Hemlocks (1999) Forge approaches Morris Louis’ veils with a suggestive energy that has an existential intensity.

As I began to move back and forth between two large and transcendent works by Forge, April (1991-92) and November (1980-81), each painting opened up slowly, illuminated by a synthetic, intellectualized light. April evades prettiness in an airy softness of buzzing pulses, echoing Pierre Bonnard’s more apparitional works, and in November, a shadowy palette yields an ocean of chromatic patterns. Exceedingly dense, both works are lightened by the amount of white ground variously peeking through, creating a Bezold effect. With their flowing networks of shifting hues, these paintings are polyphonic in the way they changed radically from a distance of 3 feet to 6 feet and again from across the room. As one moves back certain configurations appear and then disappear as one’s brain synthesizes the color oppositions. At the furthest remove, the canvases have an atomized geometrical structure.

It was during this immersion that I was suddenly aware of a parallel experience, an extraordinary evening at New York City Opera (2011), listening to Feldman’s monodrama, Neither, for soprano and orchestra based on a short text by Samuel Beckett. As the composer noted in his last interview (1987), with Everett C. Frost, “The subject essentially is: whether you’re in the shadows of understanding or non-understanding. I mean finally you’re in the shadows. You’re not going to arrive at any understanding at all: You’re just left there holding this—the hot potato which is life.”

This stunning music sustained a chromatic atmosphere which had drawn me in, repeating phrase fragments that seemed to have much in common with Forge’s networks of dots and dashes, billowing into varied densities of space and light. In this hour long piece, Feldman achieved a moment held in duration–vertical time–unexpected in music, but central to painting. Every luminous chord changed so gradually that what seemed movement in the moment, was reflected in repeated patterns subtly shifted by tempo and his orchestration of instruments. Here too, segments of listening time resembled my various positions in relation to each canvas. Or as Feldman put it, “I am involved with the contradiction in not having the sum of the parts equal the whole.”

Both Feldman’s and Forge’s works achieve lucid-dream states. In my experience, it was the especially large scale, whether spatial or durational, that produced profoundly transporting totalities. The disquieting mood for Feldman had “to do with instrumental images,” whereas the indistinct inner worlds in Forge rely on the diffusion of color into unnamable but apprehensible feeling. After a number of gallery visits, I haven’t come to the end of these works: all their secrets hide in plain sight.

The post Standing in the Shadows: On Seeing Andrew Forge and Hearing Morton Feldman appeared first on artcritical.

Stanley Lewis’s work is the obverse of what one might think of as a downtown aesthetic. His paintings and drawings, now on view at Betty Cuningham’s new Lower East Side home, carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects — backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua — transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition.

The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and a very contemporary, almost sculptural painting process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality. Cloth and paint are built up by cutting and repositioning pieces of worked canvas that will be reconnected, at least partially, with a loaded brush, painting wet into wet, layer upon layer. This often leaves bare staples, gaps, and deep scars that resist integration with the image.

In his larger works, Lewis is often seen trying to correct initial estimates of how much surface is needed to chart the movement of the eye from near to far, so that the space of the picture can make sense as a world. As he focuses on a specific area, it expands to fill his field of vision, fragmenting a sense of the whole. If Lewis wanted to cover the tracks of his labors he easily could, but the point of his work, evidently, is not a view of nature alone, nor is it just a correspondence between built up paint and the presence of things. Instead, we are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process. Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to his inner experience of looking and making, to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.

As I was looking back and forth between three terrific works in the gallery’s back space, Lewis’s distinct quality of light on partly cloudy days became evident. In Boat on the Beach, Lake Chautauqua (2013) and even more so in Backyard Jeykll Island, GA (2014), a subtle pink tone suffuses the air, transforming the everyday into a glimpse of reality enchanted. This surprisingly recalled Jess’s magical Translation paintings, which also share with Lewis a charmed light and an irrational play between image and a lapidary surface of thickly applied paint, erupting here and there into incongruous lumps. The third painting, Winslow Park, Westport (2010-2014), and the most recent work at the gallery’s entrance, Matt Farnham’s Farm with Truck (2014), share a cooler blue-green quality no less captivating than the others.

Structural ideas vary from picture to picture: a traditional repoussoir of dark trees frames the central vortex of space in Farm with Truck; in Winslow Park, a tree masked by a telephone pole serves as a pictorial axis using wires above and the gated fence below to extend their reach backward and forward into space. A network of silhouettes and shadows orchestrates Jeykll Island and diagonal paths of thickly worked rivulets of grasses and clouds open the space against the horizon in Boats on a Beach.

Perhaps the most unusual and surprising structure is featured in the show’s largest work, an elaborate paper bas-relief, Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow (2007-2014), made with pencil on layers of cut and carved print paper. This irregularly-shaped snowbound landscape is partially modulated through the physical modeling of the paper, allowing the dominant central tree to float, as if we were watching a slow motion explosion of limbs moving outward in all directions. This is the show’s knockout punch. His master work captures the eerie grey light of a soft snow fall that carries an unmistakable air of fatality.

Thinking about this and other fine drawings on view, it is hard to miss correspondences between Lewis’s work and School of London artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Closer to home and recent innovation are the drawn mappings of Dawn Clements and recent tree photographs of Mike and Doug Starn. All these artists share with Lewis an interest in the reinvention of realism by piecing together literal fragments of paper that re-synthesize the image. Lewis’s crazy-quilt painting process stands for the dignity of his unique experience. This is the source of what is so disconcerting, so irritating and so crucial in his work.

The post One-Two Punch: Stanley Lewis at Betty Cuningham appeared first on artcritical.

April 24 to June 14, 2014
515 West 27th Street
New York City, 212 563 4474

[The catalogue accompanying this exhibition, edited and introduced by the curators, includes a commissioned essay by Nobel prize-winning neur0scientist Eric R. Kandel and a 1952 story by Roald Dahl written in response to the Soutine exhibition at MoMA in 1950.]

Seventy one years after his death, Chaim Soutine’s work is vehemently alive.  A few years ago the Helly Nahmad Gallery held a memorable exhibition, Soutine/Bacon, which made much of Bacon’s work look wan and perfunctory by comparison.  Now, Paul Kasmin Gallery has assembled sixteen works, also curated by Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, co-authors of the catalogue raisonné. At Kasmin’s West 27th Street space all but two works can be seen—as they were painted—in full daylight. You will be hard pressed to find richer works on view anywhere in the city.

Nevertheless, Soutine remains an outsider to the mainstream narrative of Modernism; he belongs instead to the still largely unwritten alternative history of modernist figurative painting. Well aware of all the developments from Post-Impressionism through Cubism, Soutine absorbed their lessons but rejected the language of abstract signs, and chose to develop his art out of the sensually rich tradition of nineteenth century naturalism: Corot, Courbet and their forerunners Rembrandt, Chardin and Goya. Foremost in this was his commitment to painting from life, which allowed him to connect emotionally to what he saw, to wed his strong temperament to a deep empathy with his subjects.  Working directly from life also allowed him to evade academic solutions to depicting the world, instead paying attention to the complex nature of our seeing; how we map the world as we turn our head and our eyes. This essentially personal vision is quite different from the social metaphor implicit in Albertian perspective.

There is nothing routine or indifferent in a work by Soutine. He was an ecstatic and painting was his vehicle into rapture. Few so-called expressionists have had Soutine’s capacity to render painterly effects, no matter how crude, into emotions so fully felt, so convincing. And this experience is heightened by its crabbed and bittersweet aspect: at once joyous and anguished.  Indeed, the kinesthetic rhythms that animate his landscapes and portraits, which also knead the hanging and splayed bodies of dead animals, suggest the bodily experience of dance and song, especially the plaintive cry of the human voice. This is the pictorial equivalent of García Lorca’s idea of Duende, a demonic possession that comes from a trembling in the moment, in being truly present in the work itself. Yet, this expressive ambition could strain the capacity of a painting to achieve coherence, and it is this negative capability that established Soutine’s avant-garde reputation as a man possessed by feelings beyond his control. This is the cliché about Soutine that suppresses any fair acknowledgement of his intelligence and his rare ability to synthesize opposing influences without succumbing to mere imitation.

Too often we have been told that Soutine was a man who painted without concern or interest in composition.  After spending some time in this show, I came away with an opposing view. Moving from picture to picture, I was continually struck by the variety of successful pictorial inventions. In the early and uncharacteristic work, Landscape with Donkey, (1918) the motif is at some distance from us as it unfurls into an arabesque governed by the suppression of tone for color, a dusky orange/green dyad, evoking early Bonnard.  In his most extreme landscapes, from his Céret period, it is El Greco who presides over the swaying alley of trees, the warped buildings and hills pressing up toward the surface in sensuous orgies of luminous writhing paint.  In the brilliant wide panoramic view, The Rainbow, Céret, (1920) Cézanne’s rhomboid structure is used to simultaneously shape and destabilize the landscape. In another work from 1919, The Red Castle at Céret, space seems to curve in all directions, as the windblown trees are swept back and forth, yet pictorially pressed up against the surface, so that space seems to open up only at the edges. Isn’t this precisely what happens thirty years later in de Kooning’s great Excavation? Aren’t these the same exemplars that brought Braque and Picasso to similar structural qualities in Analytical Cubism a decade earlier than Soutine?

The show’s focus is on still life, especially the nature mort of rabbits and fowl. I wish this had been more truly the show’s focus, for it is here that we enter into the greatest intimacy with Soutine’s contemplation of being and non-being, of gazing in fear and wonder in the presence of death. This is what I would call his spiritual quest. Each of these works has something marvelous: the iridescent flesh of a rabbit being attacked by animate forks, the contorted twitching of a skinned rabbit made evident by the visual ripples of a table’s irregular shape, a brace of pheasants set like jewels upon a radiant yellow cloth, a glowing icon –perhaps an inspiration for de Kooning’s Montauk Highway. And in another mesmerizing work, we are made tolook down on two pheasants displayed against a white cloth, projected up to the picture’s plane by the delicate diagonal shaft of a small side table, the blue, orange and yellow hued bodies seem to swim in the cloth, propelled by their rhythmic contortions, like the souls in Pontormo’s drawings of nudes for his lost Deluge.

Most memorable for me is the Plucked Goose of 1933, which achieves a sublime, tactile presence, realized with a searching calligraphy.  As I looked closely, opening myself to the painting, I was drawn inexorably into Soutine’s experience, into paint made most naked flesh.  Framed by a blue-black table, the body’s flesh glows from within, subtle desaturated pinks and blue purples. The fragile but lustrous body is materialized by the action of the paint smearing into modeled form. Stabbings and streaks of purple whites and pinks describe the remains of the head, neck and wings. Here and there tufts of unplucked remnants heighten the immanent mystery of the body.  It is less violent and less spectacular than his various depictions of a carcass of beef, but more profound. It is a stunning experience that stands with Gericault’s Anatomical Fragments and Goya’s The Butcher’s Counter.

It may also be significant that this is the only depiction of a dead fowl done in the thirties, and the only one shown decapitated.  It certainly can stand as a symbol for that tragic year, the year Hitler came to power. Even if this work was produced without the slightest conscious thought to its potential meta-meaning, Soutine could not have been oblivious to the current political climate, as an Ashkenazi Jew from the Pale of Settlement, used to the contempt of Russians, and devoted as a painter to expressing his existential anxiety as a Jewish émigré.

When the Nazis overtook France, Soutine fled to the south, to shelter in Champigny-sur- Veuldre, where he painted one of his last works, Maternity, in 1942, shortly before his death. A distressed, petit young woman holds a dead or unconscious child in a pose that is essentially a pieta—yet another symbolic painting of martyrdom, like Marc Chagall’s painted protest after Kristallnacht. While the emotion in Maternity is quite palpable, it remains psychological and isn’t adequately sustained by the picture itself. By this time, Soutine was painting very little and his anxiety had accelerated the severe attacks from the stomach ulcers from which he had long suffered. In August of the following year, he collapsed and died after an emergency operation in Paris. Picasso was one of the few that followed the coffin to the cemetery at Montparnasse.

The post Sensuous Orgies of Luminous Writhing Paint: Chaim Soutine Still Lifes appeared first on artcritical.

September 26 to December 21, 2013
976 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, (212) 744-2313

In its first effort to represent the estate of Balthus, the Gagosian Gallery is presenting an exhibition of 35 photographic works and an unfinished painting, the whole of which carries a whiff of brimstone and in my opinion suggests a scandalous disregard for an artist’s wishes.

Who exactly is the author of these 35 works: Balthus or whoever arranged them as groupings? In close collaboration with the artist’s family, it appears that Nicolas Pages and Benoit Peverelli, the “editors” of the two volume book of 2,000 Polaroid images, published by Steidl, have actually manufactured the combinations of 155 Polaroid images on view to simulate the up-to-date “look” of serial images by Duane Michaels or multiple image panels by Nan Goldin. It is a very clever way to hawk a wide range of images that vary greatly in subject, intent and quality, and have them range from $20,000 to $240,000 in price. And they have done a very fine job of obfuscation: one has to look closely before the smell of sulfur begins to emerge.

Balthus was known to be very reluctant to allow people into his studio while he worked, or to see work in progress, as Pierre Matisse once complained. Thus the exhibition of this unfinished work is nothing less than a betrayal by the family. Looking at the tiny Polaroid images of weak stages of paintings in progress made me wince. As a painter, in these last years, Balthus was “not the man he once was”, as he said himself in Damian Pettigrew’s film. And I write this as one who would champion the best of the late paintings as great.

After his eyesight and hand co-ordination had seriously deteriorated, Balthus took up the Polaroid camera as a substitute for drawing with three kinds of results: studies, accidents, and independent photographic works.  There is much on view that represents genuine searching to find the telling image for a painting and explore the crucial particulars needed to adjust the “single-eyed” perspective of the camera to reveal the spatial relationships wanted by the artist.  One might become familiar with this sort of search by viewing the sketchbook drawings of Edouard Vuillard. Yet, Balthus is known to have destroyed many of his drawings done to this end. The useful images are clear and as normative as many photographs that appear in magazines. Then there are the accidental images created by a shaky hand, works never meant to be seen.

From these accidents, Balthus seems to have pursued an idea both appropriate to photography and subversive of what I would call the medium’s innate materialism. The idea was to use the subtle movement of the camera, and the movement of the model to suppress detail through blur and create a sensation of fading consciousness, that plays ambiguously between the viewer and the subject. With moving intimacy and poetic affect Balthus evokes, in these images, both a sense of Anna’s drift from lassitude into dream and his/our fatality. In these works, a “young” photographer has melded the tenebrism of Titian to the futurism of Duchamp in works that are truly “deskilled” by a master.

By blending all three kinds of images into “super-sized” products, the estate has sanctioned a diminishment of his real achievement as a photographer. And by displaying a feeble and effaced canvas they have given comfort to those who would deny Balthus his due. Such work belongs in study collections like the unfinished drafts of poems, not in public exhibitions.

The post Super-Sized and Compromised: Balthus at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.