For me, MoMA is the art museum. The Frick may have the near perfect historical collection. Certainly, the Met has everything, which is why I love getting lost there. And the Guggenheim and Whitney are always worth visiting, as, sometimes, is the New Museum. But MoMA is our place, it’s the museum that formed and forms the canon in modernism and whatever comes next. That’s why I trace my own Bildungsroman by remembering the changing arrangements of the permanent collection, and recalling conversations I had about them: I once met up with the late Linda Nochlin there, who told a funny story about Willem de Kooning’s female nudes. And I met T.J. Clark in the exhibition comparing the paintings Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.  I suspect that I’m not the only person who responds to the museum like this, with ample happy personal memories.

Just as only someone you care deeply about inspires the most passionate complaints, so this museum inspires deeply personal critical responses. I am aware, then, that its relationship to Abstract Expressionism, now well represented in the permanent collection, was for a long time problematic. And I am old enough to remember when it looked like there would be endless Frank Stella retrospectives. But when I recall such great shows as “Inventing Abstraction, 1920-1925” (2013) or “Adrian Piper A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” (2018), that turned my head around. Simularly, when I recollect the amazingly ambitious rehang just before the closing last year, the first draft of a revolutionary contemporary world art history, all my complaints fade away. The museum is often uncomfortably overcrowded. I can recall when you could be nearly alone with Guernica. But those present crowds are a measure of the success of we educators.

The problem right now facing MoMA is what Hegelian Marxists call a contradiction. Our leftist art world depends upon a support system provided by the super rich, many of them Republicans, who name galleries and donate masterpieces. In practice sometimes the art world closes its eyes, and takes the money but not the politics. So far as I know, no one is picketing the Frick, though how Henry Clay Frick earned his money is dismaying to the moralist. And we may regret some actions of the Rockefellers. It would be worthwhile, I think, to chart the sources of the wealth of all the MoMA trustees. But institutions often accept old money whilst having problems with the new money of a Leon Black or a Steve Cohen. The grandfather made the money, and so the children could become philanthropists: Henry James and Louis Auchincloss have told that story. If you care about posthumous opinion, a magnificent art collection looks better than a yacht or country estate. Nowadays, however, no doubt the grand collectors also have yachts and estates.

Like the duc de Saint Simon, who, as Marcel Proust explains, had a snobbish preference for the old nobility rather than those ennobled only under Louis XII, many think that old money is better than new wealth. And yet, people who call for reparations for slavery or for Native Americans, are not satisfied to be told that those moral miscarriages took place long ago. And a realist might argue that since we’re stuck with the rich, let’s at least get some benefit from their money by asking up their offers to support our museums. At any rate, in the present division of labor, the function of the trustees is to raise the money while scholars do the theorizing. (And the staff does the work.) This is  why neither Meyer Schapiro nor Clement Greenberg were trustees of MoMA.

How would this museum finance itself if it had to do without the uber rich? It would be admirable to display more female, Black , and Asian-American artists. But that’s already starting to happen, at least in part. Could MoMA be seriously downscaled, perhaps, like the New Museum when it was on Broadway before it constructed its expensive building on the Bowery? Once I asked a MidWestern museum director if he wanted to have free admissions.. A good idea he said, but here’s what I need, and he quoted the exact grant required. Change is requires a serious chunk of change.

Twenty years ago as a Getty Scholar, I started to write my book on the art museum, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006). Thanks to J. Paul Getty’s oil dealings in Saudi Arabia, whose fierce theology prohibits graven images, the last new grand museum devoted to the European figurative tradition can now sit high on a hill above Los Angeles. We could view the automobile traffic stretching out far beyond the airport as we worked. But even literally aloof scholars are unavoidably inside the system, which isn’t to say that we have to approve of its dealings, or that we should fail to protest. It’s easy to be critical about other people, but harder to be self-critical about your own role. That’s why I am genuinely unsure about how to judge the actions of my colleagues and friends who protest at MoMA. Spectacular injustices and inequalities make our art world possible. But I am deeply uncertain about what change is likely. In 1974 I read one of the great publications of that era, Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His conclusion coveys a feeling for the leftist world of that era, to which I am still attached:

“Long live the Revolution!”
“Yes! In spite of everything!”

These are Courbet’s instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire’s to himself in 1865. They don’t seem to me to have dated.

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Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at the Haus der Kunst, Munich

October 14, 2016 to March 26, 2017

It has been clear for some time now that received accounts of art in the decades following World War II are deeply unsatisfying. It is no longer plausible to speak of “the triumph of American painting”. Equally unwilling to accept October magazine’s ultimately conservative retelling of that story, however, we need a radical revisionist history of this period. Entering the first gallery of Haus der Kunst, which is also the first of eight “chapters” telling this story, titled “Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Age,” you face the mammoth Joseph Beuys installation, Monuments to the Stag (1958/82). Other works you see include two of Morris Louis’s early political paintings, of which Charred Journal, Firewritten II (1951),is one; Frank Stella’s black-striped Arbeit Macht Frei (1958); Barnett Newman’s The Beginning (1946); Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration (1951), by Norman Lewis; and Gerhard Richter’s Coffin Bearers (1962). Form Matters,” the next chapter, includes major pieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and a large Lee Krasner picture along with a gargantuan abstract painting by Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, a Turkish artist who worked in Jordan; John Latham’s Untitled (Roller Painting) (1964), which uses a spray painted cloth, hung horizontally to mark the passage of time; and three black, densely gridded paintings by Rasheed Araeen, the Pakistani painter who lives in London. The fourteen high-walled galleries all mix art by well-known figures with strong works by lesser-known artists. Thus “New Images of Man,” for example, included Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951), and sculptures by Giacometti alongside artists who will be discoveries for many westerners, —such as Maqbool Fida Husain, who uses layers of paint to surround his figure in Man (1951) and Alina Szapocznikow, whose Head VII (1961) is a heavily slashed cast lead sculpture. And “Realisms,” which takes you upstairs, includes Vasiliy Jakovlev’s over the top Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union (1946) as well as Chinese and Egyptian social realist paintings; an Alice Neal portrait; and Andrew Wyeth’s Young America (1950).

Curated by Okwui Enwezor (director of the Kunsthalle), Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes, “Postwar” shows artists responding, whether in figurative or abstract works, to subjects as diverse as the beginning of the end of European colonization, the postwar reconstruction of ruined Western Europe, the Holocaust and the American atomic bombings of Japan, the coming to power of communism in China, the birth of a consumer economy in Western Europe, the American Civil Rights demonstrations and the start of US intervention in Vietnam, the cold war rivalry of the USSR and the USA, the history of South America, and the development of cybernetics and novel information processing technologies. All this in a building so fraught with history: formerly The House of German Art, it was opened by Hitler in 1937 as a showcase of Nazi culture. The catalogue states, incidentally, that the exhibition is coming to the Brooklyn Museum, but alas that is not to be.

Sometimes the artists respond simply by virtue of the sheer scale of their art. This would be the case for Lee Ufan’s Pushed-Up Ink (1964), Lygia Clark’s Obra mole (1964) and Alfonso Ossorio’s mixed-media panel Rescue (1951). At other times, however, they present these subjects through the iconographical content of their pictures: Ibrahim El Salahi’s Self-Portrait of Suffering (1961), a harrowing portrait of stress, Ben Enwonwu’s Anyanwu (1954-55), an elegant elongated figure based upon traditional Nigerian sculpture, John Biggers’ The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas (1955) and Boris Taslitzky’s astonishing Riposte (1951), which depicts the violent breakup by the French police of a 1949 dockworkers’ strike against arms shipments for the colonial war in Indochina. But sometimes, the artists employ a synthesis of subject and its form. In a section titled “Concrete Visions” Gyula Kosice’s Variation in Blue (1945), a shaped canvas meant to inspire utopian reflection, or Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) are good examples. And there are examples of a synthesis of formal and inconographical approach in works such as Jasper Johns’ Flags (1965), Yosef Zaritsky’s Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz) (1951), a painting honoring that agricultural utopia, and Ben Enwonwu’s narrative painting, Going (1961) which shows Nigerians celebrating national independence.

Displaying well-known artists alongside lesser-known figures could easily become a pious exercise in political correctness. And dealing with so many, very varied subjects, using artworks, most of them large, by 208 artists, could generate visual cacophony. The show might easily have been a disaster. In fact, however, this oddly harmonious visual feast was, in the three days I visited it and looked closely, entirely visually convincing.In part, this was because you saw how artists from visual cultures everywhere responded to the traumatic events. But it is also because the skillful installation frequently identifies suggestive visual correspondences. Sometimes the catalogue drives a group show of this nature. But although a massive catalogue, with essays by thirty-seven scholars, accompanies “Postwar,” it is the visual evidence that inspires conviction. This powerful exhibition changes permanently your sense of the history of postwar art. It demonstrates that it is now possible to present a world art history in which the American Abstract Expressionists and their immediate successors are legitimately set alongside their peers from not only Europe, but also Africa, Asia and South America. And it shows the power of a social history of art. If “the truth is the whole”, as Hegel famously proposed, then what follows is that in a world where artists from everywhere are in contact, as was the case between 1945 and 1965, no merely partial presentation of art can be entirely satisfying. And sometimes, as “Postwar” shows, more is more.

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September 12 to October 27, 2018
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York City, speronewestwater.com

In stand up comedy, there can be a thin, easily crossed line between aggressive hilarity and remarks that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic. A great performer needs to identify and respect these limits. Is it also possible for a painter to go too far? People used to think that Francis Picabia had done so with his ‘bad paintings’, works that inspired David Salle in the 1980s. But now Picabia, and maybe also Salle, belong to the postmodernist canon. Many commentators felt that Giorgio de Chirico, in his later works depicting gladiators and horses, had gone off the deep end, losing touch completely with the inspiration of his haunting early cityscapes. But nowadays it seems unacceptable for retrospectives to include only his early and widely admired masterpieces. The lessons of art history teach critics who reject the transgressive to take care.

Forty years ago Malcolm Morley became famous for his photorealist paintings. Then he had a long, highly successful career, demonstrating an amazing ability to work in a variety of disparate styles. In the 1980s, for example, he was identified as an important Neo-Expressionist. Now, in pictures completed in the three years before his recent death, Morley shows close focus pictures of armored knights. In Piazza d’Italian with French Knights (2017) two knights find themselves in a de Chiricoesque cityscape; in Melee at Agincourt (2017), a canvas of six by nine feet, a crowded field of mounted knights is on a yellow monochromatic background. And French and English Knights Engaged in Mortal Combat (2017) shows a joust in front of a lovingly detailed castle, with a sailing ship in the background. The great plaids in Italian Knight (2016) may recall modernist grids. And the vast green and yellow fields behind the knights in Tilting (2017) might remind you of the backgrounds in Alex Katz’s classic portraits.

Like many boys, Morley loved playing with toy soldiers – in the exhibition catalogue Nicholas Serota notes that his art demonstrates “the way we retain deep in our memory visual triggers to our profound psychological experiences, to our encounters with each other, and our relationship with the material world around us.” Via Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (1438-40), the nineteenth-century Scottish history painter James Henry Nixon, and Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V, Morley learned how to compose battle scenes.

However bizarre new artworks appear, it’s always possible to adduce sources and argue that they extend visual tradition, in a meaningful way. But for me, these new Morleys stand to history painting the way Liberace’s Chopin stands to normal pianists’ performances. Most of these pictures are absurd, so obviously, deeply silly that I cannot imagine an art world in which they would be taken seriously. Still, I grant that one painting is a real achievement. In The Ultimate Anxiety (1978), the second largest work in the show, a line of freight train cars runs diagonally across the Venetian lagoon, which is filled with gondolas and a golden ceremonial barge, with Venetians observing from the quayside. When in the 1840s a train bridge was built in Venice, John Ruskin worried that his favorite city had been ruined. Morley’s visual commentary, is an inspired update of an, alas, all too real concern for the fate of Venice. One could say, I believe, that the painting makes a fantasy out of Ruskin’s fear. But after that, I think, Morley went too far.

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Brian O’Doherty is justly renowned for his short book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976). In any case, as a much-acclaimed artist and a veteran critic, he deserves this presentation of his writings. Collected Essays brings together substantial personal reminiscences of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, who were his friends; accounts of travels to Las Vegas and Miami; discussions of medicine that are informed by his early experience as an MD; descriptions of the work Orson Wells and other filmmakers; and selections from his art criticism of the 1960s and ‘70s, dealing with Richard Chamberlain, George Segal, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. There’s a marvelous account of how he took Marcel Duchamp’s heartbeat to compose a portrait of that artist and the story of how, as a political gesture, he took the name Patrick Ireland (1972-2008). “As a young man in Dublin,” he writes in a brilliant introductory essay on masquerade, “I felt the need to assume a persona that stretched the borders of a culture where literature always flourished and the attitudes to visual art were warily provincial” (pp. 8-9). O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture.

As examples of his luminously lucid, jargon free analysis, I especially admired his highly instructive account of the role of windows in Hopper’s paintings, the problems with the dark paintings in Rothko’s Houston Chapel, discussion of neon signs in Las Vegas, and an analysis of Stella’s early reception. But because he doesn’t provide an overview on the very diverse themes of these essays, it’s left to the reader to tease out the unifying concerns. And it’s not clear who will read this book through – except a very patient reviewer. Perhaps Inside the White Cube provides the unifying perspective much needed in the present volume, with its appeal to the role of the spectator’s space. When O’Doherty describes the ways that Hopper’s “aim was to keep the spectator right there, looking” (p. 21), using his windows in his “mysterious realism” which “invites you in to test the logic of his space with reference to your everyday experience” (p. 39), his account is revelatory. And his claim that Rothko’s dark late paintings show “an urge to experiment in ways he had not previously allowed himself” (p. 83), extends that analysis in a surprising way. I regret, then, that O’Doherty doesn’t go out of his way to make this overriding concept, which points to surprising parallels between Hopper’s realism and Rothko’s abstractions, entirely accessible, nor indicate how it might bring together the concerns of the other essays in this volume.

What is the right format for republication of a famous critic’s writings? When Clement Greenberg collected his criticism in Art and Culture (1961) he provided a carefully edited selection of his essays; he was famous enough that no elaborate editorial discussion was needed. When Michael Fried collected his criticism in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), he offered an elaborate introduction describing the genesis and development of these writings. But although O’Doherty’s Collected Essays opens with respectful brief essays by Liam Kelly and Anne-Marie Bonnet, they don’t really tell enough to provide a full perspective on his career, much of which now is historically distant. I sought out this volume, I confess, because I wanted to know if how he had rethought his history of the commercial art gallery, in light of its recent development. But I was frustrated by the very condensed five-page account, whose title, I admit, is suggestive: “Boxes, cubes, installations, whiteness and money.” “Art and its reception,” he rightly says, “always intersected finance. Art is made to be coopted” (p. 331). What then follows? “The white cube I described over thirty years ago is no longer the same place. The stresses on it from within have increased” (p. 330). True enough – but surely there is much more to be said. Right now I can think of no more interesting challenge for anyone interested in contemporary art and its market than spelling out the implications of these claims.

Brian O’Doherty, Collected Essays. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.) Edited by Liam Kelly. Introduction by Anne-Maria Bonnet. ISBN 9780520286542, 342 pp. $85 hardback, $34.95 paperback

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May 4 – September 16, 2018
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

In 1950, a Chaim Soutine exhibition at MoMA attracted a serious response from the New York art world. Willem de Kooning expressed great admiration for Soutine, arguing  that “[he] builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance.” Indeed, three years later de Kooning’s own figurative works responded to that show. Subtitling this year’s small exhibition of thirty-some Soutine still lifes “Flesh,” the Jewish Museum subtly (perhaps unconsciously) alludes to de Kooning’s famous statement, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”?

In our very different contemporary art world, this show will surely fascinate figurative and abstract painters alike. (I would be surprised, for instance, if Bill Jensen is anything but riveted by it.) Soutine appeals to our present sensibility in ways that his once more famous near-contemporaries, Picasso or Mondrian, do not. Where Cubism, Surrealism and modernist abstraction are now of essentially historical curiosity, Soutine’s painterly manner remains a live option. That is surprising, for he wanted to work within the old master and early modernist museum-based tradition – he expressed great admiration for Chardin, Courbet and Rembrandt. But the way he radicalized that tradition remains galvanizing.

Soutine is a surprisingly varied artist.  Still Life with Artichoke (1916) sets a dinner on a tilted table in a traditional still life format while Still Life with Fish (1921) lines up the fish in an opened up dish. He paints a number of hanging fowls, Chicken Hanging before a Brick Wall (1927) being one. He does great sides of beef and, inspired by Courbet, The Fish (1933). And near the end of his life, he painted the very strange Sheep behind a Fence (1940), which isn’t a still life. All of these works (except for the first and last of these I have named) set his subject, which is painted in his expressive style, on a flat, relatively neutral close up background. To speak, then, as I do, of Soutine as an expressionist is to identify the way that his technique always draws attention to the pigment per se. Seeing his luscious intense browns, yellows and reds, we are aware at the same time of the subject that they depict. Of course, all figurative art calls for this dual-awareness. But Soutine, more than the old masters he admired, focuses attention on the physicality of pigment. In his review of a Jewish Museum show of twenty years ago, Arthur Danto offered a challenging argument, which is relevant to our present inquiry. Soutine, he argues, is an artist who could only be properly (or fully) understood after the development of Abstract Expressionism, for his goal was “to paint recognizable subjects abstractly, that is to say, without the isomorphism between the image and the subject’s visual form as traditionally sought.” In thus inspiring de Kooning, Soutine showed us how to understand his own works – and demonstrated why today they remain so challenging.

Contemplating Paul Cézanne’s still lives, you become aware of how he manipulates the table and bowls supporting his apples and other still life objects, fashioning a visually precarious, spatial harmony. Cubism, we see, is in the wings. Here, in very different paintings, Soutine’s subjects are the armatures, the pretext if you will, for his exercises in pure painting. A great colorist, he uses intense, generally dark pigments, which almost always remain luminous. His art is touching in the double sense of that word: it is intensely expressive because you feel that he has created from mere pigment, as it were, the objects which he depicts; and it is touching because it holds your attention. Some old master still life painters show precious or rare foodstuffs and artifacts, luxury goods. Soutine’s banal subjects don’t call attention to themselves. And yet, once I attend momentarily to any one of them, I can hardly tear my eyes away.

Arthur Danto’s “Abstracting Soutine” is republished in his The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York, 2000).

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Bookstein
April 19 to May 26, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Harvey
April 18 to May 20, 2018
208 Forsyth Street, between Houston and Rivington streets
New York City, shfap.com

Might a bookish analysis provide the best way to understand the art of a marvelously intuitive painter? Perhaps! In his great treatise on figurative art, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) Ernst Gombrich offers a far-reaching thesis about the history of European painting. In a process of what he calls ‘making and matching,’ an artist starts with some simplified pattern, which Gombrich calls a schema, and then adapts it to match the particular visual features of what is represented. In cubism, which marks the beginning of the end of this tradition, so Art and Illusion claims, “the scrambling of clues” baffles perception. And then Jackson Pollock, going one step further, prevents “us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind . . .” Then visual deadlock is what results when there’s no way to consistently match the pictorial content to some depicted site in physical reality.

Often Paul Resika’s paintings from the 1980s show seascapes from Cape Cod, where he maintains a studio. These works, it might seem, are far from the modernist tradition of abstraction. But now, as if working in a highly personal way through a Gombrichian history of figuration, he juxtaposes backgrounds of clear skies, with yellow suns, with jagged pyramids in the foreground. And this show falls into two, distinctly different parts. Bookstein Projects shows a roomful of these enigmatic works, Resika’s more conventional paintings, variations on this theme. And at Steven Harvey’s gallery, in addition to the beach scenes, you also see several works, which are harder to place — A Quiet Romance (2017), showing a conch shell on a similar background, and, in the back room, the magnificent Self-Portrait with Rag (2017). Resika, you sense, keeps his options open. For this reason, my schematic history hardly does justice to the bold originality of all of these paintings. Look at Triangle- Sun (2017) are Harvey, or Rose Dawn, also 2017 at Bookstein. These prickly images set against the sky, which have no sources that I can identify, are a law onto themselves.

In some of these recent paintings, The White Sky (2017) for example, (on view at Bookstein) you see the edge of the sea on the horizon. The sea and sky backgrounds of these landscapes could be painted from nature, but what are we to make of these geometric structures – which, and here I contradict one statement by the artist in the gallery press releases, do not look remotely like any sand dunes that that I have seen at the beach, neither in Cape Cod nor elsewhere? Rather, I would argue, it is as if Resika self-consciously chooses to juxtapose a seemingly non-figurative form against these natural settings, in pictures that are half abstract, and half figurative. What a strange juxtaposition of figurative and abstract-looking elements – and what an original way, certainly never envisaged by Gombrich, to deal with the traditional issues of pictorial representation. As far as I know, this is a remarkable, seemingly unprecedented development in Resika’s long evolution. MoMA’s display “the long run,” which runs through November 4, chronicles the development of artists after their breakthrough moment. This exhibition includes an enigmatic recent work by Lee Bontecou, a late painting of Elizabeth Murray and one picture from the seemingly endless ongoing development of Frank Stella. These two shows of Resika’s very recent paintings nicely supplement that presentation, for at ninety his art, too, has undergone a dramatic transformation. In old age now, he prepares to leap into abstraction, as if returning to the concerns of the art world of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied in the mid-twentieth century. How surprising and how absolutely admirable is his determined ability to remain essentially unpredictable!

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The Museum at Capodimonte has a great collection, including a large part of the Farnese heritage of Italian Renaissance paintings and, also, many distinguished Neapolitan works. But nowadays, when most visitors come to museums primarily to see temporary exhibitions, attracting an audience is a real challenge. And this is a special concern in Naples, for that fascinating city, which can be difficult to love, is only just starting to be recognized as a major art tourist’s destination. As recently as 2014, this large institution had only 126,000 visitors. Here, then, the very imaginative conception of Sylvain Bellenger, the relatively recently appointed director, and Andrea Villani, director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, known as Museo MADRE, the Neapolitan Kunsthalle devoted to contemporary art, was to ask ten famous intellectuals—artists, industrialists and professors – associated in some way with Naples, to select works illustrating thematic concerns from the permanent collection. And, also, the curators offer a reward to that visitor who proposes his or her own best personal supplement to this exhibition. The resulting show, Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire, is a popular success – for the first time in visits now over more three decades, I actually found crowds in the galleries. And, this is equally if not more important, the exhibition offers a dramatic conceptual challenge to our usual ways of thinking about art history.

In the show Paolo Pejrone, who is a landscape artist, collected paintings showing gardens. Gianfranco D’Amato, who runs a packing company, gathered pictures—Jacopo dè Barbara’s Portrait of Luca Pacioli (1500) was one example—displaying various containers. Laura Bossi Régnier, a historian of biology, presented paintings with medical themes. The French intellectual historian Marc Fumaroli organized a display arguing that Bernardo Cavallino, a painter whom he greatly admires, is as significant as the more renowned Jusepe de Ribera. And the great Neapolitan-born conductor Ricardo Muti chose to display but a single work, Masaccio’s Trinity (1426), accompanied by a large photographic reproduction, a picture which in his judgment encapsulates the values of the entire collection. Too often, Bellenger and Villani suggest, “the traditional narrative of the History of Art,” an historical presentation, “is too often considered as the only key for understanding art.” By opening up discussion of that cliché, Carta Bianca aims to inspire up reflection, offering a real alternative to these interpretive traditions, which poses challenging questions about how to we are to understand the history of art. Walking out of the show into the permanent collection, inevitably one thinks critically about the adequacy of our usual ways of understanding visual art. Is there not something inherently limiting, one asks, in focusing too exclusively on historical thinking about the arts. It happens that Bellenger is in charge not only of the museum, but also of the large surrounding park, which like the hanging of the collection has now been renovated. On a plaque at the entrance he offers a statement from Michael Foucault: “A garden is the smallest particle of the world, and, at the same time, it is the totality of the world.” I believe that this quotation suggests how museum collections, like gardens, also can reveal the power of imagination. Certainly it demonstrates how old master art may be seen in ways that reveal its living significance. And that is a very important goal for museums devoted to traditional painting.

Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples on view December 12, 2017 to June 17, 2018

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October 26, 2017 to March 10, 2018 (extended)
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, gseart.com

In this ambitious exhibition, 34 works on paper, most of them small, by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) are joined by an equal number of works, mostly also on paper but including a couple of paintings, by Sue Coe (b.1951). Kollwitz is well known for her images of the working classes, the unemployed, men killed in action during the Great War, and political activists and demonstrations. Early in her career, she did history scenes, like the etching Outbreak/Charge (1903) from her series showing the German sixteenth-century Peasant War. Then, turning to the present, she depicted victims of World War One. In Killed in Action (First Version) (1919) we see the mother of a soldier who died in the war. And near the end of her long life, her lithograph Seed-Corn Must Not be Ground (1941) responded to the Second World War. Coe, an English emigrant to the United States, has presented subjects as various as English riots, the homeless of New York and slaughterhouses– she is an animal rights activist. Her works often are visually aggressive – as when her War (1991), depicts the endless field of menacing warplanes darting above an array of their victims. Or consider Grenfell Tower (Corporate Murder) (2017) a linocut showing the great spiral of flames about the burning London building. Because Coe works mostly in black and white, her occasional use of reds makes the appearance of that color very powerful. Look, for example, at Abolition: Meat Free Every Day (2014), where marching animals perform musical instruments accompanied by a ferociously red banner with the inscription: “Abolition.”    

Kollwitz and Coe developed very different styles of political art, in ways that reflect the broader history of modernism. Set Kollwitz’s lithograph Demonstration (Final Version) (1931) alongside Coe’s drawing Demonstrator–Times Square (1991) and you see both their shared sensibilities and the vast differences in how they express themselves. Usually Kollwitz sets you at some distance from her figures, while Coe typically puts the viewer aggressively close up to her demonstration. Indeed, in Getting the Chop (1989), showing workers arrested as illegal immigrants, the figures are really in your face. But Kollwitz too can be formally imaginative.

Her woodcut Hunger (1922) depicting a starving woman and her dead child anticipates Picasso’s later images of agonized women. And in The Volunteers (1921-22), a woodcut, an  abstracted group of human figures presses upward in way that recalls earlier Futurist compositions.   

Neither Kollwitz nor Coe has more than a modest place in standard histories of modernism. In the massive Octoberist volume, Art Since 1900, for example, Kollwitz is merely mentioned alongside her better-known Dadaist contemporaries, Hannah Höch and George Grosz. And, as the gallery handout says, Coe “is not of the art world.” In my opinion, this is just a reminder of how limited a place the art world sometimes is. I’m not sure that ‘All Good Art is Political’, but I am convinced that Kollwitz and Coe are both major artists. Coe, who is consistently inventive, deserves to be shown alongside our great senior master of over-the-top political painting, Peter Saul.  

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November 4 to December 22, 2017
15 Rivington Street, between Chrystie Street and Bowery
New York City, bettycuninghamgallery.com

Because our visual culture is supersaturated with representations of all kinds, contemporary figurative artists need to be resourceful to survive. Some do this by appropriating imagery from advertising, while others borrow from old master or modernist art. The paintings and works on paper in this mini-retrospective present a now familiar modernist theme, beach scenes. And so, merely identifying Graham Nickson’s theme may suggest that he is a very traditional artist. As a teacher, I should add, he loves to talk about the importance of drawing; and in this exhibition’s catalogue he discusses the importance of working from direct observation – both, of course, traditional concerns. But look at Bather with Reflector (1982-83), with its dramatic horizontal division, the intensely artificial sky above the sand and reclining bather. Here you see how much Nickson owes to Brice Marden’s monochromes and to the blank colored backgrounds in Alex Katz’s portraits. Observe, too, how Departure (1977-1994), another enormous painting, plays an intensely lit sky against the darkness of the foreground, where the fisherman and beach goers stand. This, too, is a most untraditional composition. Or consider Tracks (1982-91), an enormous near-monochrome in which the tracks in the sands run out to the horizon in a daring perspectival construction. Originally this much-reworked picture was done in full color. A nineteenth-century painter might show this motif from a distance. By taking us close up and eliminating local color, Nickson reveals the strange visual qualities of his tracks. And I love the daring way that the delicious Maine Grey: Yellow Jacket (2017) places the back-turned standing figure in the immediate foreground, presenting another untraditional motif.

Nickson is a very varied painter – and this exhibition provides an effective introduction to the range of his artistic interests. What then links together all of these works is a highly personal, most effective vision of the artist’s goals. He has said: “The entire process of creating art is abstract, but the finished work is a metaphor for the artist’s experience and direct observation of nature.” If I understand him correctly, this statement helps identify the difference between the five paintings in this show and the various smaller watercolors and charcoal drawings. These works on paper are relatively immediate responses to his chosen motifs, while the paintings are more considered developments in which reworking of these products of direct observation is mediated by prolonged reflection. ‘Abstract’ here thus is a shorthand way of identifying his active concern to develop these motifs, in response to his governing aesthetic. This, I think, is why Nickson is not interested in the psychology of the people he depicts – they are just his subjects. And it is what makes the beach such an ideal site for him, because of its location between the urban world of culture and nature. We may enjoy beaches because we think of them as timeless, unspoiled places, but of course they too, as much as the city, are, in part, modernist urban creations – they too thus are artificial. I believe that only a contemporary artist would understand figurative images in these terms. What then seems to me distinctive (and highly original) in Nickson’s art is his passionate pursuit of immediate visual experience. You don’t imagine that he searches the Internet for motifs. In that way, allowing for the qualifications that I have offered, he can be identified as a very belated modernist.

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October 21 to December 22, 2017
18 Wooster Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, deitch.com

The cartoonist, so E. H. Gombrich observes, “can mythologize the world or try to dispel illusions.” Gombrich is particularly interested in the ways that political cartoonists critique wrong-headed thinking, revealing the “reality behind the empty clichés.” In this exhibition, Kenny Scharf shows some cartoon-paintings whose target is modernist painting. In Color Field painting, so we have been told, the paint stains appear formed in a radically impersonal way, as if without human intervention. But in Sloppy Melt (2017) and some of Scharf’s other paintings, at the top of the descending lines of paint one sees faces of figures like those found in comic strips, as if each stain were the extended body of one of those figures. Like Warhol, Scharf uses diamond dust to brighten his paintings. Imagine Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse depicted as spectators within a Poussin Annunciation. The result would playfully undercut the seriousness of that scene. Here, similarly, we see a comic reworking of a very solemn style of painting.

Six of the paintings on display, four of them large, are faux Color Field. A number of additional paintings, most of them small like Sloppy Star (2017), develop another motif: the lines of paint ending in a face presented in crossing lines. These, I think, are Scharf’s versions of Kenneth Noland’s plaid abstractions. And two paintings with words are his versions of Ed Ruscha word paintings. Trump Tower of Evil (2017), in which the word “TRUMP” is spelt out in capitals, in towering pink letters, is marvelous. Scharf has spoken of his interest in connecting with modernist art movements by making new hybrids, as if these earlier forms of art had been placed in a blender. His take on Color Field recalls Philip Taaffe’s notorious We Are Not Afraid (1985) with its witty deconstruction of Barnett Newman’s zips. Scharf seems to be saying, let’s show that the stripes in these abstractions really need to be animated by the figures whose heads he depicts. The attitude taken by a cartoonist to his materials, Gombrich argues, can be complex. Sometimes a cartoon is a visual critique, but it also can be an homage. As I see it, Scharf’s ironical attitude to the art he caricatures is ultimately respectful. Acknowledging the power of Color Field painting, he offers a radically revisionist visual interpretation of these works.

In a recent book, Joachim Pissarro and I surveyed the enormous range of what we call ‘wild art’, art that is outside the contemporary gallery world. What defines the present art world, we argue, is the felt need to exclude a great variety of visual art- including, of course, almost all of the cartoons like those analyzed by Gombrich. What’s so remarkable, then, about “Inner and Outer Space” is the way that Scharf successfully incorporates the concerns of an habitually excluded art form, comic caricature. Very little gallery art is intentionally humorous in the way of these works. This is a great show because it changes, permanently, how you will see some important modernist art. Morris Louis’ paintings will never look the same after you see Sloppy Melt (2017). There also are on display two kinds of relief sculptures: TV tubes decorated with oil painting and rhinestones; and small assemblages of found objects, what Joseph Cornell might have done had he responded to our contemporary pop culture. They seem finicky, but perhaps I’m just missing the joke.

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