October 12 to November 11, 2017
531 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, masseylyuben.com

I can think of few sculptors at work today who have a greater respect for their materials or their craft than Claire Lieberman. She was the subject of a recent show at the Massey Lyuben gallery. The center of the gallery was dominated by nine sculptures carved from single blocks of black marble and placed waist high on white pedestals. The daunting regimentation of their arrangement in rows of three by three lent a sense of high seriousness. Together they formed UDBO Playground in which UDBO stands for Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.

Unlike so many contemporary artists, more concerned with the message of their work than with its material or form, Lieberman rejoices in the sheer, irreducible objecthood of her works, and that enthusiasm is infectious. It is hard to stand near them, each about the size of a large watermelon, without wanting to engage them—against one’s better instincts and art world decorum—in some tactile way, to revel in their absolute smoothness or even to lift them in order to assess density.

Lieberman is not an abstract artist. Each of these nine works suggests something that might exist in the real world. But at the last moment the sculptor pulls back from that hint of familiarity to render the objects alien and inscrutable. The title, UDBO Playground, provides some clue as to how we should interpret them. They are indeed beautiful objects that resist identification. At the same time, a sense of danger lurks about them. In addition to their unyielding density, several of them resemble grenades or the sort of generic bomb that might explode in a vintage Looney Tunes cartoon.

That association brings us to the other component of these works, the element of child’s play, but with little of its presumptive innocence. Often these objects recall the little metal objects in a Monopoly set or the trinkets that one might attach to a bracelet. In this respect they playfully resemble schematic flowers or children’s tops. Only one, shaped like a gourd, suggests something organic rather than machine made. All of them have been burnished to a degree of superhuman smoothness, although one work—a sort of oblong orb—does betray a few fleeting, consoling glimpses of rough stone on several of the protruding bosses that enliven its surface.

What is Ms. Lieberman up to in these UDBOs? In part she is invoking the inveterate game of the Minimalists as she plays with scale in tiny trinkets enlarged to the size of mid-sized mammals. At the same time, and more importantly, she derives from Surrealism an appreciation of the dreamlike strangeness of her objects, at once present and familiar yet inscrutably elusive, as well. And yet, overriding all of that, I suspect, is a deeper reverence for the pure materiality of the stone and also for that transcendental quality that stone, with its awesome permanence, holds for us evanescent creatures of flesh and blood.

While the nine objects in UDBO Playground made up the core of this show, it also included several of the artist’s prints and blown-glass objects. These latter, in particular, share thematic elements with the stone sculptures. They combine an element of danger—often resembling guns—with a sense of inscrutability and of play. Their spectral fragility played off against the density of the stone objects a few feet away.

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Some artists conduct their lives in ways that seem so divergent from their art that we have a hard time reconciling the two: Mondrian may have been a revolutionary painter, but he looked and lived like an accountant. In the case of Martin Naylor, who died on December 31 last year, that dissonance was never a problem. Indeed, he even managed to look like his works, and the question of whether he looked like them or they looked like him is one of those chicken and egg conundrums that are impossible and unnecessary to solve. Although one could argue that Whistler, in his person and comportment, roughly resembled his paintings, that seems somewhat unimpressive given that he was, after all, a portraitist. But that Naylor, who was very nearly an abstract painter and sculptor, should have achieved a comparable communion is, in its way, astonishing.

Naylor was born in 1944 in Morley, a small town in Yorkshire (now part of Greater Leeds), and to the end of his days he spoke with a pronounced Yorkshire accent, as though it were a point of pride and a principled retort to the posh, compromised diction of London. Just because he was born too late to be one of the Angry Young Men who stirred up British culture in the Fifties and Sixties didn’t mean that he couldn’t be angry. A towering, Wagnerian figure of a man, he always cultivated the air of going to or having just coming from a fistfight, even though, in my dealings with him, he always behaved with the greatest decency. His clothes, meanwhile, were apt to fit him as fortuitously as those fragments of apparel that he incorporated into his paintings and sculptures, and the tousled storm-cloud of his long, spindly hair had an obvious correlate in the squiggled lines, either abstract or nearly so, that made up his so many of his later paintings. The sweater-wearing stick figure in one of his best and earliest works, Discarded Sweater (1973), a cross between surrealism and arte povera, could almost stand as a self-portrait.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Naylor was a prominent figure on the London art scene. In addition to teaching at Leeds Art College and the Royal College of Art, he exhibited at the Rowan Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and the 1977 Sao Paolo Biennial. In the early 1990s, however, Naylor declared himself fed up with the London art establishment and moved to Buenos Aires with his Argentine wife, the psychoanalyst Liliana Maler. There he quickly established himself in the local art scene and exhibited in such prestigious venues as the Centro Cultural Borges. He remained in Buenos Aires for roughly fifteen years before moving back to London in 2008. By this time, however, his health was beginning to deteriorate, and with it his will to produce art.

But his energetic productivity before that decline has left us with an abundant legacy of paintings and sculptures that sit in eminent collections throughout the world. And they are now becoming the subject of new and vigorous interest to a younger generation.

Of related interest: David Cohen’s profile of Martin Naylor in The Independent, August 1996, on the occasion of his fourth exhibition in Buenos Aires that year:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/exile-in-a-land-of-mischief-1310606.html

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Joachim Neugroschel, who died May 23 aged 73, is best known as a literary figure, the prize-winning translator of over 200 books, mostly from French, German and Yiddish, though also from Russian and Italian. But in addition to this literary work, Neugroschel was an important participant in the New York art scene from the Sixties through the Nineties, especially during its Soho days. Joachim, who was born in Vienna and came to America when he was three years old, wrote and translated catalogue essays for art galleries, composed gallery reviews for a variety of publications, and was an avid collector of the art of his contemporaries.

In one sense, he was the embodiment of a not uncommon character in the Soho of those days or in the Chelsea of today: he was a poet as well as an art critic, a disciple of Baudelaire, a flaneur, in whom the two disciplines indissolubly merged. He was also a founding editor of Extensions, a little magazine that published some of the early poems of John Ashbery and Andrei Codrescu, as well as the art writings of Lawrence Alloway and Vito Acconci, John Perreault, Peter Schjeldahl and Richard Kostelanetz.

But to the many people who knew Joachim, or knew of him, this dry recital of a few biographical details will give little sense of the essence of the man. I knew him for the last 15 or so years of his life and he seemed, more than anyone else I have known, to live up to Hamlet description of Yorick as “a fellow of infinite jest.” In all the hundreds of times that I had lunch or dinner with him, he never once seemed anything less than happy, even when, in later years, he was clearly beginning to be enfeebled by a variety of ailments, as old age began to take its toll. Despite the seriousness of his intellectual pursuits, he saw humor everywhere, not least in himself. Indeed, he perennially seemed to be at least a generation younger than he really was, since he never lost that inexhaustible and ebullient sense of wonder and adventure that are or should be the hallmarks of youth.

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Born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and transported to London soon thereafter, Pablo Bronstein the artist, as opposed to Pablo Bronstein the little boy, thoroughly missed the Postmodern boat. By the time he emerged as a mature artist around 2000 AD, the hardcore Postmodern classicism of, for example, the Sainsbury Wing in London’s National Gallery had become the standing jest of the cultural world, a status it retains ten years on. Even its most blow-hard supporters, critics like Charles Jencks, have largely disowned the movement and would prefer not to talk about it. Only Bronstein, it seems, is willing to make a public stand in support of this much-maligned ism, as is abundantly evident in a charming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

This diminutive show consists of 7 drawings or groups of drawings, as well as a series of ink-jet prints and another series of etchings. All of these works were completed in 2009 and the majority of them have to do in some fanciful way with the architecture of the Metropolitan Museum itself. Indeed, this focus is in keeping with most of this artist’s work to date, which consists of archaizing drawings of architecture and interiors. To this critic, there is a distinctly dreamlike element to Bronstein’s art: he depicts the Met, that neo-classical temple, much as it is today, and yet strangely altered. In the largest image in the show, the Met appears as an 18th Century construction site seen from “4th Avenue,” as if nothing had ever been built in between. Dotted with palm-trees and pre-modern cranes, it is a labor of Pharaonic immensity. Meanwhile, another drawing depicts the Met as a massive quadrangle, as indeed McKim, Meade and White had intended it to be in their promptly discarded master plan.

The formal vocabulary of Bronstein’s images is, in his depictions of architecture, a mixture of the Memphis style from the mid-Eighties and the fastidiously classical idiom of Vanvitelli and Juvarra. As for his interiors, they look fondly back upon Louis Quinze and the neo-classical Adam style. Superimposed upon these formal convictions is a mood or attitude that shifts from the archness of Hockney to the pseudo-sublimity of Piranesi.

One is naturally inclined to ask what Bronstein could possibly be up to. The Met’s press release dependably communicates the party line: “[Bronstein] highlights the complicit power structures that are required to accomplish great works, in turn inviting viewers to consider the mechanisms that delineate private and public space.”

Well, there’s that: but I would suggest another reading. At his best, the artist is a really first-rate draughtsman, whole passages of whose drawings could pass for respectable exercises in 18th century architectural studies. Contemporary culture allows artists to do anything at all, anything—except the one thing that Bronstein appears to want to do, namely to design and draw classical buildings as though he were at work in a perpetual ancien regime. But because the age will not reward an artist for a forthright indulgence of this “passéism,” an ironic subtext, having to do with power structures and the art world, had to be found and has been found.

But the real reason behind these works, or so I believe, is the artist’s abiding love of old architectural drawings, a dying art that Bronstein has somehow learned to practice with impressive mastery.

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