February 14 to March 14, 2013
The Gallery at Higgins Hall
Midtown Campus,
181 White Street, Danbury, Connecticut

Margaret Grimes’s paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level.  She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest. And although Grimes depicts trees, her work also suggests technology. She paints the hard drive, the motherboard of nature.  The interlocking, crisscrossing branches and root systems could as easily be wires and cables.  The patterns the roots form are not exactly grids, but they nonetheless imply matrixes because they play with our desire to find patterns and regularity in the midst of chaos.  In this sense they are about the sublime, the beauty that is at the edge of our grasp, in Rilke’s sense, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”

Grimes is the subject of a retrospective at the gallery of Western Connecticut State University where she is also founding coordinator of the MFA program. She herself studied with Neil Welliver and Rudy Burckhardt at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her artistic peers also include Stanley Lewis and the younger painter Allison Gildersleeve.

“In art school we were taught to look at nature as if we were seeing it for the first time,” she has written.  “Now we look at it as if we were seeing it for the last time, hence the need to meticulously observe.” Her paintings—dense networks of trees, vines, and roots—are about both these ways of looking: for the first and last time.  They provoke us similarly.

To see Grimes’s show is to be hit with darkness as well as blooming forsythia, black paint swelling out between the greenery, and wiry, twisted, uncontained energy.  The exhibition includes two of Grimes’s early paintings (from the 1960s), although the other twenty paintings date from the 1990s to the present.  Those earliest works show an interest in Van Gogh, but really Grimes is more aligned with Soutine.  Van Gogh is an outliner of forms, polemical in his positioning of right and wrong, whereas Soutine creates an allover field, not just of painterliness, but where danger and beauty meld into one another.  Grimes’s work makes me think of Soutine’s Return from School after the Storm (1939), in the Phillips Collection, which was painted, literally, as Soutine was fleeing from the Nazis.

Grimes’s painting alludes both to the magic of our interconnectedness (the common root systems we share, like spirals of DNA) and the terror of connective systems we have invented, like the Internet.  These paintings remind us of the potential for self-destruction, the pressures we impose on nature, even though Grimes is not literary or didactic.

Her paintings do have a powerful, surprising, and sometimes overwhelming scale, all the more impressive since she works from direct observation.  But it is not just about the paintings’ size. Rather it is in their insistence and the explosiveness that comes out of recursive patterning–patterning that we know, intuitively, exists on both a universal and microscopic level.

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The genius of the exhibit “Matisse: His Art and His Textiles,” is that it provides insight into how an artist works — the material and intellectual processes by which art is made. Hilary Spurling, the Matisse biographer, originally suggested the exhibition’s concept to the Royal Academy in London and acted as consultant to the show. Included here are approximately 75 paintings, drawings and prints, exhibited alongside actual textiles, all from Matisse’s own collection. The textiles have never been exhibited before, and were stored by the artist’s relatives until Spurling discovered them in her research. Spurling’s belief is that no one truly recognizes how important textiles were to Matisse’s career. In her catalogue essay, Spurling seeks to prove the impact Matisse’s upbringing in Bohain had on his work. In Bohain, handloom weaving was a prime industry and Matisse’s family had been weaving there for generations. Spurling links the ‘daring’ nature of the textiles created by Bohain weavers to Matisse’s own individuality and iconoclasm. In contrast to Spurling’s rather factual and biographical discussion of the artist’s relationship to textiles, Jack Flam’s catalogue essay provides an aesthetic, pictorial analysis of Matisse’s relationship to decorative materials. Flam demonstrates how Matisse used the decorative “to extend the energy within individual things beyond their physical boundaries and to create, in effect, a kind of metaphysics of decoration.” Unfortunately, the documentation of the textiles in the catalog is not very thorough or well organized.

The exhibition covers almost the entirety of Matisse’s career, but it notably bypasses what has traditionally been considered Matisse’s most important and most revolutionary period: the mid-teens. This alone indicates that the curators are trying to reinterpret Matisse’s career.

Spurling dedicates considerable attention to exploring Matisse’s life during the 1920s, when he made the so-called “Nice period” paintings. This might reflect her desire to reconsider the works that have generally been perceived as both politically problematic (“Orientalist” odalisques), as well as a retreat from the radicalism of the 1910s. The exhibition is dominated by odalisque paintings. In fact, the entire exhibition is harem-like, with dimly lit rooms, arched doorways framing a North African haiti (a pierced and appliquéd hanging), and one very atmospheric group hanging of textiles — ikats, an actual toile de Jouy, batiks, and silk damasks, from Italy, France, the Middle East, India, and Morocco — all flowing down loosely from dowels hung high on the walls.

The first room of the exhibition provides a succinct account of how Matisse developed his individual style between 1890 and 1909. A painting from 1890,Still-life, Books and Candle, contains the image of a textile — a tablecloth beneath objects. Although the tablecloth is beautifully rendered it does not take on deeper meanings. By 1909, however, Matisse’s use of textiles in his paintings becomes more complicated. His Still-life with Blue Tablecloth uses fabric to create a field of energy. Pattern fills the entirety of the painting, and the three still life elements — a copper coffee pot, a compotier of fruit and a green flask — no longer sit atop the table, but appear to float within the textile, completely united with its atmosphere. The textiles become symbolic representations, what Matisse would later term “signs,” and the patterns begin to begin to take on a life of their own. The blue tablecloth in the painting is based on a textile which is also on display — a nineteenth-century French printed cotton and linen fabric Matisse apparently adored and called (incorrectly) his toile de Jouy. The actual fabric consists of a delft blue pattern against a white background, but in the painting, the white is transformed into aqua, enriching the overall harmony. These imaginative transformations of subject matter prove that Matisse was not a realist, but rather an inventor of harmonies that have a tangible yet oblique relationship to reality. Matisse uses the pattern the way he uses color, to extend his representation of the subject, whether it is still life, figure or interior. For example, in The Moorish Screen (1921), the patterned screen enlivens the conversation between the two women. A violin case, off to the side, is a reminder of the musical motif, but Matisse generates the presence of sound by having at least four distinct patterned textiles bump up against one another in this room. In Odalisque with a Screen(1923), a model raises her arms in the same posture as the palm leaves to her right, which are echoed in turn by the palm shaped pattern of the red and white textile in the background. In Seated Odalisque (1926) Matisse rhymes the red diamond pattern with the model’s accentuated orange-red nipples.

In the fourth room of the show paintings from 1926-28 and 1937 face off. A group of five paintings from 1937 all represent women posing in striped robes. Three such Ottoman and Turkish robes are on display, one of which — with purple and white stripes — appears in a few paintings. Again, it is instructive not just to compare the actual robe to the painting, but also to note how Matisse simplifies the patterns to serve his purposes, and uses the continuous lines of the stripes to create a calligraphic flowing line that unites and expresses harmonies and feelings. While he clearly relishes the use of pattern in painting, he never gets lost in the details of the patterns.

This is also clear in Woman with a Veil (1927). The Ottoman red and green robe depicted in the painting is on display beside it. While the actual robe’s patterns are detailed and ornamented with curved lozenge shapes, Matisse simplifies them into a linear diagonal grid. By the time you reach the final rooms of the show, simplification takes on whole new meanings. Kuba cloths are juxtaposed with a rather densely hung wall of paper cut-outs, a chasuble maquette from which Matisse created priests’ garments, and a costume for the ballet Le Chant du rossignol. Here especially, Matisse’s ability to use bold color and geometric and organic forms allusively and evocatively is apparent. While the patterns of the toile de jouy were organic, resemble vegetables and flora and fauna, the patterns on the Kuba cloths are geometric and abstract. Matisse’s last works, the cut-outs, hover somewhere in between the geometric and organic realms. Matisse did not just use textiles to create Oriental fantasies or environments of patterns. Patterns and shapes are used to express what is not easy to express — like the wavy lines of the Roumanian blouse — which express the dream-thoughts of the female figure in The Dream (1940). This exhibition shows us how textiles inspired Matisse to create an alphabet of arabesque forms which he improvised with, like a skilled musician.

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February 17 to May 7, 2005

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is housed in a nationally land marked building on 8th Street – a maze-like architectural wonder that combines four Victorian townhouses, mews carriage houses, and Art Deco frontage – which has always been a dynamic center for intellectual adventure. It began as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio, then became the original home of the Whitney Museum. In the late 1960s, artists and philosophers (including Buckminster Fuller, Meyer Schapiro, and Morton Feldman) gathered there around the Studio School’s founder, Mercedes Matter. And these days, current Dean Graham Nickson leads an Evening Lecture series, which has brought hundreds of leading art critics, thinkers, and artists to the school.

On the occasion of the school’s 40th anniversary, I was asked to curate an exhibition about its history. As an art historian, my research centers around a generation of New York-based, painterly figurative artists, many of whom taught at or were even founding faculty members of the school. The exhibition, “The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” whose first part opens today, will examine the institution’s history, via the work of approximately 100 faculty members and alumni.

The school was founded in 1964, after Mercedes Matter published a harsh critique in Art News of the state of current art education. She criticized art schools for their fragmented, busy curriculum, and for teaching students about “what is going on” in the art world but never actually “how to draw.” Matter taught at Pratt at the time, and a group of her students prevailed upon her to start a new school based on the ideas she outlined in print. The students then took an active role in locating a space – originally a loft at Bleecker and Broadway – constructing worktables and modeling platforms, and even paying the rent. The school moved to its current home in 1967 (a move made possible through a student who died young and left her inheritance to the school).

Although the school has always emphasized working from life, and many teachers avoided discussions of content, the divide between abstraction and representation was indeed fluid and dynamic. A teacher like Nicolas Carone (who taught for nearly 25 years and has been hugely influential within the school) claims an ideal art to be “abstraction with content.” Charles Cajori’s “Seated Figure”(exhibited in part one) hovers at the edge of abstraction and sets the tone for the conversation around these issues. Esteban Vicente, the noted abstractionist, was also a founding faculty member.

Drop by the school this week, and you will note in the galleries work by these artists, as well as Leland Bell, Alex Katz, George McNeil, and Matter – all dating from the period – a quick course in early faculty aesthetics. In those days, Studio School students learned “plastic values”: the creation of form on a two-dimensional space. The object, whether the still life or the figure, was basically an armature – an excuse – for organizing forms in space. This teaching was based on that of Hans Hofmann, who had his own school on 8th Street in the 1940s and 1950s, and with whom many Studio School teachers, such as Matter, Carone, and McNeil, had themselves studied.

In the 1970s, a generation of influential abstract artists began to emerge from the school, including Andrea Belag, Emily Cheng, and Christopher Wool. Faculty included rigorous abstractionists Milton Resnick and Jack Tworkov. Philip Guston – another founding faculty member – was a particularly powerful influence at the school (he was making his own transition from abstraction into more personal imagery at this time). He encouraged his students to develop their own personal vision. Steven Sloman, a student of Guston’s in the 1960s, became a teacher in the 1970s.

The 1980s were a time of transition. Sculptor Bruce Gagnier became dean for several years and was followed briefly by painter and future MoMA curator Robert Storr. Mr. Gagnier brought in a new group of teachers. Ophrah Shemesh embodied the cultural mix of the 1980s: Her paintings take on sexuality and the body and have a European, neo-Expressionist feel. Ross Bleckner taught at the school and curated an important exhibition there, “From Organism to Architecture.” The mystically inclined monochromist Frederic Matys Thursz, a faculty member who did not believe in drawing, provided a very different kind of guidance than the founding teachers. This period seemed to open up the school to influences that were swirling around at the time outside its doors.

In 1989, Graham Nickson became dean. Mr. Nickson, who is British, brought to the Studio School the influence of his own training at the Camberwell School of Art, where he had studied with Euan Uglow, who in turn worked under William Coldstream at the Slade. The tradition developed by Coldstream is based on intense observation, working from life, and employing an exacting system of measurement to scale down what the artist sees be fore him onto the page. The influence of Coldstream, Uglow, and the Slade – brought via Mr. Nickson and other British teachers he has employed – is a new element in the mix of teaching ideologies at the school.

Mr. Nickson pioneered the Drawing Marathon, an extraordinarily intense two-week, full-day course of study, which he has taken around the world. British emigre students have included such figures as Matthew Ritchie and Cecily Brown. The latter purportedly once complained that the charcoal smudged Studio School students didn’t understand her dressing up to attend parties, yet her work displays an undeniable Studio School painterly panache.

Although Mr. Nickson’s own style of large-scale, complex, psychologically suggestive figural painting has certainly made its mark at the school, there still is no single “Studio School” vision. More recently, teachers have included Rosemarie Beck, Paul Resika, and British artists Carole Robb and Garth Evans; works in the final show of this series will include these artists as well as John Walker’s muscular abstraction, a seemingly alchemical abstraction by Bill Jensen, and densely painted, evocative works by Jake Berthot, Eric Holzman, and John Lees.

Teaching and painting are the two principal legacies of the school – and in most cases, the artists selected for this exhibition are actively practicing, exhibiting, and often teaching, not only at the Studio School but also around New York City, nationally, and internationally. The common denominator, in the face of diverse artistic output, is an extended tradition of seriousness and innovation; a willingness to utilize the timeless languages of painting, drawing, and sculpture; an engagement with art of the past; an appetite for intellectual adventure, and a devotion to sustained studio practice.

This is what distinguishes and marks the New York Studio School.

The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, Part 1 (1964-1971)

“The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” will be held in four separate parts, between today and May 7. The installations move chronologically through the decades of the school’s history, combining the work of faculty and students and presenting a glimpse into four periods of the School’s history. Many of the selected works date from the periods represented, but others are more recent. Grounds for these decisions were aesthetic as well as historical: to convey both a sense of the educational system at the time, as well as communicate the possibilities for what an artist who trained there might become.

Part one (1964-71), opening today, includes the work of founding and early faculty members, as well as founding and early students. Themes presented in this show include a group of works about the body, in the entrance halls to the school, such as George Spaventa’s “Walking Woman” bronze; cutout figures by Mark Zimetbaum; Carl Plansky’s self-portrait, naked in work boots; feminist works by Marjorie Kramer and Irene Peslikis; Judy Rifka’s post-September 11 skeleton meditation, and Chuck O’Connor’s 1968 classic Studio School style nude.

In the galleries, works by Charles Cajori, Gretna Campbell, Louis Finkelstein, Sidney Geist, and Alex Katz set the tone for discussions around abstraction and figuration, planar form, and active drawing; while heads by Earl Kerkam and Nicolas Carone examine the soulful possibilities of Studio School aesthetics.

Selecting the works for this exhibition was fascinating: it very much contradicted the idea of a unified “Studio School style.” It was my own “marathon,” a la Mr. Nickson, of research, interviews, studio and gallery visits. But this is only the beginning of the story.

this article originally appeared in the New York Sun, February 17, 2005

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