May 13 to June 23, 2006

Relationships between the individual and and the communal component of artistic achievement bedevil every generation. T.S. Eliot insisted that every innovation gestates in an affinity with indispensable predecessors. Robert Musil declared that ·”·it is only meaningful to speak of originality where there is a tradition.·”· Unmoored from the reciprocity of similar sensibilities, there is only idiosyncrasy and caprice. Much as we love the romance of radical breaks, modernism itself evolved from roots in previous tendencies.

The innovations of Arthur Dove (1880 -1946) are inconceivable without Cezanne, Kandinsky, Matisse, or Picasso and, especially, Picabia. A valued member of the Steiglitz circle, he was in close sympathy with Georgia O·’·Keefe and the American painters who clustered around 291. Yet out of creative affinity with the work of other modernists, came a distinctive achievement that makes it possible to call Dove an American original. And a national treasure.

This exhibition displays a comprehensive gathering of Dove·’·s watercolors, produced in the last decade and a half of his life. It includes sketchbook pages and a select group to works from the Dove estate never before exhibited. These radiant little works (most 5 x 7 inches, later ones 3 x 4 or 3 x 5 inches) distill his move toward abstraction while continuing to suggest organic forms and the diurnal brightness of the natural world.

Dove began his career as an artist around 1903, the year he graduated. from Cornell, where he had studied law. He moved to New York determined to become an artist instead. Soon his work was appearing in mass-circulation magazines and he was dining at Mouquin·’·s, a Gilded Age restaurant popular with John Sloan and others of ·”·the Eight.·”· He married and, after four years as an illustrator, left for Paris.

He joined the cadre of Americans in Paris where he made friends with Alfred Maurer, a frequent visitor to Gertrude Stein·’·s salon, and exhibited in the Salon d·’·Automne of 1908. He and Maurer went on sketching trips outside the city, often to Cagnes, in the south. Dove was a rural modernist, closer in spirit to Cezanne than the urbanites who were his friends. The earth·-·its tones, distances and undulations·-·provided impetus to paint.

Back the States by 1909, he moved to Westport and bought a chicken farm to support his family. The labor was grueling; his marriage collapsed under the strain. In 1921, he moved into a houseboat moored off Manhattan with his companion·-·later, second wife·-·the painter Helen Torr. The pair eventually settled on the North Fork where he continued to raise his own food, a precarious livelihood supplemented with stipends from Steiglitz and, later, Duncan Phillips.

Dove did not commit himself to watercolor until 1930. Its translucent liquidity suited his need for what he called ·”·a means of expression which did not depend upon representation. . . [but was] nearer to the music of the eye.·”· The crystalline light of water color well-handled evoked what he referred to as ·”·sensations of light from within and without.·”· He took readily to the medium, producing one or two a day.

“Sunrise” (1937) and “Clamshell,” both beautifully elliptical and spare in drawing, typify the process of simplification in which medium and color became the essence of his imagery. Unconstrained by the conventions of landscape painting, “Wooded Pond”(1935) summarizes Dove’s characteristic tension between empathy with the natural world and a bent toward full abstrac tion. The fluidity of the paint and the speed of the brush dabbing wet-in-wet suggest a locale – a broken downward stroke for a tree, a single horizontal one for the water’s edge – without depicting it. Its subject is the fugitive mood of the place, a turbulent metaphor for the inner life of the artist observing it.

The jagged spiral of “Willow Tree” (1938) lets the pale green and white of the willow’s downy leaves stand for the tree itself.The first American to produce an uncompromisingly abstract painting as early as 1910-11, Dove earned Duncan Phillips’s proclamation that he was “the boldest American pioneer.”

The post Arthur Dove: Watercolors appeared first on artcritical.

January 7-31, 2006

This review first appeared in The New York Sun, January 12, 2006.

SALANDER-O’REILLY IS SHOWCASING CHRISTOPHER WINTER’S Bavarian kinder kitsch as a courtesy to Asher Edelman, mega-collector. Described by the Wall Street Journal in 1998 as “one of the most notorious raiders on Wall Street in the 1980s,” Mr. Edelman once taught a business course at Columbia University called “The Art of War.” As Thomas Kamm reported, he offered $100,000 to any student who would identify a takeover target for him. (Columbia banned the offer.) The Association of Trial Lawyers of America, in the October 2002 issue of its journal “TRIAL,” discussed the fierce legal battle between Mr. Edelman and the Société du Louvre, the main subsidiary of Groupe Taittinger (of champagne and Baccarat fame), which claimed he wrongfully manipulated the market for the company’s securities.

Why does this matter in an art review? Because the sensibilities of speculator-collectors determine the character of what we think of as contemporary art. Going by Mr. Edelman’s well-known business history, it is a reasonable guess—though only a guess—that Edelman Arts is long Christopher Winter. Of interest here, apart from the mechanics of cultural influence, are the qualities of mind on show.

Mr. Winter would be a YBA (vernacular for Young British Artist) if he were not an expat Brit who lives and works in Berlin. At 37, he is friendly with Saatchi’s Sensation crew but, as the press release croons, he has “advanced to the company of such painterly heavyweights as Markus Lupertz and Gerhard Richter.” If that does not bring you to your knees, maybe mention of Joseph Beuys will do the trick. The gallery wants us to know that the painter’s Düsseldorf mentor, Fred Schwegler, was a protégé of the sinister Beuys.

Mr. Winter’s cartoony “Virgin Forest” series substitutes disconnected allusions for coherent content. It alludes to a welter of things without being “about” anything substantive beyond the commissioned rhetoric of a catalog essay. Many of the paintings would be meaningless viewed singly. What could you make of two birds pecking at a disembodied eyeball if you had not seen that scrap of printed green cloth elsewhere on its wearer? (The paintings are not sequential but the costumes are repetitive.)

Among Mr. Winter’s sources of allusion are horror movies. Rewind to “The Shining,” “Jaws,” and “The Blair Witch Project” for several canvases. Other obvious spurs to imagery are Caravaggio, Balthus, Caspar David Friedrich, Andrew Wyeth, comic books, graphic novels and photos from the 1950s. The show is a jumble of suggestive appropriations carefully outlined and laid down in flat acrylic color, mainly brash green and black. This “synthesis of visual similes” bears the same relation to painting that watery Eschwege Pils bears to the great unfiltered kellerbiers of Wurzburg.

Take “Neverland” (2005), where a diluted Balthus meets Hänsel and Gretel. A grinning boy in lederhosen and feathered alpine hat joins an underage St. Pauli girl in the Bavarian Alps. Mouths agape, they are poised to tuck into an hallucinogenic mushroom as if it were a Black Forest torte. An ersatz pastoral, the scene would be perfect behind the bar at the Pfefferberg in Berlin’s Mitte district. On offer at Salander-O’Reilly, and buttressed by the hired appreciations of Charles A. Riley II, PhD., it looks like a bid for disposable American income.

Then there’s “The Shadow” (2005). Hänsel lies on the ground face up, his head between the legs of Gretel who doubles over like a trollop-in-training, tush to the spectator. One leg is unaccountably smeared with a blood-like shadow. Menstruation? Rape with a broken bottle? Who knows. But as if to illustrate “the binary code of pastoral and satire,” her underpants are clean.

You only need to look at one of these paintings to know which way the trolley is headed: Innocence is a myth. So corrupt the little ones as soon as possible. They’ll eat it up. No one is too young to die, sleep with snakes, play with drugs, sex or violence. Get with it, dude. Didn’t you read the catalog essay? This what the artist calls “discovery and experimentation from a child’s point of view.”

Mr. Riley II places the artist in the company of Archimedes, Juvenal, Lucilius, Horace, Chaucer, Swift, Dryden, Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Alfred Hitchcock and the Brothers Grimm. Then there’s Theocritus, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Sidney, Tasso, William Blake, Shakespeare,Thomas Gray and Wordsworth; plus the operas of Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Wagner and Benjamin Britten. Names keep coming: Poussin, Michelangelo, Holbein,Velazquez, Georgione, Guarcino, Reynolds, Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Kandinsky, Balthus and Courbet. These are all “worthy antecedents to Winter.”

The lunatic grandiosity of the essay banks on the lack of sophistication of its audience (“These are weighty comparisons for a newcomer.”). A single glance at the actual source for any one of these canvases tells us the name of the game: Read my allusions, not my painting.

Winter’s current series balances the right degree of slick graphic clarity, burlesque and coy nastiness to appeal to today’s breed of bottom-feeding collectors. Adept at tropes of arrested adolescence and the pasteurized irony that has become an art industry staple, he works a trendy dead end. No culture can cannibalize itself—mocking everything, affirming nothing—and continue to survive. If smart-ass nihilism is your stein of Oettinger, you will be able to swallow this show.

The exhibition draws attention because of the prominence of its promoter and the prestige of the venue. But a durable culture requires more than what Croesus’s wallet dictates. At stake is our ability to retrieve a sense of public reason—call it the common good—distinct from market cunning.

The post Christopher Winter: Virgin Forest appeared first on artcritical.

George Billis Gallery
511 West 25th Street,
212-645-2621

October 4- 29, 2005

This review first appeared in the New York Sun, October 6, 2005

You think you know what cityscapes look like until you view them through Ron Milewicz’s eyes. I can’t walk down a treeless street in Long Island City on a hot day without seeing it bleached by the flash of yellow light that envelopes “Citiwide, Summer” (2004).  The color scheme of “Citiwide, South” (2004) is true to the heated intensity of urban life, a fidelity that points beyond verisimilitude. In August, nothing is more credible than deep-shadowed buildings in fuschia that pulse against  torrid orange skies.

Mr. Milewicz’s urban panoramas, on exhibition at George Billis Gallery, are real to the extent that each maps a recognizable site. (He moves his studio around to gain access to fresh views.) But color is totally expressive, built primarily on a disciplined binary system of near-complements or analogous pairs. It is a striking approach that can veer into the decorative occasionally. But at their best,  Mr. Milewicz’s rebellious color schemes, freed from naturalism, take us very far east of Eden. They startle and unsettle, evoking the diabolism of the city rather than the rationality of urban planners.

Field of vision is equally pregnant. Exaggerated lateral perspective places subtle emphasis on the tilt of the earth. Urban geometries of steel, stone and concrete,  poised on the curve of a spinning globe, are less stable than they appear. The city, where human works displace other signs of human life, is ultimately as transient as its invisible inhabitants.

“Citiwide, Late Afternoon” (2005), close to 11 feet long, is physically imposing and psychologically unnerving. Blues and yellows-an acidic lemon plus a deep cadmium that stops short of orange-combine to cast a sulfurous tinge over a city that dominates man and nature.  The Manhattan skyline fills the distance, a solitary fortress encircled by the sweep of elevated train tracks. Grating tonalities raise this no-man’s-land to the level of myth,  reminding us that the first builder of cities was Cain, acting in response to divine curse. Urban predicament is as old as Babel.

Recent paintings develop this mythic dimension with several figural references to Laocoon, Icarus and other tales from the Greeks. But unconvincing figuration distracts from Mr. Milewicz’s achievement . The abrupt literalism of his reliance on superhero dolls as models narrows the significance of his customary pictorial power.

The post Ron Milewicz: Recent Paintings appeared first on artcritical.

This review first appeared in The New York Sun, July 21, 2005.

Black is the primary color of the creative classes; every artling sports it. Now Betty Cuningham Gallery is trying it on the walls in a “search for resonant symbols”. Despite curator Phong Bui’s unsmiling jargon (“centralizing black as a mediating agent”), the search turns up merrier widows than expected.

Dead black barely exists in nature and is often ignored by painters as a palette color. Lustrous blacks can be created from colors that lose their identity mixed at full intensity and, touched with white, create inimitable grays. Everything here looks straight from the tube, surprising for work intended to “broaden the meaning of black.” But not to niggle. Good painting is on view, even some color.

The pictorial language of Forrest Bess and Thomas Nozkowski, a dialogue between abstraction and description, suits this scant palette. An isolated, self-described visionary Modernist, Bess (1911-1977) exhibited with Betty Parsons from 1949 to 1967; his work is rarely seen anymore. This small untitled painting (c. 1952) evokes moonlight over water by adjusting textures heightened by a few well-aimed strokes of white. Simplicity of form, refined edges and command of paint quality combine in Mr. Nozkowski’s untitled oil (1995). Luminous egg shapes play against a series of tenebrous, filamented placentas, each one bounded by subtle threads of near-purple.

One arresting (untitled, undated) painting by Nick Carone, haunted with elusive color, hints at human form emerging—inchoate and with difficulty—from unlit chaos. It makes Terry Winters and Phiilip Guston, nearby, look facile and dull. Joan Waltemath lends optical interest to tube black by manipulating refractive capacity with iron filings, interference pigment and metallic powders. Her “Universe is a Square” (1996-99), rectangles of pure color floating over a beautiful surface, is the single geometric abstraction with emotive power. In Norman Bluhm’s “Silent Vamp” (1980), undulant ebony forms press against each other with volumptuous abandon, squeezing high color through the interstices.

Displayed in its own niche, Bill Jensen’s “Black Madonna” (1978) is a ghostly tar baby surrounded by dripping slashes. It has the necrophiliac charm of an album cover for a death metal band: Our Lady Queen of Demonstealers. What was Jensen listening to in ‘78? Alice Cooper? Black Sabbath? Judging from “Death’s Door” (2003-4), he’s still listening.

Christopher Martin’s prominently positioned “Here (For Wallace Berman and Hilma AF Klimt)”, 2005, is an over-amplified cipher crudely inscribed in white and bisected by a cable-like line with a box in the center—a dumbwaiter to nowhere. The thing reminds us how far art has traveled from obligation to the visual. Art is now the mark of an artist’s presence: something left behind, like paw prints. It also reminds us that the word curator is misleading. Less the disinterested expert of popular piety, a curator is frequently an agent for artists, dealers or collectors.

The post Paint it with Black appeared first on artcritical.

May 12 – June 26 2005

Barbara Grossman has achieved substantial recognition over the three decades of her exhibiting life. The reasons why are on view at the Studio School, the fourth and final stop of a traveling exhibition of painting, oil pastels, monoprints and drawings. It is accompanied by a well-illustrated brochure with an essay by painter and critic Hearne Pardee.

Calling the work “radiant and expansive,” Pardee gets to the heart of Ms. Grossman’s appeal. Here are color and pattern for their own sakes yet still tethered to the human figure in domestic interiors. Her figures-languid women in variegated dress-are less references to the real world of parlors and dining rooms than pretexts for juxtapositions of pattern and color harmonies. Even skin color surrenders its cue as a racial reference, providing either a contrast against background color or a means of sinking the form into the value range behind it.

I did not know Ms. Grossman’s work in the 1970s. For me, the surprise of this show is the earlier work and what it reveals about the creative decisions she has made.  “Apple Tree,” (1976) is a lovely charcoal that places the rightward droop of a branch in the exact spot the composition requires to fill the page as gladly as possible. The architectural emphasis of the bare tree provides accompaniment to the clear, schematic building lines of “Bassett Road House,” (1976). Her attention to structure is still fully apparent in “Louise in Rocker,” (1976), an oil that presages her chromatic skills but retains the spatial elements of firmly realized planes.

Ms. Grossman’s increased attachment to an overall design–in the abstract expressionist sense–is most apparent in the oil pastels and monotypes. Here, figures melt into their backgrounds; one textile evocation slides into another like the parts of multi-hued batik print. Constituent parts rise to  merge into a single prevailing pattern. This building up of pattern in ever-increasing complexity is attractive on its own terms; but it risks surrendering the psychological overtones that accompany figures in groups-what Graham Nickson called the “conversation” between these women.

Going forward, it would be good to see Ms. Grossman reassert her own linear grace and clarity. By re-establishing structure, attending more closely to it, she would strengthen the coloristic rhythms and harmonies she has chosen to emphasize. More precisely, it would observe the distinction between composition and decoration. The first applies to the establishment of structures, the other to their elaboration and and enrichment. Gombrich reminds us that, in music ornamentation has no effect on harmonics, on the progression of chords. It remains an embellishment, a grace note. In painting, too,  grace notes exist to serve the composition, not to obscure it.

The post Barbara Grossman: A Survey appeared first on artcritical.

Marlborough Chelsea
211 West 19 Street
212-463-8634

Through June 4, 2005

In 1937 Ivor Winters prefaced his analysis of free verse with an essay entitled “The Morality of Poetry.” He could apply the concept of morality to art without irony, confident of being understood by his audience. Winters was not referring to moralism but to what might be called the virtue of craft: the discovery of values which the poet-any serious artist- finds by grappling with the difficulties of his medium.

In the brief span of a single lifetime, public grasp of the communal function of trained, sharpened sensibilities has eroded nearly to oblivion. Navigating in the fine dust of disconnected particles, we can barely glimpse purpose in art beyond that of entertainment or self-expression. On view at both Marlborough galleries, uptown and down, are the mechanisms of that erosion at work for half a century in the art of Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

Rivers was born Yitzak Loiza Grossberg to Ukrainian immigrants in the Bronx. At seventeen, he began a career as a jazz saxophonist, changing his name after a nightclub emcee introduced his combo as “Larry Rivers and His Mudcats.” He played gigs around New York and studied musical theory briefly at Julliard until beginning to paint in 1945. On tour that year with a jazz band in Maine, he met Jane Freilicher, wife of the band’s pianist. Painting appeared a more opportune vehicle for creative ambition than jazz, dominated as it was by great black musicians. Back in New York, he and Freilicher drew from the model at the studio of Nell Blaine who encouraged them to study with Hans Hofmann. Rivers’ first show at the Jane Street cooperative in 1949 earned praise from Clement Greenberg and the artist was launched.

Through the1950s, into the early ’60s, he created some wonderful things but few are here. I miss “Double Portrait of Berdie” (1955), a resonant synthesis of figuration and modernist intentions and his sweeping hybrid structure “The History of the Russian Revolution” (1965). Also absent is “The Greatest Homosexual” (1964), a parody of Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon in His Study” but with a delectable surface that holds its own.

On view uptown are several sensitive portrait drawings and delicately painted heads from the ’50s, suggesting the emotional power Rivers soon relinquished to the artifice of Camp. Veils of pure color are whispered onto fine-grained linen, supporting and balancing passages of elegant drawing. Lovely and distinctive, paintings like “Head of a Woman” (1957) leave you lonely for what he could have produced if he had resisted the tongue-in-cheek detachment of Rauschenberg, Warhol and company. But Rivers never kicked the habit of burlesque.

He was a skilled performer, a great mimic and fine draughtsman who abandoned the problems of painting early, gravitating toward the random I-do-this-I-do-that of Beat sensibility. “Portrait of Frank O’Hara” (1953), keeps the flavor of his abstract expressionist origins. But by the mid-1950s, Pop Art had begun its advance against seriousness and qualitative distinctions. Jackson Pollock had already used Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace as a urinal; Rauschenberg was combining stuffed goats with his paintings and undrawing de Kooning (“Erased de Kooning” 1953). The moment belonged to bad boys. It wasn’t long before play hardened into pose and Rivers substituted waggish constructions and anecdotal interest, often with sexual overtones, for the language of painting.

The sculpted and painted foamboard relief “Modernist Times: Assembly Line” (1989-90), a cartoonish Charlie Chaplin amid the machine-like forms of Leger, is good fun; so is every foamboard piece here. But the shelf life of sight gags is brief. Looking at lampoons of Balthus, Matisse and Gericault you wonder: Where does the fun end and the damage begin? Rivers’ gibes are ultimately as transient as window decoration-a reminder that Warhol’s paintings debuted in Bonwit Teller’s windows in the early 1960s.

Cleverness is a thin reed in visual art; it looses currency fast. This show looks as dated as Teddy boy Edwardiana, Beatles-style chukka boots or Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Beat dreams of the free poetic life. By the time Mary Hopkins bumped “Hey Jude” down the music charts with “Those Were the Days”, Rivers was already copying himself. “Dutch Masters Silver” (1969) is the third rendition of a cigar box motif begun in 1963. How many times can Rivers bleed the same logo-Dutch Master, Camels, Webster-before life drains out?

Marlborough Chelsea displays his most recent work, a last hurrah for commercial glamor. Rivers ended where he began: in an ethos of fashion-obsession that celebrated style over substance. The downtown paintings recycle photos from high-end fashion mags, a brash ensemble strangely reminiscent of the 1960s. Twiggy resurrects in the the concave droop of the bony, cropped-haired model of “Fashion Seated” (2001). Mary Quant’s micro-mini skirt is back; only the tone of the models is different. Here is Carnaby Street on the skids with the gartered waif of “Thigh High Fishnets” (2000) or the black stockinged pickup of “In the Artist’s Car” (1995). In Mary Quant’s memorable phrasing: “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

Larry Rivers fastened on showmanship and attitude. Beyond the earlier works, few are more enduring than a low-budget Warhol movie or the Velvet Underground. He spent high talent on the carelessness of his era, one foreign to the ground of lasting achievement. Works of great communicative scale and meaning are not products of a cultural attitude epitomized by Rivers’ close friend, collaborator, and aesthetic apologist, the poet Frank O’Hara: “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to; if they don’t need poetry, bully for them.” And if they don’t need painting either, no big deal.

The post Larry Rivers: Paintings and Drawings, 1951-2001 appeared first on artcritical.

Susannah Phillips, a former student of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow, lives and works in Montreal. Her first show at Lori Bookstein is a gracious, lively debut. Her work combines the gestural vivacity and painterly ease of accomplished abstraction with a strong affinity for observation. Particularly distinctive is her ability to enkindle the grey scale and convey an impression of color with a limited palette. “Grey Interior” (2004) and “White Still Life” (2004) illustrate how little chroma is needed to infuse an image with coloristic vitality simply by sunning or cooling its values.

I particularly like her darkened still lifes, in which different spatial devices are reconciled by an encompassing mood. Ms. Phillips’ gifts are abundantly clear. Less evident is where her heart lies: in the swing and movement that the living figure provides pretext for or in the darkling, architectural still lifes. Emotional temperatures are not the same.

The post Susannah Phillips: Recent Painting appeared first on artcritical.

March 24 – April 30, 2005

A version of this article was first published at The New York Sun, March 31, 2005.

Adele Alsop, a former student of Neil Welliver, lives and works in Utah. Her second show at Alexandre Gallery includes 12 paintings and an installation adapted from a stage set she designed for a community theater. Paintings divide between luscious still lifes and landscapes and several figurative tours de force.The pleasure of this show lie in the painting of redrock scenery, local vegetation and jaunty bouquets. These are lush, bouyant and engaging.

“Wild Flowers with Full Moon” (2004), sets a glass jar of golden heliopsis and purple blooms in front of a desert landscape. Flower foliage merges with a line of cactus in the middle distance, locking them into a single verdant horizontal. Petals sink into the dry earth beyond or dance over it, depending on placement against shifting tones. Dark stamens, like stepping stones across the sand, carry the eye toward blue-purple mountains and a daytime moon punctuating the lively cerulean sky.

Ms. Alsop’s enthusiasm for the gestural feats of a loaded brush is contagious. So is the richness of her color and exuberant capacity to suggest fresh air. The central bouquet of “Snow Thunder” (2003) plays scraped transparent shadows against buttery brush strokes that register blossoms with surety and economy. She makes good use here of fine-grained linen which permits a full brush to glide over the surface yet has just enough tooth to hold trace color when pigment is knifed away. “Heart Self” (2003) floats a clear red flower across a line of white birches that rise in front of a snow-covered mountain. Truth of observation, fresh and persuasive, yields a subtle valentine to Georgia O’Keefe who frequently centered a disparate motif over a natural backdrop.

Prominently textured, Ms. Alsop’s monotypes have a topography all their own. Look at the tactile depth of “The Mountain Lion in the Cattails” (2003). Paper pressed onto high impasto lifts sufficient pigment for it to retain dimension . Effects are lovely, less dense than a painting but with greater materiality than familiar monotype. In both paintings and monotypes, she exploits transparencies to allow surfaces to breathe.

But something goes wrong in the figures. They have the provisional look of studio experiments painted by some one else. Detached from visual realities, Ms. Alsop’s expressiveness loses conviction. These are all unfelt oddities. Several versions of Imanja, a Brazilian sea goddess, have her standing on one rubbery leg imitating aTantric deity. The heroine of “Here I Come” (2004) is a sketchily winged female nude hovering like a darning needle over a lake of white paint. Ms. Alsop serves herself best-and beautifully-by keeping faith with what she observes.

The post Adele Alsop appeared first on artcritical.

February 3 – March 19, 2005

British-born John Walker is an abstract painter of singular power, fully in possession of his craft. As an artist and much admired teacher, his career has been illustrious and influential. Yet no exhibition should be seen through the distorting lens of credentials. Viewed straight up, this sampling of mammoth abstract collages from 1974-78 at Knoedler, together with current work in the same medium, is disconcerting. The exhibition is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

First impressions are breathtaking. In the main gallery, your eye is pulled immediately to the two10 by 8 foot paintings-painted canvas collages-structured on a majestic ordering of blues and yellows : “Ostraca I” (1977) and its untitled pendant piece from the same year. The architecture of the work overwhelms with the coloristic rhythm of its recessions and advances, hard-edged pieces of painted and cut canvas shifting and jostling for position like tectonic plates. Ignoring Clement Greenberg’s gospel of flatness, Mr. Walker has been a gifted exponent of spatial depth. So difficult to achieve, this is what makes these arrangements particularly memorable.

The skewed facets of “Juggernaut with Plume for P.Neruda” (1975), with its moody rusts and earthen tones over an ashen ground, is punctuated by a small flash of brilliant color that appears like a sudden sharp recollection. While the title evokes a preferred political stance of the post-Vietnam era, the image itself reminded me of Joan Baez’ “Diamonds and Rust,” an inescapable hit in 1975. We both know what memories can bring; rarely is it politics.

In the 1970s, the decade of muscle cars, painting was another macho performance vehicle. Of these early collages, the artist himself said he wanted the impact “of a truck, not a mini.” Minis they are not but Chevie El Caminos or Pontiac GTOs are another matter. Hugh Davies, writing in 1979, referred to them as “a wall of machinery in flat-out operation.” It was an apt analogy for aggressive works built from component parts moving together like pistons. Besides, the artist’s hot-rodding paint application is of a piece with the era of Sting Rays and Firebirds.

Heavy moving machines impel you out of the way. These collages have a similar effect. You have to keep backing up to enjoy them. Seen from a distance, Walker’s transparencies are magical; but the closer you get, the more the means-gel in great swaths-asserts itself. Compare the transparencies of Matisse or Diebenkorn which rely on the properties of pigment, not plastic transparentizers.

Followers of art world Kremlinology will notice Dore Ashton’s swipe in her catalogue essay at “conservative critics” who “breathed a sigh of relief when Walker produced identifiable landscape elements.” She adds, ” But I think they missed the point.” It is a gratuitous reference to Hilton Kramer’s stated admiration, in 2001, for Mr. Walker’s landscapes of the Maine sea coast. Perhaps Ms. Ashton has missed the point. Mr. Kramer aligned Walker ‘s Maine motifs with those by Marsden Hartley and John Marin precisely because they avoided scenic cliches. But abstraction generates its own cliches, which overtake Walker’s collages from 2003-04 installed in the smaller gallery.

Recent works are art department pot boilers of throw-away gestures in raw red, white and blue. It is as if the artist has begun to mimic his own imitators. Gone are Walker’s previous tonal subtleties and near-musical subordination of detail to patterned relationships. One untitled collage refers to the Maine landscape with a smear of real local mud, a hokey literalism that mocks the mastery of analogy on which great art rests. His earlier loamy neutrals were wonderously suggestive; mud is just mud. (Try to imagine Haydn composing “The Creation” using real farmyard animals.)

Then there are those illegible scrawls of handwriting, gravely termed “signage” by Ms. Ashton. What Magritte wittily-and fastidiously-introduced in the 1920s and 30s has dissolved into inchoate decoration. No longer a germinal idea, it has become a platitude that a generation of artists have fallen for like nine-pins.

My favorites are two very small collages from the ’70s and a series of four spare., schematic drawings, white chalk on a black ground. No bombast, much tremolo. Here are testaments to what refinement of conception and execution John Walker is capable.

The post John Walker: Collage appeared first on artcritical.

February 11 – March 5, 2005

J. Alfred Prufrock can keep his coffee spoons. I have measured out my life in Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker covers. His first drawing appeared in 1941, before I was born. A survey of his work for the magazine is a timeline of my own existence, marked along the way with rites of passage that correspond to his dates of publication. Over 50 original drawings for the magazine and its cover are on view at PaceWildenstein, opening tomorrow. It is a delicious exhibiiton, a rare opportunity to see the covers in their original state and in various renditions.

Born in Romania, Saul Steinberg (1914 -1999) studied philosophy and literature in Bucharest, enrolling to study architecture in Milan in 1933. He drew the whole time, paying bills by submitting cartoons to the satirical bi-weekly, Bertoldo. Italy’s anti-Semitic race laws of 1938 rendered nil his architectural diploma (issued to “Saul Steinberg, of the Hebrew race”). His residency papers ran afoul of oficialdom in 1940 and he was interned briefly in a prison camp in the Abruzzi, forcing him to flee. He was waiting for a visa to come to the United States when he made his first submission to The New Yorker. Contributions continued for nearly 60 years producing 90 covers and and over 1,200 drawings that made his name and the magazine’s almost synonomous.

Categories fall by the wayside in discussing Steinberg. He has been described variously as an illustrator-draftsman, a cartoonist or a modernist without a portfolio. All three fit; none is quite exact. Sui generis, he invented gnomic vignettes that navigate the prosperity of post-war America and its pitfalls with terse, punning economy. Steinberg’s gift for pointed compression is the hallmark of good cartooning; it is equally a quality of fine art which seeks the core of any chosen set of intelligible relations.

The immediacy of actual drawings is necessarily diminished in reproduction. The grace of his line and its inflections- blithe and distinctive-is even more strongly felt in the originals. That line stretched and contorted to express the unspeakabe, sometimes bending to convey sadness or curling back on itself to suggest confusion, deep thought or the creative process itself. No one could take a line out for a walk quite like Saul Steinberg.

“The Line,” on view for the first time, is a trademark Steinbergian transmogrification from the 1950s: one unbroken changeling line that reinvents itself-from a pen mark to a clothesline, to railroad tracks and more-as it travels across and around the page. After 30 feet of wandering, it returns to its origin in the artist’s madcap pen. A 1961 cover depicts an opera house, its orchestra pit filled with his characteristic false handwriting that evokes a full symphony, the physical gestures of the musicians and, at the same time, the cleffs and bars of a composer’s musical notation.

Steinberg brought an enchanted eye to the vagaries of the High Art scale and his place on it: “People who see a drawing in the New Yorker will think automatically that it is funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it’s artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie it’s a prediction.” It is that same sly candor that marks his drawings, making his hand an instrument for wry cultural examination. Steinberg considered drawing “a way of reasoning on paper” and his adopted country gave him much to reason about: the masks of modernity, the bafflements of communication, American can-do vitality and vulgarity together with misgivings about where these would take us in the 21st century.

Steinberg was a dual citizen: not only of the United States but of The New Yorker as well. His loyalty to the magazine was rooted in the help it gave him getting into the country in war time. Even after his reputation was established by museum shows, gallery exhibitions and an international following, he continued to publish in The New Yorker, insisting it would be his “patria” forever.

The flavor of his drawings, the tongue-in-cheek generosity of them, is always apparent even when their meaning is not. “What do you make of this?” was a sure-fire conversation starter-as well as a signal of one’s own taste- for half a century among those who shared The New Yorker’s aspirations and aesthetic. Steinberg himself did not mind being thought undecipherable at times. He did not like being grasped too easily. Better to be misunderstood than to be obvious.

The exhibition coincides with publication of “Steinberg at the New Yorker ” (Abrams), a collaboration between The New Yorker and the Saul Steinberg Foundation. Amply illustrated, the book opens with an intimate anecdotal introduction by friend and colleague Ian Frazier. Joel Smith’s text, drawing on unpublished material in Steinberg’s papers, is informative and insightful. It is a tribute to an American original, the post war visual culture he helped create and the magazine that conspired with him.

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