January 7 to February 6, 2021
530 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Elventh avenues
New York City, berrycampbell.com

A veteran of more than 20 solo exhibitions in New York since her 1982 debut, and nearly 30 group shows since 1980 from Massachusetts to Florida, Jill Nathanson is entitled to be counted as a heavyweight in the art scene. Ironic, therefore, that her latest show is so striking for its light, airy, almost translucent qualities, its diaphanous veils of color rooted in both science and imagination.

She learned the ABC’s of color from Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons on an informal basis in the late 1970s and early 1980s when an undergraduate at Bennington College, Vermont. Neither of these painters was on the faculty, however, and Nathanson once told me that many and maybe most of her fellow Bennington art students were making paintings that looked more like Helen Frankenthaler – Bennington’s most famous alumna – with whom Nathanson wanted her paintings to have nothing to do. And although there may be some remote similarities, the glossier-looking finish of Nathanson’s paintings and the distinctive shapes in them have long stamped them with an artistic personality entirely her own.

Nathanson’s technique differs from those used by color-field painters in the 1960s, though it employs “modelli” (preparatory studies) and in this somewhat resembles the “modelli” that Friedel Dzubas employed in the later 1970s and ‘80s. But Dzubas didn’t invent modelli. Their use goes back to the Renaissance, if not earlier. And the materials that Nathanson employs are right up to the minute – as is her abstract idiom.

Like all abstract imagery, Nathanson’s has roots in the external world. The shapes in the most novel paintings here suggest ocean waves or giant ribbons sprawling across the canvas, from right to left (with the horizontal canvases) or from top to bottom (with the vertical ones).

If it weren’t for their paleness and transparency, these shapes could be seen as collages of paper or fabric. But Nathanson uses no paper or fabric. Instead, she creates each modello out of strips cut or torn from sheets of a transparent plastic that is normally placed in front of spotlights and other theatrical fixtures to project colored light onto a stage. These transparent sheets of plastic are called “gels” in showbiz circles and sold in theatrical supply stores.

Next, the artist transfers the modello’s design by stages to a larger panel. The uniquely pale, translucent paints she employs are specially made for her by Golden Artist Colors, who since 1980 have been concocting specialized and sometimes individual paints for artists. The firm can trace its lineage back to Bocour Artists Colors, which under the leadership of Leonard Bocour sold paint to Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and others in the 1940s and ‘50s.

As Nathanson heavily edits her finished paintings they often don’t look much like the original modelli. But the best of the current crop and their modelli have certain qualities in common. For one thing, I was struck by the paleness of the colors. They seemed to me paler than the paintings I saw at Nathanson’s last show, in 2018. While the different shapes in 2018 were impressive, with the heavier forms at the tops of her panels, hanging down or invading the central space of the picture, the current show is has these gloriously marching wide ribbons of color turning and twisting inside themselves as they make their way across the picture surfaces.

Three paintings in the first main gallery demonstrate different approaches within this unified body of work. First to strike the eye is Light Wrestle (2020). An eight-foot-wide horizontal, it offers a wide panoply of colors, starting with two broad, upward sweeping pale areas of pink and mint that surround a central downwardly-swinging area with mauve, pale grayish green and baby blue. This central area is reinforced at the far sides of the panel with further verticals of peach and pale mustard (to the left) and gray-brown, pink and blue (to the right). .

Far less complicated but singularly winning is Tan Transpose, (2020). One of only two vertical compositions in the show, and standing at nearly 8 feet tall, it is structured around fewer but larger and narrower ribbon-like forms, sweeping majestically from one side of the panel to the other as they descend from top to bottom. The interstices between each loop are the colorful parts of the composition. From top to bottom, they are pale olive, lemon, mauve, a second mauve, and peach. But even more impressive, to my eye, is Light’s Cover, (2019), a somewhat smaller horizontal at six feet wide. So daringly composed of many shades of just two colors – pale greens and plums at the center, darker shades of the same at the periphery – this narrowness of chromatic range dramatizes the classic simplicity of the composition while magnifying the grace of its undulating forms.

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I first saw the paintings of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) in 1983, when I flew down to Washington for his retrospective at the Hirshhorn organized by Charles Millard. I loved it. Back in New York, I started work on a major article about it for Arts Magazine, and (believe it or not, by coincidence) spoke with Clement Greenberg on the phone.  “He’s great,” Greenberg said, “But nobody knows it.”  Or maybe it was “knows about him.”  Anyway, I know he said “great.”

Still, Dzubas has never become as well-known as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis or Jules Olitski, three other painters admired by Greenberg, and associated with what in the 1960s was known as Color Field painting. or post-painterly abstraction. Moreover, Greenberg himself must bear some of the responsibility for Dzubas’s relative obscurity. The two had been close personal friends ever since 1948, when the critic placed an ad in Partisan Review, seeking a summer vacation home for himself and his son Danny, and the Berlin-born artist, recently arrived in New York, offered to sublet him rooms in a large Connecticut house that he himself had newly rented.

Throughout the 1950s, when Dzubas was painting gestural abstractions, and the ‘60s, when he took a more “post-painterly” turn, his work was exhibited in many of the same galleries that showed others Greenberg admired.  However, it was not until 1972, when the artist was teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, that he developed his first truly distinctive, original style, with solid, powerful bands of color feathering away into airy glows of paler hue. The front cover of the book under review shows one of his first canvases in this mode —Fan Tan (1972), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And It was not until 1977 that Greenberg wrote about him. Even then it was only a curiously ambivalent little essay in an exhibition catalogue for the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld, GermanyAnd by 1977 Greenberg was no longer the kingmaker.

Patricia L. Lewy, a Mozart scholar turned art historian, is particularly insistent that Dzubas should be seen not as a Color Field painter but as a true independent. This newly revised, mammoth, lavishly illustrated edition of her absorbing monograph corrects typos and off-color illustrations from the original edition; the only thing it still lacks is an index.  Lewy argues that as a native of Germany, Dzubas differs from this New York peers on both artistic and personal grounds.  Artistically, she sees him as inspired by different earlier art: German as opposed to French, ranging back from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the German palaces decorated in the 18th  Century with murals by Giambattista Tiepolo. More dramatically, she tells of his early experiences  in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a true horror story.

I had always believed that Dzubas was Catholic, because I’d heard of the mystical Catholicism he favored in later life and because of the long interview with him by Millard in the Hirshhorn catalogue.  Here Dzubas explained that he fled his birthplace in 1939 because he’d been a Communist and because he didn’t want to serve in Hitler’s army.  Thanks to Lewy’s impressive research, though, it turns out that the artist had a much more pressing need to emigrate: He was really a “Mischling,” or a child of mixed parentage, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father.  The Nazis took a particularly grim view of Mischlings for defiling the Aryan race.

By the later 1930s, as a grim prelude to the Holocaust, Hitler and his Nazi government were already confiscating Jewish property and businesses, expelling Jews from jobs in the civil service and the universities, and barring the schools to Jewish children – not least, the Prussian Academy of Arts, where young Friedel had hoped to study. The Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 confirmed him in his decision to emigrate.

He was enabled in this effort by two Jewish organizations trying to relocate German-Jewish youths outside of Hitler’s expanding sphere of influence. These organizations set up a farm in Silesia where Jewish boys and girls were taught farming techniques.  The hope was that by being able to offer an occupation in demand by other nations, these youngsters could creep through the loopholes in the immigration regulations then in force in the United States and elsewhere.

Thus the future artist spent two years of his adolescence tending crops and farm animals in Silesia.  After he’d arrived in the America, he spent some months on a farm in Virginia that had been set up by Jewish organizers to host the young émigrés. Then he headed north in search of his real ambition: to seek an artistic career. To Millard, he referred to the farm in Virginia as merely a place where he was visiting with “friends,” nor did he offer the slightest hint that either it or his immigration had been made possible by Jews.

Despite what seems to have been considerable personal charm, in Lewy’s telling Dzubas doesn’t emerge as an altogether sympathetic character.  Denying his Jewish heritage was only one of his evasions of, or embroideries on, the truth. He also claimed to have studied in German schools that he couldn’t have attended, and he married his second wife without getting a divorce from the first. However, in the 1940s, with anti-Semitism very much prevalent in this country, Dzubas was far from the only Jew to try and evade it, as many did, of course, by changing their names.  Even more to the point, art is one thing and personality another.  The art is what really matters and survives –triumphantly in the case of Friedel Dzubas.

Patricia L. Lewy. Friedel Dzubas (Milan: Skira, revised edition 2019) ISBN: 978-88-572-3280-5. 390 pages, 390 illustrations, $65.

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It is not every art dealer who calls forth the kind of widespread, genuinely personal mourning that greeted the demise of Richard Timperio this weekend. Even less often is it artists leading the charge, as the latter usually look upon dealers as business associates more than friends. But Timperio was no ordinary art dealer. A better-than-average painter himself, he was also a community leader: The mammoth “Sideshow Nation” exhibition staged annually at the eponymous Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg, with literally hundreds of participants, was as much (if not more) a civic enterprise as it was a venture in high-risk capitalism.

Timperio suffered a massive stroke last week while visiting friends in upstate New York, and had to be rushed to the Albany Medical Center. He died on Sunday, September 9, at the age of just 71. He is survived by his daughter Cheyenne and his son Willy—the children of his former companion, Elspeth Leacock. Expressions of grief from an unusually wide range of people in the art world continue to pile up on Facebook.

A native of Ohio, Timperio arrived in New York in 1970 with dreams of becoming an artist, although his first foray was the design for a pinball machine. Relocating to New Mexico, he found he was able to make a living in commercial art. (It was in the south-west that he acquired his trademark black cowboy hat – as much a part of his latter-day persona as his wavy, shoulder-length iron gray hair, his genial smile and his booming laugh). Before long, he headed back to the Big Apple, where he graduated to political caricatures for The New York Times and began to paint in earnest – initially within the sphere of pop, evolving into abstraction in the early 1980s. His first abstract pictures were heavily laden with paint and employed organic forms, but this gave way to the thinner paint application and gently geometric shapes that define his mature style. His last show, in 2015, was at André Zarre in Chelsea.

Timperio’s “day job,” Sideshow, originated in 1995 when a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg invited him to hang some art on its walls. In those days, the neighborhood was still working-class, with rents that appealed to artists, and subsequently to galleries. Williamsburg is now gentrified almost beyond recognition, but it still appeals to a younger and more progressive demographic, to whom Sideshow’s annual extravaganzas appeal which makes sense since they were originally titled “Merrie Peace” and were anti-war shows.

It’s been so long since I first saw Timperio’s spectaculars that I’m not sure who introduced me to them. Most likely it was Sasha Silverstein, a subscriber to my blog, (An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor’s Doorstep (FMD), who exhibited her impressionist figure studies and landscapes in these shows, . Since I try to review work by my subscribers, I beat feet to this group show and and was pleasantly surprised to find work by many other artists whom I admire: Larry Poons and his wife, Paula De Luccia, Dan Christensen, Randy Bloom, Francine Tint, Jim and Ann Walsh, Lauren Olitski, and Peter Reginato, among others. Ever since, I have devoted much space to reviewing these shows in FMD.

Still, I don’t think I’m unique. Nobody who visited these sprawling “Sideshow Nation” shows could forget the hundreds of artworks mounted together, from the baseboards to the ceilings. Paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and photographs provided the two-dimensional experience, while assemblages, kinetic art and more conventional carved or modeled sculpture extended the panorama to the third dimension. Fans like myself of high quality abstraction found these shows wonderfully rewarding, but representational work – like that of Silverstein — was well-represented, too. And although Timperio favored “something to see” in his own artwork, the shows had at least a modest quotient of conceptual and other “edgy” but less purely visual art.

Above all, it was the spirit in which these “Sideshow Nation” exhibitions were mounted that made them so distinctive. They were somehow cooperative in spirit, with famous artists jostling modest ones who practically never exhibited. Husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings all exhibited together. Artists best known as artists cozily shared wall space with artists best known as critics or even artists best known as dealers. Indeed, these multi-faceted shows were more than merely art shows: they were the joint creation of a whole community, a Sideshow “nation” indeed.

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September 14 to October 21, 2017
32 East 57th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Back in swinging ‘60s London, John Hoyland (1934-2011) was already being called by some the best British abstract painter. Those who knew best his starkly simple, large and brilliantly colored canvases were aware that he’d been paying attention to Yankee painting.

The show at Pace focuses on those glamor years; it enables us to revel in the work’s beauty and to sift through the artist’s antecedents for a historical perspective on where and how they coalesced into fresh, distinctive work.

Not least among Hoyland’s recent admirers is an unexpected one: Damien Hirst, the “Young British Artist” better known for pickled animals, pill paintings and a diamond-crusted skull. When Hirst opened his Newport Street Gallery in south London two years ago, to showcase work from his collection, he inaugurated it with a display of paintings by a fellow Yorkshireman – John Hoyland.

The catalog to the Pace exhibition excerpts a conversation between Hirst and Hoyland in 2009. The junior artist (b. 1965) recalls how in his youthful visits to the Leeds City Art Gallery he saw “a great painting of yours…with a big purple rectangle at the bottom – 12 feet or something, with oranges in the middle.

“You were creating a lot of big paintings with unarguable power,” Hirst continues, “paintings that give you a slap: a physical, gut reaction to some sort of spiritual – or not spiritual but hugely emotive — transcendental, thing. You know, a big thing, and grand. There’s a great meeting of geometry and organic forms.”

Another catalogue essay is by William Boyd, the celebrated Scottish novelist who has likewise begun collecting Hoyland paintings. Yet more enlightenment concerning the painter’s possible antecedents came from a public dialog held at the Pace show’s opening reception between Arne Glimcher, chairman of Pace, and Mel Gooding, the London art critic who has written widely on British abstraction, and whose monograph on Hoyland was published by Thames & Hudson in 2006.

The prime issue was the impact of Hoyland’s first visit to America, when he came to New York in 1964, at or near the tender age of 30. A graduate of the Royal Academy, he had already also absorbed the contributions of postwar School of Paris abstractionists like Nicolas de Staël, and those versions of Bauhaus design that had percolated through the English art-school system. .

He knew and admired the work of the British sculptor Anthony Caro, who had been teaching at St. Martin’s School of Art since the mid-‘50s, had been to the U.S. earlier in the ‘60s, learned there from David Smith the nuances of assembling steel sculpture, and begun painting his own sculptures with bright colors.

Hoyland had seen and been impressed by the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still, Motherwell, and other American abstract expressionists in exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in 1956 and 1959; Pollock and Rothko had also had solo retrospectives in London.

And Hoyland was already a success in London. He was one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of younger British talent that had appeared in several prestigious exhibitions of the ‘60s, most recently the “New Generation” show staged earlier in ’64 by the legendary Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

But, though Hoyland had met Helen Frankenthaler through Robertson, and may have met Clement Greenberg in London, when he came to New York in ’64 he wasn’t familiar with American Color Field painting as it was being practiced by Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. Moreover, there was one first- generation abstract expressionist whose work Hoyland had never seen.

This was the German-born Hans Hofmann (1880 – 1966), who had apparently been excluded from both Tate Gallery shows. Evidently he was not considered “American” enough to be included, having settled in the U.S. only in 1932 at the age of 52. But he had been exhibiting abstract expressionist paintings in New York since the 1940s — and it was in a 1946 review of one of his shows that Robert Coates, art critic for the New Yorker, first applied the term “abstract expressionist” to the emerging movement. Greenberg revered Hofmann’s teaching and his paintings. Two of the very few solo exhibitions that he organized for a gallery were of 1958 Hofmann paintings, at the Kootz Gallery; Greenberg had also written a small book on Hofmann. So on one of those art-viewing strolls in Manhattan that he took with Hoyland and another visiting British artist in ‘64, he showed them some Nolands in a warehouse, and then exposed them to two Hofmanns at Kootz.

After Hoyland returned to London, he gradually entered into the period of creation celebrated at Pace. These paintings occupy large expanses of canvas, reminiscent the Wild West’s wide open spaces.

These paintings are dominated by blistering colors — fire engine red, acid green, electric blue, volcanic orangey-brown and corpulent purple — and by a few large, simple shapes. Some of these shapes are rectangles, but some are diagonals, implying (and then denying) perspective, and some are narrow little rows of blips. To the extent that these shapes are vertical rectangles, they’re vaguely reminiscent of Hofmann’s “slabs,” but Hoyland’s surfaces don’t resemble Hofmann’s brushy beds of oil paint. Rather, they employ thinned acrylics — stained into the canvas, not laid on top.

Hoyland suggested that he was most indebted in his staining to Rothko and other first-generation greats, but he is hardly the first artist to deny his immediate competition and celebrate hors de combat seniors instead. Stain painting was the modus operandi of Noland, Frankenthaler, and Olitski in the early ‘60s. It makes Hoyland their post-painterly contemporary, not a holdover from the gestural ‘50s – a true kissing cousin to color-field.

Nobody at the opening “conversation” said this, though. Gooding cited Caro as Hoyland’s prime inspiration, while Glimcher mentioned Donald Judd. Of the two, Caro is more likely, but in the early ‘60s, minimal art and modernism were still friends. Caro would be included in the Jewish Museum’s “Primary Structures” show of 1966, which introduced minimalism to a wider public, while Judd’s first solo exhibition, which had opened at the Green Gallery in December 1963, was favorably reviewed by Michael Fried, an intimate of Greenberg’s. But, in the end, what do such “influences” matter? What counts is the unique synthesis that Hoyland achieved: a bold and beautiful, lyrically beefy British presence.

The post Bold, Beefy, British: John Hoyland Stain Paintings of the 1960s appeared first on artcritical.

Epic Abstraction: Friedel Dzubas in the 1970s at Loretta Howard Gallery
April 9 to May 9, 2015
525-531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 695 0164

For most artists, a “late style” comes as the final fillip. With Friedel Dzubas, it represents the third stage of an evolution that may be viewed in terms of Hegelian dialectics.

The first stage, or thesis, is the Dzubas style of the 1950s, marked by the energy and dynamism common to so many gestural abstractionists of that period. The antithesis comes along in the 1960s, when — in the words of Barbara Rose — Dzubas “cleaned up and emptied out his canvases.” Instead of many active small shapes, the artist focused on a just a few, large and superbly calm ones. The final stage, or synthesis, occurred in the 1970s, and lasted right through to Dzubas’s death in 1994. The dynamism of the 1950s combined with the detachment of the 1960s in Olympian canvases of increasing scale distinguished by the artist’s unique stylistic device, a feathery spectrum of color.

Since Dzubas began to exhibit in the 1950s, one might think that he was born in the 1920s. In fact, he was born in 1915, only three years after Pollock — and in Berlin, which was still fighting World War I. As a boy, he knew that he wanted to become an artist, but his father, a textile factory manager, only allowed him to apprentice with a business firm of decorative painters.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Friedel was Catholic, not Jewish, but his politics were leftist and he didn’t want to serve in Hitler’s army. Leaving Berlin in 1939, he wound up in Chicago, designing magazines for Ziff-Davis Publishing. There he also read articles by Clement Greenberg in Partisan Review, which impressed but mystified him. He moved to New York after the war, determined to become a fine artist, but only able to support himself freelancing in commercial design. In 1948, he became friends with Greenberg and through him met many of the first-generation abstract expressionists, and, in 1951, Helen Frankenthaler, Greenberg’s new companion.

She and Dzubas were sharing a studio in Manhattan when in 1952 she painted Mountains and Sea, a stain painting that was to inspire many artists, among them Dzubas himself. His work continued to resemble Frankenthaler’s throughout the 1950s, with brightly colored, vigorously wrought stains and splats.

Although there are no paintings by Dzubas from this period in the two shows under review, The Elkon Gallery has Eden (1964), a typical example of his bright and lively stain painting. Perhaps it was intended as a homage to Frankenthaler, as one of her best-known canvases is also titled Eden (1956). The other five paintings at Elkon give a good idea of Dzubas’s progress in the 1960s. Most distinctive are the three larger ones, all about seven feet by six feet. Here the artist has abandoned the stain technique. By applying a gesso primer, he kept his colors on the surface of the canvas and independent of each other.

The result is just a few large, often oval and subtly colored shapes on each canvas. The simplicity of Azure (1962) makes it particularly memorable. It is dominated by a large, jaunty area of pale aqua, set in the upper center of a big white field, and a dashing small peach horizontal comma of color at the bottom.

Still, it wasn’t until around 1972 that Dzubas achieved his truly original look, his device. This consists of bold rectangular slabs of color that feather off into increasingly paler shades, finally disappearing into the surrounding field. These feathered bands combine the vitality of the stain paintings of the ‘50s with the more emphatic shapes of the ‘60s. They dramatize the contrasts between colors while retaining the majesty of the resulting forms — particularly as the canvases themselves get larger.

Four huge canvases dominate the show at Loretta Howard Gallery. The smallest, Chenango (1973), which hangs in the front gallery and measures about four by 14 feet, is a symphony of churning reds and greens. Facing the entry in the back gallery is the largest painting here, Procession, (1975), which measures about 10 by 25 feet. To its left and right hang Nebel (1971) and Foen (1974). Nebel (“fog” or “mist” in German) is dominated by a misty field, with only a relatively small number of pats of deeper color. Foen, named for a treacherous warm spring Alpine wind, features ominously dark cloud-like shapes on top, with quivering paler earthlike colors below.

On the fourth wall in this back gallery hang eleven of the small colored acrylic sketches or modelli that preceded larger paintings, and were used by Dzubas to work out his ideas before he translated them into major scale. These range from 5 1/2 inches square to 13 1/2 by 31 inches, and they are a delight. Especially joyous are those that served as modelli for Inca (1975), Heath Cote (1978), and Westerly (1973). Even more illuminating is the modello for Procession since the resulting painting hangs on the opposite wall, providing an opportunity to compare what stayed and what changed in the larger finished work. On the right-hand side of both large and small paintings are a double row of vertical bands, feathered at one end or the other. They seem to have made the transition more or less intact, but the horizontals on the left-hand side of the larger canvas appear to have been more precisely worked out.

In a vitrine there is documentation for the creation of an even larger mural for a Boston bank in 1975, with an accompanying text by art historian Patricia Lewy Gidwitz, who is working on a book about the artist. Gidwitz quotes Wes Frantz, onetime studio assistant to Dzubas. “With Friedel’s painting the devil was in the details. If you compare closely a small sketch to a large painting, the large painting will have all the details that the small ones don’t. And it’s in those details that Friedel sought his identity.”

The post Friedel Dzubas: Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis appeared first on artcritical.

October 24, 2014 to February 11, 2015
1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City, 212 423 3500

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924-2001) was a contemporary of second-generation American abstract expressionists like Sam Francis (1923-1994) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Like them, he was an abstractionist. Beyond that, the most mature paintings in this Indian painter’s mini-retrospective at the Guggenheim (which travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice next Fall) look like nothing I have seen that originated in New York or even Paris.

These subtle works are radiant yet passionately restrained. Paint has been scraped away until the surface hue remaining is as thin as air, while the small, vague shapes patterned upon them suggest no writing or imagery of any kind.  Their vertical format suggests Chinese or Japanese scroll paintings, as well as Indian tapestries, murals and miniatures. When the dominant colors are grays and smoky yellows, the association with East Asian art is enhanced—but when brilliant reds, orangey-yellows or clear blues predominate, the Indian subcontinent looks more like their home.

Not least, this difference from American and European abstract painting is due to the fact that Gaitonde was born and raised in India. He spent almost all of his adult life there, assimilating his nation’s cultural heritage and other Asian art besides the Western art that came his way. More importantly, what he made of all these influences is more than their sum total. His style is personal as well as multicultural.

This show was largely organized by Sandhini Poddar, an adjunct curator at the Guggenheim. In her engrossing catalog essay, she describes the artist as “short, stocky, self-centered and confident,” a man who “tended toward solitude.” Never married, he lived for his later decades in a single-room rental apartment-cum-studio in New Delhi–though he’d long since become one of India’s best-known painters. He’d represented his country in two Venice Biennales, and shown elsewhere dozens of times, in solo and group exhibitions, at galleries and museums, mostly in India, but also in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Switzerland, Eastern Europe and Singapore.

Still, that single-room rental in New Delhi may well have carried with it reminiscences of Gaitonde’s childhood home in a working-class tenement in Bombay (now Mumbai). This childhood was in the days of the British Raj, and the Bombay art school that he entered around 1945 was patterned on the Royal Academy in London.

Known for short as the “Sir J. J. School of Art,” it was named for Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, a Parsi merchant who underwrote its founding in 1857. When Gaitonde entered, it still required students to draw from plaster casts of antiquities, paint portraits in the academic manner, and do studies from the nude model. The winds of change were blowing, however, and in 1947, India became independent. India’s cultural heritage achieved new relevance, while “modernity” and internationalism appeared other ways to declare the country’s freedom from colonialism.

Gaitonde graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1948, and stayed for two more years as a fellow. By the time he left, he’d studied Indian techniques and aesthetics there, as well as being exposed to Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Braque. The contemporary art scene in Bombay, meanwhile, was in its infancy. The first commercial art gallery was not to open until 1959, so Gaitonde joined the Progressive Artists Group. It staged exhibitions of Indian artists pursuing non-academic styles, but such styles were more likely to be expressionist than abstract.

Gaitonde experimented with figuration in a traditional Indian mode, in a European style influenced by Georges Rouault, the French expressionist, finally modeling himself on Klee. The Guggenheim show commences with one 1953 Indian-style drawing, followed by five Klee-like works on paper. Then, around 1957, Gaitonde begins to evolve into pure abstraction.

In the mid-‘60s, he spent a year and a half in New York on a Rockefeller-financed grant. He visited Rothko, watched American movies and explored the city’s streets. His paintings were shown in Manhattan gallery exhibitions, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired one, but the 1960s paintings in the current exhibition are overly familiar. With dark, shiny surfaces, horizontal formats and careful paintbrush squiggles imitative of calligraphy, they look too much like what ‘60s New York expected of Asian painting. Only after Gaitonde had returned to India, immersed himself anew in the Zen Buddhism that had long been his solace, and settled in New Delhi in 1972, does the work begin to go beyond anything done before.

He abandoned paintbrushes, laid his canvas on the floor, and, according to Poddar, “began utilizing a ‘lift-off’ process: tearing pieces from newspapers and magazines, he transferred color from these cut-outs by applying rollers onto the verso of their wet, painted surfaces and subsequently erased aspects of the transfers with palette knives.”

The fruit of this technique, which owes as much to Rauschenberg as to Rothko or Indian tradition, can be seen in the largest gallery of this show. The dozen carefully-spaced paintings that surround the viewer, all done between the mid-‘70s and the ‘90s, create a serenity conducive to contemplation and meditation in the grand tradition of Zen.

“Everything starts from silence “ Gaitonde once said. “The silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences.” In this exhibition, he bequeaths that silence to the noise-harassed Manhattan viewer.

The post “Everything Starts From Silence”: Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde at the Guggenheim appeared first on artcritical.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when James Wolfe (b. 1944) was still an emerging East Coast artist, his sculpture was exhibited at André Emmerich in New York. Then in 1990, he moved to Los Angeles, and for the next two decades exhibited primarily (though not exclusively) on the West Coast. Now he has moved again—to Northport, Maine—and  New Yorkers are getting a chance to catch up with his development in a most lively, invigorating show, organized at the New York Studio School by Karen Wilkin.

Wolfe has always been known for the linearity of his sculptures, the way that their narrow strips of steel twist and twirl, but this unique capacity has become almost an obsession—and a most stimulating one. To be sure, his language belongs in the constructivist tradition that began with Picasso and Julio González in the 1920s, and continued on down through David Smith and Anthony Caro. And Wolfe was, in fact, one of several young American and Canadian sculptors who worked as Caro’s assistants in the early 1970s. But far more notable than Wolfe’s antecedents is his vigorous present stance, his work’s tremendous vitality.

His ribbons of steel appear to flutter like flags, sway like saplings, or wiggle like underwater plants, making his sculptures full of motion and life. All but two of the fourteen in this show are made of powder-coated steel, with a brightly colored, semi-gloss finish; the other two, the largest and most ambitious, are made of oiled steel, with a modest brown finish.

Not only do colors of works in this show vary, but so do placements.  Some sculptures, like the red, marvelously bird-like Just Right (2013), are screwed to the wall.  Some, like the copper-colored T Time (2014), sit sedately on pedestals that bring them up to chest-level. Spiral Yellow (2013), a congeries of saffron curlicues, “sits on a very low platform, forcing the viewer to stand back to admire its beauties.

While three works here have “wicket” in their titles with shapes suggestive of croquet or cricket wickets, there is no evidence that the artist meant to depict actual wickets.  More likely, in the search for satisfying abstractions, is that he named them upon completion, on the basis of what they reminded him of.

And, in the way of all abstractions, other associations also tie them to the natural world.  In no case is this truer than with Spread Wicket (2013). Resting on the ground and facing into a corner of the gallery, this seven foot high sculpture, one of the two oiled steel pieces, is nearly as wide as it is tall. It resembles not only a cricket wicket, but also a door or window facing into a house or church, a giant mask or helmet—none of these association detracting from its dignity, from its purely visual statement of elegance.

Of the four tall, tree-like sculptures  leaning against wallsfrom the “Quartet” series, two suggest further allusions to the natural world—conveyed through small additions, reminiscent of the poetic symbols that Joan Miró once used (though in other respects, these sculptures look nothing like Miró’s).  Midway from the top of Quartet Purple is a small square boxlike piece of metal enclosing an open hole. In the same position on Quartet Gray is a small ball sticking out at the top of a curly strip.  Female and male are thus impishly implied.

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Mitchell: May 15 to August 29, 2014
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-242-7724

Intimate Forest: April 23 to June 7, 2014
224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd avenues
Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 718-833-9100

Celebrating the end of a singularly unlovely winter, two galleries have burst into summer verdure.  Chelsea has an exhibition of eleven semi-abstract paintings of trees by Joan Mitchell, dated from 1964 to 1991; in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, fifteen contemporary artists also explore the theme of trees in varied styles and media.

Who would have believed that such a commonplace object could inspire such a range of responses? But there’s magic in trees. Not only are they beautiful to contemplate, and useful for building and fire fuel, but, according to Anders Knutsson, co-curator of the Brooklyn show, trees “have figured in every known religion and belief system on earth,” from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis and the sacred fig tree of Buddhism, to the “battle cries of the Environmentalists” (aka “tree-huggers”).

Mitchell’s paintings were inspired by French landscape. Having established an enviable reputation as a second-generation abstract expressionist in the early 1950s in New York, she went on to spend increasing amounts of time in France, moving there permanently in 1959. From the later 1960s until her death in 1992, she lived on a 2-acre estate in picturesque Vétheuil, a Paris suburb painted many times by Monet.

These paintings represent – or at least reflect – her garden-like surroundings there.  In my opinion, the paintings that come off best in this selection are those that tip toward the representational as opposed to the reflective.

The statuesque 9-foot tall Tilleul (Linden Tree) (1977) faces the entryway to the gallery and leaves no doubt about what it is. The color contrasts are striking.  A taut, strong upward rush of blackish-blue lines captures the branches of the tree. They’re embellished with daubs of aqua suggesting leaves, while a crepuscular yellow surrounds the trunk at the bottom.

To the left of this painting hangs a much smaller oil of the same title. Although its surface is merely a spatter of bluish-green pats of paint, the oval shape of the canvas combines with the image on it to strongly suggest the branches and leaves of a tree.  A third standout is Green Tree (1976), a large picture whose centrally-located heavy clouds of bluish-green daubs again suggest a thicket of foliage.

Tabla Rasa Gallery was founded by Audrey and Joseph Anastasi who both have imaginative works in Intimate Forest.  His (an archival print on canvas) occupies a corner and combines trees with an angel, while hers has birch trunks incorporating a human hand. The name of the gallery is also imaginative. Most people are more familiar with the Latin phrase, “tabula rasa” (“clean slate”).  The Anastasis chose the unusual spelling because of its musical sound, perhaps with its associations with the drum used in Indian classical music. “Rasa” also means “taste” in Sanskrit.

The work in Intimate Forest ranges from very abstract painting (by Rodney Dickson) to the verism of photography (Julia Forrest using it surrealistically, while Peter White captures an idyllic group of trees in a field). Other media include sculpture (carved oak and sycamore by Eric Pesso), drawings, cut Tyvek, and graphics (Spring Gold Forest I and II, by Kathleen Hayek, are stand out in this category).

Four painters appealed to me in particular. The small oil entitled Glade, by Thomas Hagen, combines a realistically rendered background in olive greens reminiscent of Corot with dazzlingly abstract foreground brushwork.  Blizzard, a somewhat larger oil by Tom Keough, depicts in delicate whites, golds and tans a tall, graceful tree in a winter storm amid urban surroundings.

Scott Bennett has three good-sized acrylics, each lovingly portraying the trunk of a single tree in a landscape setting.  Paint application is luscious. Forms are large and gracious. Colors are rich and vigorous.  Pansdance has the most humanoid tree trunk, its bluish grays offering a dignified contrast with the riotous green of the field beyond.

Co-curator Knutsson put five of his own pictures in the show, each depicting a single tree or tree stump (no landscape background).  They have twisted, struggling shapes.  Done in black and white, or brown and white, with only touches of green, these pictures look like outsized drawings, but four of the five are acrylics based on drawings.

The artist superimposed clear Mylar with a grid over the drawings, and then, in the traditional manner, transferred the structure of the tree by plotting the outlines on a larger piece of linen. Caucasian Wingnut, a tree in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, must be a favorite of the artist’s as Knutsson has been drawing it since 1992.

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In the 1960s they called it “color-field painting” and after 1970, it was increasingly called “modernism,” by which time it attracted less attention.  But the artists kept at it. Now, to judge from four overlapping exhibitions of this later period, there may be fresh interest in what they did.  Following Larry Poons’s two recent exhibitions of early and recent painting (reviewed in these pages by Jill Nathanson) Bernard Jacobson unveiled “Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings” (through April 30). Most of the work is from the 1970s onward, climaxing with “Bella Donna” (1987). While Spanierman’s “Dan Christensen: Sprays and Stains” (March 6 through April 2) has one painting from the late ‘60s, most of the show is from the 1980s. Also opening on March 6 but up through April 19 is “Jules Olitski: Mitt Paintings” at Paul Kasmin. Created between 1989 and 1992, these paintings come from Olitski’s “baroque” period, and were made with the aid of heavy gloves normally used by house painters.  “Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water,” at Berry Campbell, is up through March 15.  Although Bannard was known in the early ‘60s for minimalist paintings, by the 1970s he had shifted to modernism, reveling in its succulent surfaces and offbeat colors.  This show is all from the 70s.  As is evident from “Pakistani,” he could convey a swinging, curtain-like motion with colors both radiant and restrained: mauve, purple, pale-to-vibrant orange and pale, almost citric lime-yellow.

Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water, on view  at Berry Campbell Gallery, through March 15 at 530 West 24th Street

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April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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