Julie Webb and her two Boston terriers welcomed me at the entrance to the gallery. Just outside of Dallas, this 10,000 square foot cabinet of curiosities. which she founded in 1987 with her husband, Bruce (like her, an artist) greets you with a cast iron storefront, painted in red, yellow and blue. It is a magnet for collectors of Outsider art, including the likes of David Byrne and St. Vincent. The entrance is peppered with potted plants and the open doors give way to a visual treasure trove of vintage neon signs, fraternal banners, paintings, sculptures and folk objects.

The Webbs had just returned from the 2015 Outsider Art Fair in NY, so I had the benefit of watching Julie unpack some drawings that they had shown at the Fair.

She pulled out eight drawings by Reverend L.T. Thomas and spread them across the table for me to study. The Reverend used colored pencil and some ballpoint pen on spiral paper, ledger paper and scrap paper. His drawn figures are fashionably dressed in suit jackets that look like military dress coats with a dash of western flare – outlined in vivid colors with matching hats and shoes. In all the drawings, the faces have pursed lips, as if striking a pose. Each drawing bears the same title: “Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd or Frederick Douglass.” With the exception of a rare Bonnie Parker drawing, these three men were the only characters in Rev. L.T. Thomas’s drawings. I mentioned to Julie that the figures look remarkably similar. Julie agreed: “they resemble the Reverend himself.” I could see how the oratory skill and righteous leadership of the fearless abolitionist Frederick Douglass would resonate with an African-American Baptist preacher like Thomas. But what about Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow? One answer is a personal connection: Reverend Thomas claimed to have known Clyde Barrow. Reverend Thomas was born in Calvert, Texas in 1904, so he was in his twenties when Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde were all wreaking havoc during The Great Depression. Many people thought the outlaws represented the little guy, the poor folk versus the banks. Those stories were more fiction than fact, but one thing is certain: the outlaws were concerned with style. This style is evident in the Reverend’s drawings and in the care he took with his own dress even into his nineties. Julie describes the Reverend as a joy of a person, always stylish and smiling. When the Reverend was asked about his subject matter, he responded: “My mind just gives it to me and the old man upstairs gives it to my mind.”

In my conversations with the Webbs, it struck me that their relationship with their artists is often one of friendship before business. Bruce and Julie Webb visited Reverend Thomas in the nursing home for several years until his death in 1995. They purchased his drawings by paying for dental and medical care, and they bought suits and other stylish items for his wardrobe. In 1998, the Webbs donated fifty of his pieces to Collection de l´Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, the premier collection of Outsider Art.

In the gallery’s flat files I stumbled upon the small, whimsical labyrinths of Tom Burleson. Using colored pencil and marker on card stock or labels, Burleson creates interconnected worlds from edge to edge, like James Siena, with the bright palette and biomorphic shapes of Franz Ackermann. Burleson’s structures suggest a Rube Goldberg chain of events with machine-like parts that are playfully aware of a watchful eye. Burleson was born in 1914 in Waxahachie. He had a short career in minor-league baseball before entering the navy. After being honorably discharged for malaria-induced emotional instability, he continued work as a civilian for companies with military contracts, like Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in San Jose, California. At Lockheed, he arranged to be on the night shift, where his obsessive drawing gained momentum. Employed as a shipping inspector, his subject matter was probably influenced by the equipment surrounding him – interlocking machine parts and constructs that seem both playful and entrapping. In his retirement years, his reclusiveness grew more acute: he sent his wife out for art supplies so he wouldn’t have to leave the house. He died in 1997.

A third artist whose work captivated me at Webb Gallery stands in contradistinction to the previous two in terms of career trajectory. In contrast to Thomas and Burleson – who never self-identified as artists, did most of their work in the later years of their lives and achieved recognition posthumously – Esther Pearl Watson is a mid- career artist who has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally. She has published two graphic novels and teaches at the Art Center College of Design in California. Her acrylic paintings on wood immediately pull you into a narrative world: the imagery involves natural landscape, children, vehicles, façades, and a flying saucer, the latter usually appearing in foil or glitter. The small text written with paint on the top left or right tells the location or a small statement of context, for example: “Waiting until Payday” with the artist’s name and date painted underneath. The brushwork is childlike, but the humor is sophisticated. And there is clearly something odd happening in these scenes. Asking Julie about the subject matter, I learned that Esther’s work pulls from childhood journal entries: her father built flying saucers in their backyard obsessively. His goal was to sell the saucer to NASA or to Ross Perot. I was enthralled with this contemporary version of Noah’s ark and I wondered out loud to Julie about the ridicule Esther and her younger siblings may have suffered from the neighbors. “No, the other children were envious… she had a space ship in her yard!” And Julie should know, because she grew up near the Watson family. I asked Julie how she discovered Watson’s paintings. She was a fan of Esther’s hand-drawn comics on the back page of Bust Magazine for many years. In the late ‘90s, Julie and Bruce received a package from Esther and her husband Mark: it was “full of stickers, postcards, multiple cool zines, and the sweetest handwritten fan note to us about the gallery.” In 2005, Julie received an invitation to Esther’s painting exhibition in Los Angeles – and it was only at that moment that Julie realized the painter and the comic artist were the same Esther Pearl Watson. Immediately, Julie called Esther and included her in a group exhibition at the Webb Gallery in 2005. Since then, Esther has had several shows with the gallery. Additionally, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas just installed a large painting by Watson for their new atrium where it will remain on view until May 2016.

My visit to Webb Gallery was enchanting. The Webbs have a hunger for the overlooked artifact; they recognize the gem that languishes outside of fashion. Because music came up thematically throughout my conversation with Bruce and Julie, I couldn’t help but think of their role as producers. Like Rick Rubin bringing Johnny Cash to a whole new generation of music lovers, Bruce and Julie Webb bring the secret, the buried and the overlooked into the light and into our lives.

The post The Producers: A Road Trip to Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas appeared first on artcritical.

Cheshire, Connecticut is an affluent but unprepossessing town of 30,000 nestled in the rolling hills between Hartford and New Haven. “The Bedding Plant Capital of Connecticut” is home to a highly regarded prep school; the state’s tallest single-drop waterfall; Blackie’s Hotdog Stand (since 1928) and — up Route 10, just past the Cheshire Correctional Institution — the Barker Character, Comic and Cartoon Museum. It might seem an unlikely place for a ­­­­­­major art and cultural center, but that is precisely what artist and Cheshire native Kevin Daly and collaborators have undertaken to establish — and, in June of 2017, to open to the public — under the name of “Ball & Socket Arts.”

Daly’s co-founders in the venture are costume designer and Yale School of Drama faculty member Ilona Somogyi, and Jeffrey Guimond, who is with New York City Ballet. The trio envisions an enormous and multi-faceted nexus of visual, performing and culinary art located on West Main Street, just east of the center of town on Route 68. It will be housed in the old Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company, a linchpin of Cheshire’s industrial past which, early in its history, produced buttons and snap fasteners (of the ball-and-socket type) for use in Union Army uniforms.

The factory was in continuous operation until 1994, at which time the company folded and the property fell into disuse. The oldest extant building in the rambling, 65,000-square-foot complex dates from the 1890s. Over time, the facility expanded — in a haphazard, as-needed way — across a three-and-a-half-acre plot that abuts the once-busy (if short-lived) Farmington Canal.

Since 2011 a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity, Ball & Socket Arts, Inc. bought the property about a year ago for $750,000, assisted by a $1.689 million loan from Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development, tax breaks, and a deal with the Connecticut Light and Power Company. “I went to art school, and I teach high school art,” says Daly. “I’m like the least-suited person to be doing this.”

Be that as it may, the organization’s efforts got the site into the State Registry of Historic Places, opening up new funding sources for the buildings’ rehabilitation; federal recognition may soon follow. David Arai of Meier Group Architects, based in Ann Arbor, is overseeing the renovation project, which will retain much of the labyrinthine look and feel of the existing structures.

Daly hopes the project will become a shining example of “adaptive reuse” in the vein of MASS MoCA, the North Adams, Massachusetts institution launched in 1999 and widely viewed as a factor in that town’s economic revival. A walk-through of the abandoned complex suggests its enormous potential. The question now facing Ball & Socket Arts is, if you build a center for cultural producers will an audience of cultural consumers materialize?

According to Daly, “We’re seeing it not just as a big regional arts center, but also as a benefit to the local community,” with some of Ball & Socket’s exhibition programming reserved for artists who work nearby. Also included in the plans are artist and music instruction studios, a dance studio complete with a sprung floor, a cinema, and — in a performance space that can seat 150 — programming for the 60-year-old Cheshire Community Theater. The Cheshire Historical Society will present exhibitions here, as well.

The idea of a printmaking cooperative has been floated. An outdoor sculpture court (or two) seems likely. Also in the works are a bar, a food court, and a dining room served by a teaching kitchen with a chef-in-residence program. And beer! For the hulking, cavernous coal house that dominates the southern end of the property, various uses were considered before the current plan for a brewery emerged. Says Daly, “I liked the idea of indoor rock-climbing, but if we can’t have that, well… beer is good, too.” One expects that the Ball & Socket Ale label will contribute significantly to the organization’s goal of supporting itself financially within just a few years, enabling free admission. A retail concourse and office space rental will help, too.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of work to do. The buildings have been shuttered, but time has taken its toll on infrastructure. Environmental remediation of various kinds are needed to restore the interior to functionality; Daly targets the spring of 2016 for completion of that phase of the overhaul. “If the building falls down, someone has to clean it up,” he notes, so the $400,000 grant by the Town of Cheshire (money channeled from the DECD) is a wise use of municipal funds.

No stone is left unturned in the search for ways to integrate Ball & Socket Arts with the broader culture of the community: the old Farmington Canal — later, a railroad right-of-way — is now a bicycle trail and the spinal column of the Farmington Canal Linear Park, which is scheduled to be completed not long after Ball & Socket Arts opens its doors. At the rear of the new complex, just a few yards from the trail, a bike shop will be set up to service the needs of local cyclists.

Daly, a painter of hard-edged, color-savvy abstractions, has for several months organized lively group exhibitions — mainly of artists from New York and southern Connecticut — at the Art Garage, a tidy, white-walled exhibition space in a former automobile service station across the street from the factory. Having the Art Garage has been “huge,” says Daly; as well as providing enhanced visibility and a public face for Ball & Socket Arts, the gallery “revives the passion that was our original motivation” by embodying, albeit on a small scale, the concept of “placemaking” that he hopes will thrive in the bigger project. An art auction is planned for October 24 to benefit Ball & Socket’s capital campaign.

The post Thinking Big in a Small Town: Ball & Socket Arts Takes Shape appeared first on artcritical.

January 9 to February 8, 2014
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
Mixed Greens: First Floor, 212 331 8888
Zoubok: Second Floor, 212-675-7490

Co-presented and co-organized by Pavel Zoubok Gallery and its downstairs neighbor, Mixed Greens, this exhibition celebrates the effervescent and flamboyant swath that Holly Solomon cut through the art world. For some 30 years a succession of Manhattan galleries that she ran exhibited a stunningly eclectic roster of artists. Holly was, of course, a major queen bee, very frequently the subject of her artists as well as their promoter, agent, and mother confessor.

This stereophonic show, while only beginning to convey the width and exuberant breadth of her stylish career, reminds today’s industrial strength art world of her irrepressible energy.  She played a key role in ushering in stylistic pluralism, not to mention the return of content, recognition of emerging women artists, and the whole postmodern aesthetic that erupted in the mid-1970s. Holly and Horace Solomon, as a couple, helped break down the austere hegemony of minimalism, injecting some real fun into contemporary art.

While there now are and have been wonderful, intrepid woman art dealers, renegade individualists such as Holly (who was, after all, a classic Sarah Lawrence girl) are increasingly rare in the current celebrity climate of the art industry. Mixed Greens has installed many of the portraits of Holly, including Christo’s Wrapped Holly (1966), Arch Connelly’s Holly Sparkling (1988), Robert Kushner’s jazzy portrait of 1983 and Robert Mapplethorpe’s seductive triple photograph of 1976. Across the two venues there are individual pieces by more than 40 former gallery artists and artist friends, including Brad Davis’s Bird & Lotus Tondo #4, (1979), which always hung in Holly’s rose-patterned bedroom.

Holly’s youthful ambition was “to be a great actress,” as she emphatically told me in 1986.  That year we began our collaboration (with photographer John Hall) on the book, Living With Art, published in 1988, based on the then novel idea of examining the domestic environments of contemporary collectors who paired sophisticated understanding of furniture and the decorative arts with a passion for art collecting.  As to her thespian ambitions, the art world in fact became Holly’s stage. And she always had an audience. The galleries were basically a mom and pop store.  But Holly was after all, never a shopkeeper but an aspiring uptown socialite when she first arrived in Manhattan. Her early collectors were very often social friends. All it needed to get them to participate in our book was a phone call from Holly, who always talked fast, waving a lit cigarette in her right hand.

Holly’s own first contemporary art acquisition, she told me, was a Warhol Brillo Box bought from Eleanor Ward (an outspoken, pioneering female dealer of the previous generation who had opened the Stable Gallery in 1953). It had been delivered to the kitchen but Holly instructed that it go into the living room where she used as a coffee table in the Solomon’s Sutton Place apartment.

In short order she reupholstered Horace’s beloved 19th-century English and American furniture in day-glo pink velvets. Before long, a Christo wrapped storefront filled the apartment foyer. It would later be replaced by a wild Judy Pfaff exploded cubistic construction and then a Ned Smyth aquatic-themed screen. Led early on by Richard Bellamy, from whom she bought a Lucas Samaras on the installment plan, and then by Leo Castelli, the Solomons collected Pop Art in the 1960s. (Andy Warhol produced an iconic multiple portrait in pastel hues of Holly that not too long ago sold at Christie’s.)  Later, paintings and objects by Lichtenstein, Twombly, Rosenquist and Oldenburg were superseded by works from Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Dennis Oppenheim and Neil Jenney as downtown art dealer John GIbson expanded the Solomons’ knowledge of the avant-garde. The Solomons embraced conceptual art in the late 1960s.

Collecting was the pathway that would lead Holly to dealing. Aided by Horace’s moral and financial support (the money came from a New Jersey fortune based on a family-owned company making hair accessories) she evolved from aspiring actress to art collector in the 1960s, when contemporary art became the rage among a group of upwardly mobile Manhattanites that included the Sculls.  Back then the contemporary art world was really a rather small club.

The Solomon apartment (and later her smaller apartment on 79th Street) was always an extension of her pioneering, flamboyant taste and an example of how high art and décor could fearlessly co-exist. While the current shows give a glimpse of her wide-ranging eye, they cannot encompass the cheeky vitality of that apartment and also of the galleries as they evolved. Soon a shiny Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt centerpiece replaced the small fabric Oldenburg as a dining room table centerpiece and in the 1980s Patkin covered the dining room windows with a stunning, silvery grey rubber curtain (veil) embellished with fruit and flowers.. The Christo in the foyer gave way to a Ned Smyth aquatic-themed screen featuring lively fish, and later an ebullient Judy Pfaff construction. Doreen Gallo had transformed the kitchen, covering walls, countertops and furniture with a riot of mismatched colored and patterned tiles, glass fragments, and stones. The living room was a mad riot of patterns and colors created with artist made furniture and window dressing constructed by Brad Davis. And the frequent extravagantly generous parties at 57^th Street were like family celebrations, with Holly’s artists as the family members.

Always the actress, Holly wrote  (and performed in) a couple of plays and by 1969 the couple had opened 98 Greene Street, a performance and project space designed and built out by a very young, radical Gordon Matta-Clark, only one year after Paula Cooper had opened one of the first of the loft galleries that put SoHo on the map. It was here that Robert Kushner staged his legendary fashion shows and others exhibited work and read poetry. Many of the 98 Greene Street artists formed the nucleus of the SoHo gallery the Solomons opened at 392 West Broadway six years later, among them tinsel king Lanigan-Schmidt, Mapplethorpe, Brad Davis, and Izhar Patkin. When the Solomons inaugurated the strategically located street level gallery with a very lively, diverse group show, it was action central. The opening night crowd–a kind of proto-flash mob–jammed the West Broadway sidewalk drinking art critic white wine and champagne till all hours.

Many of the artists Holly took under her wing since have carved out substantial careers, among them William Wegman, Robert Kushner, Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Pfaff, Robert Barry, Yvonne Jacquette, Kim MacConnell and Joe Zucker. She also showed Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Peter Hutchinson, Nam Juin Paik and Richard Nonas as well as Jed Bark, who was an early participant, went on to become one of the most sought-after framer to museums, galleries and high-end collectors.

When there were very few women artist successfully showing at the time, Holly was quite proud to be a pioneer in championing work by women, including Laurie Anderson, Donna Dennis, Eliza Jimenez, Mary Heilmann, Yvonne Jaquette, Alexis Smith and Melissa Meyer. (She was a founding member of the woman’s organization, ARTable.) She is also still best known as the early doyenne of what came to be called “P & D,” as a new generation of artists renounced the austerities of conceptual art in favor of flamboyant color and shape referencing the patterns and decorations of fabrics, beading and cellophane.

After seven years on West Broadway, the Solomons moved the gallery uptown to 724 Fifth Avenue, a block south of 57th Street, where Holly once again was out front in her enthusiasm for the design and decorative arts. I recall, for example, her enthusiasm for Kim MacConnel’s splashily painted sofas and the Dufy’s designs that upholstered a set of French chairs she showed and the French provincial desk that she always sat behind in her small office (until some collector wanted to buy it) dressed in Chanel suits, her wrists dripping with her Seaman Schepps bracelets. Who else would have showed Izhar Patkin’s life-size gold-anodized aluminum horse and helmeted rider, Don Ouijute, Seguna Parte, (1989) in a toney midtown gallery? The last public gallery was a long, narrow space on Mercer Street.

Time inevitably tames radical art, incorporating it into the long-range history of culture. Some of the art Holly showed has since entered the mainstream but it was really new, fresh and even shocking forty years ago. And let me stress that Holly’s eye was always courageous. While she would have never considered herself an intellectual, her taste was almost always impeccable.

The post The Art World Was Her Stage: Holly Solomon, Actress, Collector, Dealer Extraordinaire appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Timperio lends new meaning to the terms “skying” and “grounding” with the humungous 470-artist group show, Sideshow Nation, at his Williamsburg gallery.  The precedent for such jam-packed art installation that comes to mind is the 19th-century style of exhibition of the great European academies and salons with their paintings hung floor to ceiling to which the public flocked en masse.  Sideshow Nation closes this coming weekend after a two-month run.

“I never liked the idea of a Christmas show,” the artist-turned-gallerist tells me.   “A lot of little trinkets.  Nobody buys them and nobody cares.” In the early days of Sideshow he staged just such an event, with the title “Merry Peace,” but what he has come to prefer is  “an overview – a chance to show what people are doing.”

An estimated crowd of 2,000 attended the opening January 5.  Of coure, if each artist attended with a couple of friends it would get up to that number pretty fast.  People lined up in the cold half way around the block, and Timperio had to stand out on the pavement, in order to let new people in only after previous guests had left.

The official hours were six to nine PM but the galleries were still crowded at eleven. Timperio’s annual salon has become a New York art world fixture: even its premier fun couple, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, were spotted in the line in one recent year.

The hanging is a work of art in itself, a complex checkerboard of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural objects. But then, Timperio is himself an artist, and one who has evolved through a variety of personae..  (His own show at Art 101 in Williamsburg was reviewed by artcritical in 2011.)

WhenTimperio arrived in New York in 1970,  in his early twenties, from his native Ohio, he designed a pinball machine. This was followed by a sojourn in New Mexico, where he was able to make a living in commercial art (and acquired his trademark cowboy hat). Returning to New York in the later ‘70s he did political caricatures for the New York Times and began to devote more time to his painting.

Starting out in a pop idiom, with special attention to rodeos, Timperio evolved into abstraction when, as he says, “I realized that I was more interested in what the paint was doing than in telling a story.”  This was in the early eighties, when he also started to paint on the floor. Dan Christensen, a good friend, was a big influence on his art.

Sideshow had its beginnings in 1995, when the legendary Williamsburg restaurant, Planet Thailand, invited Timperio to hang some art on its walls. In those days, Williamsburg was still a working-class neighborhood where artists found attractive rents. “We would have an opening and you could actually have a dialogue,” Timperio recalls, nostalgically.

But other galleries and young professionals followed the artists, and they, in turn, were followed by edgy boutiques, restaurants and condos: the usual story. Today, a Sotheby’s real estate office shares the block with the cheerfully graffiti-decorated building into which Sideshow moved in 2000, and, grouses Timperio, “Everything costs a fortune.”

Some of the artists showing in this year’s Sideshow Nation are “celebs” like Paul Resika, Bill Jensen, Forrest (“Frosty”) Myers and Dorothea Rockburne.  Others are at least as well known for their writing: Robert Morgan, Phong Bui, Mario Naves; or their dealing:  Janet Kurnatowski, Pauline Lethen. Some are unknowns and/or friends of artists included in the past, and some are tried and true friends of Timperio’s who have returned year after year.

It’s also a family affair, with brothers Don and Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield and son Noah Landfield, husband-and-wife team James Walsh and Ann Walsh,  twins Carol Diamond and Cathy Diamond, and  Timperio’s own artist-childrenWillie Timperio and Cheyenne Timperio.  The younger Timperios both showed abstraction in the past but this year both opted for figuration.

Most of the artists on display are alive, and of all ages, but occasionally room is made for a distinguished deceased.  For instance, a lively self-portrait drawing by the late impresario Willoughby Sharp is in the current show, as is a fine small painting by Dan Christensen.

Being a painter himself, Timperio is not overly enthusiastic about conceptual art.  “It has to have something you can see,“ he says.  He considers the visual “more important than meaning – I’m not big on the word. But I try to keep it as open as possible. I think every generation has something valuable to say.”

Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery through March 24, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

The post The Salon Meister: Richard Timperio of Williamsburg’s Sideshow Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Jim, you have had a stellar career in the field of Asian art history.  You served for a number of years as a museum curator, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC, until 1965 when you moved to Berkeley where you retired in 1995.  You’ve pretty much received every prize the College Art Association offers.

Yes, and the Freer Medal last year, equivalent for my field of a Nobel Prize!

Congratulations.  How would you characterize your scholarly interests?

I have been, for some sixty years now, an art historian specializing in Chinese painting—secular painting mainly, since I never mastered the doctrines and iconography of Buddhism beyond the superficial level. I have also written extensively about Japanese painting, especially the school called Nanga (“Southern School painting”) which tried to take the Ming-Qing painting of China as its model.

Tell us a bit about the scope of your publications.

I am the author of a dozen or so published books, including book-length exhibition catalogs, several of them done with graduate student input, and numerous articles in learned journals. My books have been translated into many languages; in China, books published under my Chinese name Gao Juhan are extremely popular, selling in the tens of thousands.

So, I’m intrigued to know how the body of new material posted to your website, jamescahill.info builds upon your publications?

It substitutes, in a way, for a book I never wrote. I intended, when I had completed my series on later (Ming-Qing) Chinese painting, to go back and do the early periods, backwards from Southern Song—and that first volume would be titled “A Pure and Remote View,” after the great landscape hand scroll by Xia Gui (a section of which opens and closes all the lectures in this first series.) But I was pulled away from this plan by the series of invitations to do endowed lecture series—Norton Lectures at Harvard, others at Columbia, Harvard again, University of Kansas, University of Southern California – which were published as books on big special themes, instead of the period-art-history books I had planned. I never got back to those.

You’ve published many books, why is this latest material published on the web instead? Does that way of thinking involve any general view of the future of art book publishing?

Quick answer: I wasn’t ready, at my age and weakened condition, to take on another book, with all the fuss of getting permissions, dealing with an editor, etc. Longer answer: I was attracted by the idea of being able to show my viewers all the visual materials (mostly from digitized slides) I wanted to, all  in color, no limits – this after spending decades producing books with highly restricted number of illustrations (plates) and even fewer color plates. We show many thousands of images, including lots of close-in details of paintings. Between my own old slide collection, very extensive, and that of my old department, I probably have access to more of these materials (slides mostly) than anyone else living.

There are over forty hours of the “Pure and Remote View” lectures. The first lecture at my website has already been watched more than three thousand times. They are also accessible on the  website of our sponsoring organization, the Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C.  Berkeley.

A second series, to be titled “Gazing Into the Past,” with lectures devoted to particular Chinese (and some Japanese) artists and paintings of the later (post-Song) period, will begin going up on the web soon. I have already completed a dozen or so of the lectures of this series in draft, and mean to continue making and posting them as long as I am able.

Specialists will of course look at your website as a matter of course. Could you say something, however, about what the many people interested in the art of China who are not experts will find there?

I have always argued against the idea that Chinese painting is an esoteric art that requires some background in Asian philosophies and religions for its appreciation. Anyone who watches the first lecture (or any of the others) comes quickly to realize that I am presenting a pictorial art quite as visually rewarding as any they know in their own familiar tradition. Non-specialists, that is—as I know from numerous responses—will be as visually rewarded, even excited, as they have been previously by the works of their favorite artists: Picasso, Degas, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, Botticelli, whoever.

Ernst Gombrich believed that European painting of the Renaissance and after was the only time that artists have, in his words, “striven systematically, through a succession of generations, step by step to approximate their images to the visible world and achieve likenesses that might deceive the eye.” But I would counterthat with another, earlier tradition equally fits that pattern: Chinese painting through the Song when artists produced deeply moving and philosophically grounded paintings that rank, in my view, among the greatest works of man.

Is your material accessible also to Chinese audiences since the web there is censored.

One very popular website in China, called Tudou (Potato), has posted my lectures and thus made them accessible (they are also on YouTube but Chinese don’t have ready access to that). We are negotiating with organizations in China about the possibility of their sponsoring our project and posting the lectures.

As a veteran scholar, what hopes have you for the future of art history in China?

Great hopes—as indeed I have for the future of China as a whole.  It is too great a culture to continue forever under such harsh restrictions. I hope to live to see the emancipation. Art history in China is presently plagued by a widespread adherence to the “verbal” faction in what they term the visual-verbal controversy—to an art history, that is, based mainly in reading written materials and producing more of them—theory, criticism, a text-reader’s art history–rather than in looking seriously at the works of art themselves. We hope to better that situation both by offering an attractive model for visual art history and by making the materials (images) accessible to everybody. We plan to issue the lectures also on sets of disks, with some provision for downloading the images on them.

I really want to stress my gratitude to the Tang Research Foundation whose director first encouraged me to undertake this project, and has funded it since then, and also to Rand Chatterjee, who has transformed what I originally envisioned (a simple filming of my old slide-lectures, in effect) into what is really a new medium, ideally suited for presenting images and ideas together in ways that are both visually and intellectually exciting. And, best of all, unlike the commercial lecture-series operations, we can present them for free viewing by anyone at any time. With proper publicity we can expand our viewership, and all these benefits, to huge numbers of people all over the world.

I am now 85 years old, a few months from being 86. I am still more or less OK in the head, but running down badly every place else. When I write about old-age styles of artists I note that their late paintings tend to lose depth, become flattened out. I hope the same will not be true of my lectures.

The post “A Pure and Remote View”: James Cahill on Scholarship and the Web appeared first on artcritical.

If walls could speak they would make great art market chroniclers.

As gallery goers will have noticed, Yvon Lambert has shut up shop in New York.  When the venerable 75-year-old French dealer retired earlier this year direction of his Paris flagship gallery was handed to Olivier Bélot, who had been managing the New York space.  Running both ventures was too great a strain: that, rather than diminished market, is the given reason for the retreat.

The old space at 550 West 21st Street has a new tenant: Haunch of Venison New York.  They inaugurate their new space Friday September 24 with a group show, Boundaries Obscured, featuring ten artists or artist-partnerships they work with, including Jake & Dinos Chapman, Peter Saul, Gunther Uecker and Ahmed Alsoudani.

Itself a US outpost of a European venture, a coincidence with Lambert for the gallery walls to savor, Haunch of Venison takes its meaty name from the back alley in London’s West End where it started its operation in 2002.  That time, the inaugural show, organized by gallery founders Harry Blain and Graham Southern, was a Rachel Whiteread survey that filled many floors of its sprawling mansion premises.  Since 2007 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Christie’s and, in addition to London and New York, also has a space in Berlin.

Their first New York quarters were on two floors of the Rockefeller Center, home of their auctioneer parent, but as director Emilio Steinberger explains, the restricted size of the freight elevator, not to mention the low ceilings of the office premises, limited them in scale.  They also wanted the greater foot traffic for the artists they represent.

There are other connections between the old and new tenants at 550: Steinberger worked for Lambert before moving to Haunch of Venison.  Bettina Prentice, the PR consultant for Haunch at Prentice Art Communications, dealt with press at Lambert.

To some, a launch with a group show might indicate tentativeness and excessive diplomacy.  But Boundaries Obscured, a thoughtful selection made by Steinberger, is not simply a cross-section of stable and stock.  For a start, there are is an abundance of critters as befits the gallery name, from the bronze gargoyles crowning Jitish Kallat’s canvases to the gelatinous, bottom-feeding blob fish (platypus) in Patricia Piccinini’s Eulogy (2011) or the stuffed toy animals in Joana Vaconcelos’s War Games (2011).  There is such an abundance of taxidermy in the Chapman’s Fucking with Nature (2009), a see-saw with copulating wild animals at one end and domesticated creatures at the other, with mice running along the middle and tipping the balance, that the piece has been held up at Customs.

The other theme is memorial, which is apropos of our ominous times but perhaps inauspicious for a launch?  The Piccinini fits this theme as the man bewails the imminent extinction of the newly discovered fish.  Kevin Francis Gray’s The Temporal Sitter (2011) is a Job-like marble monument to a homeless man.  Uecker’s Aschemensch (Ash Man) (1986), is the only known figurative work by the op artist famed for his abstractions in nails.  It was made in the wake of Chernobyl by the artist covering himself in ash and rolling on a canvas, a gesture reminiscent of the athropometries of Yves Klein.

When I shared this observation with Steinberger at the press preview he retorted that Klein was Uecker’s brother-in-law, which I had not known.  That is the kind of art historical details walls can’t share.

Boundaries Obscured, September 23 to November 5, 2011. 550 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 259 0000.

The post The In and Out Club: Haunch of Venison Takes Yvon Lambert Spot in Chelsea appeared first on artcritical.

“The back-story of Allan’s estate – estimated at over $300 million – and the Allan Stone Gallery, an enterprise that continued to function until its abrupt closure in late April, is a near-Shakespearean tale replete with internecine family rivalries that have simmered for decades and an outside agitator with just the right set of skills and motivation to turn that simmer up to a boil,“ according to Stender.  The gallery that had given Wayne Thiebaud his first New York exhibition and Eva Hesse a show of drawings when the artist still lived in German shut its doors in the spring.

Works from Stone’s extensive collections, which includedAbstract Expressionist paintings, African tribal art, American and European folk and decorative art, have been selling this year at Sotheby’s.  The third sale is scheduled for Friday, September 23 in New York.

After Allan Stone’s death, in 2006, Claudia Stone, a daughter from his first marriage and a trusted lieutenant of sixteen years standing, ran the gallery.   Direction was wrested from Claudia by trustees of the estate, however, which had been left to Stone’s widow Clare.  But the Upper East Side firehouse premises of the gallery belonged to Claudia and were subsequently put on the market, selling in July reportedly for close to $10 million, and the gallery shut.  Stender recounts this saga in great detail, and delves into the family dynamics of the litigious heirs, and the travails of artists associated with the gallery (Stender herself being one of the latter.)

Therein, ethically and perhaps legally, lies a problem.  The article was commissioned by a leading art magazine, and when rejected, considered briefly by artcritical.  It is a superb piece of journalism in respect of having a tale to tell, doing its homework, and attempting due diligence.  It makes for great copy.

But the piece collides the responsibilities of a reporter with the axe to grind of a cheated artist.  Stender, like a number of artists, had works on longstanding consignment to the gallery subsequently caught up in the back and forth of the warring heirs.  The upshot is that the works are trapped, deemed gallery property in the absence of documentation to the contrary from the artists – rather than due to the presence of documentation in the hands of the gallery.

Had the stories been separated then each might have been fine in itself, from a publisher’s perspective and with fact checking and legal proofing.  But this is our problem, not Stender’s.  For her part, she constructs a compelling yarn of the sad decline and spinning out of control of a once seminal gallery, from the perspective of the aggrieved artist.  Publishing her 2000 word exposé as a “note” on her Facebook page draws her point of view to 600 friends who include Loren Munk and Jerry Saltz, both of whom cross-posted it a combined, further 7000 friends, allowing for overlap.  Plus the “note” is unrestricted.

Stender may not get her artworks back any sooner, but she has had the satisfaction of telling her tale – and even making some new friends.

The post Stonewall Me and I’ll Facebook You! appeared first on artcritical.

The poster for the show, which was envisioned by Churner, encapsulates the time-based quality of photography that many of the exhibits are exploiting. “I thought what would be great is if, when you open the poster, the photo turned black as you were looking at it. Just like undeveloped photo paper would do.” Rachel laughs at the mention of the show poster, partly at the absurdly ambitious idea and partly because the absurd idea ended up working so perfectly.

The same enthusiasm flows into the discussion of the three artists being displayed in the exhibition Every Photo Graph Is In Visible. Rachel specifically mentions one of the installations from the third artist, Laitha. Entitled “2X4,” it’s literally a photograph pressed into the wall – “crumpled” – by a two-by-four. To install the piece, Churner will have to cut into the wall of her own gallery and insert the installation. Six months on and three installations in, Churner is still remodeling.

The idea for the gallery began while Churner was still working at Peter Freeman, Inc. “We were dealing mostly in 60s and 70s artwork. But the more that I started working with the artists, the more and more exciting that became.” She began looking for a suitable space, but found that she would be limited by the aesthetic characters of most neighborhoods. She wanted to feature emerging artists, but ones that were less consciously in the vanguard and more dedicated to craft and conceptual rigor. The only place that felt appropriate was Chelsea.

Churner & Churner is located close to the corner of 22nd Street on 10th Avenue. Rachel Churner had to go against conventional thinking about location – that galleries thrive on streets and are choked out on avenues – in pursuit of more important factors. The space had to be small, and location on the ground floor was a must – a spot on 26^th street would have been unacceptable if it meant being up on the sixth floor. It’s a quiet section of the city, and construction scaffolding is slowly encroaching on the gallery front, but foot traffic has still been steady. “We’ve had great foot traffic. In part because of the High Line, that’s really made a difference in people just walking on the avenue. When we first opened it was just because they were looking how to get on it.”

The other Churner in Churner & Churner is Rachel’s younger sister Leah, a film curator and archivist. Churner & Churner is the first major project the two have worked on together, and Rachel comments that their family’s perception of the venture has become its own beast. “There’s this great confusion in my larger family. Because my grandparents assume that now that it’s a Churner and Churner business that we also live together. They have no idea that there are distinct personalities anymore.”

But so far, the two have collaborated very little on the gallery. Leah herself remarks that she helps from the sidelines, mostly assisting at openings and giving input when Rachel is hanging shows. Even the latest programming event – the screening of several short films from the 60s and 70s featuring, among others, a Lar Tusb film of Joe Cocker playing baseball – was, according to Leah, an idea developed and executed solely by Rachel using films rented from The Filmmakers Coop.

It remains to be seen to what degree Leah will include herself in the gallery’s programming and exhibition schedule. For now, it seems that Rachel needs little help. She tosses out a few ideas she has been turning over in her head as she tries to settle on the perfect event. “While the exhibition program is set for the next year, these little things aren’t. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

The post Sister Act: Profile of Churner and Churner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

The Ghost in the Machine, Curated by Stephen Westfall: John McLaughlin, Nicholas Krushenick, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Jennifer Riley, Rachel Beach, Jackie Meier, Thomas Raggio is at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., June 23 to August 19, 2011.

REVERIE, Curated by Stephen Westfall: Andrea Belag, Shirley Jaffe, Alix Le Méléder, Sylvan Lionni, Julia Rommel, Patricia Treib, Stephen Westfall, Stanley Whitney, at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, New York. NY 10012

The last thing you expect of cognitive dissonance is a harmonious feeling, and yet that is what you get when you consider Stephen Westfall’s mode of painting and his way of conducting himself in the world.  Rigorous, cool, hard-edged formal abstraction is his painting mode whereas his activities as an educator, critic, essayist and (this season) an especially busy curator of group exhibitions are marked by ecumenism: warmly inclusive and boundary-breaking in the people he selects to write about or to exhibit with/together, he often makes unexpected connections across mediums and styles, generations and allegiances.  His approach is non-dogmatic, suggesting that pragmatism rather than idealism lies at the heart of his aesthetics.

This season he has been the subject and instigator of three New York shows.  His sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, his Chelsea dealer, titled Seraphim for one of the paintings in the show, opened at the end of April and followed on from an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, in Summer 2010.  During his residency in the eternal city, Westfall became mesmerized by mosaic flooring in early medieval churches.  The result – an extended series of diamond-shaped bands of color, formats that recall Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella but in ways that, to paraphrase Klee, take the grid for a walk – captured praise from the influential husband and wife critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.  For Smith, in the New York Times, Westfall’s “syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is.”  For Saltz, in New York Magazine, “it feels vibrantly alive, quirky, open, ever-mutating, and popping with color… Westfall’s work has never felt so free, confident, and his own.”

His New York solo show was followed in the same space by a group show he selected, Ghost in the Machine, that included a large work of his own, a show that juxtaposed artists all working within geometric abstraction but to sharply contrastive ends.  Coincidental with the Chelsea group show was Reverie at Zürcher Studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, which again included a painting of his own amidst a diverse and intercontinental group. Zürcher is his longstanding representative in Paris.

Ghost in the Machine can be read as a kind of manifesto of “impurist” geometric abstraction in which popular culture and humor are celebrated as extensions of abstraction rather than its enemy.  “Some people think that artists deploy geometry as an austerity.  It ain’t necessarily so.” Westfall wrote in a statement accompanying the show.  “All the work here stands for more than one thing: swoony craft, optical dazzle, compression and expansion.” John McLaughlin, the Boston-born Californian whose proto-minimalist paintings have been the subject of recent rediscovery, might seem closest to a purest aesthetic with its allegiance to Mondrian, Malevich and Zen.  Even he allows his color and spatial decisions to be inflected by a Californian aesthetic of gloss and ease.  Jennifer Riley, one of the younger artists in the group, and a former student of Westfalls (he has taught for years at Bard College and at Rutgers, both important centers for abstract painting on the East Coast) makes the connection between her crystalline forms and a Pop aesthetic explicit, if extremely coded, in the title, Starburst for NK, (2009); NK is Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999), also represented in the exhibition and held by many to be the father of pop abstraction.

If Ghost is a manifesto, Reverie is a visual poem; in place of the rigorous organizing principle of geometry – whether subversive or subverted – this show allows for greater diversity of touch and process, ranging in its modes of abstraction from monochrome (Julia Rommel ) to gestural (Andrea Belag) to minimal (Sylvan Lionni ) to organic (Patricia Treib).  Its presiding eminence grise was the Paris-based veteran Shirley Jaffe, represented by a monumental, tapestry-like collage of glyphs and decals, while another “lifer” – to quote Westfall’s witty euphemism from his supporting statement – was Stanley Whitney, whose gutsy grids are composed of wobbling lozenges of sharply contrastive colors and gently differentiating textures. Whitney’s found grid stood in instructive contract to the meticulously preplanned rigor of Westfall, but rather than suggesting an opposition, it seemed that Westfall enlisted Whitney to say that he, too, arrives at his patterns through feeling and whim as much as any formal logic.

Westfall has been known for years for his penchant for cheery, upbeat geometric abstraction that simultaneously registers order and disruption.  At first his compositions strike the viewer as well-behaved structures of pattern with decorative correlates in the applied arts, such as plaid, herringbone, chevrons.  Good humored populist titles like “My beautiful Laundrette” or “Candyman” and raucous color schemes hint at subversion of prim minimal grids or Color Field-redolent arrangements of parallel stripe.  But his visual wit goes beyond mere reference to recent abstract art history.  A key element in his vocabulary is the disruptive kink he will admit into his patterning that sets it off kilter; never quite subverting the flatness of the picture plane, he nonetheless allows a breeze or ripple to run across the composition.

The references to other art and the broader culture, coupled with his funky palette, might sound like Westfall belongs simply within the pop or deconstructive camp of Neo-Geo and its derivatives, making him a bedfellow, say, or Jonathan Lasker or Peter Halley.  And there are generational connections, as there are with other abstractionist wits like Mary Heilmann.  But somehow, in Westfall, the attachment to the positive, energetic, affirmative aspect of pattern and decoration always seems in earnest; the subversion is within pattern, rather than of pattern.  He recalls Ruskin’s dictum that “All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed.” He leaves viewers feeling that his intention is to invigorate abstraction rather than to debunk it.  And this makes sense of the community he establishes around himself of fellow abstractionists, and workers within other styles, for whom wit is important but irony is to be avoided.

This article first appeared at the newly-launched website of Abstract Critical, a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to abstract art.  Despite a similarity in name, Abstract Critical is not connected with artcritical magazine, although artcritical editor David Cohen has agreed to submit quarterly reports to Abstract Critical with cross postings here at artcritical.

The post Purism for Pragmatists: Stephen Westfall as Painter and Curator appeared first on artcritical.

Stealing a march on the Armory in an early attack of fair fever, Studio Zürcher launches Salon Zürcher Monday night, February 28, in a show that transforms their Bleecker Street premises into a showcase for seven downtown and Brooklyn galleries, Zürcher themselves being one of them.  In view of the size and range of fairs in the offing, this is perhaps a homeopathic dose of the overdose to come

The gallery has been chopped up into booths, handsomely fitted with what are rather sturdy looking temporary walls for a fair.  Zürcher hosts six renowned galleries from the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, some of whom were pioneers of their respective neighborhoods.  It is a way for the New York satellite of the prominent Paris gallery to acknowledge peers among what could be called the “indie” dealers of the offbeat locales.  The idea of proprietors Bernard and Gwenolee Zürcher is that harried visitors to New York for the fairs week will not have time, but will have the desire, to sample the wonders of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.

Zürcher’s guests are Feature, Inc.; The Journal Gallery; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery; the Proposition; Parker’s Box; and Audio Visual Arts.  The show opens Monday night, 5-8, and might well qualify as first off the mark in Armory Week.

Until March 6, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, 212 777 0790

The post Salon Zürcher: Showcasing the Indie Dealer Spirit appeared first on artcritical.