Louise Fishman, the preeminent American painter, died on July 26th at the age of 82 with Ingrid Nyeboe, her spouse, at her side.

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Fishman translated her life experiences into radiant, muscular works of art. The highly personal abstract style that she evolved was born of her physical power, intellect, and engagement with art history.

In her youth she had been a competitive athlete, which helped shape her gestural idiom. She was both the daughter and niece of practicing artists, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman (1916-2013) and Razel Kapustin (1908-1968) respectively, both of whom studied at The Barnes Foundation, then in Merion, Pennsylvania. Fishman was steeped in the works of such European modernists as Matisse, Cézanne, and Soutine through catalogues from the Barnes in her mother’s library.

Fishman loved music of all genres and could often be seen in a rapt state, sitting beside Ingrid, her beloved, at performances. She became a part of my life several years ago through our mutual friend, pianist Idith Meshulam, who performed music by my spouse, Laura Kaminsky at a concert at Tenri Cultural Institute in 2013.  Louise was deeply moved, and this became the catalyst for a few special gatherings and conversations that we treasure. Her absence is going to have a profound impact on those who treasured her alto speaking voice, radiant smile, and the depth of expression in her eyes that made everyone feel that they were clearly seen and heard.

Though in her mature paintings she employed tools such as drywall knives and trowels, Fishman’s command of the traditional materials and techniques of oil painting came through her academic training at the Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Fine Arts, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where in 1965 she completed her MFA before heading to New York City in her Nash Rambler.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she confronted gender discrimination in the art world, and further isolation as a lesbian. Working as a proofreader and editor, she painted at night and on the weekends and became involved in the feminist and queer activist movements. As if to destroy the influence of the male-dominated art power structure, she cut her canvases apart, reworking them into small sculptures that incorporated stitching, dying and weaving. She experimented with liquid rubber, inspired by Eva Hesse’s 1971 memorial exhibition in work at the School of Visual Arts.

In 1973, curator Marcia Tucker included Fishman’s work in the Whitney Biennial.  Exhilarated by this professional recognition, she was nevertheless ambivalent about this inclusion, when it was not extended to  other women artists in her life. Her Angry Women Paintings of that year were an expression of self-awareness, unleashed in a series of 30 text-based works, inscribed with the names of her heroines and friends in bold letters obscured by drips and slashes.

A 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín had a profound impact on Fishman who transformed her grief into a series titled Remembrance and Renewal. Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz into her paint in elegiac works that embodied her belief in painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of being.

For There She Was (1998), one of my favorite works, is a darkly shimmering painting whose title is taken from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color becomes another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet, and black shot through with cadmium red and burnt sienna, Fishman painted a vibrating field that evokes a Chinese garden at dusk. The artist was a collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, and farm stools. She was sustained by her Buddhist practice as well as the years that she spent walking the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse in upstate New York.

In the last few years, Fishman enjoyed long-overdue recognition, including publications and solo exhibitions at Vielmetter, Los Angeles; Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and Karma, New York, and retrospective exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College. We can expect more exhibitions and research to examine her unique contribution to the language of gestural abstraction, one that fuses, in her unique way, elements of tenderness, fury, and joy.

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This panel discussion, recorded the day after Alain Kirili received the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in his New York loft, was both a tribute to that achievement, shared with the artist at the time, and a tribute to a great friend of artcritical and a major force in contemporary sculpture marking his death earlier this week at the age of 74. The diverse job descriptions of our panelists reflect the important roles Kirili played in different spheres, as a patron of free jazz, as a scholar in the history of sculpture, as an artist and a friend. My guests are Michael Attis, musician; Maria Mitchell, dancer; Dorothea Rockburne, painter; and Barry Schwabsky, art critic, poet and editor. In addition to this video, artcritical salutes Alain Kirili with two archived posts brought to our front page: an interview with the artist from 2018 by Mary Jones (where he made an early public acknowledgement of his battle with leukemia) and a review of an exhibition of iron works from Rouen at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation from two years earlier.  DAVID COHEN

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The loudest, most boisterous among us often garner the attention. But sometimes it is the quiet, unseen, yet powerful, undercurrent that most profoundly shapes us.

Much of Marc Zimetbaum’s life was under the radar. But his impact on others, whether they realize it or not, was enormous. Some may remember him for his major role in the foundation of the New York Studio School, which for more than half a century has impacted the lives of so many. Others experienced his love for sculpture during the summers he taught at Chautauqua. Or perhaps you knew him and didn’t realize it, simply through the many years he worked as the third floor manager of that mecca for artists, Pearl Paint on Canal Street.

On December 20th, 2020, Marc Zimetbaum passed away peacefully in Eger Nursing Home from Covid-19. Fifty-seven years earlier Marc, then a junior at Pratt Institute, read a 1963 ArtNews article written by Mercedes Matter entitled “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools”.  Years later he wrote, in an unpublished manuscript:

We didn’t want a degree. We didn’t want grades. We only wanted to study with artists we respected, to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the studio, to have time to grow individually and stylistically without an instructor hovering over us, to be in a place where there was art talk, intelligent visiting faculty and lectures. We wanted to look long and hard at ourselves and our relationship with the history of art and the art world of today.

Along with his friend Chuck O’Connor, Marc met with Matter. Leading a group of disgruntled students, they decided to start an alternative kind of art school with no grades or distractions, only a powerful ambition for their work as artists. There were several meetings in the Chelsea apartment of Louis Finkelstein and Gretna Campbell. After talking with Mercedes they named it “The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture”. The Dean at Pratt said their new school wouldn’t last six months. In the Fall of 1964 the school opened. The original faculty included Matter, Charles Cajori, Sydney Geist, George Spaventa, and Meyer Schapiro. Their visiting faculty included Edwin Dickinson, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Earl Kerkam, and John Heliker. Many of us who know and love the Studio School may not know this, but without the faith and Herculean efforts of Marc and Chuck at the beginning, that article written by Mercedes would have remained no more than a critique in an art magazine.

Mercedes told me many times that she adored Marc, that he was a critical backbone keeping the school alive in its early years. Marc had been a straight A student in high school, third in his class of 500 at Weequahic High School (then ranked the top high school in New Jersey). He was elected Senior Class President and became Editor in Chief of their literary publication, Ergo. Marc’s mother wanted him to go to an Ivy League School. Instead he chose the struggles implicit in the life of an artist. He would have remained closely involved with the Studio School, but life had other plans. In his twenties he suffered the first of what were then called “nervous breakdowns”. These would periodically haunt him for the remainder of his life, interrupting his long stretches of stability. Despite that enormous obstacle, Marc always remained passionately optimistic, and repeatedly pulled himself back in unexpected ways. There is a lump in my throat as I write that there is a lesson in that for all of us. He never gave up.

Recovering from one of these episodes he became well known as the third floor manager at Pearl Paint for many years. Later he managed the Studio School’s art store, Manet On Eighth. For eighteen years, Marc worked as a sculpture instructor at The Art Lab School at Snug Harbor and at Wagner College he was most proud of a group he created for sculptors who shared the cost of a live model. They met on Saturday mornings and he always looked forward to working and talking about art with his friends there.

In the early years of the new millennium, I invited Marc to teach figure sculpture in the renowned Chautauqua Institution summer program. He taught there until 2014. He collaborated with other faculty and students, exhibited his work, and made work in his studio. He was proud to be a part of the 100th Anniversary Chautauqua School of Art exhibition at Denise Bibro Gallery in 2010. A mutual friend, the potter Polly Ann Martin, summarized the shared experience that many of us had with Marc in this latter phase of his life by saying In distant memory, it was a divine summer shared in collaboration with my throwing vessels and his endless passion for drawing on them with many a raku firing. Polly shared the image of a piece on which he drew and gave to her, going on to say simply I have never found myself tired of looking at this work as it has…become part of our home.

Zimetbaum was the recipient of a grant from the Rothko Foundation in 1974, and the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001. In 2005, at the suggestion of his dear friend Harriet Vicente, he applied and received a grant from The Harriet & Esteban Vicente Trust in order to write a book about his experience during the early years of The New York Studio School. Although left in manuscript form there are plans in place for its completion.

A biographical film entitled Marc Zimetbaum: Journey of An American Artist,  by Mark Ozz and Erick Emerick (available at Amazon)  offers a lesson to all of us who have faced what we may think are impassable obstacles. He was a living example revealing that it isn’t what happens to us that defines us. Instead, it is how we respond to what happens to us that defines who we become. A few years ago Marc wrote “I’ve been involved, all my artistic life, with the figure, with trying to create an image that grows out of perception, in an attempt to capture a particular model in a particular pose, without slavish preconceptions or reliance on anatomy that tends to dehumanize, rather than bring a figure to life.” Marc didn’t just bring a figure to life. For many of us he made our own lives richer through what he gave of himself.

Marc is survived by his sister, Lisa Max Zimetbaum and her husband Philip Popkin, his former wives Nancy Lewis, Eve LeBer and Janet Rispoli, his daughter Erica Zimetbaum and her husband Guy Johnson, his daughter Ruby Zimetbaum Oyola, his son Red LeBer, his niece Rebecca Royen, and granddaughters Sylvia Johnson and Sienna Oyola.

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When “ABC Art,” published in 1965 in Art in America, went the equivalent of viral, it launched the remarkable, decades-long, international career of art critic and art historian Barbara Rose. Rose, who was also a curator and filmmaker, died on December 25, 2020 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 and was active to the end. In that seminal article, she outlined clearly and forcefully the significance of the pared-down work by a coterie of little-known, lower Manhattan artists who would soon become Minimalist icons. Among them were Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Since that debut, Rose helped shape the discourse of some of the major art movements of the late 20th Century through a constant stream of exhibitions, publications and documentaries. While she concentrated on modern and contemporary art, she also explored European art history in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969). Fast forward to 2011, she became the first Morgan-Menil fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, resuming research on a project that linked the medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse with commentaries of Beatus of Liébana with the drawings of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Her first book, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967), highlighted artists who were not fully canonical: John Marin; Joseph Stella; Stanton Macdonald Wright; and she included Irene Rice Pereira among them, at a time when female artists were seldom—if ever—acknowledged in such surveys. Pivoting, Rose began to champion painters and painting in the 1970s, in defiance of Greenbergian formalism and the nearly universal declaration of the medium’s demise, transformed into an impassioned advocate. She curated American Painting: The Eighties, an exhibition of 41 artists at the Grey Art Gallery in 1979, in advance of the decade, the bravura a characteristic trait. It was both applauded and derided, also characteristic. But whatever criticism was lobbed at it, the essential premise, that painting was alive and kicking, was absolutely right. It was followed by a sequel, Abstract Paintings: The 90s at the Andre Emmerich gallery in 1992 as she reprised her commitment to painting many times over.

Other books by Rose included Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2006); and, more recently, Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium-USA-Italy (2016.) The latter accompanied the exhibition of the same name that she curated in Brussels, an exchange between artists from those three countries. In it, Rose laments our extremely unstable and changing times and our “increasingly inhuman, technologically driven, globally-networked world.” She defines the spaces of its reproduced imagery as postmodernist, borrowed from “photography, film and video.” To counter that, she said, we need a “rebirth of a pictorial space” which is “ambiguous and amorphous” created by a “visionary consciousness.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Rose attended Smith College, but completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1957. She studied art history at Columbia University, which was one of the top-ranked departments in the nation, with an illustrious faculty that included Julius Held, Meyer Shapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower. Among the friends she made then were filmmaker Michael Chapman, artists Carl Andre, Larry Rivers, and Stella—whom she married in London in 1961, when in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship to Spain. Her Spanish sojourn was the beginning of a long, requited affair with a country that became a second home to her, awarding her the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2010. Other awards include the College Art Association’s Distinguished Art Criticism Award in 1966 and 1969, as well as a Front Page Award in 1972. She did not complete her doctorate (contemporary art beckoned) but Columbia awarded her a Ph.D. in art history in 1984, in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

Rose wrote regularly for Studio International, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, New York magazine, Partisan Review, and others over the years, and was editor-in-chief at the Journal of Art, which she co-founded, covering a range of subjects that dealt with art, culture, and politics. As well, she wrote monographs on many, if not most, of the artists of the 1960s and 70s, a dazzling line-up that included Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence and Hunter College, among other institutions and was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine and the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC. She was curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—not without controversy—where she curated Miró in America (1982); Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit (1982); and a retrospective presciently, cannily dedicated to Lee Krasner (1983), too long eclipsed by her famous spouse. Rose’s films include the documentaries The New York School and American Art in the 1960s (1972). She collaborated with François de Menil and Philip Glass to make North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977).  Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978) was a solo effort, as was the film about the master printmaker, Tanya Grosman: A life with painters and poets (1979).

Rose was married four times to three husbands: art and music stars Stella and Jerry Leiber, and bookending them, economist Richard Du Boff, her first and last, who survives her, as do her children Rachel and Michael Stella and four grandchildren.

Rose was an art world fixture and provocateur. Criticism did not cramp her style or self-assurance.  She was a character, a force, a diva, quirky or brilliant or both, depending upon your perspective. She had panache, spirit, curiosity, and ambition, and disdained the increasing monetization and corporatization of the art world. She said, with typical pungency, in Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film, The Price of Everything, that she’d only been to one auction, and it was distressing to see “art on the auction block, like a piece of meat.”  Trenchant, outspoken, confounding, she could be formidable but also amiable. She could also be hilariously irreverent—and often salty. Let’s not rehabilitate her. She was bracingly, admirably who she was, and that was much more than enough.

The post A Character, A Force, A Diva: Barbara Rose, 1936 – 2020 appeared first on artcritical.

This morning a red fox crossed my path for the second time in two days, its rufous coat glowing in the pre-dawn light. Clocking its surroundings, the vixen swiftly disappeared into nearby woods. It felt like a visitation from Margaret Grimes: sensitive-eyed, brave, smart, unceasingly searching and like this fox, of abundant titian-colored hair.

A painter of the landscape, Grimes found her motifs in densely overgrown and ungroomed places. In all seasons she would take her paints and huge canvasses to carefully chosen, hard to access sites. Each completed painting was the result of many trips to the place where it was first begun. She needed to revisit the foliage, lighting and weather conditions with which she had started. Of course, she struggled with the inevitable changes she found, for that is what she loved about painting landscape. Inspired by the intricacy and linearity of briary thickets, choking vines, entwined scrub or clumps of broken sticks and bare branches, she painted attentively, as if deciphering an ancient vegetal code. She not an artist who favored the picturesque.

Landscape was a genre that Margaret never stopped thinking about. In one of her lectures, she touched on what she was after. “In art school, we were taught to look at nature as if we were seeing it for the first time. Now we look at it as if we were seeing it for the last time, hence the need to meticulously observe.” Like her mentor Neil Welliver, she understood that we humans are devouring our world, especially the overgrown, undomesticated places that support the rebirth of both flora and fauna.

Margaret Whitehurst Grimes was born in New Bern, North Carolina on June 5, 1943 and died in the Bronx, October 9, 2020. Growing up in central Michigan, her parents, Margaret W. Grimes and Alan P. Grimes, were both writers and professors at Michigan State University. As a child, her commitment to art was already apparent, and she would often go without school lunch in order to save money for art supplies. In 1964, she married painter and professor John Wallace who predeceased her in 2011. Margaret graduated in 1975 from Governors State University in Illinois earning BA and MA degrees. Most importantly, in 1976 she met Alice Neel at Notre Dame’s Women Artists-in-Residence Program. Neel’s fierce commitment to both art and politics were to prove a decisive inspiration for her. She then received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 where she studied with Rudy Burkhardt, Paul Georges and Welliver.

Soon after graduating, Grimes began her long association with the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City which featured her well-received one-person exhibition of 2017, The Secret Life of Trees. Other recent exhibitions include a 2018 solo show at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. In 2019 several of her works were included in the Invitational Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters earning her the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award. A painting from that show is now in the collection of the Lyman Allen Museum in New London, Connecticut. In 2013 Margaret Grimes: A Retrospective was held at the Gallery of Western Connecticut State University. In an artcritical review entitled The Connective Sublime: A Retrospective for Margaret Grimes, Jennifer Samet wrote:

Margaret Grimes’ paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest. And although Grimes depicts trees, her work also suggests technology. She paints the hard drive, the motherboard of nature.

A beloved, inspiring teacher and lecturer, Grimes initiated WestConn’s Masters of Fine Art program with her husband. It was Margaret’s desire to create a serious, challenging graduate school for students who were not able to enter more well-known MFA programs. As Program Coordinator there, she was unceasing in her efforts to give both grads and undergrads the very best art education. A driving force, she fought to get better studio spaces and enough funding to bring in well-known artists and lecturers. In 1990 she was awarded the Henry Barnard Foundation’s Distinguished Lectureship, and in 1992 she received lifetime status as a Connecticut State University Professor and the title of Distinguished Professor. A tireless teacher and mentor, her legacy continues through the achievements of those many young artists she so believed in.

In 2013 Grimes retired from WestConn as Distinguished Professor Emerita. After years of intense juggling of academic and art careers, she could, at last, give her studio the focus she felt it deserved, and her art subsequently soared in both scale and achievement. The paintings and drawings of the last seven years were, arguably, among her finest. These large-scale landscapes fulfilled her ambition to reveal an untamed world; dark, forested, richly textured, ornate, uncultivated and secretive. Dedicated to both the history and practice of landscape painting, Grimes understood that not everyone shared her interest. She often said that the genre of landscape, which depicts a world beyond our reach and scope, can be hard for some to embrace.

Margaret Grimes loved the wild places. She walked amongst them, painted there, and like her subject, lived fully and strongly. She has passed leaving loving friends, a daughter and a son, the musician Carolyn Wallace and retired software engineer Bernard Hulce, among other family members. Those who knew her will miss her stimulating company and reflect on our never dull nor ordinary times with her. While we can no longer raise another glass of Pinot Grigio with Margaret, we can still revel in her beautiful, mysterious, vibrant artworks, gifts for us now and for all those who will follow.

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Like Scheherazade, Matt Freedman kept death at bay for a thousand and one nights, with one story after another. Slowly weakened by illness, he soldiered on with his rambling, brilliant Endless Broken Time performances with percussionist Tim Spelios, the most lasting of his innumerable collaborations, until a few months ago. In the final week of his life he continued to draw a seat-of-the-pants existential comic strip with daily installments on Instagram. In the last few panels, a bear-fish realizes he’s all alone in a watery void, floats on his back and contemplates the constellations in the night sky, then closes his eyes and sinks into the abyss. Yet the protagonist, now underwater, finds that he sees new constellations in the form of his old friends (and to be sure, Matt had as many friends as there are stars). A beautiful ending, except keep in mind that Matt would have had no trouble inventing his way out of that predicament–– while waggishly puncturing any sentiment–– had he been able to draw the next endlessly broken panel. DAVID BRODY

Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal

Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

The post Cancer, Chemo, Comedy: David Brody on Matt Freedman’s Cancer Treatment Journal appeared first on artcritical.

I met Wolf Kahn in 2011, when beginning a catalog essay for a show of his work. It was the among the first essays I had ever been asked to write. I was apprehensive – particularly as to whether I would be able to add much to the conversation surrounding such a well-known, and for so many viewers across the country, beloved painter of iconic American scenes.

Needless to say for anyone who knew the artist personally, he was warm, gracious and entirely generous with this unknown writer throughout the process. Talkative and funny, he was also gentlemanly, and would pause often to ask and listen. He had that remarkably bright-eyed expression I have come to recognize in artists of all kinds who have spent their life involved in pursuit of an all-engaging and totally vitality-giving subject. The years Kahn had invested in thoughtful observation and creation had lent to his natural gaze a quality of wise attention, suggestive of a rich history of looking and thinking shaping each of his works. The short essay I wrote was very much influenced by this singular impression of an artist who will be sorely missed. CHRISTINA KEE

Wolf Kahn’s recent paintings are celebratory scenes of a familiar outdoor America: quiet Maine coves, dense Vermont forests, rural views marked by wooden barns and slowly moving rivers. They are powerful statements of light and color, in which pale birch trees are made to stand out, white-hot, against flame-crimson grounds, and ponds’ still surfaces reflect the evening sky in deep lavender tones. Kahn has been a prolific painter for over 60 years, and his works collectively convey a particular vision of a countryside in countless modes: quiet, stormy, mysterious and dazzling. The appeal of Kahn’s work is far-reaching and often immediate, so directly do his approachable scenes and deft color combinations lend themselves to recognition, contemplation and straightforward optical pleasure.

The undeniably “lovely” quality of Kahn’s paintings is real and intrinsic to the works’ subject matter. One senses, however, that the translation of nature’s beauty is not the only aim of these paintings, and prolonged viewing reveals that it is certainly not the central effect. It can be easy to forget, when viewing Kahn’s convincingly vivid hues, that the world does not naturally present itself in bands of vermillion and scumbles of silvery gray — that his paintings are the result of countless pictorial decisions, some lithely intuitive, others fought for and deliberate. Central to Kahn’s work is the process of perception and invention, the slow conversion of sight and thought, in color and form, through time. An equally important aspect of Kahn’s paintings is that the density of experience they convey has itself been visibly shaped by practical engagement with one of the most active periods in American painting. Just as abbreviations are linked to larger place names and single words are inseparable from their definitions, the aesthetic of Kahn’s work is bound to a uniquely individual response to the last half-century conversation about the nature, problems and possibilities of the painted form. The new paintings gathered here continue to address elemental questions of space, shape and color with rigor and understated sophistication. They are at once ambitious, compelling and complex.

This past year, Kahn has worked primarily from landscapes in the Vermont area, and this show gathers works of four distinct views: a forest, a grove, a shed in the woods and a pond surrounded by reeds and hills. From these few motifs, Kahn has created a spectacular range of variation, in which each painting stands out in striking contrast to the next. The formal diversity generated from the economy of subjects makes it clear that, beyond the pleasing quality of the scenes, the real drama here is, at root, pictorial. Several of the new works depict, for example, a grouping of spring-leaved trees at the edge of a forest. In Pink, Yellow, Green (2010), the bright new foliage appears to play and shift against an improbable, but inviting, depth of soft alizarin. In Light Green Landscape (2009), the same figure-like trees are stacked in tones modulating from green to gray in a composition that appears congregational, even, it might be said, ascensional in nature, with one glittering shade leading upward to the next. It is a pattern that echoes the growth of trees themselves, silently stretching toward sunlight. Throughout this new body of work, we see similar elegant transformations of the subject – intimations of movement and metaphor made through seemingly simple means – in what are perhaps among the artist’s most successful paintings to date. They mark a significant achievement in what has been a truly remarkable career.

Having arrived in America in 1940 at the age of 13 from war-struck Germany, Kahn spent his teenage years in New Jersey and New York. He painted at 19 as a student at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art. Kahn’s work gained early critical attention – he was included in New Provincetown ’47, curated by Clement Greenberg, then an emerging voice, and his first solo show in 1953 was reviewed by both Dore Ashton and Fairfield Porter. His friends, peers and teachers over the next formative decades included Larry Rivers, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Louis Finkelstein, Milton Avery and the renowned art historian Meyer Schapiro. One need only review a few dates to envision the cultural milieu in which Kahn was becoming a serious painter: In 1950, Pollock had just completed his major drip works, and de Kooning was beginning his Women series; in 1952 Harold Rosenberg published his essay “The American Action Painters,” and Greenberg’s “American-Type Painting” came out in 1955. At the risk of nostalgic simplification, it can be imagined that during these crucial years artists’ everyday conversations would turn to key questions of surface and depth, formalism vs. expressionism, and the on-again/off-again relationship of figuration to abstraction.

Wolf Kahn’s responses to these questions, as expressed in his own writings and interviews, suggest those of a veteran of countless debates: one who has, after a long intellectual trajectory, allowed himself to quietly arrive at some conclusions. One is struck, when meeting the artist, by a certain cadence of clarity that informs his speech. Despite the casual, often funny, tone of Kahn’s conversation, his words are chosen with uncommon care, and key issues are often ingeniously illustrated with anecdote. In a travel memoir, Kahn writes of an exchange that once took place when he watched Fairfield Porter painting a landscape in Penobscot Bay:

“I was watching him paint a view of the Island’s “little harbor” – just a dock sticking out into deep water. He had indicated the farther islands, the water, the sky and the dock. In the foreground he painted a small gas tank and the pipes leading to it. “Fairfield,” I said, “why don’t you leave out the tank and the plumbing?” He turned to me angrily, “You don’t understand what I do at all when you speak like that. I’m not some esthetician who censors the landscape – I’m painting my field of vision. How do I know whether the stuff you don’t like isn’t what holds the whole thing together?” I respect this attitude, and to a point I share it, but it seems too rigid to apply consistently. I certainly would have kept the gas tank out.”[1] Aside from the admittedly delightful image of Kahn and Porter’s dockside bickering, the question the story raises is an important one: In the three-part relationship of subject/artist/painting, what are the artist’s obligations to the scene represented? Kahn’s conclusion is also distinctly characteristic of his approach – namely, that beyond all theory, the demands of the painting are paramount.It is an approach that, in Kahn’s case, can be traced to some of his earliest formal training as a student in the Hans Hofmann School. Much has been written about Kahn’s relationship to Hans Hofmann, in part because his respected teacher’s approach to painting offers a key to understanding some of the most elusive – and one could say most intrinsic – qualities of Kahn’s work. In his teaching and writing, Hofmann set out a philosophy for the appreciation and creation of the plastic arts based on a clear distinction between physical and pictorial realities, delving into the mysterious nature of the latter. Among the key tenets of Hofmann’s teaching is that the two-dimensional surface of the painting or drawing is governed by a system of forces that are purely visual in nature, and which can, given the intention of the artist, be sparked into a state of pictorial dynamism. Hofmann lays out the idea as follows: “Space must be vital and active – a force-impelled pictorial space, presented as a spiritual and unified entity, with a life of its own.”[2] The authentic painting, then, in Hofmann’s view, is nothing less than “living,” and it is by this criterion that Kahn’s work is perhaps most successful.

Among the most important elements in the construction of Kahn’s vital compositions is the artist’s palpable engagement with the spatial possibilities of the painted surface. In these new works, we get a clear sense of the artist’s seasoned awareness of just how expansive the world of the canvas can be. It is useful to remember that Kahn would have been taught that the relevant space of a painting is neither actual in the sense of the measurable surface area, nor illusory, referring to a perspectival appearance of depth, but rather plastic, meaning that it is able, through elements such as line, shape color and proportion, to convey a specific spatial scenario through perceptions sparked in viewing.

Destroyed Woodland (2009) is a remarkable image of a forest’s visual patterns caught in a state of rhythmic disarray, and it offers a clue to Kahn’s spatial approach. Central to the canvas is a tangle of forms blocked in a succession of live-wire brush strokes that depicts a mass of damaged trees. The broken verticals of the fallen trunks become strong diagonals in an otherwise tectonic environment, pressing firmly against the top and sides of the rectangle, leading the eye in a fast-paced track around the canvas. One trunk extends from the bottom left of the painting, starting against the picture plane, then traveling toward the upper right of the canvas and into the recessive plane of soft pink sky. Another trunk forms a hard-angled dash through the deep center of the image, finishing in delicate strokes at the periphery. A third smaller diagonal line anchors the right of the canvas, setting up countless “V” formations in relation to the other trees. The linear components of this work, initially almost graphic in appearance, open through the process of viewing to a deep space where the viewer’s gaze might linger indefinitely.

Above all, Kahn’s works operate dynamically through a highly original use of color. Working from pastel drawings done on-site, Kahn translates the natural palette of a given scene into highly charged counterparts of hue and tone. Kahn intuitively creates powerful color combinations that are, almost uncannily, evocative of specific times, places and moods. It is difficult to say, for example, why the violet expanse of Upper Potomac (2011), an extreme form of purple by any chromatic standard, so convincingly conveys the density of forested distance. It is here set off in opposition to a clump of grass in the lower-right and a mildly outrageous bit of lemon yellow on the left. It is through color that Kahn takes his greatest risks as a painter, creates his strongest points of visual tension and conjures his greatest rewards. Kahn’s relationship to color, even to the pigments themselves, is an intimate one – so directly does he identify with their specific suggestive powers. “Yellow,” he has said, “is the color of buttercups — and of warning signals,” tidily summing up the spectrum of emotional associations possible within variations of one hue.

Kahn’s use of color is always evolving. He noted, for example, during a recent studio visit that he had only recently begun to understand new potential in the use of black. This development is evidenced in Clearing on the West (2010), which, with its hulking and ominous forms, is a refutation of the misguided impression that Kahn’s work is always bucolic in feel. The use of black is bolder still in Order in Disorder (2010), in which the pale presence of a single trunk stands out in soft radiance against the inky darks of the undergrowth shadow. In a masterful transition from light to dark, Kahn here counterintuitively balances the prominence of the white tree in the midground with a recessive shadow in the foreground, setting up the sense of ebb and flow of sunlight and shade within an always regenerating forest.

Given the strengths of the abstract means used in Kahn’s work, one may ask why the artist chose not to follow the logic of this pictorial approach through to a conclusion of total abstraction. Kahn’s against-the-grain decision to work from the landscape is reminiscent of decisions of other artists who eschewed abstraction – Picasso’s insistence on retaining a figurative reference throughout his experimentation comes to mind, for example. In Kahn’s case, however, the decision has been one of faithfulness not just to representation, but to perception. Along with a handful of peers who felt that “the fun was in taking an object in nature and trying to make a painting out of it,”[3] Kahn’s aim was to realize works in direct connection to the world. Just as the wider cultural move toward abstraction was associated with systems of philosophical and even spiritual beliefs, Kahn’s commitment to perception arises from similar concerns, arriving, however, at different answers to similar questions.

Louis Finkelstein notes the role of landscape as Kahn’s subject of choice at that time: “As Kahn and his colleagues looked for an art grounded in direct experience, landscape beckoned on two counts. First, it represented a common experience that needed no explanation, and secondly, it is inherently accommodating to a free, spontaneous development.”[4]

The element of shared experience is central to Kahn’s work. He expresses wariness about the conception of a painting as representing sort of a grand, expressive gesture of the artist’s internal state. This hesitation makes sense in relation to his own work, which acts more as a meeting point between the real world and his own subjective experience. During a recent lecture, when a questioner asked why Kahn had not once mentioned his work in relation to his “self,” he replied simply, after some reflection, that in his opinion, “‘self’ is a dingy word.” A word inadequate, perhaps, to Kahn’s notion of human experience as encompassing a great deal of that which is “not-I” in addition to the “I.”

Kahn’s recent paintings serve as valuable reminders of one of Hofmann’s more optimistic phrases: “Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.” The new works are valuable as exuberant records of a painter’s curiosity, humility and wonder in the face of the natural world. They serve also as a hard-won, perennially relevant model of perceptual painting – one engaged both with the inner workings of the painted form, and the beauty and interest of our common experience.

1. Kahn, Wolf. Wolf Kahn’s America. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003) 50.

2. Hofmann, Hans. “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts”, taken here from Hans Hofmann. ed. James Yohe. (New York: Rizzoli, 2002) 46.

3. Finkelstein, Louis. “The Development of Wolf Kahn’s Painting Language”. Taken here from Wolf Kahn, ed. Justin Spring. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1996) 101.
4. Ibid., 100.

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The vibrant pulse of  Mexico City’s cultural renaissance didn’t miss a beat during La Semana de Arte (Art Week) (February 4-9, 2020), tenaciously ticking throughout the city from the mega blockbuster Zona Maco fair to the edgier Feria de Arte Material, and onto neighborhood streets enlivened by a heady stream of  exhibitions. Besides the fairs, Mexico City’s new-millenial status as an international art hub was evident in the growing community of young expat artists and gallerists drawn to  warm sunshine, an inexpensive lifestyle and, most important, an openness to diversity. Add to this the fluid and bustling mix of international galleries with emerging and well-established Mexican venues and you have a juggernaut; a brisk global marketplace enticing collectors and art aficionados of every stripe.

The annual Material Art Fair, in particular, allows one to view all these elements afloat in a cultural petri dish of sorts; to watch an evolving art organism spread its tentacles from this indigenous landscape to New York, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Tokyo and beyond. This cultural mashup was much on display in an eccentric performance that took place on the  sun-drenched  Plaza de La República. Paloma (2020), by Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu (b.1985), in collaboration with her American husband, musician Kyp Malone and Mexican designer Barbara Sánchez-Kane, was organized by arts performer and producer Michelangelo Miccolis.  It featured a  bicycle-propelled figure of a giant paloma, a bird-symbol of peace made with  Acapulco chairs and lilies, set against the  Monument to the Revolution. Malone’s amorphous instrumental accompaniment to the plaintive refrains of Mexican singer  Luis Pablo, spirited this fantasy dove from the summit of the plaza down to the Frontón Mexico, the Material exhibition space. Lemsalu and Sánchez-Kane, dressed in lavender suits embellished with plastic eggs, followed behind strewing lily petals towards an appreciative crowd.

Hoping to create a niche for lesser known Latin and international artists, Brett Schultz, Creative Director of the Material Fair, and his current partners, Isa Castilla and Rodrigo Feliz, have grown the shoestring project begun 2014. It took guts to time this exhibition to run simultaneously with Zona Maco and  insist on affordability. But so was it great marketing strategy to welcome international well-recognized  gallerists to participate, giving them a venue for their own emerging artists that large numbers of collectors were unlikely to otherwise see.

And no other fair looks like Material. Counter to the  generic-fair labyrinth of white cubes, Material occupies the Frontón México, an Art Deco jai alai arena imaginatively reconfigured to echo street markets, a procession of open stalls  where vendors hawk everything from vibrant embroidered wearables to car parts. Three levels of scaffolding— a series of  Piranesi-like catwalks, ramps and stairs— support exhibition booths flanking narrow walkways around the perimeter of each floor. These simultaneously  open and intimate spaces foster easy hands-on camaraderie, something  reflected in the exhibition’s focus on the physical connection between the artist and the art object. Hence the Material title.

This casual and playful ambiance encourages easy visual conversations between the emerging and the arrived. For example, textile artists Cecy Gómez (b.1992) and Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) recall their ethnic roots as ancient craft and modernist art respectively. Muy Gallery,  a recently formed initiative promoting the works of  Native artists, represents Gómez who preserves the weaving traditions and mythologies of her Tsotsil-Mayan community in a direct, naive style. Nevertheless, her unique fabric works —made on cloth from traditional skirts worn by indigenous women, and with natural plant dyes—convey contemporary feminist and ecological themes. Works by French artist Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) represented by the well-established gallery, OMR,  are by contrast elegantly conceived in the visual language of early modern abstraction. For his enormous tapestry, Untitled (2020), he hand-dyed burrs of cotton mops, glued them to vinyl and combined them with local  fabric finds to create imagery steeped in Yoruba  ritual and Nigerian folklore.

Mexico-based galleries accounted for twenty-five percent of the exhibitors. Other stand-outs among these venues included LuLu gallery, a small gem co-founded by Chris Sharp who selected a series of gorgeous paintings by Argentine-born artist Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978). De Paoli’s small luminous canvases consist of sensuous, erotic and eerie abstract figures recalling early modern isms, but dwell in a surreal world of their own. Stepping from here into the installation by Irak Morales (b.1981) crossed the line between sensual eroticism and porn. Represented by Neri/Barranco, a Mexican project billing itself as a “nomadic gallery with no physical space,” Morales’s work comments on pulp porn as, he said, “a young Mexican man’s source of sexual information in the 60’s.” His multi-media installation, “Deme 3×5, con tode y pallevar!!!” (2020) included cut-outs  from vintage pornographic  comic books, some shaped as pork-chops suspended from the ceiling as mobiles, others plastic-wrapped around  Mezcal  bottles, or collaged within the frames of religious altarpieces.

Political commentary was most notable in an interactive project by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (b.1974) at Labor gallery, known for controversial art. Visitors to his installation, Nothing But the Truth (2020), were invited  to write down a lie in an open notebook. Throughout each fair day these lies were compiled, printed as giant posters in a  variety of typographies, and plastered to every inch of exhibition wall. Writ large lies, little and grandiose, merged and, like our daily confrontations with distorted social and network media news, they read as new alternative truths.

Gabriel Orozco’s (b.1962) work, Tracing Money (2020) at the internationally  well-established gallery Kurimanzutto politicizes the graphic form and symbolism of money.  Orozco made prints from layered banknotes— double exposed transparencies merging the currency images of different nations into single blurred composites. Along with drawings, this extensive installation contrasts paper bills as historical and cultural symbols; their ephemeral qualities disturbingly underscoring the existential fluidity of money as a global vehicle of power.

Exhibiting international galeries represented works by Mexican artists and those from their own countries.  New York’s Thierry Goldberg Gallery  featured paintings by Mexican artist Maria Fragoso (b.1995) and included a  triptych featuring an extended family crowded around a typical Mexican dining room, La Peor es Nada (The Worst is Nothing) (2017), unmistakably alludes to the Last Supper. In it Fragoso meshes a comical depiction of loving and dysfunctional family life with the tradition  of Mexican mural painting.The pull of one’s culture is also embedded in works by the team of Lina Mazenett (b.1989)  and David Quiroga (b.1985), Colombian artists represented at Instituto de Visión in Bogatá, a gallery that seeks to trace the Mexican roots of conceptual thinking in Latin America. The artists’ jewel-like reliefs replicating Aztec designs are made of green circuit boards mimicking the brilliant patina of fine jade.

Yngvild Saeter (b.1986), the solo artist featured at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, makes much scarier outsized jewelry-inspired sculptures from motorcycle parts that she reconstructs, paints and embellishes with feathers, chains, metal spikes and metal rivets. Saeter says these works relate to the euphoric life/death moment she experienced during brain surgery when she momentarily “died,” then revived. She recalls that mystical lapse as a vision in which she was surrounded by motorcycles. Thus did the  biker cult fuel her art: otherworldly helmets, masks, breast plates and shields, the regalia of punk or gothic vampires, perhaps, but like the artist’s strange ordeal, as alluring as they are terrifying.

Milan-based gallery Clima featured the startling work of Italian artist Matteo Nasini (b. 1976) who also channels the dream world, but  from a clinical perspective. His installation of sculpture and tapestry sources data from encephalograms taken while a subject is dreaming. Using a variety of hi-tech software he translates these data into sound, tapestry, and porcelain sculpture using a 3D printing process. Nasini’s intriguing practice eerily suggests that our thoughts have a hidden structural armature, that they are not as ephemeral as we think, and that we can somehow render them immortal as sculptural form. If this boggled your mind, and if you needed a break from cerebrally processing the riotous visual party of this art fair, you would happily aim for  Aria McManus’s (b.1989) Relieviation Works (2017). McManus, an artist and product designer, created an installation for Los Angeles-based gallery AA/LA: a seemingly mundane office environment with hidden healing mechanisms including  a calendar with deliciously edible date pages, and an illuminated name plate radiating the physical and mental nourishment of sunshine.

Coincidentally,  the current Whitney Museum exhibition in New York, Vida Américana, which explores the  impact of  Mexican muralists — Clemente, Orozco and Riviera—on American art, bows to both Mexico City’s vibrant art moment and the art historical importance of its cultural heritage. But it’s perhaps more important that the city is today a magnet for contemporary art and artists, not because of cheap space, sunny days, and hungry collectors, but because of the rationale driving such efforts as the Fiera de Arte Material: from its architecture to its openess to diversity, it represents a metaphoric ideal for a much needed world without walls.

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“It’s strange, we never changed ourselves….we are still doing exactly what we always were.” Claude Lalanne played her own bafflement with pitch perfect innocence; for how had this bohemian Surrealist, an artisanal craftswoman in her Chinese peasant jacket, horny-handed everyday metalworker, gardener and cook become a fabulously wealthy fashion icon?

For at her death aged 93 Lalanne was suspiciously close to being a celebrity, certainly a point-of-reference for anyone who wanted to prove their own status within that modish zone where fine art, design and haute couture mingle. “Claude”, her first name alone was a code word to a certain world, like using just ‘Jacob’ rather than Rothschild, proof of membership.

But even with all their recent retrospectives and books Les Lalanne, Claude and her husband the late François-Xavier, still remained a shared cult, clandestine secret. Famous yes, but only amongst the right people, their furniture, sculpture and jewelry traded and treasured amongst an international élite, the last exhausted fumes of the jet set, final crust of le gratin.

The paradox was that for decades nobody had been willing to take Les Lalanne seriously within the contemporary art circuit and yet their credentials were nonpareil; as young and poor artists at the fabled Impasse Ronsin they were friends of not only Brancusi but also such Surrealists as Ernst, William Copley and Dalí, with whom Claude collaborated. as well as an entire generation of emerging avant gardists from Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle to Jimmy Metcalf and Larry Rivers, even cooking steaks on their studio stove for Yves Klein.

If the Impasse Ronsin was the founding myth of the Lalanne cult their compound at Ury, outside Fontainebleau was where we devout disciples had flocked for decades, a simple farmhouse in the simplest of villages where behind a long stone wall Claude and François-Xavier maintained separate studios and an enviable communal existence. Having moved here at the prompting of Tinguely there was no shortage of local artist friends – Marcel and Teeny Duchamp and Jackie Matisse – nor adjacent grandeur whether de Ganay or Noailles, and the house soon became famous for its parties, a veritable flotilla of limos heading south from Paris in the night.

Les Lalanne were the ultimate exemplars of Picasso’s dictum to live as a poor man with lots of money, the modesty of their world being a lesson in the taste that wealth alone can never purchase, whitewashed walls, wonderful art, warm worn furniture and an entirely personal goût impossible to replicate. An anonymous wooden door opened up to this enchanted private domain, an alligator acrawling, a baboon standing guard in the courtyard, a little gate leading to an enfilade of gardens, each wilder than the last and inhabited by a menagerie of sculpted beasts and benches, cast flora and patinated fauna.

Since the death of François-Xavier in 2008 Claude had enjoyed a full decade in which to really blossom and come into her own, increasingly recognized as just as creative, inventive and industrious as her late husband and indeed perhaps the more ambitious and worldlier of the two, her energy and acumen seemingly redoubled as she hit her eighties.

This ferocious work ethic, heading into her atelier no sooner than she had risen to spend the day solving the practical problems of her latest chair, necklace, chandelier or staircase, was the core of her personality. But it was mitigated by a most honest and open hospitality, this perfect hostess with her home-grown fruit and vegetables and suitably good bottle of Bordeaux, her posy of garden flowers, every meal culminating with her own justifiably famous tarte tatin.

Some could find her altogether ‘formidable’ for she suffered fools badly and was easily wearied by the devious demands of photographers and hagiographers, capable of turning frosty at the slightest perceived slight, her full froideur being a winter unto itself and impossible to thaw by mere flattery alone. It was also probably true that she preferred male company, often homosexual and of deliciously old-fashioned bitchiness and took the slightest sadistic delight in teasing and tweaking, promoting and demoting, those within her private court.

Despite her petite presence Claude was a genuinely strong woman, physically, emotionally and practically and her beauty, still notable even in old age, was of another era. Likewise, her manner of speaking should really have been preserved like a rare threatened species, a mellifluous, high-pitched sing-song with an echo of vanished aristocratic diction, a voice designed for the telling of naughty stories and juiciest gossip, irresistible in its intimacy, “et alors, mes chéris…”

A highly attractive woman it was hardly surprising Claude had gathered a considerable fan club around the world for whom any invitation to Ury was achievement in itself. And her uniquely confident style, cowboy boots and Mao tunics, men’s white shirts with paint brushes in the hair, had always proved irresistible to her many friends in high fashion from Christian Dior lui-même to young ‘Karl’, her lifelong soulmate St Laurent and an entire subsequent generation of designers, from Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs to Maria Grazia Chiuri.

After lunch Claude would retire to her white sofa where with Texan heels crossed high, cigarette at a jaunty angle and devoted dog she would trawl for the latest tittle-tattle, speed dialing one of her infinitely indiscrete friends whilst toying with a precious broach or cuff link, lifting it towards one with a teasing twinkle, “do you think you might like…?”

One of my last memories of Claude was of her digging wild cyclamen from her garden to give me, she herself wielding the spade with a determination that belied her ninety something years, a clod of black sod with the prettiest white and purple flowers, costing nothing yet meaning everything. For surely it was a central metaphor of her personality that she took the natural, the soft and yielding, leaves, branches, flowers, and by a process of galvanization made them hard, strong and inflexible, her own admixture of the gracious and indomitable.

“Why not have this?” she might say and the generosity was not in the market value of the piece pressed upon one but in the initial generosity with which Claude had made it, the inherent act of ‘offering’ which is the essence of all art making, each artist’s ‘gift’ in every sense and one here accepted and acknowledged with suitable gratitude and admiration, and now, grief.

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There is something especially fitting in acknowledging Alain Kirili at the Vision Festival. (Drummer Andrew Cyrille is the musical awardee in the 24th annual event.) While there is too much talk of so-called “artist’s artists”, the world can always use a musician’s artist. Understand that Kirili is 100% a sculptor. But his work is, at this stage, almost impossible to conceive divorced from music, so intimately connected is music with his modus operandi in the plastic arts. Music is no mere “violon d’Ingres” in Kirili’s case. First thing to state: Kirili himself is not a musician, unless one counts the now silent rhythmic hammering of metal evident along the surfaces of his sculpted lines and forms as some kind of frozen music. But one can “make” music by invitation, and Kirili and his wife and fellow artist Ariane Lopez-Huici have turned their Tribeca loft into a legendary venue for new music over the last four decades. Predominantly devoted to free improvisation, the musical idiom of Visions Festival, Kirili’s guests are not just performers but truly collaborators. Music is made in direct response to the visual art with which it is juxtaposed.

For years this was Kirili’s own work, but true to the ever expanding field of his artistic generosity, more recently guest artists have been invited to install a work for the occasion. Fellow visual artists showcased in this way with newfound musical peers have included Laura Newman, Thomas Nozkowski, Jeanne Silverthorne and Christopher Wool. Whenever he has been given a museum exhibition – which is often, especially in Europe – Kirili has made sure that music and dance play a crucial role in programing.  But the kinship to music runs more deeply than any of this could suggest. The lesson of free jazz for Kirili the sculptor (or, perhaps, not so much lesson as enduring point of commonality) is the example, ubiquitous amongst music-makers but in recent centuries an increasing rarity among painters and sculptors, of symbiosis. That collaborations and dialogues and interchanges are greater than the sum of the individual artists participating. Whether it is his interactions with traditional smiths and forgers in rural settings away from the usual artistic centers of New York or Paris, or his dialogues across time with historic figures like Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, David Smith and Julio Gonzalez, each of whom has been the shared focus of a museum exhibition, or indeed his collaborations with musicians and dancers, the outcomes are by their nature open-ended. The events and exhibitions are truly jam sessions, the sparks beyond predictability. Everything his makes is jazz.

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