For me, MoMA is the art museum. The Frick may have the near perfect historical collection. Certainly, the Met has everything, which is why I love getting lost there. And the Guggenheim and Whitney are always worth visiting, as, sometimes, is the New Museum. But MoMA is our place, it’s the museum that formed and forms the canon in modernism and whatever comes next. That’s why I trace my own Bildungsroman by remembering the changing arrangements of the permanent collection, and recalling conversations I had about them: I once met up with the late Linda Nochlin there, who told a funny story about Willem de Kooning’s female nudes. And I met T.J. Clark in the exhibition comparing the paintings Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.  I suspect that I’m not the only person who responds to the museum like this, with ample happy personal memories.

Just as only someone you care deeply about inspires the most passionate complaints, so this museum inspires deeply personal critical responses. I am aware, then, that its relationship to Abstract Expressionism, now well represented in the permanent collection, was for a long time problematic. And I am old enough to remember when it looked like there would be endless Frank Stella retrospectives. But when I recall such great shows as “Inventing Abstraction, 1920-1925” (2013) or “Adrian Piper A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” (2018), that turned my head around. Simularly, when I recollect the amazingly ambitious rehang just before the closing last year, the first draft of a revolutionary contemporary world art history, all my complaints fade away. The museum is often uncomfortably overcrowded. I can recall when you could be nearly alone with Guernica. But those present crowds are a measure of the success of we educators.

The problem right now facing MoMA is what Hegelian Marxists call a contradiction. Our leftist art world depends upon a support system provided by the super rich, many of them Republicans, who name galleries and donate masterpieces. In practice sometimes the art world closes its eyes, and takes the money but not the politics. So far as I know, no one is picketing the Frick, though how Henry Clay Frick earned his money is dismaying to the moralist. And we may regret some actions of the Rockefellers. It would be worthwhile, I think, to chart the sources of the wealth of all the MoMA trustees. But institutions often accept old money whilst having problems with the new money of a Leon Black or a Steve Cohen. The grandfather made the money, and so the children could become philanthropists: Henry James and Louis Auchincloss have told that story. If you care about posthumous opinion, a magnificent art collection looks better than a yacht or country estate. Nowadays, however, no doubt the grand collectors also have yachts and estates.

Like the duc de Saint Simon, who, as Marcel Proust explains, had a snobbish preference for the old nobility rather than those ennobled only under Louis XII, many think that old money is better than new wealth. And yet, people who call for reparations for slavery or for Native Americans, are not satisfied to be told that those moral miscarriages took place long ago. And a realist might argue that since we’re stuck with the rich, let’s at least get some benefit from their money by asking up their offers to support our museums. At any rate, in the present division of labor, the function of the trustees is to raise the money while scholars do the theorizing. (And the staff does the work.) This is  why neither Meyer Schapiro nor Clement Greenberg were trustees of MoMA.

How would this museum finance itself if it had to do without the uber rich? It would be admirable to display more female, Black , and Asian-American artists. But that’s already starting to happen, at least in part. Could MoMA be seriously downscaled, perhaps, like the New Museum when it was on Broadway before it constructed its expensive building on the Bowery? Once I asked a MidWestern museum director if he wanted to have free admissions.. A good idea he said, but here’s what I need, and he quoted the exact grant required. Change is requires a serious chunk of change.

Twenty years ago as a Getty Scholar, I started to write my book on the art museum, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006). Thanks to J. Paul Getty’s oil dealings in Saudi Arabia, whose fierce theology prohibits graven images, the last new grand museum devoted to the European figurative tradition can now sit high on a hill above Los Angeles. We could view the automobile traffic stretching out far beyond the airport as we worked. But even literally aloof scholars are unavoidably inside the system, which isn’t to say that we have to approve of its dealings, or that we should fail to protest. It’s easy to be critical about other people, but harder to be self-critical about your own role. That’s why I am genuinely unsure about how to judge the actions of my colleagues and friends who protest at MoMA. Spectacular injustices and inequalities make our art world possible. But I am deeply uncertain about what change is likely. In 1974 I read one of the great publications of that era, Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His conclusion coveys a feeling for the leftist world of that era, to which I am still attached:

“Long live the Revolution!”
“Yes! In spite of everything!”

These are Courbet’s instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire’s to himself in 1865. They don’t seem to me to have dated.

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Defiance, celebration, warning, rallying: There are so many good reasons to unfurl a flag. Some of those hoisted above his home by artist James Esber on Williamsburg’s Grand Street entreated citizens to vote recently, although others over the years have defied the raison d’être of flags with witty subversions intellectually worthy of the bohemian ‘hood. But Brenda Zlamany’s double-sided masked portrait flags actually conform to a plague-fighting remit. Real, living human visages peep out from the functional, life-saving fabrics which themselves often deploy the signifiers and tropes of heraldry: symbols, fields, words. A portrait of fellow artist Justin Sterling peers out from a lined cloth whose tapering black strokes on a white ground recall a kaffiyeh in just the right balance of protection and resistance.

Above Store For Rent Gallery at 179 Grand Street, Brooklyn, New York. Best viewed from the north-west corner of Bedford and Grand
There are two flags alternating week by week through April 9, with changing flags at 4pm Fridays
Mask Flag 1 features Justin Sterling (pictured) and Joel Lahey, Mask Flag 2 features Helen Oji and Adé.

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Tony Robbin wants us to see the invisible in all its actuality. Working variously as a painter, sculptor, writer and researcher, he has come to make his creative home in the fourth dimension, and beyond. In his 1992 book, Fourfield: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension (one of several lucid and singular books to the author’s credit) Robbin, who was born in 1943, offers something of a personal credo in his opening chapter, which is titled “Einstein’s Cave”, a reference to Plato’s well-known parable in which higher-dimensional reality must be inferred from shadows. Robbin writes:

In the caves, we are forbidden by authority to turn and face the dancers directly, but in fact authority has no real power over us in this matter. We have the ability to see the dancers in their full dimensionality –– to accept the cultivated experience of seeing the fourth dimension as being “out there,” and it is our choice to do so. Failing to make this choice handicaps our ultimate understanding of reality. Our ability to apply four-dimensional geometry as a useful template for experience connects us to the multiplicity of spaces and points of view that implode upon us every day. If culture can teach us to see the third dimension as real, then just a little more culture can teach us to see the fourth dimension as real as well.

From Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, to Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, avant-garde artists at the beginning of our epoch took the fourth dimension seriously, but without really sweating the details. Even Marcel Duchamp, who diligently worked through hypergeometry manuals, did so only up to the point of malicious drollery. Tony Robbin, on the other hand, holds a patent on the application of three-dimensional projections of six-dimensional quasicrystals to architecture. His best-known book, Shadows of Reality; the Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (just translated into Chinese), is a primer for climbing the dimensional ladder, from Flatland to esoterica such as entanglement and quantum geometry. The book also chronicles, from an insider’s perspective, the history of 4-d visualization: that is, as diagrams by mathematicians and pedagogues, and as works of art by literally all the important schools of early Modernism. (So far, historians have ignored Robbin’s scrupulously argued mot juste, that Cubism should properly be called “Hypercubism.”)

Nor was Robbin satisfied with a century of attempts to visualize the fourth dimension. In 1980, after mastering the theory but still hungering, as had so many generations of 4-d obsessives, to see the thing itself, he learned of a pioneering computer animation at Brown University: Thomas Banchoff, a mathematician, and Charles Strauss, an engineer had tamed the morphing 3-dimensional projection–– the solid “shadow”–– of a hypercube. They could rotate it at will in hyperspace. (Please note: time is not the fourth spatial dimension, more like an extra dimension. In the rotation of a hypercube, time is the fifth dimension.) Robbin got his hands on the interactive knobs of Banchoff’s million-dollar computer, as well as a copy of his hypercube film, which he took home and studied on a flatbed editing console frame by frame, back and forth, until it took.

The friendship with Banchoff also took, opening the door to the milieu of professional mathematics. Soon Robbin himself had become a pioneer of computer visualization, having learned to code four-dimensional geometry at off hours in computer research labs, and later on his own first-generation workstation. To visualize a tessellation of hypercubes (in which all four dimensions would be continuously packed, as three can be by cubes), Robbin consulted the most renowned geometer in the world, H.S.M. Coxeter, who was delighted to see what had never been seen. On Coxeter’s recommendation, Robbin was invited to present his research at a mathematics conference. Many conferences later, Robbin’s friends, correspondents and collaborators in the math and science realm have proliferated–– from cyberpunk mathematician Rudy Rucker, author of Infinity and the Mind, to maverick cosmologist Roger Penrose, the recent Nobel Prize winner, whom Robbin has consulted about quasicrystals and twistor theory.

Robbin’s collection of experts also includes art historians, such as eminent Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, and most profoundly, Linda Henderson, whose book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983) placed this mathematics at the very foundation of modern art, and of Robbin’s thinking. Of course, Robbin’s Rolodex is mainly filled with fellow artists–– “Held, Al” being an especially well-thumbed entry. When I asked Robbin if Held, a lifelong friend who had been Robbin’s teacher at Yale, was a mentor, he quipped, “I met him in 1965 and we stole from each other ever since.”

A snapshot of this relationship exists in an article for Arts, where Robbin gave his take on Held’s black and white paintings. With their elegant spatial contradictions, the paintings, wrote Robbin, are “exercises in omni-attentiveness, and the viewer’s capacity for experiencing and enjoying them grows with his tolerance for multiplicity.” Forgiving the skunked “his” (magazine standard of the day), few viewers of any gender could have brought as much tolerance for multiplicity to Held’s studio as Robbin. A few years later, Robbin was to be greatly influenced by the paintings he was writing about here; considering the overt spatial ambition of the work that resulted, mutual thievery might well be considered a factor in Held’s richly colored paintings of the mid-eighties with their whipsawing perspectives.

In 1971, at the time of the article, however, Robbin was not yet making pure geometric abstractions. He was, instead, at the center of a growing movement involving, among others, Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, and Valerie Jaudon, who were meeting to discuss non-Western, feminist, and countercultural approaches that might invigorate contemporary abstraction. As Kushner put it in an essay on Robbin, “We were even willing to accept that taboo word–– decoration.” Robbin’s contributions to what was originally called Pattern Painting (which Robbin still prefers for his work) were sweeping abstract rebuses with motifs and textures derived from the artist’s immersion in Japanese and Persian aesthetics (he had lived in Japan and Iran until age 16). One of these, Japanese Footbridge (1972) is included in the exhibition “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985,” originating at LA MoCA, (and slated to travel, after a year’s delay, to Bard College in 2021). On a twelve-foot-long golden cloudscape reminiscent of a Zen folding screen, the painting asserts curving rhymes that suggest Islamic tilework, stenciled kimono fabric, and swooping, supersonic speed.

At any rate, Robbin mentions F-111, James Rosenquist’s epic military-consumerist montage, as an influence around this time, although not for its subject matter but for its abrupt transitions. Increasingly, Robbin, like Rosenquist, divided his canvasses into cinematic sequences that stand apart from the symmetrical, fabric-like flattenings common to the works of most of his P&D peers. In 1974-5 Robbin had a solo exhibition of these aggressively compositional paintings at the Whitney Museum, and for the remainder of the decade exhibited at the influential Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His career path was ascendent.

Ironically, it was an observation in Whitney curator Marcia Tucker’s catalogue essay that set Robbin on a new and, to judge by the artworld’s neglect of his later accomplishments, unfashionable trajectory. In “forcefully architectonic” works such as Tonikuni (1972), in which Shinto temple pillars are concatenated with patchwork and aerial views, Tucker detected that “contradictory visual information suggests the complexity of four-dimensional geometry.” Tucker’s inadvertent prophecy sparked some ready tinder in the artist’s mind. Soon Robbin was engaging a physics graduate student to tutor him, equation by equation, through the authoritative textbook on relativistic gravitation–– which is to say, in the four-dimensional reality of the world we live in.

But at the very beginning of his hyper-awakening, a fundamental change was also happening in Robbin’s paintings on their own terms. Even as the authenticity of the artist’s hand along with revisionist cultural politics had, by and large, come to define P&D, Robbin purged references to the non-Western and the handmade and began to compose, as Al Held had been doing, solely with precision lines, curves and planes.

Robbin’s paintings of the later 1970s superimpose four or five cleanly delineated layers which disagree about space. At first Robbin placed darkly contrasted or fully monochrome backgrounds behind vibrantly colored linework: electric blue squares receding like the bent coffers of a barrel vault, yellow double circles shooting across the screen like bullet holes, green L-shaped gnomons in fisheye view, and plenty more, all moving past each other like the multiple exposures of a Dziga Vertov film. In darkly arresting works such as 1976-6, and 1979-3, we may feel caught inside the celluloid itself, adrift in the unspooling frames. Gradually, however, Robbin brought the color of the orthographic (non-perspective) background patterns into dominance, so as to play games of hide and seek. Where the lines intersect, they interrupt and occlude; cut or join. And often the “wrong” background color fills these Boolean and/or/nor mutations, making for irrational, disorienting jumps back to front. Beautiful works such as 1978-3 and 1978-20 seem to compress deep space like Formica marquetry–– and yet they don’t let the viewer off so easily, in that disparate spatial cues warp past the point of integration in a way quite unlike Held’s black and white works, which crisply hold the picture plane however much sliced and reassembled. As critic Carter Ratcliff observed of Robbin’s work of the time in a 1978 essay in Arts, “The irreconcilability of the spatial systems in these paintings has to be recognized as deliberate; that is, Robbin has generated new intentions.”

Robbin was not yet making explicitly four-dimensional works, but he was upping the ante on the “P” of P&D. (Ratcliff: “Of course, there are patterns, and there are patterns.”) Robbin’s new intentions were not to confuse, per se–– although there is a skepticism of systems in all his work, a subject to which I’ll return. Rather, he was goading the viewer into seeing more, seeing multiply. Robbin compares these paintings to fugues whose dense chords contain a weave of melodic symmetries; listeners can learn to hear the independent voices. Taking this approach to impressive paintings such as 1979-8 or 1979-20, one can begin to understand what the artist was after. Imposing in scale (70”x120” and 72”x166” respectively), the faceted crystal logic of these works suggests the reverberations of a pipe organ in a cathedral. But Messiaen or Boulez, perhaps, rather than Bach; pattern is not so much fugal as fugitive. As Robbin had written of Held’s paintings, his own works were increasingly “exercises in omni-attentiveness” that captivate and disorient in equal measure.

It was in 1980 that Robbin broke through to the fourth dimension. More than a century of geometers, artists and spiritualists (Steiner and Ouspensky, for example, who seized on the fourth dimension as a portal to higher being) had strained to see it for themselves. For all of them, the animation of a hypercube in various rotations by Banchoff and Strauss, made on a supercomputer of the day, would have been a holy grail. And so it was to Robbin, who studied it until he could see the rubbery distortions and weird inversions of the spinning hypercube as 3-D projections, or shadows, of a rigid, unchanging figure passing through a dimension we only infer–– just as anyone would take for granted the solidity of a rotating cube from its distorting 2-D shadow (or for that matter, the full volume of the world from the flat projections on our eyeballs.) One of Oliver Sacks’s last books, The Mind’s Eye, includes a chapter about some extraordinary powers of visualization among the blind. Sightless topologist Bernard Morin solved, with his inner vision, the problem of turning a sphere inside out. Reports Dr. Sacks: he quite literally saw it. Inner or outer visualization, it’s the same neurons. Like Morin (if not, perhaps, to the same extent), Robbin had succeeded in rewiring his mental map, and he was determined to bring that map to bear on the propositions of Pattern Painting.

A square can spin on a point, a cube on a line, and a hypercube… on a plane, as would be obvious if you could see four-dimensionally. As Robbin explained in his 1992 book Fourfield, “to the person accustomed only to observation in three dimensions the properties of planar rotation are mysterious, even paradoxical (shapes appear and disappear, turn inside out, flex and reverse); but these paradoxes become the very means by which we see the fourth dimension.”

For the painting Fourfield, Robbin’s 27-foot long magnum opus of 1980-81, the artist welded steel rods projecting from the surface to simulate the paradoxes of planar rotation. Here is Robbin’s description of his ingenious hybrid technique, from an essay (written 30 years later) entitled 4-D and I:

I went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the painted lines and the painted metal rods look the same to a standing viewer. But as the viewer moves, strange things happen. As in any relief, planes can be hidden behind an edge of that plane (seen exactly edge first), and in my four-dimensional works, one has the sensation that whole three-dimensional structures are hidden behind open cubes. Space spins out of space as the viewer moves.

How much math does one need to know to appreciate Robbin’s paintings? By watching Banchoff and Strauss’s film and others now widely available on the internet, I have become somewhat conversant with the hypercube’s gemlike symmetries, which appear when axes align, and with its inversions and flexions as it rotates across a hidden plane. Sometimes I can recognize these familiar landmarks in Robbin’s works, like red rhomboidal capes waved by matadors. I haven’t, so far, experienced the full higher-dimensional consciousness that Robbin wants to impart, but the fascinating manner in which space spins out of space in Fourfield is something new in the history of painting and sculpture.

In color, rhythm and hybrid technique, Lobofour (1982, 96” x144” x 24”) seems similar to Fourfield at first glance; but it is less regular, non-orthographic, subtly wilder. According to one of Robbin’s collaborators, mathematician George Francis, in Lobofour, “the four-dimensional lattice is no longer constrained to flat Euclidean geometry.” (The painting’s title acknowledges Nikolai Lobachevsky, the Russian pioneer of curved space.) The complications of this geometry are beyond my intuition, but clearly some higher order lies behind the painting’s darting spatiality, constantly in motion like sparkles of reflection on a lake. If you look for space in Robbin’s work, you will find it endlessly.

For Primary Structures artists and the conceptual artists of the 1960s, geometry meant the eternal (if slippery) truths of simple grids, boxes, and counting numbers. For Robbin, the uses of geometry are open-ended and dynamic–– in a word, baroque. Not long after Fourfield and Lobofour, Robbin stopped painting for almost a decade, focusing his efforts on sculpture and research, but when he began painting again in the mid-1990s, this open-endedness became more and more pronounced.

First, however, Robbin committed himself to the implications of the steel rods, making wall sculptures that added curving, wiggly forms and rhomboids of tinted plexiglass to the projecting geometry.  Like Man Ray’s rope dancer, these reliefs accompany themselves with their shadow. When lit by red and blue bulbs, the colors combine into near white except where the metal rods cast pairs of diverging shadows on the wall, one blue, one red, encoding the spatial relations of lights, sculpture and wall. For a viewer wearing 3-D red-blue glasses, the parallax of these shadow lines integrates into a stereoscopic image. Geometry now seems to project into the wall, while the actual projections–– the translucent panels, along with their skewed, tinted shadows, and the metal rods–– hover ambiguously in space. As with Fourfield and Lobofour, movement by the viewer allows for an experience of four-dimensional unfolding, while the interplay of dimensions–– one, two, three, and four; real, simulated and virtual–– glues together and flies apart.

As Robbin’s ambitions for sculpture grew, so did his grasp of cutting-edge research by Roger Penrose and others about irregular space-packing patterns, or quasicrystals. Robbin saw in quasicrystals a way to produce an infinitude of deep, fractal-like patterns–– patterns that exhibit simultaneous 2-fold, 3-fold, and 5-fold symmetry and yet, paradoxically, never repeat. Even better, quasicrystals turn out to be shadows of more regular figures from higher dimensions. How Platonic can you get?

Robbin’s involvement with quasicrystals climaxed with a permanent installation at a technical university in Copenhagen, where Robbin made an assemblage of rods and colored plates to hang from the roof of a three-story atrium. It was precisely engineered to unfold its layers of symmetry with viewers’ movements and to project animating quasicrystalline colors as the sun arcs low through the northern sky. COAST, installed in 1994 with great success, was summarily destroyed in 2003 by a new administration. With mathematician Francis’s help, however, Robbin has made a 3-D digital version of a quasicrystal, full-scale and interactive–– an aptly innovative memorial that compensates, somewhat, for bureaucratic vandalism.

In 1995, after the complex logistics of COAST, Robbin returned to painting, but this time with an eye to the native virtuality of the medium, its built-in dimensional depths. Where his paintings and hybrids, impressive as they were, had tended toward dryness and a certain claustrophobia–– with improvisation concealed afterward or restricted to the cranium–– now Robbin applied himself fully to the flat, unshadowed picture plane, allowing for improvisation to flow from head to hand; and from stencils, tape and airbrush to viscous, semi-translucent colored pigment, at first acrylic and later oils.

Robbin’s geometric paintings between 1974 and 1982 had already seen an evolution toward asymmetry and richly colored backgrounds. The carefully airbrushed minor key blues and oranges of Lobofour, at the end of that progression, seem nevertheless to remain primarily functional, a means of establishing color-coded rules to be embroidered upon by the frontal lines, actual and painted. The saturated pigments of Sol Lewitt’s cleanly abutted illusions of solid geometry (wall drawings begun in the mid-1980s) have, perhaps, a similar informational edge; the more sensuous, the more stand-offish. But by 1999, Robbin’s newly painterly approach had turned the tables on color. In comparison to Lobofour (1982), 1999-4’s chromatic power is tremendously increased, yet the palette has hardly changed. There are additional foreground elements in the more recent painting–– delicate strings of regular polyhedra that dance in space–– but the principle difference is that the background is no longer tessellated, tiled and airtight. Instead, it is thickly gaseous and luminous, with soft, intense spots of color that give off heat as well as light. The painting is impenetrable with colliding incidents and riddles of structure, yet it’s light on its feet, porous: a muted rainbow that fractures into foreground shards plays a dark scherzo all the way back to the farthest cloud of matter. In 1999-4, in a way that is new to Robbin’s paintings, color and space are intertwined–– relativistic, one could say; entangled.

Robbin’s new painterliness has continued to develop alongside mathematical speculations that are by now so far beyond the grasp of most viewers that plain looking is surely what is being called for. Which is not to say Robbin has given up explaining–– as in this technical notation in a peer-reviewed math journal about a computer study of a “a quasicrystal lattice in 5-fold orientation where the acute angles are 72° and 36°; it is a slice through a quasicrystal cloud that was made with the deBruijn algorithm.” There are grids and there are grids.

Later in this article, Robbin explains his artistic method and purpose. For the math-challenged, we may take comfort in Robbin’s assertion here, addressing math-savvy readers, that “Sorting out all these complications is not the point. My paintings are not equations, and it is not possible to read a mathematical resolution in them.” He continues:

Rather they revel in the richness and paradox of higher-dimensional visual phenomena. With a knowing nod to the mathematical possibilities, the paintings encourage an acceptance of such spatial complexity. Further, they encourage a taste for, and even a giddy joy, in spatial complexity.

2006 began a period of tragedy, misfortune and serious illness for Robbin and his family. Giddiness departed; spatial complexity stuck around. Robbin revived the idea of monochrome backgrounds to highlight phosphorescent imagery that recalls the pulsating cathode rays of early hypercube animations. The dark background in 2007-8 (2007 56”x70”), for example, recedes behind polygonal planes nested in blue, green, and orange matrices, a slashing, compressing framework. Unlike the monochromes of the 1970s, where geometry is inscribed on top, here the translucent lines embed themselves into the paint; brushy and stained, the background opens up into inscrutable space and color, a cosmic cave.

Robbin’s backgrounds didn’t stay dark for long, blossoming, for example, into the lustrous reds of 2008-1, the molten golds of 2008-O-6, and the fierce ceruleans of 2010-O-3. These insistent colors are worked and worried into unapologetic expressionism. On the other hand, 2009-7, with its palette of pale pinks and oranges, powdery yellows and blues, and with its feathery precision and buoyancy, is distinctly Impressionist in feeling. One might take it for an homage to Monet–– a unique one, which acknowledges Monet the scientist as much as Monet the painter. In Fourfield, Robbin had written about Monet quitting Paris for “the scientific study of light on haystacks and facades at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions.” Later in the book, Robbin hypothesized Monet’s water lilies–– in which surface, sub-surface, and reflection are mingled–– as the completion of Cubism: “From this point of view […] it is the spatial properties, not the color and brushwork, that make Monet’s later work so appealing and enduring.” Those words were written in 1992. Robbin’s spatial point of view began to give ground to color and brushwork when he resumed painting a few years later, and with the Monet-like 2009-7, the two viewpoints achieve a kind of stereo integration.

Color and brushwork continue to be on the upswing. Since 2013 or so, Robbin has dispersed his dense, braided matrices more and more, leaving dimensional ghosts in shimmering fields of color and light. In 2013-6, the orange background subtly dominates, like the tarnished gold leaf of a Buddhist screen of fluttering Fall leaves. It has a richly melancholy feel. 2016-4 brings foreground and background into raw, scribbling equilibrium, achieving an almost psychotic gorgeousness reminiscent of Ensor or Nolde. 2019-1 is translucent and provisional, grays floating upon but not quite hiding deeper hues, and above that, light-struck facets like fragments of box kites in vapor.

This viewer has already confessed to being unable to see the higher dimensional spaces where Robbin’s work is embodied, but his most recent Pattern Paintings–– which one could say are less late-Monet than late-Cézanne–– provide guided-tours to the edge of the spatial horizon more expert, and every bit as lyrical, indeed as musical, as any offered before. Robbin wants us to see (as he put it in 2006 to the mathematicians) “all of the spaces in the same space at the same time.” He is speaking the language of Masaccio and Leonardo; of Picasso and Duchamp; of Al Held and Robert Smithson.

Smithson, of course, invoked four-dimensional paradox in his writings and artworks, notably the mirror displacements–– part of a general revival of interest in the spatial fourth dimension in the 1960s. In 1969, Robbin wrote about Smithson for Art News, before Robbin’s own 4-d obsession had taken hold. In that article, his focus was on Smithson’s dismantling of systems, including those of art. “I want to de-mythify things,” says Smithson in an interview which precedes the article proper.

Robbin: “People will be frustrated in their desire for certainty, but maybe they will get something more after the frustration passes.”

Smithson: “Well, it’s a problem all around, and I don’t think we will work our way out of it.”

In the text that follows, Robbin places Smithson in the company of Cage more than Judd, identifying his arrangements of materials as “reconstructions of thought processes” rather than sculptures, per se. He recognizes the originality and power of Smithson’s critique of systems. Yet Robbin doesn’t quite accept the bedeviled state of affairs that Smithson delights in exposing:

Since our perceptions mold us, we ought to be responsible for them. How they mold us, how we can be responsible for them, how we can change what we see … are only implicit in Smithson’s work. For further explorations we must wait for other artists or for other shows by Smithson.

Quite a prediction. The next year, 1970, Spiral Jetty crystallized, figuratively and literally, Smithson’s message about the open-ended nature of mathematics, of systems; in doing so, this celebrated work epitomized the “something more” that Robbin proposed beyond the horizon of certainty.

Robbin continues to believe we ought to be responsible for the way we see, but the extraordinary flowering of his paintings of the last two decades has made it easy on the eyes to do so. Built upon a gamut of restlessly shifting higher-dimensional grids–– not only quasicrystals, but braided lattices, four-dimensional knot diagrams, hyperplanes, and so on–– Robbin’s painterly improvisations constitute their own kind of systemless sytem, an open-ended spiral at whose tip all spaces coalesce. “Something more” is there for the seeing.

The post In Einstein’s Cave: Tony Robbin, An Appreciation appeared first on artcritical.

From Alberti’s paradigm through Duchamp’s Large Glass through Rudy Burckhardt’s Brooklyn Window of 1954, the literal and metaphorical potency of windows has reverberated through art history. Taking his cue from the Zero Tolerance “broken windows” policy of racialized policing, Justin Sterling has adopted the fractured sash as a Rothko-like format for visual adventures within and beyond the actual glass. Rothko resonates in the “chapel” environment Sterling has created at Cathouse Proper’s Brooklyn project space. In Sterling’s chapel, prayers for the defeat of Donald Trump were evidently answered on the eve of the extended show’s closing celebrations.

A socially distanced closing is scheduled for Sunday, November 8, 12-6PM. 524 Court Street, 2nd floor (enter Huntington Street) Brooklyn, NY 11231

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How important to you is the actual landscape you depict?

I’m more interested in the painting problems than the descriptive aspect.

Is landscape a metaphor for what is happening in the painting process?

It’s a pretext.

No different to a still-life object then?

It’s better than a still-life because there’s much more movement in there. In fact if you make it too static it’ll no longer feel like a landscape. I suppose I care much more about a landscape than I wish to let on. But I’m also terribly aware that landscape as a genre has been debased over the last fifty years so that there is very little possibility of doing something that has, say, an ideological, religious or nationalistic meaning, all of which were apropos in the nineteenth century. At this point the only meaning I can really assign to it is painterly. It’s still a wonderful tradition in art; there are so many good examples of how to do it right that you can still get very excited over it. And of course, if you’re not excited about going out into nature you’re not alive. The two of them have to meet somewhere. I try to make them meet in my painting.

Did your boyhood in Germany expose you to a special sense of landscape and nature?

And how!  The Germans have this thing about nature, woods especially, which is deeply embedded in the culture. I grew up with that. Every weekend we’d take what is called an Ausflug, a trip to the country. It’s part of my tradition.

Yet at the same time don’t you feel that the German romantic sense of landscape is historically tainted with nationalistic overtones?

German landscape painting never interested me. All the fuss over Caspar David Friedrich seems to be misplaced. As paintings I don’t think they’re very interesting. The guy with his frock coat and big hat standing in front of a scene with his arms outstretched: all that rhetoric gets on my nerves. I like to take things for granted. To inflate things with rhetoric is wrong. All you have to do is put down two colors and you’re way past all rhetoric, if you’re doing it right.

That’s quite a formalist position.

Well, I’m a formalist painter. I’m a student of Hans Hofmann, and probably a rather faithful one. I’ve never really found any reason to ditch any of his ideas, which I still find perfectly useful. They were well thought-out and profound. I don’t think what’s around today is in any way superior.

But did Hofmann tolerate landscape painting?

Sure. He did it himself, until he was fifty years old. There are paintings he did in Provincetown in Summer 1946 that are very recognizable landscapes.

But wasn’t there a sense under his tutelage that the future of art lay in abstraction?

A great thing about Hofmann is that he never thought in large categories. He dealt with the job at hand. What ever you were interested in, he’d tell you to try and do it as well as you could. Someone asked him if they should take a course in anatomy and Hofmann said “If you need it in your painting, of course”. Ideologically he had no axes to grind, except he wanted his students to understand that there is a mainstream in art, and not to hew too far away from it.

I’m still not convinced that landscape is just expedient. There must be some very deep draw, as you’ve spent the best part of your career doing it.

The deepest draw is, I know how to do it. You do what you can. I always drew well. Early in my career I tried everything: I wanted to be the kind of artist, like Van Gogh or Cézanne, who could paint anything, subsuming it under one’s own style. I did landscapes, figures, portraits, still lifes, interiors. But it turned out the only theme where I really had something personal, a sense of freedom and the possibility of growth, was landscape.

Landscape in itself entails freedom and growth.

To me it does. First of all, of all the kinds of representational subject matter, it encourages you to feel the most cavalier about description. If you need an extra branch on a tree, add an extra branch. If you’re painting a figure you’d end up with a three-legged person that way. I don’t like upsetting the apple cart. From the point of view of keeping your painting flexible and allowing all possibilities to emerge, I think landscape is the best. What I have to say in landscape comes out of my love of color, and my love of paint.

You studied with Hofmann, you have a love of color and of paint for its own sake, and you’re drawn to a subject that offers the most liberty and flexibility. It begs the question: why is landscape more conducive to you than abstraction?

I never wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I always liked to draw; I’ve drawn representationally all my life, and I’m very good at it. It seemed to me that to jettison that was going too far. I admire De Kooning, who could draw like an angel but nevertheless threw it over, but he was at a moment in history when abstraction was a conquest; at this point it no longer is. It’s more a conquest to keep landscape going.

Is there anyone else around right now who you’d rate as a landscape painter?

Rackstraw Downes, Wayne Thiebaud, Frank Auerbach, Anselm Kiefer, Alex Katz. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m not a good man for lists. If I sat down I could probably come up with fifty people whose hand I’d gladly shake.

There is an interesting point of comparison between yourself and Alex Katz, who you mention. He’s a painter with obvious affinities with an American realist tradition who nonetheless had the ambition to paint on the same terms as the New York School. Was that your situation too?

I’m not ambitious in the way Alex is. One of my gods is Bonnard, and he was a fuss-pot. I love the idea that you can go over the thing again and again, go back into it, then let go.

Do you believe in the autonomy of color, that it can exist quite independently of the objects it describes?

I don’t think Bonnard every subscribed to that. I think he liked the idea of taking a color to an extreme position, but always gaining permission from some visual experience.

And you do the same?

Yes. I’m trying very hard not to be arbitrary. I think the more daring you are as a colorist the less right you have to be arbitrary. You have to take your public with you.

The public?

General sensibility. You can’t be doing things just because you feel like doing them, there’s got to be some sort of justification. I think it comes from the color parameters set within the picture. I try to stretch them, but at the same time I have to respect them. If you are any kind of colorist you know that somewhere behind all this there’s a kind of reason.

I’m surprised you mention the public, or “general sensibility”. Do you feel their presence when you paint?

No, but I’m happy to feel that they exist as a result of my painting, because I’m a very popular painter. I must be talking to somebody about something.

Are you anxious to preserve your popularity?

No. I’ve certainly spent many more years not being popular. I’m rather surprised by it, and it would be churlish not to be pleased by it.

It’s refreshing, and surprisingly, to hear a professional painter speak as candidly as you do about popularity and general sensibility.

I don’t like to think of myself as being “the other”. There are many artists who derive great comfort from being the other. In general I’m a friendly person, I’m gregarious, I wish the world well, I’m happy that my painting elicits enthusiasm.

The paintings certainly don’t convey any existential angst or inner turmoil.

When I’m painting, all I am is an eye. Feelings have very little influence, except in so far as they regard my original sensibility.

Mark-making and gesture, do they come from the eye or feelings?

I suppose feelings, but to be conscious of where they are coming from is not going to help anything. It would make you unnecessarily self-conscious.

In a painting like In a Breeze, there are some quite vehement marks.

Vehemence comes about because I want everything to exist as strongly as it can. I don’t want to hold back, I want to use myself up.

You say the heightened color in your painting can’t be completely improvised, that there has to be some credibility, yet it’s synthetic color, it doesn’t strictly speaking arise from observation, does it?

It has to have some correspondence. If it’s all imagined color that doesn’t feel like there’s an organic unity to it, then I’m not doing it right. It’s got to be justifiable in viewable terms. I’m not just doing it in order to make bright colors. I have a lot of followers who think that’s what my painting is about, but it’s not, it’s about color harmonies. I’ve done great paintings without any bright color in them at all. Look at Fog Bank Out There for instance.

It’s quite colorful for a gray painting, although it’s quite gray for a Wolf Kahn.

Well let’s face it, reticence isn’t my forte.

You generally want to paint good weather, is that fair?

No. Here’s a pastel of a thunder storm. When I was on the water I saw it, but there was still some sunlight hitting the trees. I saw the yellow of the trees against the black of the clouds and thought that was rather wonderful. It gave me permission to make something rather dramatic. Unless I’d had the visual experience I wouldn’t have felt justified in doing it. I made a little pastel on the spot which didn’t have nearly that much contrast. When you work on site you end up being more austere than you need to be.

More empirical, perhaps?

Yes, that too.

What percentage of the works you exhibit are made wholly in the landscape?

Twenty per cent. And then another forty per cent are made directly from drawings done in the landscape.

Should an educated eye, other than your own, be able to establish on the evidence of the work which belong in each category?

I hope not. The ideal is to make very daring, bright, courageous paintings outside, but usually one doesn’t because there is too much going on, and nature does enforce a certain austerity. Oftentimes you see the full implication of something only when you are back in the studio.

I love the fact that you use the word “austerity” where others might say “fidelity”.

I don’t know what fidelity means. Fidelity to what?

To what you see.

Is “what you see” what the camera sees, is it a series of objects that can be listed like things in a Sears-Roebuck catalog that happen to be thrown together, is it just an atmosphere?  It doesn’t mean anything, fidelity, until it’s filtered through a sensibility. The only fidelity that means anything to me is fidelity to my own highest aspirations – to be very pretentious for once! I value the possibility of development. I want each painting to be a step towards the next painting.

Is that to avoid mannerism?

Mannerism would be death. I have one thing that’s in my favor in this regard: I get bored very quickly. As soon as I’ve done things a few times I don’t want to do them any more. I certainly don’t want to become a manufacturer of Wolf Kahns.

You came of age as a painter during the high watermark of abstract expressionism, yet you owe more to Impressionism.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, I don’t know. The main thing is that I don’t want to force the issue on anything. My motto is “follow the brush”. If the brush ends up with Impressionism then so be it.

You paint American landscapes, and you paint within the tradition of American landscape.

I love Innes, Ryder, Blakelock, and the more modern American landscapists, Sheeler, sometimes Georgia O’Keefe, Burchfield, all these people are dear friends of mine.

What about Marsden Hartley and Milton Avery?

Avery more than Hartley. Hartley is a very uneven painter. I knew Avery very well and even went out painting with him. He was a wonderful guy. I don’t think about him when I’m painting, though. I think about Cézanne quite a lot, and De Kooning. I’d like to be as athletic as De Kooning – though I’m not, as you can see. I think about people that I’m not.

To gear you on to be something else or to comfort you for being what you are?

I don’t need comfort. I’ve made my peace with myself. But one needs brothers in arms. The feeling that other people have been similarly occupied.

Your paintings of barns have an archetypal American feel to them. Did they suggest themselves to you as a great form, or did they have some historic or symbolic resonance?

At one point I claimed that they are like a Greek Temple to us Americans, but now I think I painted them more for formal reasons. They are great shapes, very present, very unfussy, always planted in a very interesting way into the landscape, with one entrance high for the feed, one low for the animals.

Fog Bank is the kind of subject you might get in Hopper or Avery, but Avery at least would be much more concerned with the actual form of the sea.

The shapes you mean?  I’m just as concerned with the shapes as they are, but in a different way. Avery and Hopper were working in a modernist idiom at a time when that was a tremendous conquest. At this point its commonplace, so I don’t have to think about a lot of the things that they had to. Instead I think about tiny color gradations, small modulations that give me pleasure. Going from pink through all sorts of colors to that blue down there.

You can’t be oblivious to the fact that you are concerned with retinal pleasure, ultimately with beauty, at a time when those values seem very suspect in the artworld.

Such considerations are uninteresting because they don’t help me with my work, and who knows, next year the whole thing might change. We’re talking about matters of taste that have nothing to do with eternal values.

But surely at any historic moment there are going to be some painters who have a sense of moving the language forward and others who enjoy a contentment which allows them to take great delectation within the terms that are set.

I probably belong more within the second category. I work within my limitations. You can’t force yourself to be more original than you are; at the same time, you can develop your normal proclivities and make the most of them. I’m not smugly sitting back and looking at my work and saying, Gee, isn’t it beautiful?  That’s not my style at all. I worry about it just as much as anybody. I think about just the problems you raised earlier: What excuse is there for making landscape paintings at this moment in history when there is no real ideology to back it up. And yet, people love it and I love to do it. Maybe that’s enough. Who knows?  Then again, maybe the fact that it is problematical shows in my paintings. My attitude when I’m working on them is questioning all the time.

But answering lots of minute questions, rather than the big one.

I hate big questions, it’s not my nature at all.

But you seem to like big painting [looking at a large work in progress].

No, I don’t like big paintings. I’m doing this because I have a brand new big studio. I’ve had that same painting in the same space for the last three years. Every now and then I wipe my brushes on it. I haven’t taken it to any conclusions. My favorite size is 36×52 (inches). That’s where I feel most comfortable. Any yet I know sometimes that I can do things on a larger scale that the smaller works won’t allow me.

It is interesting to see a painting on the easel which is in process. How long have you been working on that?

Probably about five hours.

What we see is half a dozen or so trees in a space which will probably be filled by several dozen.

Certainly there’ll be the hint of even more. Eventually I’ll want it to be a full painting, filled with happening.

There’s already a lot of energy at this early stage, the way that orange shows against the purple.

You start off with something that’s going to get you going. I start out with strong relations. I can always tone them down. It’s very difficult to start with something toned down and then work it up to something outrageous.

The eye can become so acclimatized to brilliant, shocking contrasts of color within your work, pinks against yellows, oranges against purples, that when we get nursery colors, the pale green of your grass for instance, the effect is quite exquisite.

That’s a nice word. I’m not trying to be exquisite, but if one is one shouldn’t sniff at it.

It sounds like you are making conscious formal decisions at every stage.

All the time. I don’t make a stroke that isn’t a conscious decision. Except when I’ve got enough paint on the picture that I can go strip-strap [gestures] just in order to open up the space a bit, just take a cutter and go across, and not worry too much about where it lands.

The placement of the trees, was that a slow act of deliberation?

Eventually it’s going to be subject to a lot of second thought. The initial placement is based on the idea of division, going back and coming out again.

You enjoy creating a sense of pictorial depth, don’t you?  In that sense you are rather anti-modernist.

If I have pictorial depth it’s a fault because I really would like the painting to appear flat. I want everything to come back to the surface.

But you do create perspectives, don’t you?

You can’t help it.

I mean you avoid stylized ways of achieving flatness.

I don’t know how. Have you seen me do stylized paintings which achieve flatness?

No, but I’ve seen Van Gogh do it.

Well, he was a great artist who could do anything. I have a very different space to Van Gogh.

Isn’t yours more traditional?  Closer to an Albertian sense of the picture as a window onto reality?

I’d like to think not but maybe it is. To me it’s all marks on a surface. One luxury an artist doesn’t have is to look at his pictures objectively. Let me see if I have something that’s not Albertian. The thing that started me off with this painting (The Lagoon at Martha’s Vineyard) was that all of a sudden I had the idea that the horizon isn’t really a straight line at all, but that it recedes at an angle, and I thought that’s worth exploring, and I think I got away with it.

It gives a naivete, and tension, to the composition. It’s interesting that it arises from something you observed in nature.

I observed that, and I observed those blotches on the water which have to do with the sunrise.

Those blotches really go against the pictorial logic; the shapes, the drawing of them, pull one up short. A quality I respond to in your work is this sense of having your cake and eating it, of there being credibly pictorial depth and at the same time an equality of the picture surface. Your teacher Hofmann had that expression he was so fond of, “Push-Pull”.

I still think of that every now and then, but differently, as a way of just not letting the eye get stuck.

Wherever the eye is, there’s something next to it which is pulling in a different direction.

You are never allowed to lose the dynamism. When it’s finally done, though, I want everything to look very natural. I love that statement by Mallarmé, that the condition to which every work of art aspires is that of having made itself.

This painting (A Path Through Green) shows you at your most reductive in terms of composition, although the eye is given a lot to do with subtleties of tone. There’s a central blue shape…

It is supposed to be trees, that is what I thought. What I tried to do here is make a sort of generalized landscape with no particular incident to distract one, but still make a place where you could be.

There’s a slight sense of the effects one gets in a Rothko here.

I’ve said on some occasions, with a certain amount of snideness, that my aim is to do Rothko again, after nature (paraphrasing what Cézanne said about himself and Poussin).

And how about Pollock? There’s tremendous surface tension and agitation in a work like this one (Deciduous) it really pulls everything to the surface. It also de-centers the picture, doesn’t it?

Right now that is what I am trying very hard to do, to paint an all-over landscape in which there is no hierarchy. It’s very difficult to do. I was brought up and educated in a particularly hierarchical environment. It’s one reason why American painting is so interesting: it’s fought those battles. Pollock is someone I think about a lot, but at the same time I’m not only working on that one idea. It’s difficult to paint a Pollock at the Ocean.

Or Rothko in the forest. You mentioned Caspar David Friedrich. You just need a monk here…

The fact that the monk isn’t there means a lot.

But wasn’t it the achievement of Rothko to internalize the monk?  So that either the painter or the viewer is the monk?

That’s the part of Rothko I would disassociate myself from, his pretentiousness. One of my favorite painters is Morandi, because he made modest claims and made them stick, whereas Rothko (and Barnett Newman) made exaggerated claims which didn’t always stick. I try not to make large claim but I know that I’m a healthy painter. The virtues that I try represent are things we could have more of without any great harm to the body politic: enthusiasm, consideration, delicacy, subtlety, nuance.

The post “To Do Rothko Again, After Nature”: Wolf Kahn in conversation with David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

In 1919, John Singer Sargent’s monumental canvas, Gassed, went on view in London’s Imperial War Museum. The painting was lent to the exhibition, World War One and American Art, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016, while “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends” was seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a year earlier. After seeing Gassed in London recently, MAX KOZLOFF felt moved to dwell on the theme of Sargent and tragedy. The accompanying photos of hands in Sargent’s paintings were taken by DENNIS KARDON at the Met exhibition.

Background

The phrase “La Belle Epoque” rivals “The Gilded Age” as a salute to an historical period, from the “naughty nineties” to the outbreak of World War One, supposedly a fun time. But these two terms also seem bouncy when compared with the more substantial record inferred by Fin-de-Siecle, with its shifting cultural paradigms, some that sprouted, others that subsided. Of course, game changers among the early modernists outmatched the routines of fading traditionalists. Still, in this unstable moment a few conservative portrait artists briefly flourished by attracting clientele from an upscale social class. Their servitude to the vanity of their patrons earned them monetary benefits, but left little impression in the history of art.  Who today celebrates the names Giovanni Boldini, William Merritt Chase, Emile Carolus-Duran, or Mariano Fortuny?  In contrast, one of similar vintage, John Singer Sargent, still stands out and is much admired—for good reasons.

The cordial address of this American expatriate (1856-1925) was so resourceful that it exceeded any formulaic, professional obligation. He was hyper qualified in keenness of eye, and so confident in his skills as a performer, as to make them look exhibitionist, glib and tossed off. Actual entertainers, like gypsy musicians doing a number, were known as part of his repertoire. Sargent was well disposed toward overt role-playing, as demonstrated with splendor in his Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. He found or created countless examples of it, treating their artifice of transparent self-consciousness as a decorous norm of his genre, transmitted through body language as well as facial expression.

What made him highly popular among his patrons was the compliment his flippant virtuosity paid to their self-esteem. Sargent could position them in stances reminiscent of Gainsborough and Reynolds, while letting it be known that he was a friend of Claude Monet.  He was a rhapsodist of satin and chiffon, which billowed out in coils affected by the weight and posture of the female figure. Seductive, young ladies could expect to being treated as a little dangerous if identified with their portrait by Sargent. As for his palette, he subdued its range in drawing rooms, while outdoors he splashed his sitters with the shadows, reflections and leafy twirls of nearby plants. Sargent added to these broad energies of warm and cool the much smaller attractions and motivations of hands, as they flutter, twist or press against supporting surfaces. He was a master in portraying the nervous behavior of women’s fingers. Had neon lighting existed, he might have used a likeness of its shimmer to decorate the folds of gowns.

All this genteel restlessness was intended to declare that his act of seeing was as much on the move as the action he depicted. People are often visualized as doing something, not just sitting still. Robert Louis Stevenson was walking by (close action) when seemingly caught by Sargent’s brush (as if by thoughtless snapshot). In more formal portraiture, people appear to look out, first at their observer, and then, by implication at their unseen or unknown future viewers. One of the most common scenes in Sargent’s watercolors represents friends or colleagues sketching outdoors, scrutinizing nature, brush in hand.  They are in the midst of carrying on the kind of work that he has already concluded on his own. This note of the instantaneous moment lends an aura of disheveled, vivacious texturing to images that are often diaristic in character.  Where he went and whatever he saw, this traveling artist (again, with watercolor) acted like a gondolier paddling through canals of opulent sensation. He provided vignettes of them– as tourists would for their circuits back home.  His take on the monuments of Venice is liquefied by the multiple appeals of their kind, competing for the attention of viewers on a distracted schedule.

When Sargent accepted public commissions to paint murals for the Boston Public Library (1895-1919) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, (1916-1925) his emphasis on ephemeral glimpses needed to be broadened.  These two institutions were storehouses of historic knowledge, thought, and imagination. To honor the educational legacies of the human mind, their walls had to be decorated in sweeping, allegorical mode. An allegory is a didactic framework populated by figures acting as symbols of conditions like truth, justice, heaven and hell. In short, symbolism replaces narrative as a means of visual communication. One also senses a reluctance—in fact a distinct aversion—to be informative about place or time. Many characters don’t even obey gravity. Employing a worldly Salon artist to tackle these generalized types and schemes was to ask of him quite a lot. The more oracular or legendary the status of certain characters, the allegorical mode permitted them to wear fewer clothes. It is ironic that an artist who catered to a small, entitled social class could arouse criticism if he depicted a bodice hung too low but when he worked for the community at large, he could disrobe his figures at will, as mostly they happened to be gods. Nudity based on Hellenist models was in accord with public taste.

Sargent adjusted to these circumstances with good grace. His figures became vaguely statuesque, though still based on his life drawings, elaborated with academic finish.  For research on the History of Religions panel in Boston, he traveled to the Middle East to study the faces of Bedouins. He drew heavy, unnatural outlines to feature the bodies of those selected for ascent out of their plasma to the beatitude of heaven. Yet he knew how to inject the earthy witness of his materialism into range of the idealism purveyed by his clients. His accent on leisure and theirs on virtue, or at least rectitude, mingled together to form an interesting tension. But it was even then too late to rescue Victorian allegories from their inevitable datedness, as modernity rolled in.

Achievement

London’s Imperial War Museum is filled with belligerent, sinister, and horrific artifacts. Their erstwhile use and subsequent display registered the fact that during the slaughter of 1914—1918, the époque was not belle. As commissioned by the British government to act as an official war artist, sent to the front in the summer of 1918, Sargent conducted himself dutifully.  He chose to focus his powers on one dismal scene that he witnessed: an aftermath of the poisoning of British troops by German mustard gas. In the museum, this work would naturally fit in or even compete with brutal company.  But encountering this great painting, arguably the peak of Sargent’s career, installed in appropriate quarters, I was struck by Gassed’s difference, some element more broadly conceived to stir emotion than national pride in a military context.

Did Sargent misunderstand the treatment proper to his choice of category or genre?  Well, it was unlikely that he would devote an epic work measuring around nine feet by 21 merely to documentary reportage. And this scroll-like grandeur of scale rules out any portrait emphasis, even if the soldiers’ eyes weren’t bandaged.  Furthermore, a propaganda motive, while possible in theory, would have needed more upbeat content to support a creation whose subject is a military disaster. Gassed shows that British dressing stations were overwhelmed by drooping and fallen casualties, the targets of an onslaught of mass destruction. We see nameless victims of that attack, everywhere, promiscuously disabled.

However, a group of Tommies, in single file, crosses laterally from left to right. They, the artist’s protagonists, cannot be said to be merely passing through –a zone of recumbent bodies. Rather, they’re shuffling or slogging by at an uncoordinated pace, barely assisted by medical orderlies. They have all the momentum of a bas-relief, an effect caused by the work’s side view of their progress and their awkward stumble. Their heads are variously bowed, their arms grope for immediate support, and their legs are hesitant and intimidated. Mustard gas menaces the eyes before it ravages internal organs. Sargent thus gives us a spectacle of fresh affliction, still vertical when compared with the suffering troops lying everywhere around.

Slumped at the bottom margin, the bodies of the maimed are in more than ample supply. In fact, their presence continues far behind and beyond the miserable progress of the blinded subjects in the foreground. Sargent elevated these figures so that our vantage is approximately at the level of their feet.  Urged by the artist, I begin to regard them as monuments of calamity, in disordered, vulnerable gait, profiled with their darker khaki uniforms against the radiant light of the setting sun. With its lime greens and roseate tones, nuanced with pale yellows, this light is gorgeous. It floods my sense of what these soldiers have lost—their precious eyesight. No wonder that Sargent exults the world we do see, one he created in homage to the visibility of life. If this intention comes through, as I think it does, it is more an existential than a patriotic statement. How mindful is this grateful recognition and heartbreaking sorrow, which a visual work of art can make evident.

For those curious to learn more about the artist and his  career, I recommend a most informative  book— John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff, Abbeville Press, 1982

The post  GASSED! Max Kozloff on John Singer Sargent’s Great War Masterpiece appeared first on artcritical.

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Three summers ago, a precocious Bronx Science high school Sophomore, Oona Zlamany, interviewed Leonardo Drew in his Brooklyn studio on video for artcritical. Zlamany was able to draw on familiarity with the artist as she had grown up with him as a close family friend. Now an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, our interviewer has shed some puppy fat but little of her youthful verve, and Drew gives as good as he gets, explaining the motives and working practices underlining both his Madison Square Park commission, where the interview takes place, and his current spectacular solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong, his debut with that Chelsea venue. In acknowledgement of the 2016 exchange, this interview is billed by Zlamany as “Part Two”.

Leonardo Drew: City in the Grass at Madison Square Park, June 3 to December 15, 2019
Leonardo Drew at Galerie Lelong, May 16 to August 2, 2019

Oona Zlamany Calls on Leonardo Drew (June 2016)

The post Invader of Space: Leonardo Drew on his Madison Square Park commission and debut show at Galerie Lelong appeared first on artcritical.

In writing about the exhibition, I could have played very happily on my own in the domestic spaces of Niles’ paintings. However, I was intrigued by the relationship that Niles has to the people he paints and the pseudo-autobiographical content of the scenes. I felt this could be another lens in which to view work already rich in narrative and pictorial content.

Perhaps Niles’ greatest feat with this show was pinpointing emotional, psychological dynamics in and between the figures. As humans, we are wired to diagnose these dynamics and then situate ourselves within them. As we meet the eyes of the various figures in the room, we become part of their web of relationships, which can be off putting at times and also deeply affecting.

VIRGINIA WAGNER
Was there a first piece that started the series, that sparked it for you?

ARCMANORO NILES
The last show I did was all outdoor scenes. It was a tour of my neighborhood and the people in it. There was also a little tiny still life of a kitchen with nobody in it. And I just remembered thinking, ‘Oh, I never went inside the house!’ Then I started thinking about who was in there, thinking about different spaces in the house where I could walk in on people reflecting on their life. And from there, I painted my grandfather in the kitchen.

Can you tell me how you go about putting the paintings together?

Everything that is orange is the ground. It’s acrylic. You see these red lines here? That’s the drawing and that’s everywhere. It’s the second step. And in that red, I do the values.

Like a grisaille. You studied traditional painting at the Academy?

I did study this indirect type of painting.

And by indirect you mean…

Layering. Mixing optically. Painting it in different stages. Going back and painting a color and seeing how the color on top interacts with what’s underneath. Direct is mixing all of the colors on the palette. You always do a mixture of both but I lean more heavily towards indirect painting because each part is built in steps. And I like each step to be visible at the end. I put the texture on with a roller. And, after that, I cover the whole painting in gloss medium before using oil. It seals the glitter but also it makes everything smooth again. And then when I get to the skin there’s a subtle difference in texture to help with the space.

Did you use the same method and colors of oil paints for all the skin colors?

Yes. So even on the blue ground it’s all the same colors. Throughout school, I was always dissatisfied with my skin tones. I felt that there was a lot more color in darker flesh that I wasn’t pulling out. I don’t know if it was from an old photo, but I was going to make this painting and I was like, ‘Oh it looks orange, so what if I make the ground orange and paint it with the bright colors that I see in the skin and then go back and glaze it with brown.’ But I just never went back and glazed it. After that, I decided not to use any neutrals in my palette.

When I think about paint I think about it as built on oppositions — thin and thick, texture no texture, light and dark, cool and warm.

That’s how you get tension and resonance.

I also think about how quickly the light comes back to your eye. The acrylic is a lot more opaque and dry with less layers, so the light comes back to your eye quicker because there’s not much there. The skin is done in oil. It has to go through the red, through the yellow, through all the different colors, and then it comes back a little slower, and that’s what gives it the shine.

I would say glow more than shine. The acrylic has a reflective shine. The body seems to keep its light within it. It has a golden quality. Where do you see yourself in the work? That’s you in the painting, right?

Yes, a lot of them are me. I’m around and easy to work with as a model.

But how do you orient yourself to the figures of you?

A lot of this is stuff that I’ve experienced and am recreating. Or it’s something someone’s told me and I’m like, ‘What did that feel like?’ and I try to put myself in that space.

It’s almost like you’re casting yourself.

I think I used to want to be an actor. Or, I don’t think I did. I did when I was a kid.

Me too. I teach this class called the Bestiary about illuminated manuscripts and animal stories and we look at marginalia. All the things that monks drew on the edge, which are often tiny lude creatures– copulating animals, nuns lifting up their skirts, a tree growing genitals. Your little gremlins remind me of those.

I call them Seekers. I first started putting this Egyptian fertility sculpture – basically an orgy scene — in my paintings. I wanted the regular figures to be vulnerable and interacting with each other and whoever’s looking at the painting but then the other creatures, the Seekers, to be impulsive. Whatever’s going to make them happy in the moment, that’s what they’re going to do.

I was thinking about how (when I was young) my mom would always say never go too far from the porch and I felt that these other things were influencing her decisions. And also thinking about how sex and violence started to influence things that I did.

Kind of creeping in from the edges of your life?

Yeah. I would do things, but really it was more about this other thing. Even if I didn’t realize. I’d be up at night thinking, why did I do that?

It is a simple idea in some ways and yet as complex as anyone’s relationship with the invisible things that haunt us. The Seekers are so well integrated into the composition that they don’t actually look as strange as they are. At first, we don’t even question them. And then we’re disturbed that we didn’t.

And sometimes people don’t even see them, which I think is kind of cool.

I think they’d be happy not to be seen; they have their own agenda. And they probably register subconsciously. They’re also agents of perverse sexuality. This one feels like he’s riding the other creature. This one is like when you cut a worm in half and the other half wiggles out and..

.. becomes its own thing. He’s always chasing that thing and I was thinking maybe it’s a part of himself that he lost and is trying to get back.

You are letting us in and being very generous with what you are showing us emotionally and pictorially and yet some of the figures look at us like, ‘What are you doing here?’

I did want them to feel like they are engaging you, inviting you. Even if they’re turning away – I wanted it to feel like they are choosing to do that.

So, there is some agency in the knowledge that they’re in a painting?

Yes. You’re walking into their space.

I’m really interested in the gaze in ‘Does a Broken Home Become a Broken Family.’ Is this your family?

Yeah it’s my mom and my sister, my nephew, and me. I was thinking about what happens when a family doesn’t grow up together, because I didn’t grow up with my sister. So I wanted them all to be separated from each other. They’re separated by the counter. I’m separated from them.

I know some artists struggle with how much to reveal about the dynamics of their own life and the people closest to them. Because often that’s the richest source material they have but the process of exposing it could make them vulnerable.

Oh, I don’t mind.

Do they mind?

I don’t think they mind. Also, it’s just a painting and they’re all just sort of standing around in the kitchen so it’s not unfamiliar.

They are and they aren’t. There are these wild sexual and violent Seekers dancing around them. It’s charged.

I’m actually a super private person. So maybe, here I’m not. This is my way of connecting to people.

I also feel implicated in this painting. Because if you’re the figure on the left and they’re not looking at you, then they must be looking at me. I’m grateful someone let me in the door, but I feel put on the spot. And I need to weave between Seekers shagging and those with knives in their hands just to enter the kitchen.

I want you to feel like you are walking into the space. That you are a part of it. That you are just late to the party.

The post Paper Heart: Arcmanoro Niles discusses his work with Virginia Wagner appeared first on artcritical.

On this last afternoon of the 2019 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, artcritical’s David Cohen moderates a discussion with five of this year’s prizewinners: Judith Bernstein, Charlotte de Larminat, Inka Essenhigh, Alain Kirili, and Doron Langberg.

The post April 7 Panel at the American Academy of Arts and Letters appeared first on artcritical.