Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, at The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art and Technology

February 5 – April 2, 2022

55 S. First Street
Newark, Ohio 43055
attheworks.org

When I was very young my grandmother, Mary Sherwood Wright Jones (1892 – 1985), would often draw a picture and give it to me as a gift when we came to visit. Holding the small sheet of notepad paper I could see her sure hand in the lively pencil lines creating the outlines of a squirrel or a rabbit or a deer. With this exchange an invitation to her world of making images also passed between us. I felt a kinship with her in these moments. I knew I belonged in her world.

Best known as an illustrator, my grandmother’s legacy is complicated. After working with my cousin, Michael Kennedy, on the exhibition “Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones,” at The Works Museum in Newark, OH, over the last three years, I can see that everyone has their own perspective on who our Grandmother was and why she made the life choices she did. What I can say with certainty is the personal space she created for self-expression and her generosity and encouragement gave me permission to claim my own territory of expression, permission that has animated my life’s work.

Mary Sherwood Wright Jones’ warm, understated presence was inseparable from her charmed circumstances. She grew up in an ornate, red brick mansion with Victorian era interiors on the top of a secluded hill surrounded by evergreens, oaks, cultivated lawns encircled by rich farmlands. In her early 20s, with encouragement from her banker father, she left her secure midwestern nest to spend two years studying fine art in New York City. She studied with members of the Ashcan School in 1913 and 1914, and her small oil paintings in the show, The Gardener and Nude, are fine realist works. Several of her charcoal self portraits from this time show a serious young woman deftly revealed in light and shadow looking directly at the viewer.

This is the first time her serious paintings and drawings will be shown to the public. While visiting my studio in Mattituck, NY, this summer Michael proposed we show only our grandmother’s fine art works despite her established reputation as an accomplished illustrator for children’s periodicals. My cousin’s suggestion to show our grandmother’s earliest works freed me to speak something unspeakable in my family: something about my grandmother’s illustrations – and the attention they have gotten – has always bothered me.  Yes, my grandmother loved to draw, she enjoyed collaborating with the top educators who were her editors, and she liked being paid for her work. At the end of her over three decades illustrating for My Weekly Reader, her longtime editor Eleanor M Johnson wrote, “Mary Sherwood Wright Jones had an ability to deal creatively with reality and fantasy. She used the objects and creates of nature (bugs, raindrops, flowers, birds, bees and fish) which mean so much to children in their discovery of the world.” However, I never wanted to create something under someone else’s direction as my grandmother had done – and I wonder if that choice was an unhappy compromise on her part.

After my own life spend engaging with the vagaries, biases and challenges of the fine art world, I can understand her choice. I understand that the trade-off between creative control, money, and access to an audience has many shades. And yet, I felt she had held something back by choosing illustration. Something colorful and full-bodied and real was missing from her work.

The show is meant to bring attention to the early fine art she made for herself, and to trace her legacy across generations, putting her work in company with the work of my cousin, my daughter, and myself. I have been making art since those early days with my grandmother. I’ve searched, explored, and experimented, on my way to finding ways to make meaning. I chose two new large-scale paintings on stained, cropped, and stitched unstretched canvas for the exhibition. These works show my process of working from the inside letting the boundaries be determined by the interior play of paint flows amidst flashpoints of color. Michael is presenting his abstract paintings made in the last year, which draw upon the color palette from our grandmother’s early 20^th century pieces in the show.  And, Phoebe, my daughter, is showing photo-collages that explore trends of the American family throughout the 20^th and 21^st Century using imagery sourced from her own experience together with photographs, letters and other printed matter from prior generations, including those of her great-grandmother.

And yet, like many families I suppose, ours is not without challenges that cloud the legacy we are celebrating. My oldest sister Julia, who kept safe the enchanted, protective circle my grandmother first drew around me, suffered a traumatic injury in 2015. Our family was split in its aftermath making honest exploration of family history fraught at best. One result: my mother refused to loan works by my grandmother for this show. Despite her efforts to bring a limited view of my grandmother’s legacy, we are proudly presenting work that excites us.

In one very direct way, my grandmother’s illustration work has had a renewed influence on me. I have been working on my artist’s book, The Garden, launched at this show, since Julia’s injury. Itpresents a series of emotionally evocative abstract images with eleven semi-autobiographical singe-page stories centering on themes of abandonment and loss. Contrasting feelings of flux and balance run throughout The Garden, generating a cyclical experience that wavers between steady and destabilizing. Stylistically, the work is reminiscent of the children’s fairy tale books my grandmother illustrated. The Garden’s visible binding, with exposed, long, colored threads, highlights the physical joining of the book’s form. I am using my grandmother’s format. Her audience was young children, her iconography bright; I tell a darker more complex tale.  That too, is part of her legacy.

I have spent a lifetime exercising my grandmother’s permission to create.  I’ve taken my art practice where she could not; I’ve had choices that she did not. Still, precious little has changed for women seeking to be seen. Permission is, of course, just the start of a journey filled with risk. My grandmother showed us both the price of being different and the payoff of putting in the work, day after day. I am now one year older than she was the year I was born; I want to shine a light on the work that shows her undirected self.  I want to give her permission to create.

The post Kinships: Mary Sherwood Wright Jones and the Lineage of Artists in her Wake appeared first on artcritical.

Through February 26, with closing day concert by Bill Warfield and friends, 2-4pm
547 West 27th Street, Suite 200.

The post Featured Exhibition: Margaret Grimes Memorial Exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

September 16 to November 10, 2021
33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, galeriezurcher.com

In today’s art world, there are those who dabble in sculpture to produce inflated toys at great expense.  Let Tom Doyle’s sculpture be offered as a counterexample.

As opposed to statuettes writ large, sculpture’s engaged space-time relations attain to a complexity of thought manifestly palpable in the here and now. By this dimensional complexity, what works is given a workout: that is how Tom Doyle’s sculptures establish themselves, that they are also playful does not trivialize them.

The validity of sculpture as altogether worthy, and thus our assumptions about its nature, come through the legacy of modernism, a legacy of modern art’s reinventing itself through the significant styles of Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism, a complex genealogical stock in the art vineyards giving consequential vitality to art. Doyle would benefit from this and better develop his ‘American vernacular’, as the current exhibition has named it, through an assumption of hands-on craft at home in the modern European abstraction that had already begun to nurture sculpture’s version of Abstract Expressionism.

Located in Kettwig, Germany in 1964 for fifteen months, and being given the run of a disused wool factory, Doyle seized on the opportunity to construct assemblages of metal machine parts and wood scrap. That he was fluent in forging, taught to him as a child by a blacksmith while growing up in Ohio, made it possible for Doyle to develop his idiom from within, and yet while in Germany, at a remove from art-world pressures. According to art historian Kirsten Swenson‘s extensive interview much later, Doyle’s mature sculptural idiom emerged under conditions more permissive than those adopted by David Smith with his strong two-dimensional orientation; although respecting the art of David Smith, Doyle considered his own, gesturing exuberantly in three dimensions, more allied to David Weinrib, John Chamberlain and Mark di Suvero.

To look around plazas where public sculpture sits is to come to terms with the reality that we take the era of the 1960s for granted. But Doyle’s sculptures give us no recourse to passivity, or nostalgia, or the pleasant acceptance of applied abstraction in works interchangeable with one another. No tokens, but in singular works well developed within the formal premises set out, Doyle’s visual literacy is such that it shows as fully cognizant of the difference between the simplistic and the simple, complicated fuss and modulated structural integrity.

A given of modernist theory is that sculpture, no longer a matter of mass, is volumetric, incorporating open and closed spatial relations as it can now by utilizing industrial materials for support and for counterintuitive heft. Sedentary Taurus, 1965, does the job. Folded and bent, cantilevered planar elements are hoisted atop a linear criss-cross frame, yet this basic antinomy is already modulated through skewed orientation and internal twist; voids and their opposite play out, yet not in platitudinous opposition. Helpful to development within form is internal scale: through twisting, large becoming small, then becoming larger again, as sculptural structure induces accelerated shifts through a spectator’s changed position. A changed position is here memory: what was is now still in play imaginatively, a recognition of the relations that still obtain.

How to evade mere décor: that is the problem set out in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, 1965. Doyle makes trouble for himself by invoking good taste: a few elements in neutral off-whites to which a single hue dramatizes the difference in furnishings–a kind of decorator’s “move.” But what he does to outflank taste is to keep the sculptural coherence of the entirety by way of a directness and roughness of the contrastive compound. Further evident is the principle of dislocation: what is massive is a blocky hewn wood element that could be a stand but is midway up; on the ground where the conventional stand should be is a painting—that is, a planar element in color.

Color is indeed the proverbial elephant-in-the-room. The well-known and on-going ideological wars within modern art theory do provide a profound understanding of genre, excelling at its definition: sculpture, the art of three-dimensional work, painting, the art of two-dimensional work—not some mash-up of categories to compensate for a lack of artisanal rigor. But to this, de Stijl has a classic modernist rebuttal: the largest aesthetic category being neither painting nor sculpture, but design. Indicating functional difference through color, then, is a pragmatic strategy, De Stijl design offers a way through space not beholden to isolating the types of practice. So in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, the function of the base gets its due. Meanwhile, antithetical to painting, the color plane is not on the wall where “it ought to be,” but by a radical dislocation makes its appearance on the floor as the necessary base engenders a sculptural presence.

By the way, for the taxonomy of mass, see Doyle’s Rally Al Round, 1964: a sidelong glance at the geometric elemental form by which cylinder, sphere and cone are primary structures.

In Doyle’s art, knowledge of the tradition is enabling, not disabling, as it gives him the formal instrumentalities with which to think with the medium. Let us count the ways: point, line, plane; vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and torque for these: as well as folds, bends, bends’ reversing convexity to concavity’s implicating volumetric space; scale within volume, opacity, transparency at eye level, above and below the same; gravity and levity–degrees of.

The post Gravity and Levity: Tom Doyle in the mid-1960s appeared first on artcritical.

Picasso: Painting the Blue Period at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Phillips Collection

Toronto: October 6, 2021 to January 4, 2022
Washington, DC: February 26 to June 12, 2022

“Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” seen by this reviewer at the Art Gallery of Ontario and headed to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, in February, conveys above all the young artist’s painful hunger. Some of those cravings were carnal. Rakish charm and stints of poverty made women easier to obtain at times than food, it would seem. In his  ambition to best every other artist, past and present, he bounced from style to style. Scanning the walls reveals a list of masters that Picasso was chasing down, all at once, from 1901 to 1904: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, and Daumier just for starters. A dive into the catalogue reveals that as a sixteen-year-old student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Picasso was already anxious to take on the whole circle of Catalan modernistes, principally Isidre Nonell, whose technique he pilfered aggressively.

Even the preternaturally talented Picasso could only digest so much at once. Consequently, a lot of the earlier Blue Period pictures fail to cohere. In 1901 he attempted a bold fusion of Cézanne and El Greco in Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901). The eponymous painter-poet friend, dead by suicide, is enshrouded on a hillside in front of a tomb, as mourners gather. One figure, wrapped in blue, may as well be the grieving Mary. In the upper portion of the picture, Casagemas is mounted on a white horse. His arms are outstretched, and a nude woman is smashing her face to his as her legs dangle in space. He gallops through the sky to his supernal reward, which is apparently a bevy of stockinged harlots. (From a certain standpoint that would be just recompense for Casagemas, who had been defeated in love by impotence.) This is rendered unconvincingly in the blocky hachure of Cézanne’s faceless bathers. It lacks the older master’s inner directives, it being instead a project of reverse engineering. Still, Picasso is such that it can be interesting even to watch him screw up. He never painted anything like this again, and while he lost the war, he won the battles, demonstrating that he had understood something significant about how both Cézanne and El Greco worked figures into their compositions.

Picasso was not a religious artist, but there’s a distinctly Catholic tone of mourning to Blue Period works that postdate Evocation. One catalogue author suggests that he attended an Ancient Art Exhibition that was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where he would have seen two thousand examples of Romanesque and Gothic work. The heavily robed female figures who appear around 1902 and ‘03 support the assertion. The subject matter was informed by visits to a women’s prison in Saint-Lazare. (Speculation continues as to whether the reason for them was because he didn’t have to pay the syphilitic models, or because he was being treated himself by a staff doctor. Not often proposed is that he felt genuine pity for the women’s plight, which ought to be considered.) Though secular, there is a Maria Dolorosa affect in A Woman with Bangs (1902), whose asymmetrical face suggests resignation to insanity.

She looks as though she was carved from jade. Picasso played to his natural strengths when he was modeling form. The hairdos of Two Women at a Bar (1902) rest along the top of the picture like storm clouds. The figures hanging in the cyan-tinged darkness beneath them, with their mass and angularity, seem to have been hewed with an ax. The cloak enshrouding Crouching Beggarwoman (also 1902) has more of a feeling of clay, even an entire cliffside. This is leagues beyond the work from 1901. It is also remarkable that someone this skilled at crafting dimensional form would eventually pioneer a genre of painting driven primarily by flat planes. It would be right to suspect that some kind of shape-making engine drives both projects, and Picasso’s was of an unusually high horsepower.

Blue served a Symbolist purpose, and Picasso likely adopted it due to his fascination with the painter Santiago Rusiñol, in whose work the employment of blue had become something of a trademark. But it also allowed Picasso to take a break for a couple of years from dealing seriously with color, which plagued him. His otherwise prodigious visual memory did not record details of hue, and his reflex was to put down full-strength, acidulous primaries. One of the 1901 still lifes, Chrysanthemums, is garish. Some Rose Period works, hung as a postscript to the exhibition, show his difficulties beginning to resolve. La Toilette (1906) is orders of magnitude more sophisticated in coloration. I contend that Picasso was so good at form that for a while he had a problem deciding what not to do with it. It wasn’t the Morisot-inflected Impressionism of the nude Jeanne from 1901, nor the post-Impressionist wedges of Cézanne. It was, finally, the sculptural calm of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Only when he worked that out did his color mature.

The AGO exhibition gives edifying attention to the influence of Puvis. Picasso became interested in how to establish full-length figures in a given space. He had accomplished this sporadically using licks cribbed from Cézanne, notably in The Blue Room (1901), but with them came Cézanne’s tendency to pop the planes at the viewer. Puvis’ spaces, in contrast, are architecturally sound. The Soup (1902) appears amid dozens of drawings, one of them worked until the artist dug through the paper. Picasso slaved at the 18-inch wide painting for months under conditions of cold and short funds, while figuring out how Puvis made his figures interact. The older artist’s influence was not just formal, but moral. Puvis had treated the theme of charity in magnificent canvases, and Picasso developed a heartfelt concern for the privation he had witnessed beyond his own. The space in this painting is also a touch askew but not by Picasso’s standards, and The Soup remains a Symbolist triumph, full of sympathy for its subject. Hungry ghosts can die, it is said, and be reborn into the human realm. That seems to be what’s happening here.

The post When Women were easier to obtain than food: Picasso’s Blue Period appeared first on artcritical.

December 2, 2021 to January 23, 2022
124 Forsyth Street and 136 Eldridge Street
Both between Delancey and Broome streets,
New York City, highnoongallery.com

These new paintings by Jennifer Coates, like her previous bodies of work, arrive in a headlong rush of invention festooned upon a canny theme, in this case the female body in nature. Previously, Coates made exuberant, punkish paintings exploring dubious episodes in the life of processed food. Now she places groups of nude women –– she names them as nymphs, dryads and goddesses –– into clearings in deep, dark forests, thus activating irresistible tropes of a Western painting tradition that arose with spied-upon bathing beauties (Europa, Io, Venus, Susannah) meant for royal boudoirs. But while this hook induces thoughts about the male gaze, from Titian and Correggio to Cézanne and Matisse –– and about the feminist reckoning with that moribund tradition (Spero, Schneemann) as well as the postfeminist inversion of that reckoning (Kurland, Yuskavage) –– the figures themselves can be all but incidental in Coates’ overgrown miasmas of tree trunks, wildflowers, whiskery stalks and impenetrable leafage. As with the food paintings, where her toxic acrylics performed a kind of transubstantiation into Cheez Whiz and Smuckers, Coates’ forests are indexical floriations: sinuous strokes are branches; spills can be glitters of leaves; spray paint, fog; protruding paint-licks, thorns, ticks or mosquitos. A more occult art history comes to mind in these unkempt, unruly wildernesses, one which begins where the babes-in-the-woods tradition itself, after giving birth to modernism, withers away.

Dryads and Pollinators (Birds) (all works 2021), one of two large paintings with that title in the exhibition, is a swirling chorus of graphically insistent hummingbirds, white blossoms and filigreed stalks that recalls the backyard watercolor raptures of Charles Burchfield. While Burchfield’s glades are uninhabited, Coates’ everyday ecstatic includes luminous beings, spirits of the forest whose spare, archaic profiles float among the flowers. Faces, flowers, birds and weeds are painted with a kind of folk-art zeal while the cerulean forest behind, solidly modeled then dematerialized by dancing layers of sprayed pigment, is appealingly contrary in color, scale and attack.

Coates’ experimental approach to mark-making — thick or thin, macro or micro, tight or loose, brushed, sprayed or sponged –– goes for both forests and figures. In Grieving Woman, a lone woman in a classical pose is incised in white against the mottled background like a fading figure on a krater. Also cut from Hellenic lines, in this case black, are five hollow women in Mystery Cult, who seem to be lost in the (ergot-infested?) weeds, while by contrast, the protagonists in Three Dryads are entangled in a single libidinous squiggle of green and yellow paint that, like flesh according to Francis Bacon, verges on the repulsive. Changing tactics again, Coates gives the golden apparitions in Three Nymphs careful, earthy substance. They gesture with a narrative refinement that suggests, along with their warm, coppery tarnish, the microcosmos of a Sienese predella. Coates, however, putting the brakes on such skillful seduction according to her restless temperament, encloses this exquisite scene in a dark, seething knot of trunks and branches as brut as the figures are delicate.

Nor does Coates forswear outright satire: Bacchanal Before a Herm of Pan ridicules the sublime, if rather stiff, Poussin painting of that title as a girl orgy, complete with two hapless goats. Wry gender critique aside, the painting’s busy, stop-motion scenography seems like an attempt to do the master over again after Henry Darger­­ –– or vice-versa. In any case, thoughts of Cézanne’s “after nature” version of Poussin, his bathers, cannot but come to mind. Poussin’s trees are uncannily naturalistic, his figures –– extricated from sarcophagi –– not so much, and thus there is a certain logic to the way the trunks and limbs of Cézanne’s bathers undergo metamorphosis, like the nymph Daphne, into timber. And thence into Cubism, and all that followed.

The most compelling figure in the show, for that matter, is distinctly Picassoid. Re-engineered for function, the small, reclining nude of Fire Watcher marvelously contains her own bath. Behind her, the fire of the title rages as a preposterously scumbled orange-green goo, barely contained by the jutting blue and purple forms of super-cooled, super-flat conifers. As in all the paintings, however experimental, internal typology is firmly organized: trees are trees, figures are figures –– and in Dryads and Pollinators (Moths), insects are insects. In this second large, ravishing version of the theme, clamorous day has turned to mysterious night. The precisionist symbolism of Odilon Redon and Fred Tomaselli echo in Coates’ crisp ferns and fluorescent lepidoptera, scintillating against a nocturne of blue-violet and black. Yet rogue textures –– icky drips and thorny bumps interrupting the most beautiful passages –– remind us that nature, just like art, is a messy and dangerous concoction.

The post Mystery Cult: Jennifer Coates in a Brush with Mythology appeared first on artcritical.

Larry Day: Body Language at Arcadia University, Woodmere Art Musueum and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia

Absent Presence, Arcadia University, August 30 to November 21, 2021
Silent Conversations, Woodmere Art Museum, September 25 to January 23, 2022
Nature Abstracted, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, October 8 to December 3, 2021

Unlike most realists, who celebrate the world’s material presence, Larry Day seems as concerned to capture palpable absence in his work: something unseen, yet powerfully implicit. His mature paintings and drawings expressed his singular ascetic reserve,  a sensibility that managed to juggle American precisionism and pittura metafisica. In such subjects as a quotidian back-alley, a charades party, a poker game there is an awareness that transcends the everyday in suspended moments of painterly reflection.

Day, who died in 1998 in his late seventies, was a doyen of the Philadelphia scene. A great conversationalist with a strong capacity for sustaining friendships, he was a beloved teacher, mentor and friend to more than four decades of artists. A selection of his astute, subtle writings on art is included in the catalogue of this three-venue retrospective of nearly 150 works, guest curated by David Bindman. Divided by theme between the institutions, the exhibition spans the 1950s to the 1990s with cityscapes at Arcadia University, figure compositions at the Woodmere Art Museum and abstract works at the University of the Arts, where Day taught for many years. Cumulatively, the exhibition explicates his dialogue with art past and present.

UArts presents Day’s Abstract-Impressionist work from the 1950s and early ‘60s when he was very much part of the social world of the New York School. The theatrical “bowing” of Ab-Ex painting was replaced in Day’s work by a deft, subtle pizzicato of interlocking color passages suggestive of foliage—as in Abstraction, (1958)—possessing a contemplative emotive presence. In a parallel body of abstract paintings Day’s work in this era employed a syntax derived from Willem de Kooning in 1949-50. The standout in this idiom is Landscape for St. John of the Cross, (1955).

Such works established his initial reputation, but by 1962 he was dissatisfied with what he was doing and began defining a post-abstract realism. This was not an abandonment of modernism, but an embrace of its contradictions. In the Arcadia show, Absent Presence, we see Day extending and deepening his interest in structural invention in the interplay of buildings in a back alley or a construction site, which could provoke a reverie of a miniature universe. This could be a view of an ideal city, but at other times Day could evoke a melancholy, nihilistic vision, as in Zone, (1976). There are affinities here to Mario Sironi’s paintings of desolate cityscapes and the Neo-Realist films of Antonioni. Through a surprising fusion of opposites, Day came into his own, rejecting expressionism and adopting something of Charles Sheeler’s emotionally cool, linear style. In these austere, unpopulated spaces, Day creates a poetry of the anti-poetic.

According to David Bindman’s catalogue essay, Nan Rosenthal, late curator at the Met, characterized Day’s work as “ironic realism,” the validity of which Day himself accepted. But what does it mean to call realism “ironic”? Realists coming of age since the advent of abstraction such as Lucian Freud or Philip Pearlstein work directly from life to avoid stylistic mannerisms, to create an authentic unity of experience out of the complexity of perceptual painting. By contrast, Day felt that such a funneled vision purity was insufficient to express the fragmentation of modern consciousness. He wanted his contemplative life as a painter to encompass all his interests, whether in philosophy, literature, or the traditions of European art. His process was to work toward pictorial wholeness without jettisoning the insights of fragmentation; a synthetic process akin, in actuality, to collage: teasing out an idea through drawings, partly done from life, or from photographs of friends, past art, and images in magazines. In this way, Day exercised his amused and sardonic sensibility to reveal our awkward moments of self consciousness and the contradictory aspects of our cultural beliefs, both enduring and moribund.

This new style was the result of a search for what really mattered to the artist. In wartime service he had faced death repeatedly during the invasion of Iwo Jima and came to realize that “Some of the things that move us most are the things we take for granted. How we dreamed of the ordinary as ideal, when we were in the army.”

A narrative of everyday life became his pictorial domain, but not in any literal sense. It was actually the planarity of late Cubism that led Day to his love of Renaissance frescoes. He exchanged thickly built paint surfaces for thin coats that affirm the flatness of the canvas. I believe that as he examined frescoes, with their often missing al secco paint layers and seriously damaged areas that reveal the drawing in sinopia, beneath, he found metaphors for the evanescence of awareness or limitations of memory.

Like R.B. Kitaj, Day incorporated images from advertising, photography, cinema, and snapshots of himself and friends, sources he used to droll effect. By contrasting our consumer culture to the culture of other times he revealed both a sense of continuity and the pastness of the past.

Narrative: To the Memory of Matteo Giovannetti, (1967), named for the painter of frescoes at the Palace of Popes in Avignon, is presented as a medieval mural –  yet it feels as much like an homage to Antonioni’s early films, contrasting post-war architecture and an ancient fortress in an otherwise barren landscape. Hipsters mingle with businessmen and middle-class tourists while the totality of the scene remains ambiguous. We are not in a traditional narrative but in a tableau of signs reflecting the artist’s consciousness of a turbulent period.

In paintings like Group, (1967) Day evidently believed that get-togethers could reveal inner states that lie beneath social masks. Day appears twice in this studio setting, I would contend, seated at the center in profile, pausing during a portrait-drawing session of friends and family, and again standing at the far left, head bent in contemplation. Here the use of degrees of unfinish suggests two contradictory states: those who are absent in their presence and those who are present by their absence. Like an emblem in a Hogarth painting, the unpainted canvas framing Day’s seated profile depicts young artist friends Natalie Charkow and Mitzi Melnicoff. Adding to this fictional melding of characters is the image of the film actress Monica Vitti, one of Day’s great infatuations.

Changes, (1982) presents an idealized, Platonic type of the nude. In the background we see images by two mannerist masters, Rosso Fiorentino and Joachim Wtewael. These original works are small, and yet they loom oversized in Day’s representation of them.  Day and an observing female student are separated by a large dark space from the naked model on the right, seeming to capture the gulf between the European past and a deflated, realist, American present.

Similarly, in Day by Day, (1991), from near the end of his life, he presents a room split by a receding diagonal ledge, dividing past from present as much as left from right. On the left, Day presents himself drawing alone, framed by a pale cityscape into which his presence begins to merge, suggesting  awareness of life’s transience, while on the right a mischievous youthful self contemplates a life of the imagination.

Throughout his life Day drew constantly and copiously. In his last years, his creativity bloomed in inventive drawing sequences. As Day turned from the marvelous Tempi Del Giorno drawings, 1992-93, he moved from an interest in himself to a meditation on the mythopoeic aspects of the physical and imaginative world. In the Caprice series, (1997), and the final Elegies (Homage to Rilke), (1997)  the art past is always present and melded into our daily lives.

Day wrote in one of his notebook jottings, that “to examine an object or an event, one, of course, also examines oneself.” An autobiographical reflex allowed Day to create a psychic landscape of outer forms that express self-awareness. In this ongoing pandemic, many people are re-examining their values and ambitions. This three-venue exhibition offers us the gift of one who was there before us, illuminating an examined life that evolves before our eyes. Day’s work invites us to resist fixed ideas and accept the ambiguous and challenging complexity of being alive.

The post Ironic Realism: The Larry Day Retrospective in Philadelphia appeared first on artcritical.

Sharmistha Ray, Barry Schwabsky and Marjorie Welish discuss Dorothea Rockburne: Giotto’s Angels & Knots at David Nolan Gallery, 24 East 81st Street, Fourth Floor (on view through December 23)

David Brody, Lilly Wei and Alexi Worth discuss Intersections: Ron Baron and Sarah Walker at John Molloy Gallery, 49 East 78th Street, Suite 2B (on view through December 18)

The post The Review Panel, Guest of Brooklyn Rail’s the New Social Environment, Zoom, Friday, at 1PM ET appeared first on artcritical.

The panel of three painters (Rickert is co-curator with Graham Nickson of the Studio School exhibition, on view through November 28) is moderated by David Cohen and takes place amidst the Resnick-Passloff’s own newly-opened exhibition “Jane Freilicher and Thomas Nozkowski: True Fictions”. The Anderson exhibition’s sumptuous catalogue ($45) will be available with contributions by Martica Sawin, Susan Jane Walp, and Paul Resika, and an interview with the artist by Jennifer Samet.

The panel is sold out, but standby tickets ($15) will be released at 4.15pm. 87b Eldridge Street, between Grand and Hester.

Lennart Anderson, Nude, 1961-1964. Oil on canvas, 58-1/2 x 50 inches. Brooklyn Museum, John B. Woodward Memorial Fund

The post A panel today on Lennart Anderson at the Resnick-Passlof Foundation with painters Steve Hicks, Rachel Rickert and Kyle Staver, 4-6PM appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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Jack Shainman opened The School in Kinderhook, NY as a satellite space to his New York City galleries in 2014. A 30,000 square foot former schoolhouse built in 1929, it was renovated by architect Antonio Torrecillas. Some elements have been left intact: girls and boys bathrooms, fixtures removed, are still painted in the pink and blue of the era, the decaying plaster walls sealed permanently in their beautiful, melancholy state, in sharp contrast to the “white box” galleries elsewhere . It is worth the 2-1/2  hour drive from the city just to see the building.

This summer, the Schoolhouse presented a 22-artist group exhibition, “Feedback,”curated by Helen Molesworth “Feedback is filled with art works by artists who I’ve been following for a while,” the curator has written. “In other words, artists I ‘like’ and who I have asked to gather together today to form an assembly, a class, a chorus.”

According to Molesworth, the idea for the exhibition was triggered by first experiencing the audio piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that now greets visitors upon entering The School. When a visitor steps on the “wah wah” pedal, the amplifier placed behind it begins to play a Jimi Hendrix-inspired version of the Star Spangled Banner that is amplified to the point of aural pain. When I visited there was a guard stationed nearby to turn it off immediately, so unbearable is the noise: An inauspicious introduction to an exhibition that is in many ways a gentle exploration of contemporary visions. Among its other meanings,  “feedback” is a term for the sound generated by this pedal.

Mixing and matching in each room, Molesworth has installed works to create small universes where the artworks are orbiting each other in meaningful ways and in turn responding to the architectural implications of each space.

One of the most successful in what the checklist calls the “southeast unfinished classroom,” an eerie space with peeling and pockmarked blue paint on the old plaster walls. Molesworth has assembled the works into a tableau of relationships that carry the echoes of an old schoolroom.  Taylor Davis has a trio of three watercolors that riff on the American flag (ever present in American classrooms of the past), their stars and stripes morphed into calligraphic poems that float across the page. The room is bookended by two powerful paintings: “Ecco Homo by Kerry James Marshall and The Treasures by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Each portrays a young Black man, perhaps teenaged, in very different states of mind, looking at each other from across the room. Both send mixed messages of slavery and freedom.

Marshall’s painting, with his typical attention to crisp detail, presents a young man adorned with a massive gold chain encircling his neck which can be read as a golden yoke. He meets the viewer’s eye with what can be taken, equally, as pride and a plea for rescue.

Yiadom-Boakye’s painting portrays a young man perched on a stool in a classic formal pose. Painted in dark rich hues, the figure emerges gingerly from a dark room. The brilliant highlights of his eyes, teeth, scarf, shorts and socks pierce through the scumbled paint. The painting is direct, but not naïve. The portrait radiates a sense of hope as he smiles and gazes confidently into the room.

But it’s the two freestanding sculptures that, for me, tie the theme of the room together. Rose B. Simpson, whose masterful ceramic and mixed media figures populate several rooms in the exhibition, has a piece here entitled Storyteller. A medium-sized figure, glazed in matte yellow ochre and painted with dark simplified symbols, sits on the floor. Out of their mouth erupts a steel framework upon which are perched small terra cotta figures. Huddled together they reach, cuddle, whisper and climb on one another. The work is at once evocative of pre-Columbian and Southwest American pottery forms and totally contemporary. The sculpture personifies the passing of knowledge, albeit in a different kind of classroom.

Karon Davis’s Game: 943am (Frankie)  is provocative and open-ended like other works in this room, disturbing but alternatively perhaps amusing. An elementary age schoolgirl, fabricated out of stark white plaster, sits under a vintage school desk looking upward with human eyes. An open schoolbook lies on the desk above her, as if abandoned hastily. Evocative of so many things at once. There used to be “fallout drills” in U.S. schools; upon the sound of an alarm we would all scuttle under our desks for protection from the possible atomic bomb that was about to land on us. Hardly reassuring, but a potent image of the era. Is our young girl participating in a drill or is she hiding from an unseen threat? Or is it a game of hide and seek?

Feedback is an ambitious exhibition whose success lies in imagining the school space as a totality. The exhibition is especially resonant as American’s rethink their relationship to public spaces and the nature of childhood and schooling. Feedback is an endearing and affecting artistic take on the late-summer theme of “Back to School.”

Feedback at Jack Shainman/The School runs through October 30, 2021,  25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106. jackshainman.com

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