April 15 to June 10, 2016
18 East 79 Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, (212) 734-6300

In Acquavella Galleries’ panoramic view of Jean Dubuffet’s mindscape we are in familiar territory, immersed in sand, oil emulsion, butterfly wings, tobacco leaves, tar and gold. Dubuffet used terms like “Anticultural” and “Art Brut” to characterize his vision, in homage to an underground world where the “sap is richer” and where art is dedicated to madness. Dubuffet believed children, the uneducated and the naive are able to immediately “hit the bull’s-eye” and arrive at something visionary in their art making.The detritus and random objects of urban streets represented a diminishing horizon, for him, between high and low art.  Aquavella’s knock-out exhibition of judiciously selected works from the 1940s through the early 1960s illuminates the philosophical roots of his pictorial language.

Dubuffet’s vision blossomed in the wake of the Second World War, times of despair, daring and survival. He was keenly aware of the changed philosophic climate had occurred after the Great War with its polarization between the classical tradition and what the Nazis would call “Degenerate Art.” With the advent of WWII the realization of the innate brutality and barbarism in the human psyche affirmed aspects of Freudian thought. Though Dubuffet spoke against the Western tradition with its penchant for classical harmony, order and rationalism, paradoxically he was well versed in European culture.

The Second World War brought out in him a fierce stance against the acquiescence of the French during the German occupation. Having been a puppeteer and mask maker, he later created paintings of gestural configurations of human frailty and vulnerability in a series of portraits. The protagonists of these paintings openly expose the raw emotions of the post-war period. These portraits are non-portraits in disdain of mimesis and verisimilitude. To him, they were “cooked and preserved in memory.”

Joë Bousquet in Bed (1947), a portrait of the elusive poet disabled in World War One, has the writer almost embalmed in black sheets scribbled with white cuneiform-like script. Dubuffet melds figure and ground into a singular unity, roping his protagonists within a shallow space. He eschews Western perspectival space, possibly as a remembrance of his journey to the Algerian Sahara in the late 1940s. It was a revelation for him to observe non-Western societies that are linked and inseparable from the earth.

In Will to Power 1946, he parodies the Nazi appropriation of the Nietzschean superman as a glob of flesh, hair, a dangling genital and teeth which could be a counterpart to the later de Kooning “Women” series [1952-53]. Dubuffet’s paintings Corps de Dame, Esplanade de Peau and Beautiful Woman with Heavy Breasts, (both 1950), portray flattened pieces of protoplasm, scratched and etched with markings for their orifices and dangling cylinders for arms. They are laid out for inspection as a source of the early beginnings of life immersed in the oil and gravel of the ground. In 1954, in a similar mode to his women, Dubuffet depicted cows splayed in a grassy field. He said that he felt no hierarchies between humans, cows, earth, wind, and water, all of them belonging to the living universe. His world-view was a dismissal of all “Greekeries,” he stated.

In Façades d’immeubles, (1946), his personages begin to exit from their Parisian domiciles like small animals out of a cave. This painting links the end of the war with an “hommage” to the burial of his literary mentor, Max Jacob, who died in the internment camp of Drancy. The landscapes with and without personages of the later ‘40s and early ‘50s clearly reflect his North African odyssey and his observation of the way forms in the desert come in and out of focus as they merge with the surrounding space. In Our Old Land, (1951), a segment of earth tangled with crevices and vegetation takes a dominant position and becomes the prime protagonist, whereas in The Gallant Pursuit, (1953), two small creatures enact an amorous dialogue dwarfed by the enclosing land. The influence of Paul Klee is evident in these images, especially in the way Dubuffet integrates visual signs of the human , animal and vegetable spheres.

Dubuffet took a strong countercultural position by withdrawing from the ”call to order” and the return to old values of France during the two world war years. He was by no means a naïf or unrelated to the European cultural tradition though he championed the irrational, the instinctual and the “anticultural.” He had the French love of “matière” and was a consummate craftsman who mastered the art of preservation for his new materials. He had a vast knowledge of art history including the newly discovered cave paintings, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, Picasso and particularly Klee as well as his contemporaries Soutine, Bacon and Fautrier. His countercultural friends belonged to literary circles and Dubuffet had an interest in languages, having learned Arabic for his North African journey. He was also a musician and later became involved with Jazz.

His cerebral nature, however, affirmed the visceral reality of organic matter, and instinctual life. He thus intertwined a universe of ideas and physical substances. He considered his personages and “earthscapes” a fictive world of the mind. Consumer culture was not part of his pictorial vocabulary. Dubuffet came to maturity in a time torn asunder by two world wars and a growing knowledge of the non-Western world that gave him a different understanding than ours of comedy, tragedy and the ironic.

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October 12 to November 30, 2011
18 East 79th Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York City, (212) 734-6300

Every visitor to the great display of Willem de Kooning at MoMA is aware of the extreme difficulty of understanding his development. Acquavella’s magnificent show of Georges Braque, presented on two floors of a grand Upper East Side townhouse, poses the same question about an earlier modernist. How and why, one wants to know, does an artist who develops one style very successfully suddenly abandon it and move on? There are three Braques in this exhibition: the early fauve master (1906-1907); the cubist who was Pablo Picasso’s collaborator (1907- 1914); and the senior figure who, after that relationship was dissolved by the Great War, developed a highly distinctive late style (1917-1956), which openly borrows from but looks surprisingly different from classical cubism.

Change is difficult, as every psychoanalyst will tell you, because most neurotics cling to miserably dysfunctional lives. How much more difficult, then, to understand how Braque, who at each stage of his artistic career was marvelously triumphant, twice abandoned his style to move on. The intense colors of  L’Estaque (1906) are given up in Harbor (1909), which reconstructs a beach scene in  monochromatic brown and gray planes. (Houses at L’Estaque (1907) shows that transition in progress.) The austere Analytic Cubist The Mantlepiece (1912) is very unlike The Pantry (1920), in which Braque opens up his picture space. In the later art we remain indoors, he never returns to the landscape; a distinctive dark palette, not however restricted to blacks, grays and whites emerges. And in The Billiard Table (1944-52) cubist denial of perspective and a post-cubist palette  present a distinctive new motif.

Usually Braque is taken to be a lesser artist than Picasso. Once their collaboration dissolved, while the Spaniard moved rapidly through Neo-classicism, Surrealism and highly personal erotic images, before finding his late style, often based upon appropriations from the old masters, the Frenchman’s career was more modest. If no John Richardson has been inspired to tell Braque’s story that perhaps is because there is less to tell. The ‘flesh-colored’ cock forming part of the woman’s body in Woman with a Mandolin (1937) is as visually daring as Picasso’s erotic inventions, but how different is the studio setting, whose colors might come from early Vuillard. Mostly, however, Braque avoids Picasso’s explicitly autobiographical concerns

This exemplary show, which retells an important part of the now historically distant era of French modernism, speaks eloquently to the present. Not, I hasten to add, with reference to the pictorial concerns of cubism itself: That visual culture is now distant. But what remains of living interest is Braque’s ability to radically develop, in ways that do not simply cancel and preserve his prior manner. When Frank Stella works in series, he works through all of the variations on a motif, which he then abandons. Robert Mangold, by contrast, develops his motifs in a more intuitive way. And after the early Abstract Expressionist abstractions, Richard Diebenkorn turned to figurative painting before embarking on the Ocean Parks. Braque’s very different, arguably more radical development is even harder to rationally reconstruct. In the 1980s, some most distinguished scholars proposed to eliminate ‘style’ from our vocabulary. This exhibition shows that you cannot understand Braque without stylistic analysis. Since Stella’s, Mangold’s, and Diebenkorn’s magnificent ways of developing now reveal their period style, maybe some daring young artist will find her inspiration in this exhibition.

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John Goodrich, Stephen Maine, and Deborah Solomon joined David Cohen to review John Currin at Gagosian, Lucian Freud at Acquavella, Maureen Gallace at 303, Marilyn Minter at 94 and Fiona Rae at PaceWildenstein

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The genius of Lucian Freud has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with energy. However much he looks to the Old Masters (and increasingly in his senior years, like one), he is quintessentially a mid-20th-century existentialist: a man striving against the odds for personal authenticity. His mentor and rival Francis Bacon coined a phrase that seems appropriate: “exhilarated despair.” Doubt is as much his raw material as paint.

Mr. Freud has a large public – when his new paintings and etchings were shown at the Wallace Collection in London last month, 50,000 people visited – and many will ask, isn’t it the sheer, mesmerizing laying on of paint, the magical mortgage of touch to vision, that keeps the eye lingering for so long upon what are, in many respects, repellant pictures?

For his work can certainly seem repellant, both in subject matter and surface, with unhappy-looking, ungainly nudes rendered in murky colors and blotchy accumulations of paint. The material facts of the paint will indeed detain the viewer, but reconciling what has been put down to the total design is more likely to confound than satisfy. . A finished work is more an accomodation of doubts than their resolution.

Those works are now on display at Mr. Freud’s New York dealer, Acquavella. The exhibition is his first since the 2002 retrospective, and for an artist of 81 who works at his agonizing pace, the output of almost two-dozen pieces in the intervening period is astounding. For it is well-known that his paintings take forever to make.

The artist has admitted that his sitters’ weariness gives him energy. Like the analysis offered by disciples of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, the fiercely penetrating and revelatory observations of Lucian Freud take hundreds of sittings and do not come cheap. “The Brigadier,” (2003-04), a well-over life size portrait of Andrew Parker-Bowles (former husband of [either make this “Royal favorite” which I prefer, as its respectful and amusingly understated, or say “the Prince of Wales’ companion”] Prince of Wales favorite Camilla and an old riding friend of Mr. Freud’s), took more than a year to complete.

At first “The Brigadier,” in which the sitter wears his dress uniform and medals, seems to belong to the tradition of the swagger portrait, of the dashing military types and dandies depicted by masters from van Dyck to Sargent. But in key respects it is different. There is a psychological charge, a sense of a man familiar with life’s vicissitudes, that sets the painting in a nobler tradition of portraiturethat of Rembrandt and Goya.

Despite the impression of bravura in its initial impact, a closer reading of this (or any) Freud, frustrates the first sensation of fluency or speed. It has the grinding, compacted energy of a steamroller. The registration of effort and commitment on the part of painter and sitter alike lends the work extra charge.

But what are we to make of the individual brushstrokes, the bewildering spread of local decisions that make up the whole? This is where the idea of energy versus technique comes into play. I’m not for a moment denying, or refusing to marvel at, the extraordinary facture of a Freud painting. It is, rather, a question of identifying the divorce between micro-effort and macro-result.

A Freud is, in its way, as bizarrely crafted as the breathtaking little devotional mosaics to be seen in the Byzantium exhibition at the nearby Met. In Mr. Freud’s case, the tesserae consist of what Cézanne called “petits sensations,” individually apprehended details that are captured in isolated brushstrokes or intuited in juxtapositions of color and plane. But Mr. Freud’s little sensations are joined up, so to speak. He is more like an Old Master than a modern in that – in contrast to the deconstructivist effect of Cézanne’s Cubist disciples, –he constructs a compelling whole, a cogent window onto the world.

Mr. Freud’s power and appeal comes from his art being joined to the great Western tradition of depiction, of offering a singular, convincing vision of the actual. For all the local painterly discoveries, he finds the strong, linear boundary of his figures and forms and accentuates them. But he is no academic, opting for a clichéd set of ready-made solutions like single-point perspective or anatomical correctness.

Perspective seems to be made up as he goes along. “David and Eli,” (2003-04) resorts to almost mannerist contortions of foreshortening to depict the sprawling male nude and his pet whippet, head lolling over the edge of the mattress. (Otherwise, the human sitter’s protruding right leg would absurdly dominate the field of vision.) “Irishwoman on a Bed,” (2003-04) is the oddest picture in the show: cherries defy gravity to caress the sitter’s mottled, gray legs; the hands and feet are grotesquely outsized. But the incredible details make the whole the more compelling. In Mr. Freud’s aesthetic, the solid truth of full, human presence must win out over the illusory truth of optical expectation.

Mr. Freud’s art is animated to its core by a tension between the visual and the tactile. In his early work, intensity was entirely sealed within the image. The surfaces were pearly smooth, like a Bronzino or an Ingres. One critic even dubbed him “the Ingres of Existentialism.” As Mr. Freud told Robert Hughes in 1987, “I hoped that, if I concentrated enough, the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures.” But his art reached an impasse with all this smoothness and closure: the ethereal, aloof quality deprived it of the energy he was after. He found liberation in a switch from sable brushes to the much more painterly and open possibilities of hog’s hair. The surfaces of his canvases became, like the subjects depicted, visceral and contingent.

And yet, for all his little sensations, Mr. Freud is no sensualist. His impasto has nothing to do with the actual feeling of skin: Even the victim of an advanced dermatological condition wouldn’t have such blotchiness. Instead, the build up is of pentimenti, the result of layer upon layer of correction. What comes across is not the sensation of the sitter’s flesh but of the artist’s manic attempts to depict it. If a Freud conveys actual living presence, it is because of the oddity, distortion, and awkwardness of his means, not despite them.

Mr. Freud attains a level of realness that transcends Realism – which is, after all, only a style. When you look at the cramped, tired, alternately sagging and tense flesh and bones of a Freud figure, your own body comes out in sympathy: You begin to itch, to fidget, to sense your own physicality.

It is something of a cliché that naked equals true, but there can be no denying that Mr. Freud penetrates psychological depths in his depictions of the nude. They are plenty prurient enough in their improbable postures, but he does not eroticize his subjects. Flesh is empowered to convey personality with the force, almost, of a face. In this respect, a Freud nude is the conceptual opposite of Magritte’s “Rape” (1945), which rendered a woman’s face as a torso, with breast for eyes and so on. At the same time, the face of a Freud nude resigns itself to a deanimated anatomical state of muscle and skin hanging from a skull. The head is just another limb, not the privileged seat of reason.

If Mr. Freud can recall the animal in a person, he can also bring out the “humanity” of animals: His new show is a menagerie, almost a zoo. In addition to his own, late beloved whippet, Pluto, whose garden grave is the subject of a touching nature study, and his studio assistant David Dawson’s whippet, Eli, there is a masterful “portrait” of a gray gelding, and the rear of another horse in “Skewbald Mare” (2004), both uncharacteristic in the fluency and spontaneity of their brushstrokes. It is rare to see a modern painter of animals unconcerned with their symbolism and marveling instead in their sheer physical presence.

In his rapport with dogs and horses, Mr. Freud, a Berlin-born Jew, demonstrates an identification with the upper echelon of English society. But his depiction of animals also ties him to a specifically English tradition of naturalist painters like Stubbs and Constable. (Despite his ancestry and accent, Mr. Freud is, in temperament and taste, a very English artist.) Questioned once about the erotic potential of his subject matter, he responded that “the paintings that really excite me have an erotic element irrespective of subject matter – Constable, for example.” Mr. Freud, who helped select an exhibition of Constable organized by the Louvre last year, has an etching “After Constable’s Elm” in the exhibition. Serendipitously, Salander-O’Reilly, the gallery next door to Acquavella, will show Constable cloud studies later this month.

The show at Acquavella is complemented by a display of photographs, taken by Mr. Dawson, of Mr. Freud. These frank, animated studies of the artist at work on various pictures in this show and at play – dining, for instance, with artist pals David Hockney and Frank Auerbach – debunk some of the myths about the squalor of the artist’s bohemian lifestyle. There is a fun moment when Mr. Freud leads the pony to have a look at her portrait in progress, which recalls Mark Tansey’s send-up of naturalism in which academic painters bring a cow into a gallery to admire a landscape.

This rather theatrical gesture on the part of the painter raises a question about intentionality. As his paint gets more succulent and his design hots up, the awkwardness and oddity if anything seem to increase. It is fair to ask: Is his awkwardness a side-effect of a lust for inclusiveness and truth, or a device, an expressive means of adding edge?

As if to preempt the question, in paint, Mr. Freud offers a six inch wide canvas of four eggs on a humble plate. A group portrait of sorts, this study could hang comfortably with any still life in art history. It is an exquisite homily on the origins of life and art.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 29, 2004

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“Joel Shapiro: Recent Sculpture”
PaceWildenstein until July 31
534 West 25th Street
212-929-7000

“20th-Century Sculpture”
Acquavella Galleries until May 22
18 East 79 Street, at Madison,
212-734-6300

Someday it will have to be explained why the most vaunted exponents of modernism in the 1960s spent their senior years chasing a romantic muse. Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro, and Helen Frankenthaler have all noticeably gone this route.

Ms. Frankenthaler, whose show of 10 new paintings opened last week at Knoedler & Company, began her career at the cutting edge of abstraction. She was a crucial transitional figure between Jackson Pollock and the “post-painterly” generation. Just as Caro and Olitski, who were famous for cool, sparse abstraction, traded their hallmark styles, respectively, for expressive figures and sublime landscapes, so Frankenthaler, in her new work, succumbs to an urge to depict.

These paintings, on paper and canvas, are sumptuous, absorbing, and masterful, but you have to pinch yourself to remember that she was once an artist pushing the boundaries of the language of painting. If these pictures were a tenth of their size and admitted fractionally more narrative incident they could be taken for the work of a Victorian. Her “Yoruba” could sit besides a William Trost Richards of the 1870s.

Ms. Frankenthaler actually came out of landscape. Her poured and stained gestural paintings of the mid- to late-1950s – the seminal “Mountain and Sea,” for instance – often took landscape as their starting point. But now the references to nature are literal and overt, with horizons and promontories. “Bacchus” (2002) is almost a Caspar David Friedrich redone in a funkier palette. What a palette, mind you: The purples of this moody nocturne glow and brood simultaneously. She achieves extraordinary effects of depth and airiness through audacious layering of her acrylic paint.

It is somehow touching that this veteran abstractionist should reverse historic due process, turning “inscapes” back into landscapes. By so doing she reconnects with Old Master painting, and emphatically disconnects with minimalism. But it is telling that the most beautiful painting in the show, “Warming Trend,” is also the least legible (more Turner than Whistler). The painting fluctuates at different distances from blues and violets to turquoise, purple, and mauve. In more than one sense, it is phenonemal.

***

In many ways an old-fashioned constructivist, Joel Shapiro’s career reveals a sly ability to run with Modernist hares while hunting with Minimalist hounds. By adopting motifs like little houses, chairs, and stick figures, he tweaked life back into Minimalism’s ponderous forms. Mr. Shapiro is not Minimal art “lite” as such, but nonetheless he animated an austere movement with welcome humor.

Scale has always been a lively element in his work, a means to startle, as well as to address representation. Diminutive has more typically been his thing, with Monopoly-board houses and dollshouse chairs. Now, in a show of five new sculptures, Lilliput has conceded to Gargantua. The 21-foot ceiling of PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery struggles to contain the largest piece. As if to add insult to injury, the sculpture’s components – bronze-cast wooden beams – rhyme inadvertently with the building’s exposed I-beams.

The pieces that work best are the ones that are the least figural. And yet, ironically, “working” means conveying bodily movement and animation. This is sculpture that has internalized a sense of the body without needing to depict the body. The largest sculpture, a bronze from 2001-03, is actually not the strongest. Most of it reads literally as a stick figure, throwing back its torso and kicking out a leg, but it has a huge protuberance that doesn’t reconcile to a figural interpretation. Suspiciouslynecessaryfrom a structural perspective, its comes across like the absurd crutches of a Dalí figure.

Far more sensual and satisfying is a nearby piece in wood and metal from 2002-03. Individual components can’t be reduced to this limb or that, but there is an exuberant downward spring- as in a fencer’s thrust or a certain kind of jive. The shiny metal hinges, and a flamboyant diversity of grains and stains in the cool wood ensure that the surface of the piece keeps pace with the liveliness of its structure.

This is an important exhibition, for Mr. Shapiro and for sculpture. Not only are there big sculptures but a big conception of what sculpture can be.

***

And just what conceptions there have been is recalled in a stupendous display of 20th-century sculpture at Acquavella. On two floors of his princely Upper Eastside premises, William Acquavella has brought together nearly 40 pieces, many borrowed from private collectors. Matisse is royally represented. There is a rare chance to study the five progressively (or, equally, “regressively”) pared-down portraits of “Jeanette” from 1910-13, which start with a relatively benign, convincingly modelled head and culminate in a dynamic representation where the forehead and nose virtually stand out as an autonomous form.

These inevitably draw comparison with the extraordinary 1931 “Head of a Woman” by Picasso (even here, there is a mini Matisse-Picasso dialogue) where the hair and nose form themselves into a coiling limp phallus. The later sculptures downstairs feel somewhat cramped and rushed through, but upstairs there is a joyous technicolor contest between Miró and Calder, and an oxymoronic lead “Air” by Maillol.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 15, 2003.

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