January 7 to April 3, 2021
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Albers and Morandi, an exceedingly handsome, thought provoking show, probes the surprising affinities between two very different mid-20th-century artists. Walking through its large rooms of small, widely spaced works, one senses a distillation of distillations, so to speak, as well as a gathering argument about the surprisingly fragile division between the abstract and the observed. If we ever needed persuasion on this point, this exhibition will convince, even if some paintings make a more compelling case than others.

The works of Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) fall on opposite sides of the abstraction/representation divide, of course, but that’s just the beginning of their differences. Their entire relationship to paint could seem hardly more divergent. Morandi’s fleet brushstrokes delight in the viscosity of paint; Albers’ smooth surfaces downplay any evidence of human application. Morandi’s shapes melt into rich, atmospheric depths; Albers’s never stray from hard-edged precision. But similarities abound, too. Both artists worked most comfortably on a small scale, and preferred reductive palettes and compact, centered compositions. Moreover, they shared a certain temperament, evident in the patient determination and quiet vigor that equally animate their work.

Born into a family of craftspeople in Bottrop, Germany, Albers was hired in 1922 to teach at the Bauhaus as a stained-glass artist. With the rise of Nazism he moved to the U.S., teaching first at the fabled Black Mountain College, and then settling in for a long stint at Yale, where he wrote what was to become a standard text for art and design classes, “Interactions of Color.” His early stain-glass experience may have influenced his approach to color; his classes endlessly explored, with scraps of colored paper, the internal, abstracted light of juxtaposed hues. He was particularly intrigued by the illusion of transparency created by placing a sheet of just the right color over another one.

All but one of his nearly two dozen paintings in the exhibition belong to the “Homage to the Square” series, the nested-squares compositions that engaged him after 1948. In person, their color proves surprisingly emotive, and describable only – despite the artist’s penchant for the abstract – in real-life terms. The outer, surrounding square of a painting from 1973, for instance, acts like a dense, rust-colored frame, holding sturdily in space before giving way to delicate, central cloud-like grays. The centers of two other, side-by-side paintings suggest a pale cardboard box in shadow; behind them spreads a depthless, James Turrell-like aqua-blue. (Surely, even if abstract, the blue is behind?) At first, the two paintings look identical, but a second glance shows the blue-green to be slightly warmer, the tan barely darker, in one; labels indicate they were painted fully eight years apart. Albers’s drawing, too, hints at spatial depth: his compression of the squares towards the lower edge of every painting evokes a kind of proscenium, viewed from a point one third of the way up the painting’s height.

Morandi‘s life suggests a similar mix of modesty and rigor. Sharing an apartment with his three sisters, he hardly ever left his hometown Bologna except for summer stays in the neighboring hills. After a few early flirtations with Cubism and Metaphysical painting, he turned to more realistic landscapes and, especially, the luminous still life paintings celebrated today for the maximal light they extract from minimally modeled objects. To facilitate his muted color harmonies, Morandi famously pre-painted many of these bottles, boxes, and pitchers; a certain pre-planning is also evident in their carefully aligned tops and vertical intervals. Like Albers a devoted teacher, he taught etching for many years. The exhibition includes nine of his still life etchings, which preserve, in a busier crosshatching technique, much of his painting’s atmospheric depth.

Morandi’s dozen paintings include his “Still life with white bottle and small blue bottle” (1955), which deftly captures the conversation between two utterly different verticals: a stoutly fluted vase, barely but tangibly differentiated in its creamy lightness from the background, and a petite, spindly, dark blue vial. Colors tell us how they occupy space. Pressures of hue ebb and swell, on objects and spaces alike, so that every square inch urges a single impression: buoyant vase and its small, jewel-like descendant. In another robust painting, from 1957, repeating verticals spell out the rapport between three slender bottles and a pitcher. Overlapping in subtly shifting colors, the bottles lead the eye incrementally to a final splash of blue – a pitcher, familiar from other paintings, but reduced now to a crucial foil to the volumes in front. One moves palpably among the bottles, as through a copse of trees.

Albers’s compact rhythms serve as an effective, if unsubtle, framework for color investigations. For Morandi they feel more like elegant tethers for his continuous massaging of space. But their purposes overlap. Linger with the paintings in “Albers and Morandi,” and a peculiar realization sets in: one need only zoom in on one of Albers’s “proscenia,” adopt a slightly higher point of view – and, yes, add the cadences of observed light – and one comes intriguingly close to the intimate, contained energy of a Morandi. The greatest revelation of “Albers and Morandi,” in fact, may be its affirmation of the paradox of painting: every brushstroke is both pigment and a sensation in a parallel reality.

Arguably, the installation over-produces this revelation. At two points a single painting by each artist is centered, alone, on a vast wall. The effect is striking – the ultimate tribute to an artwork, befitting a tiny Raphael predella panel or van Eyck painting, either of which could hold up to hundreds of square feet of white. But can a painting by Albers or Morandi? Even though both fully pursued a vision of painting, neither probed its full potential; their inspirations were drawn out, elaborated, and put back, so to speak, in the same reliable box of centered and repeating horizontals and verticals. When Albers ventures “outside the box” with his non-square “Untitled (Variant/Adobe)” (1958), the asymmetric rhythms open the door to new contradictions across the surface: large vs small, expansive vs condensed, here vs there, and we may think wistfully of Mondrian’s more daring rhythms. Similarly, while Morandi’s most enthralling works make ordinary objects appear startlingly new and real, he just as often settles for the look of the impactful — those insightfully aligned bottles! — rather than its realization in a momentum of forms. Bonnard, for all his technical meanderings, more vitally located his still life objects.

But then, isn’t painting necessarily an unending quest? The exhibition’s subtitle, “Never Finished,” implies as much – and leaves one wondering what the “finish line”’ might be. My own vote would be for a painting that equally embraced the dynamics of abstraction and the complex veracity of representation, using each to inform and propel the other, to come up with something as potent, lucid, and essential as – well, a painting by Chardin, the eighteenth-century still life painter so admired by Matisse and Picasso. Dare we hope for a contemporary equivalent? That would be a painting holding up to any wall.

The post Distillations: Albers and Morandi at David Zwirner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016
325 Broome Street 1W (between Chrystie Street and Bowery)
New York City, (917) 517-4929

In the paintings of Ann Pibal, quietly resonant color and stringent asymmetry assert a hard-edged intimacy. There is an implied scale beyond the actual size of these small pictures in acrylic on aluminum, Her current show presents two series, both from 2013, hung at the same height on opposite walls of this long, rectangular gallery space. The titles hint at specificity without reducing meaning to something prescribed or directed: RBWC a group of five paintings with gold as a background color, face DHWT, six dark blue and brown paintings.

The gold paintings constitute a single, multi-part work, whereas the dark blue and brown paintings remain a series of related, but independent works. This fact adds complexity to serial thinking. The two groups of works contrast structurally, as well as conceptually—the gold are light filled and somewhat reflective whereas the blue and brown ones are light absorbent and close in tone. Perhaps the former tend toward an idealization where the latter are more earth bound and rational. But such generalizations are qualified by connections between the two groups, with constant and subtle variations at play and a sometime withdrawal from, and undermining of, symmetry as a given. Often close symmetry – more akin to the slight off kilter of the human body than exact mirroring – is like a ghost or reverberation within the image rather than a formal presence. We are aware of it even though it is not, in fact, fully expressed.

All the gold paintings contain a regular ten-inch bounding square that itself contains concentric squares that radiate, each a different color, in a rainbow sequence. Over the course of permutation within this set, horizontals become diagonal and one work may appear as an enlarged section of another. This turning and focusing is actually like a sequence of thoughts, at once both intuitive and analytical.

RBCW 2, reveals itself to be increasingly complex once the presumption of any straightforward balance has been, all be it incrementally, thoroughly undermined. A fast assumption, like a reflex, might lead to seeing the painting as only iconographic in its apparent simplicity—a single stem of parallel lines vertically off-center and flanked by two squares. But a moment later, the viewer is engaged in discerning comparative differences—thickness of line, difference of color, variable spacing, placement of shape, corresponding horizontals. In contrast RBWC 3, using the same colors and linear elements, demonstrates just how much change can occur within restricted means, enlarging a sense of ongoing possibility, within designated formal and conceptual frames. Like one stanza among several in a poem, or one fugue following on after another, the ensemble sense of RBWC is actively built.

The dark toned color of the DWHT paintings, together with solid shape, represents something quite other to those of the sharply graphic RBWC. In using a lot less contrast between the two colors, blue and brown, not only is the light crisply internal, but time seems to move more slowly, too, and the space is gradual in its expansiveness. In DWHT 2, a receding pair of centrally placed, symmetrical, inverted V’s are beneath a slightly off-center horizontal line—consisting, like the V’s of two adjacent lines, one shorter and blue—as if this horizontal could itself be converted into a V. This off balancing is so slight that, once noticed, it charges the painting with a silent, calm, and yet, occasionally surprisingly tense, emotional force. Josef Albers, and Pibal’s contemporary, Tomma Abts, both come to mind. The beauty, common to all of the paintings, is that the shifts, when located, are as much felt as they are measured. Pibal’s art is not one of cool formalism. There is a precision here that does not exclude either intellect or sensual pleasure. Neither of these attributes is reduced because of the presence of the other; on the contrary, they combine to enhance each other.

The post Like a Sequence of Thoughts: Ann Pibal at Lucien Terras appeared first on artcritical.

April 28 to September 27, 2015
2 Columbus Circle
New York City, 212 299 7777

traveling to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, October 30, 2015 to February 28, 2016

The stated purpose of this show is to consider the notable contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. Certainly an argument can be made for paying more attention to the contributions women within craft traditions, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were largely dominated by men. Artists such as Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Toshiko Takaezu and Karen Karnes used such materials as metals, textiles and clay in ways that push their work toward fine art concerns, demanding to be seen in a fine art context. Yet to date, while each of these artists is well known, their collective contribution has remained unexamined.

The current show at MAD aims to adjust this imbalance, in part through sheer volume of works presented — over 100 individual works by 42 artists fill every gallery on two floors. The range is comprehensive and ambitious. By including important Scandinavian designers such as Rut Bryky and Vivianna Torun Brulow-Hube, the parallels between women working in Scandinavia and the United States are highlighted. And by focusing on European émigrés such as Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, the legacy of modernism within American craft is established. Bauhaus trained, Albers and Grotell brought with them the conviction that craft could serve as an arena of modernist innovation.

The exhibition begins on the second floor where it focuses on a particular cadre of artists, who besides Asawa, Karnes, Lenore Tawney and Takaezu included Sheila Hicks and Alice Kogawa Parrott, who were influential as designers, makers and teachers. As the show points out, this pioneering group came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself, which was founded in 1956 at the center of the emerging American modern craft movement.

Marianne Strengell and Grotell taught for many years at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where their students included Takaezu and Parrott. The placement of works by mentors, protégés and colleagues underlines the networks and alliances that influenced and sustained these women throughout their careers.

Many pairings of “craft” and “fine art” have been integrated to encourage viewers to reconsider traditional categories and, de facto, to rethink modernist narrative in light of gender. For the most part this works well, although some of the pairings need more explanation. It is not clear why works by Lee Krasner and Eva Hesse, for example, have been paired with Takaezu and Tawney. They didn’t influence each other much and the formal connections are slight. But this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a feast of works by women rarely seen together on this scale.

One need only think of the careers of male artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Peter Voulkos and Scott Burton, to recognize the need to further examine the concerns raised by this show. Noguchi did a great deal of design work throughout his career, including lamps, chairs, set design but he was always located firmly within a fine arts context. Voulkos made wheel-thrown vessels throughout his life, but he is widely recognized for pushing clay into the realm of sculpture. Perhaps the most dramatic comparison might be Burton, who designed objects out of marble and stone intended to be viewed aesthetically while at the same time functioning as chairs, tables, etc. This paradigm can be traced right back to Constantin Brancusi whose Endless Column ensemble, erected in Romania in 1934, includes a large stone table with twelve stone chairs that Brancusi himself felt was as important to the whole as the column itself. The point being that male artists have not had problems playing with craft traditions and making utilitarian objects, but women who made work in craft areas were historically relegated to this arena.

Nevertheless, the exhibition at MAD is celebratory. Viewers venturing through the connected rooms will make many surprising discoveries: Marianne Strengell’s Forecast, a rug made from 80% aluminum for Alcoa; framed weavings by Anni Albers; a striking metal construction by Vivian Beer for instance. A piece titled DE—SIGN by Gabriel Ann Mahler, which includes a garment and a video exploring stereotypical male and female postures and clothing, was a revelation for this viewer. For the most part, the fourth floor is filled with later generations of artists and designers. Yet, as one enters these galleries, dominated for the most part by works of industrial design, one encounters an interesting counterpoint and nod to design legacy in a pairing of ceramic works by British ceramicist Magdelane Odundo. These raven-black clay forms are stunning: they provoke, startle and mystify by being at once vessel and sculptural form.

One of the delightful ironies of the exhibition is that it includes the work of contemporary artists such as Polly Apfelbaum. Apfelbaum is firmly rooted in a fine art context but her large, site-specific installation of textiles was inspired by A Handweavers Pattern Book. She pushes back toward a craft heritage by choosing not to paint on stretched canvas but on silk in such a way that the piece spreads out as a series of colored scarves. She confidently makes feminist connections to craft and clothing.

“Pathmakers” does a great deal to meet its goal of locating women within central currents of mid-century modernist narrative. Most importantly, this exhibition opens the opportunity for new lines of enquiry into the intersections of craft, gender and modernism.

The post “Pathmakers” at MAD: Women and Design appeared first on artcritical.

July 20 to October 14, 2012
225 Madison Avenue, between 36 and 37 streets
New York City, (212) 685-0008

Josef Albers, a Bauhaus refugee from an increasingly intolerant Germany, immigrated with his wife Anni to the United States at the end of 1933. The move would be extraordinarily sanguine for the artist, who had been associated with the Bauhaus almost from its inception in 1919, first as a student and then as an instructor. Once in the New World, Albers found the consolations of nature, both in an America that was mostly still unspoiled wildernesses, and in Mexico, whose rectilinear architecture became the inspiration for his Adobe series. Trained early on by his father, who was a master tinker capable of carpentry, house painting, and plumbing, Albers was a man of unusual integrity, in both his person and his art. This independence of mind produced remarkable paintings: The artist’s nearly scientific wish to explore the glories and relations of color gave way to the great, and vast, sequence of paintings entitled Homage to the Square. The Morgan Library’s remarkable show of Albers’ works on paper presents studies for that series, as well as exploratory efforts for the Adobe series, and striking color studies. It shows a very different sensibility from the austere distinction of Homage to the Square.

The kind of exploration exampled in the Morgan’s show plays with the numinous accord of colors arranged in conjunction with each other. Indeed, at one point, Albers is quoted as saying, “The greens are envious of each other,” a slightly comic aphorism born out in two very painterly studies of hues Albers deems as green (to this viewer, black, purple, and gray are also evident in the color sketch). Albers, seemingly impeccable as a rational experimenter, is shown here as both tenacious and tentative in his discoveries, even evidencing an expressionist bent, a far cry from his personality and better-known art. Works on paper have an immediacy and a spontaneity that the supposedly more serious mediums of canvas and linen lack, and Albers takes advantage of this quality, working out structures of luminous tone and subtle structure. There is a red on red on red study for Homage to the Square whose luminescence is so strong it makes the viewer feel that a light source exists behind the painting. Equally interesting is the subtle yet visible difference between the picture’s three kinds of red, with the square in the center painted the darkest hue, while the other two squares are of successively lighter intensities.

Who would have thought that Albers was capable of such moving lyricism in his works on paper? There are drips here and there, and the lines between squared forms are not exactly straight; the edges of the painting are often rough rather than clean. The idiosyncrasies of the work do not add up to much in a conceptual sense, but they result in wonderfully expressive art. The Adobe series, far more rectangular in its forms, demonstrate the inherent attractiveness of symmetry. In one, from 1947, broad swathes of two dark blues act as the background, with the pink adobe house only partially seen and framed on its outer limits by green and, a different ground, black. On front of the pink façade, one sees a rectilinear orange form, with a square in the middle that articulates two black doors. Albers is very much an artist of restraint, but in works like this his restraint is joyous in nature. In study after study, his curiosity gets the better of his hand, and marvelous improvisations result. The viewer leaves with a more accurate, and larger, view of Albers as a painter.

The post “The Greens are Envious of Each Other”: Josef Albers at the Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

11 West 53rd Street
between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City

Curator Starr Figura uncovers the relationship of geometry to two-dimensional abstraction from 1912 to today without imposing a narrative arc. The attention rests first on individual works of art, however the exhibition is teeming with a myriad of connections between disciplines, formal imagery, and the relationship between spiritual content and conceptual design. Many of the artists represented are equally recognized as teachers (most notably Josef Albers), authors of manifestos, and members of schools or collectives, and an intense doctrinaire commitment to the geometric-based practice runs through many of “Geo/Metric.”Modestly inhabiting the Museum of Modern Art’s newest gallery space on the second floor, “Geo/Metric,” is the kind of user-friendly, yet classically rigorous exhibition that can be taken for granted in the age of curatorial spectacles.  This is unfortunate, since exhibits like “Geo/Metric,” and the recently closed “Multiplex: New Directions in Art Since 1970,” are crucial in bringing MoMA’s naturally inclined historicism into a mutually beneficial relationship with its growing collection of contemporary art.

In the “Suprematist Manifesto” (1915), created the same year as “Black Square,” Kazimir Malevich describes geometric forms as symbols of both a primeval mysticism, and a highly rigorous, intellectual parlay between the artist’s subjectivity and the impassive art object.  For each succeeding generation, this interplay of geometric form and content is located at different points. Malevich and Kandinsky, arguably the first practitioners and theorists of a non-objective art of geometric forms and symbols, are presented alongside lesser-exhibited compatriots, Frantisek Kupka, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Lyubov Popova.

Learning at the table of the Russian Constructivists, Helio Oiticia’s five luminous gouache on board works, radiate a fresh Neo-Constructivism. Created when Oiticia was in his early 20s, and a member of Rio de Janeiro’s concrete art collective, Grupo Frente, the “Metaesquemas” (1957) series are simple, cut-out geometric forms in red, white and black, composed within the limits of a grid or rectangle form on a neutral ground. The total effect captures the timing of a free jazz drumbeat, a minimalist re-interpretation of the rhythmic linoleum prints of Lyubov Popova and the paper collages Hans Arp.

Mary Heilmann’s “Davis Sliding Square” (1978), provides relief from the black and white reductive optical build-up of Bridget Riley and Francois Morellet. The painting is synthetic polymer paint on paper, a Malevich on acid description of a blue square and rectangle against a yellow backdrop. Similar to Blinky Palermo’s bright green triangle on white paper (from the screenprint series “4 Prototypes,” 1970) the geometric forms have a presence that is both organic and chemical.  Classical geometry, in the hands of Heilmann and Palermo, are indeterminate substances, peeled and placed like stickers on a flat plane. In this company Ellsworth Kelly’s  “Line Form Color” (1951), a series of ink and gouache building block color forms radiates a graphically controlled precision.

The fluid concept of “radical art,” how it was defined in its own era and is understood today, also permeates the rooms of “Geo/Metric.”  A case in point is Jo Baer’s two 1965 gouache on paper compositions—thin, deftly painted frames that illuminate the paper’s white center. Baer’s work can be overlooked in a room of the decade’s flashier offerings, but it offers some of the first investigations into the conceptual perimeters of painting and painted abstraction.  Like many artists who realize a mature vision early in their chosen art practice, Baer came to art-making from a multidisciplinary background of science and philosophy, which she brought to bear on her own development as a painter.  Her frame compositions connect the hand-made line to the impersonal and industrial forms of Minimalism. Like Agnes Martin’s grids, the form realized is at once contemporary and primitive, derived from repetitive processes that reveal a wide species of spaces.

The geometric graphic’s counterpart, the ghostly space of the paper, is investigated through radical printing practices by Dorothea Rockburne. Her “Locus” print series (1972) is comprised of paper sheets bearing lines and ridges preserved from the process of folding prior to being run through an etching press.  The slight three-dimensionality of the paper (which hangs unframed at MoMA) is geometry come to life off the page. The “Locus” prints have the sublime singularity of a child’s crumpled napkin, lending themselves to the illusion of self-created works of art.  Inseparable from the invisible mechanics of the formal process, there is an important metaphysical dimension to the work.  Describing her experience working with paper in the 1970s, Rockburne alludes to the spiritual properties underlining a highly analytic practice.  “Paper began to assume terrific importance to me. I locked myself in my studio and just stared at sheets of paper. I thought that the paper would tell me something – something that I needed to know. Finally, I felt as though I became the paper.”

“Geo/Metric” brings the conversation up to date with only passing reference to the sweeping effects of digital media on geometric abstraction, a direction that, admittedly, could be better explored in a smaller survey of artists.  Instead the exhibition satisfyingly closes its narrative with an artist, Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968), whose drawings seem to embody in equal parts the early lessons of the Russian and Brazilian Constructivists, the hard edges of Minimalism, and the flash bulb presence of Op and Pop Art. The pencil on paper “Butterfly” series are tightly realized compositions of radiating color bands meeting at horizontal perspective planes.  The awkward precision of Grotjahn’s forms and the impossibility of the spaces they describe project the jubilant urgency of a hand-painted carnival sign. After being run through the pressure chamber of Conceptual Art, geometric forms for many artists working today are not indicative of a strict allegiance to any kind of school of non-objective thought or practice. From the storied history laid out in the rooms of “Geo/Metric” it seems that geometry in art has indeed reached its highest accomplishment: the freedom of eternal fresh starts.

The post Geo/Metric: Prints and Drawings from the Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York appeared first on artcritical.

January 26 — February 24, 2007

Tony Oursler
Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th Street
New York City

February 17 — March 24, 2007

Developing an eye for color as it is inextricably tied to form is a dominant theme in exhibitions at Pace Wildenstein and Lehmann Maupin. Although on the face of it, the Pace exhibition with its exquisite pairing of Josef Albers and Donald Judd would appear to be on a different planet from Oursler’s moaning, colored aluminum splatters, we propose that the interplay between color and form in the Pace exhibition can be understood at a deeper level if we consider aspects of Oursler’s project. But, first things first.

Pace Wildenstein’s Albers/Judd: Form and Color might just be the most ravishingly beautiful exhibition that the art scene has provided in many years. The show uses color as its organizing principle, e.g., a red and blue Albers hangs next to a red Judd and a blue Judd. Each of Albers’ works, painted with oil on masonite is juxtaposed with one of Judd’s objects made of brass, Douglas fir plywood, or anodized aluminum and plexiglass. The particular works selected not only sing in their own right but also take on a heightened aura when paired in this show. Given that these are at one level dry, highly intellectually designed creations, the chromatic effects they achieve are both a tribute to the works themselves and to the combinations, be they between Albers variants or homages to the square and Judd’s boxes (floor pieces and wall pieces) or his last series of carefully orchestrated colored metal rectangles, grid-like forms that are structurally closest to Albers’ variants. As pairings, they exemplify Smithson’s apt description of Judd’s achievement—“uncanny materiality”. Indeed, some of the combinations are so strong that one experiences a “meta-work”— a kind of hypothetical Albers-Judd collaboration. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon is the wall with three Albers paintings (a variant and two homages to the square) and a late Judd metallic wall piece with 8 interlocking rectangular units—all in combinations of yellows and browns. In such instances, the installation itself creates a new work of art. The people who designed these groupings are the unsung heroes of this exhibition, a fact dramatically captured in the layout of the excellent catalogue that accompanies the show.

Another dividend of this exhibition is the viewer’s greater exposure to Albers’ variants that are often treated as less well-developed demonstrations of his context effects compared to his homages to the square. The variants are particularly interesting because not only are they splendid chromatically, but because they reveal a more complex geometry. They are more architectural, with some works being titled, Study for an Adobe (1949) or Adobe Yellow Front (1959). This is not to say that at times the homages do not give us a sublime color experience as in the pair consisting of Albers painting with 3 reds (Homage to the Square: Soft Sign, 1957) and Judd’s Menziken box of clear and black anodized aluminum with transparent blue over red plexiglass (Untitled, 1991). The room to the left as you enter the gallery is both conceptually compelling and a visual knockout with four works in browns, cordovan, and black—an homage and a variant by Albers and Judd’s series of six Cor-ten steel rectangles with black plexiglass arranged vertically, facing a large wooden floor piece. We do, however, offer one caveat. At times, the pairings can move from “uncanny” to “canny materiality” as they border on the decorative, providing the balm for the eyes of a tired businessman that Matisse alluded to but never really painted (best illustrated by Albers’ 1947 Variant: 4 Grays and 2 Violets and Judd’s Untitled 1977 stainless steel box with purple plexiglass). Thus, an interesting challenge for the viewer is recognizing when this happens and why. Is it purely a function of the colors used or is there more going on?

Being decorative is less a problem with Oursler’s monochromatic splatters—their dynamic grotesqueness usually protects them, albeit even with Oursler there is one purple piece that perhaps borders on being too pretty chromatically. More interestingly, we think there is a clue in Oursler’s work that provides us with a deeper insight into the nature of the relationship involved in the Albers-Judd pairings. This is a rather surprising state of affairs given that Oursler’s grotesque sculptures are hardly known for their imaginative use of color.

All four walls of Lehmann Maupin’s large center room contain one or two brightly colored laser-cut aluminum shapes that hover between painting and sculpture. Within each of the seven large amoeboid shapes is one or two rhyming orifice(s) containing a DVD player and an LCD screen whose images (and muffled sounds from three of the works) project outward from the wall completely filling the cut out space. The colors and shapes in the small video mimic those of the larger static background mother splat and allow for a dynamic interplay between the ever shifting content containing eyes, mouths, teeth, and fingers. What is so intriguing about this work is that we are observing a process of chromatic morphogenesis — eyes morph into mouths and teeth into fingers, all beautifully tinted in colors that both enhance and are enhanced by the context color of the encompassing splatter forms.

And what does this add up to if not “uncanny materiality”, uncanny beyond that which one could ever imagine in Albers or Judd? We suggest that the shape shifting in Oursler’s creative exhibition offers a new way to frame the Albers-Judd relationship. As discussed earlier, one reason why the Albers-Judd pairings are so visually effective is that, at times they seem to imply an emergent new work. Particularly in the case of the variants, we can experience the morphing of Albers’ paintings into Judd’s objects or we can see a Judd as having been lifted out of an Albers variant. Viewed this way, there is a higher-order isomorphism that ties together the two exhibitions — they both deal with chromatic morphogenesis — one organic in the case of Oursler where the morphing is almost stem-cell-like, the other a geometric-architectural transformation that carries a similar color relationship from two to three dimensions. Most importantly, what the Oursler works do is to make us go beyond experiencing color as form to experiencing color as becoming. This treatment of color as process, in turn, provides a higher-order invariant that cuts across both exhibitions. Viewed thusly, color is not merely contained by form; color becomes an active marker for changes in form be it a shift from eyes to mouth in Oursler or in the case of Judd and Albers, where color organizes space rather than merely filling it.

The post Developing an Eye for Color: Albers, Judd and Oursler appeared first on artcritical.

“Josef and Anni Albers: Design for Living” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is a tour de force of what I’ll call ‘restrained intimacy’. Both were students at the Bauhaus where they took the best their teachers had to offer, and through their intense dialogue with one another created something no artistic movement could contrive: actual love of material form.

Viewers are likely drawn to one or the other of this couple: They couldn’t appear to be more yin/yang, male/female. Bet the truth is, they both show a great deal of slippage when broken down in such terms. One remembers Josef for his ominously dull and fascinating “Homage to the Square” series that he made after coming to America; the curators decided to omit those works in favor of emphasis on his early design and furniture works. While at first looking overtly rectangular and manly, Albers as a furniture designer looks like a handmade and more austere version of Marcel Breuer. His rectangular forms seem to predict Donald Judd, only his emphasis on intimate detailing makes me feel as if Judd would have dreamt these objects as opposed to have made them. Anni Albers is known for her quilts, but really her target is painting. While at the Bauhaus she was encouraged to take weaving instead of painting. It seems obvious to me, that she never really stopped painting. Her tapestries, supremely rich in color and form, are a shockingly powerful, in their sense of efficacy that seems to have left the Bauhaus imitators in the dust. As both an advance on the Klee’s whimsy and as a precursor to minimalism, Anni Albers was by no means feminine and quaint.

But what really makes this show work is the comparison between these two artists. The curators have done an excellent job balancing them. The first room is dominated by Anni’s weavings, including two outrageous masterpieces (1925 and 1926). Through color and form, there exists no painting equal to the power of Anni’s subtle shifts in fabric. This is balanced with Josef’s asymmetrical brick fireplace (1955) and a few pieces of early furniture. While there is a cute play back and forth between these two in asymmetries, the real kick lies in the next room where we see the basic color scheme of Anni’s wall hanging (1925) reappear in Josef’s set of four stacking chairs (1927).

The comparisons get even more striking when in the next room we have Josef’s early glass designs paired with Anni’s watercolor design drawings. This is the room where the most surprises lay. Josef’s glass works look almost bohemian and funky such as in “Grid Picture” (1921) and “Park” (1924). Anni in her two rug designs from 1927, a psychedelic interplay of shapes and forms that let loose her unbridled sense of sheer creativity. While Josef in “Upward”, a glasswork from 1926, draws from Anni’s subtle forms and imbues it a sense of cool restraint. And as revolutionary as Anni was with weaving, Josef explorations with glass are similarly ‘touchy-feely’.

The last large room is filled mostly with Josef’s furniture and design objects, many dating from a commission for the Mollenhoff apartment in Berlin. They are surrounded by Anni’s later tapestries as screens, set up to look like paintings in an apartment. Again, there is an extraordinary merger of the two sensibilities. There is also a standout display of Anni’s handmade jewelry, made out of simple industrial materials: ribbons, washers, paperclips and bobby pins. Josef’s bed and night tables from 1927 really did it for me. In such simple details such as the night table round handles turned inward to face the bed, one really gets the sense of intimacy and sensitive feelings present in both these artist’s oeuvre.

The curators here have given us a special gift in this show, and that is quite simply, the Albers’ sensitive gift of love.

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Imagine an art school that functioned like no other. Located far from the bustling art scene of New York, it was nestled remote North Carolina, miles away from anything. Here, the student decided what classes to take and how long his course of study would last. A school that could not afford to pay its professors a cash salary, but was so popular that teachers came anyway, ready to use their cars for lodging in lieu of being part of the spirit of community the school fostered. A school that had no endowment, operated on a shoestring budget from year to year, and conferred no degrees, but that saw its graduates go on to attend the prestigious graduate programs at Columbia and Harvard.

There was once such a place, and Black Mountain College was its name, and it was the hotbed of experimentation in the visual, musical and literary arts from 1933 to 1956. A whole generation of artists, writers, dancers and musicians cut their creative teeth here, and their legacies live on to this day. Black Mountain: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz, examines the history and influence the college had on the artists and teachers who emerged from its uncommon ground, and in doing so, it leaves no doubt as to its importance in the greater scope of American art history.

Black Mountain: Experiment in Art is the exhibition catalogue to “Black Mountain College: Una Aventura Americana” presented at the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, which Katz also curated. Katz’s opening essay, which shares the title of the book, presents a condensed but in no way incomplete survey of the people events that secured the college’s place in history. The history of the school, what could easily be boringly encyclopedic, is light and interesting, allowing the reader to move breezily from one profile to another. The text has a yearbook feel, as if these were our classmates, rediscovered again for the first time in years. The stories lend themselves to a quixotic notion of the artist, but they are not melodramatic for these collaborations were not born out of romanticism, but out of practicality and experimentation.

Founded by John Andrew Rice, Black Mountain was a school where experimentation was indeed the focus; one where the students would constantly question, and the teacher would foster the discussion, not provide The Answer. Calling Black Mountain College an “experiment in art” is therefore appropriate in this context. Rice gathered a group of like-minded colleagues each irritated by the rigid structures at other universities, and started a college run entirely by the faculty, where the students were free to create independent patterns of study. As Katz notes, “these organizational principles were adhered to for the duration of the college’s existence. They proved its great blessing, its difference, and its difficulty.”

The school officially opened in September of 1933, fifteen miles from Asheville, North Carolina in an under-utilized YMCA building. It would later move to property purchased at nearby Lake Eden- 667 acres with sixteen buildings and an artificial lake. From the beginning, because it was so small, one was required to be part of an integral unit at the college, so close that it took on the character of a large family. Rice, convinced that the arts should play a central role in college education, reasoned that an artist should head up the college. Physics instructor Ted Dreier (nephew of collector Katherine) suggested contacting Philip Johnson, then director of the department of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, for a recommendation. He suggested Josef Albers, and thus began Black Mountain’s venture into experimentation in art and in art education.

In its twenty-three years, Black Mountain College produced some of the most important collaborations and ideas in the twentieth century. Teachers included Lyonel Feininger, Ilya Bolotowski, Walter Gropius, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob Lawrence, Beaumont Newhall, Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind; that’s just the short list. Big names in literature were also drawn to the campus -Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Irwin Panofsky and Anais Nin. It was that sense of community, the freedom to experiment, that drew of them to this sometimes exhilarating, sometimes lonely place. It was the only place many of them did not hesitate to try.

A school as small as Black Mountain provided the perferct breeding ground for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Katz explains that John Cage’s 4’33” -possibly the composer’s most famous (or infamous) work wherein the composer sits at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds but plays nothing-was derived from Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. Cage saw Rauschenberg’s paintings (multiple planks of white, painted in subtle textural variations) as a gutsy experiment, and as such, ventured to create a musical piece based on similar ideas. Katz notes that Cage had been afraid that the piece would be taken as a joke. In any other environment it might have. By stepping into this realm, Cage was then able to take his ideas one step further. It was at this point that he created Theater Piece No. 1-widely accepted as the first “happening.”

That specific works are splendidly reproduced is another strong point of this text. Using descriptive analysis to show exactly where pivotal developments lie, Katz provides the reader a link between idea and practice. He explains that de Kooning’s gestural style and “typically de Kooningesque palette of ‘weak’ or ‘offbeat’ colors” were discovered in 1948 while teaching at Black Mountain. Asheville was painted in that year, and indeed it reveals what we know to be “de Kooningesque”, “active color rhythms in compressed space, though still relying on the linear definition of partially bounded areas.” By including a section on recent work from a handful of Black Mountain artists, Katz offers insight into how their work has evolved over time.

One area where the book falls short is in its explanation of exactly why the school failed to endure. Without a board of directors or an endowment, the school’s financial stability was always in question. Albers did much to keep things going despite this. He arranged for guest lectures, for slides for presentations, and ensured the variety of artistic viewpoints evidenced by the range of artists who taught at the college. He urged friends and alumni to donate art books to the library.

Albers left the school in 1948, and it was at this point that the poet Charles Olson took over. With a writer now in charge, the focus shifted naturally from the visual arts to the written word and became the same kind incubator for literature that it had been for the visual arts only five years earlier.

Olson studied at Wesleyan and Harvard, worked for the Office of War Information during World War II and worked on FDR’s reelection campaign of 1944. He made a name for himself in 1947 with Call Me Ishmael, his study of Melville, but his years at Black Mountain from 1948 to its closing in 1956 were the most critical to his career as a writer. Most memorable was the 1950 publication of his essay “Projective Verse”-composition by field, where the page was a canvas on which words could be dropped in a variety of positions, not just one after another. Another key aspect of Projective Verse was the demand that it be made in the moment, one word or thought was meant to spur the next-it is not a meditation but an abstraction, like a Pollock on paper. Olson also made his mark by urging authors to publish their own works. Under his direction, the movement known as the Black Mountain School of writers was formed, which included Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Robert Duncan and Joel Oppenheimer, among others.

Olson was an imposing figure, both physically and intellectually. Robert Creeley’s essay “Olson and Black Mountain College” sheds light on the complexities of person. As Creeley puts it, “It was hard not to come under his spell and he was finally bored by those who did.” Olson’s methods were challenging. His way of teaching was curious. He taught late at night, with classes lasting sometimes into the next morning. The structure that Albers had instituted was clearly erased.

When Olson took over in 1948, attendance at the college was at its peak. But what exactly led to its decline? Was it Olson’s domineering personality? Dorothea Rockburne, only seventeen when she came to the school in 1951, said, “it was strange and wonderful place, but it was very sexist. Olson was extremely sexist, and I’d never experienced that before.”

Was it slipshod management? By Creeley’s account, and within the essay by Kevin Power, “In Around and About The Black Mountain Review: Robert Creeley and Company,” it would appear that Olson spent too much time on his own writing endeavors instead of public relations and fund raising. In 1952, a prospectus for the school reported a 1:2 faculty to student ratio, and by 1954, there were only seven students enrolled. There was no science class, and Olson urged Robert Creeley, who had no knowledge of the sciences, to teach it. Creeley told Olson, “Biology was the one class I never took.” Olson’s reply, “Terrific, you can learn something.”

Was the small campus suffocating? Ilya Bolotowski found it too isolated, “a lively place, but very much inbred. And that finally became stifling, like living in a small room with mirrors; nothing else exists, except endless reflections.” Or were the teachers themselves to blame? Six of de Kooning’s ten students left the same year he did. When asked by Albers if he knew anything about that, de Kooning replied, “Sure. I told them if they want to be artists, they should quit school and come to New York and get a studio and start painting.”

In 1955, the college lost the land surrounding the school and the remaining buildings were practically in ruin. Robert Duncan described the main building as “a derelict piece of modernism-nothing looks more rundown than an art moderne building ten years later.” A very desperate end for something that once had so much glorious promise. Even so, this text leaves one with a feeling of inspiration and with a hope that art, inspired by experimentation, is useful and can still change our perception of the world.

Black Mountain: Experiment In Art
Edited by Vincent Katz with essays by Martin Brody, Kevin Power and Robert Creeley.
MIT Press, 2003

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