“The back-story of Allan’s estate – estimated at over $300 million – and the Allan Stone Gallery, an enterprise that continued to function until its abrupt closure in late April, is a near-Shakespearean tale replete with internecine family rivalries that have simmered for decades and an outside agitator with just the right set of skills and motivation to turn that simmer up to a boil,“ according to Stender.  The gallery that had given Wayne Thiebaud his first New York exhibition and Eva Hesse a show of drawings when the artist still lived in German shut its doors in the spring.

Works from Stone’s extensive collections, which includedAbstract Expressionist paintings, African tribal art, American and European folk and decorative art, have been selling this year at Sotheby’s.  The third sale is scheduled for Friday, September 23 in New York.

After Allan Stone’s death, in 2006, Claudia Stone, a daughter from his first marriage and a trusted lieutenant of sixteen years standing, ran the gallery.   Direction was wrested from Claudia by trustees of the estate, however, which had been left to Stone’s widow Clare.  But the Upper East Side firehouse premises of the gallery belonged to Claudia and were subsequently put on the market, selling in July reportedly for close to $10 million, and the gallery shut.  Stender recounts this saga in great detail, and delves into the family dynamics of the litigious heirs, and the travails of artists associated with the gallery (Stender herself being one of the latter.)

Therein, ethically and perhaps legally, lies a problem.  The article was commissioned by a leading art magazine, and when rejected, considered briefly by artcritical.  It is a superb piece of journalism in respect of having a tale to tell, doing its homework, and attempting due diligence.  It makes for great copy.

But the piece collides the responsibilities of a reporter with the axe to grind of a cheated artist.  Stender, like a number of artists, had works on longstanding consignment to the gallery subsequently caught up in the back and forth of the warring heirs.  The upshot is that the works are trapped, deemed gallery property in the absence of documentation to the contrary from the artists – rather than due to the presence of documentation in the hands of the gallery.

Had the stories been separated then each might have been fine in itself, from a publisher’s perspective and with fact checking and legal proofing.  But this is our problem, not Stender’s.  For her part, she constructs a compelling yarn of the sad decline and spinning out of control of a once seminal gallery, from the perspective of the aggrieved artist.  Publishing her 2000 word exposé as a “note” on her Facebook page draws her point of view to 600 friends who include Loren Munk and Jerry Saltz, both of whom cross-posted it a combined, further 7000 friends, allowing for overlap.  Plus the “note” is unrestricted.

Stender may not get her artworks back any sooner, but she has had the satisfaction of telling her tale – and even making some new friends.

The post Stonewall Me and I’ll Facebook You! appeared first on artcritical.

November 4 to December 23, 2010
113 East 90th Street, between Lexington and Park avenues
New York City, 212 987 4997

At Allan Stone Gallery, two artists we know well are caught in a less familiar and surprisingly compatible moment of aesthetic initiation.   In their mature oeuvres, John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie are artists of markedly different sensibility, both from one another and from these, their own early efforts.  This fascinating and focused show is like a snapshot of smiling infants now famous in utterly different walks of life—a rock star and a politician, say, or a priest and a mobster.  Here are little John and Leslie in their Abstract Expressionist kindergarten, and the toy of choice in the sandbox is collage.

Leslie famously abandoned a budding career as an action painter to achieve renown, via a foray in experimental moviemaking, with precisionist nudes and with an extended, Carravagesque narrative/allegorical series on the death of Frank O’Hara.

John Chamberlain is a sculptural giant of the era of Pop and minimal art whose trademark material of compressed automobile body parts, though expressive and contorted, has formal clarity and chromatic sharpness that contrast with the murky period palette and scruffy, ambiguous layering that permeate these early collages.

Collage, according to Rauschenberg, was the drawing mode of the 20th-century.  Does that make it, to montage one dictum with another, the probity of modernism?  What is beyond dispute is the commonality collage provides to the early experiments of an array of American movements and individuals.  Collage was seminal to formative or transformative moves by artists as disparate as Robert Motherwell, Judith Rothschild, Lee Krasner, Alex Katz, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and – as demonstrated here – Leslie and Chamberlain.

These two men are artists who found themselves in finding.  Their collage is of the manifestly messy variety.  There was actually what could be called, in a nod to Clement Greenberg, an American type collage which is better defined as “cutout” in that it is clean, hard-edged, and reductive, having to do with carving out space and depth rather than modeling in juxtaposed and contrastive forms.

Leslie and Chamberlain, however, are anything but fastidious in their fifties collage.  In fact, somewhat brutalist results are redolent of mess and distress.  These collages can feel like randomly selected patches of an AbExer’s paint-splattered floor in which detritus has been stamped into the floorboards as the painter moves around his workspace.  Tellingly, Chamberlain actually uses acoustic board ceiling panels as his support in a couple of these images.

But in common with many American collagists, and in contrast to classic European experimentation, there is little that is associative about the materials that find their way into these works.  In one Leslie piece from 1953-54 we get a scrap of an ad with GE’s distinctive graphic logo, but this hardly makes him heir to Kurt Schwitters.  Interestingly, Chamberlain, whose future idiom, found and crushed car parts, is shot through to the core with rich and suggestive social meaning, is almost willfully non-objective in his choice of materials.  There are, granted,  a strawberry and a few leaves in a fragment of wallpaper in one piece from 1959-60.

The show includes a number of Chamberlains that are not actually collages at all, but the array of mediums (oil, crayon) and of contrastive washes and impastos brings textures into collision that echo a preoccupation with collage as surely as they prefigure his later infatuation with the car wreck.  His breakthrough into car parts occurred in an act of accidental collage when he grabbed a couple of fenders in Larry Rivers’s back yard that he only realized later belonged to a precious 1929 Model T Ford.

Leslie does, in one or two of his pieces, have something of that carving as opposed to modeling sensibility I’m identifying as “American type” cutout.  Gildo the Moore (Rose) 1951 is quite striking in this respect.  Half a dozen torn, black boulders of paper and two whites partially overlap as they are bolted together against a faintly-colored ground, the rose of the title, that is allowed to peer through the slivers of space between these defiant armor plates of paper.

One strategy the artists have in common is to make potent expressive use out of a functional mode of affix, namely the staple.  This comes across very forcefully in Leslie’s Gildo and an untitled Chamberlain of 1960.  In both images, the arbitrarily directed staples, spare but strategic in Leslie, allover and frenetic in Chamberlain, are like pentimenti that electrify the compositions.  Again, however, the way the staple goes down speaks to differing artistic personalities even as Leslie and Chamberlain tap a common period sensibility.  Leslie uses the staples to find, intuitively rather than geometrically, the corners of his rough-hewn quadrangles, or sometimes to tether the forms to one another.  Chamberlain is altogether more liberal in the way he scatters these boisterous accents across the picture plane.  That said, for all their exuberant abundance, almost every staple pulls its weight as a functional necessity.

That neither artist seems to have stayed with collage is in both their cases a moot point.  The young Chamberlain came of age intellectually at Black Mountain College where the company of poets prompted him to play with language.  When he put together poems on the basis of how the words looked, rather than sounded, he realized, he says, that at heart he is a collagist.  That in a way he remains.  The most recent piece in the show, a mixed media relief of 1961, forcefully signals the direction of his mature sculpture.

For Leslie, the idea that his AbEx career is a different man from the new perceptual realist he became is anathema.  Both bodies of work, he once explained to me, are defined by frontality, confrontation and all-overness.  Differences of look and behavior, so far as he is concerned, are of minor consequence.

The boy is father of the man, as the saying goes, and this is true too of collagists and the sculptors or painter/filmmakers they grow up to be.

The post The Probity of Modernism: Collages by John Chamberlain and Alfred Leslie appeared first on artcritical.

“Garth Evans, Watercolors” at Lori Bookstein until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, 212-750-0949).

“Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color” at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues, 212-463-9666).

“Alfred Leslie 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist” at Allan Stone until December 22 (113 E 90 th Street between Park and Lexington Avneues, 212 987 4997).

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisors at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laid back pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits. Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch, Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein—in their different ways they both have us rethinking one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opaqueness. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface, closure against ethereality. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.

Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There’s also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness; although the page is saturated by watercolor used counter-intuitively with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness. There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, and yet the support has presence: its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms have a complexity that subverts the space around them, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes.

Mr. Evans is consumate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material; we see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. The former is rough on the edges, but you see what you are getting; the latter is silky smooth and slick, reveling in enigma. One is about form, the other style.

With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like its being seduced by a jelly-fish. His complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a tricksiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles manage to recall at once medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache. Where Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms, Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, about perception than that the perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes, and yet his image IS the paint—philosophically he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.

Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: it is good, true and beautiful. She follows on neatly from Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, not just because of a shared affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. She has found a strategy to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind. Building effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means.

She recalls Antonì Gaudi in this regards: as his walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic, hers postmodernize the found object while preserving its jouissance with a vocabulary consisting, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color, the cups protruding sculpturally, the beakers swirling into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt. She isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however: there is genuine exploration of color sensations—not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.

***

Alfred Leslie’s abstraction is the stuff of legend, for it is often told how he turned his back on an accomplished early style to embrace the new perceptual realism of the 1960s, the style for which he is better known. It turns out, as the cache Allan Stone has gathered together at his Upper Eastside Gallery, that he was a highly accomplished if somewhat derivative Abstract Expressionst in the 1950s. The experience of this show is rather like finding a vintage cadillac in a long locked garage: they are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go.

There are undoubtedly strong influences from better known painters like de Kooning and Kline in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure, chance effects are given full play, and the paint embodies the sensation of flesh, and there is probably some influence from such figures as Al Held and Milton Resnick. But the palette has a panache of its own that belies the existential heaviness of his peers, and the energy is prodigious.

I spoke with him as his show opened about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting, of the subsequent decades, such as his Caravaggesque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation and all-overness as the underlying formal continuum.

There is a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull my Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Ms. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avantgarde in its broad manifestation, not towards a specific style or technique.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 16, 2004

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“Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain: Sculptures” at Gagosian Gallery until December 20 (980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th Streets, 212 744 2313)

To say that a show by John Chamberlain is a smash hit will inevitably sound like a bad pun, as the veteran sculptor has made mangled auto-parts his trademark medium. But the exhibition of his early work at Allan Stone, which now has been extended for another month, is a real stunner.

Taking in the period from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the show forces us (literally) to radically rethink this artist, sending us back to his aesthetic roots. The coincidence of a show at Gagosian of less than compelling work from the 1990s, however, arouses a desire to turn the clock on Mr Chamberlain backwards.

Appropriately, in view of his menacingly jagged materials, Mr. Chamberlain doesn’t fit neatly into a stylistic box. Despite his baroque exuberance, the use of impoverished materials and an emphasis on process have associated him with minimal art. Donald Judd was a critical champion and they traded works (a pristine steel cube by Judd actually ends up, suitably crushed, in a piece at Allan Stone by Mr. Chamberlain) while at Gagosian he is being shown with Dan Flavin, and he has a nave of his own at Dia:Beacon, the minimalist cathedral.

Likewise, because of the connotations of mass-production and consumer waste, Pop has grafted itself onto Mr. Chamberlain’s reputation. That the other modern artist who uses crushed autoparts, César, is “nouvelle realiste”, as the French call their pop artists, reinforces this connection.
The show at Allan Stone, however, emphasizes earlier allegiances in a way which makes better sense of of sensibilities and manifest intentions. A butch poetics of scrap comes straight from David Smith and Robert Stankiewicz, while Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline inspire a sense of gesture battling to burst free. The gorgeously convoluted “Nutcracker” (1968) is more like a de Kooning in three dimensions than any of de Kooning’s own (later) sculptures. Mr. Chamberlain had studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where many of the instructors were entranced by notions of chance, which perhaps explains the more than passing resemblance of his collages to the combines of Robert Rauschenberg.

“Hudson” (1960) is rightly extolled as a breakthrough piece, not just because it was apparently the first instance where he appropriated a crushed auto part but because of the substance and volume of this gesture. The earlier, more linear constructions in jagged iron and machine parts seemed to speak the language of modern art, albeit with a proletarian accent. The car accelerated him into something declamatory: Looking less like drawings in air or 3-D collages, his works have truly inventive sculptural presence.

Some of the pieces that immediately followed “Hudson,” while still bold, experimental, and advanced for their time, revert to the “modern art” look. It is hard to tell from a historical distance, for instance, whether the small, mixed-media reliefs and collages of 1960-61 are more disconcerting for their messiness or their order. On the one hand, they are made from nonchalantly arrayed, defiantly trashy materials. On the other, they seem artfully uncoordinated, composed both pictorially and in the etiquette sense.

You would expect Mr. Chamberlain’s art to be animated by a sense of tragedy or entropy in view of the suffering or waste implied by auto accidents. But the eye adjusts with remarkable ease to his choice of materials. You soon tell yourself that a Chamberlain is in crushed cars like a Rodin is in bronze, and you pay attention instead to the mood established by the gestures and shapes, which is invariably upbeat and gung-ho.

Where a Kline or a de Kooning implies speed of execution, a Chamberlain lives with – is perhaps energized by -an internal contradiction: apparent frenzy that, like a symphonic scherzo, requires brilliant orchestration and artful composition. The end result is that, rather than looking at a Chamberlain as a car accident, you look at auto-wrecks as works of art.

The gentle brutalist at Stone has poetic charm, whereas his gauche counterpart at Gagosian is a consummate vulgarian. The sculptural forms are still compelling, but not so the surfaces. Maybe the inherent beauty of rusting 1950s industrial parts was a happy accident, but the decision by the artist to start painting his own components has been a tragic one, In terms of taste, Mr. Crash crashed.

The components of these three works from 1992 have been individually pre-painted by the artist, for the most part in a hand better suited to decorating bar stools at a tropical resort than to making works of art. Again defying classification, they beg the question: Are these sculptures that happen to have painted designs on them, the way traditional materials might show patina or grain, or are they paintings on very unusual supports?

Ancient and medieval sculpture was usually painted, of course, so why not modern, too? But the objection to this objection is that Mr. Chamberlain is evidently invested in the whole issue of ontology: how the thing came into being, what came first, whether it happened fast or slow, whether it is animated by chance or by deliberation. What, in other words, it ultimately is.

Mr. Chamberlain’s early work contained similar questions. His sculptures and reliefs were “anxious objects,” in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase. In or by 1992, however, anxiety had given way to crassness. It is as if your favorite young jazzman had been recruited to a heavy-metal band.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 11, 2003

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