31 October – 5 December 2015
525 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 627 6000

There is no such thing as easing yourself into the sculpture of Alina Szapocznikow. From the moment you step into the eponymously titled show of her work, currently up at Andrea Rosen Gallery, you will be deeply provoked, moved, and unsettled. Szapocznikow’s Piotr (1972), a six-foot tall sculpture of the artist’s son, confronts the viewer upon entry. Made when he was 18 and Szapocznikow was suffering from breast cancer, to which she would succumb the following year at age 47, the work is a resin cast of her only child’s nude adolescent body. Formed in a vertiginous pitch, the sculpture cannot stand on its own and must be supported by a Plexiglas brace in order to be displayed. The emptiness of the space behind Piotr suggests a void, like a pieta with the mother figure subtracted, the son left dangling in space.

Even before her cancer diagnosis, Szapocznikow spent good deal of her life enduring profound trauma. Born in 1926, when she was a teenager the Nazis confined her for years to the Jewish ghettos in Poland before she was imprisoned in a series of concentration camps during the Second World War. She managed to persevere through all of it. Several years after the war’s end, Szapocznikow contracted tuberculosis, from which she languished for months, nearly dying. Survival came at a cost to her fertility — she was unable to bear children afterwards (she and her first husband adopted Piotr Stanislawski).

In great part because of what she suffered, Szapocznikow had an uncommon fearlessness about the body (both hers and others’), and strove to leave a physical imprint of it, as well as the memories it contained, embedded in her work. Though she occasionally used the bodies of others, Szapocznikow most often applied the casting process to herself. Her breasts, lips, and legs recur in her sculptures. Disembodied from the whole, they serve as relics from the body of a person who seemed to preternaturally intuit the brevity of her life. This stunning show, exquisitely installed, offers a great breadth of Szapocznikow’s objects and the secrets they reveal when spent in contemplation of them. Each work on view here is wisely given ample space to breathe, and the act of scrupulous looking will yield generous, intimate fruit.

In Stèle (Stele) (1968) a bubble of black, polyurethane foam encases a set of resin-cast lips and knees. The lips are colored black and the knees are bent, protruding from the foam, so that it appears like a crouched human figure mainly hidden from view. Beneath this form, laid perpendicular to the knees, is a set of diminutive legs, cast in the black foam. A full circle around the work reveals another set of the same small legs adhering to the sculpture’s verso, while across the tops of the resin-cast knees a fetal shape, also of foam, is splayed. It’s so subtle that it is easy to miss, but the realization of this amorphous form drives straight to the gut — Stèle (Stele) is a mourning totem.

The informe that is alluded to in Stèle (Stele) is made fully manifest elsewhere, as in Sous la Coupole (Under the Cupola) (1970), a sculpture devastating in its total and contained abjection. Two nebulous blobs of polyurethane foam, in different shades of dismal brown, squat across from each other on the floor like competing piles of shit. A nylon pantyhose stretches between the two, each end of the stocking submerged into each pile. Szapocznikow routinely sunk personal items of clothing or other objects into her sculpture, often so deeply that they are rendered nearly unrecognizable. You can almost smell disintegration emanating from the two heaps while the intestinal stocking is meanwhile an activated life force, valiantly resisting the decay that is pulling it in both directions.

If the sorrow that unfolds seems too much to bear, the back room of the gallery, given over to Szapocznikow’s “sculpture-lamps,” offers some literal and metaphorical relief. She was known for a mordant wit, and the sculpture-lamps, while still being potent vessels of physical memory, are of a lighter tenor. Illuminowana [L’illuminée] [Illuminated Woman] (1966-1967), a plaster body with glowing breasts of sugary pink, and a seashell of blue resin, impressed with Szapocznikow’s lips where the head should be, stands like a warrior at the entrance to the room. Elsewhere, small, table-sized lamps of lips and breasts sit atop pink, phallic columns. One’s eyes are drawn to the corner, from where the large Kaprys-Monstre [Caprice – Monstre] [Caprice – Monster] (1967) radiates. The sculpture, a central element from which spring forth four long, thick, tube-like protuberances, glows a deep blood red, lighter at its core. It appears at once both slimy and inviting, and the viewer is compelled to examine it closely, pondering the folds and crevices of its aortic pipelines. Kaprys-Monstre is suffused with a defiant vitality; it pulsates with life. Her pus and blood have long drained away, but Alina Szapocznikow, flouting death, is still present.

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May 1 to June 20, 2015
525 W 24^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 627 6000

During his time as artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the prolific media artist Stan VanDerBeek composed a list of reflections of human experience in relation to the developing technologies of the 1960s. This typewritten list, exhaustively titled “RE:LOOK – COMPUTERIZED GRAPHICS Light Brings Us News of the Universe,” begins with a dictum: “1. The mind is a computer — not railroad tracks.”

For VanDerBeek, who self-identified as a “technological fruit picker,” the mind is essentially dynamic. Unlike a regulated path that shuttles objects and information ever forward, it is field of experimentation, reconfiguration, process, and error that caters to an individual’s imagination. Rather than dwelling on technology’s dystopian association with war and capitalist control, VanDerBeek was committed to finding new processes for connecting human experience with images that enhance a viewer’s relationship with and perception of her environment. In a series of computer-generated films known as the Poemfield series, made between 1966 and 1971 and currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, his effort is achieved with subtle intensity.

Within the gallery, VanDerBeek’s films are accessible through heavy, black curtains that give way to a darkened room where looping projections illuminate each of the four walls. The exhibition hosts five of the seven films and a remastered version of Poemfield No. 1 — transferred to digital video from their original 16mm format — that play together in staggering synchrony. Each film was created with the same meticulous process, culminating in glittering mosaics of color and light. A cacophony of digital and instrumental music accompanies the moving images, and a pile of furrowed cushions rests in the center of the gallery floor. The environment is a frenetic distraction from reality; it is difficult to leave.

Each Poemfield combines poems written by VanDerBeek with digital illustrations ranging from vibrant mandalas to geometric groupings of monochrome patterns, created with the movie program BELFLIX, which was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories programmer Kenneth Knowlton. The films were created via an ornate process: an IBM 7094 was fed instructions for BELFLIX to translate into a programming language. The code was transferred onto punch cards to be read by a computer that assembled a picture and record it to tape. “To visualize this,” VanDerBeek writes, “imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light; each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program.”[1] The nearly 50,000 triggered lights transform into silent black-and-white motion pictures. VanDerBeek sent the films to artists Robert Brown and Frank Olvey, who treated them with a special coloring process. (In the remastered version of Poemfield No. 1, the color is removed and substituted with cerulean blue to emphasize the result of the initial BELFLIX programming.) Then sound is added.

Just as each Poemfield is uniquely written, specific compositions are assigned to the seven films, ranging from computer-generated sounds to manipulated recordings by John Cage and Paul Motian. In the installation at Andrea Rosen, these soundtracks overlap in a delightful and confusing collage as the surrounding projections illuminate and conceal VanDerBeek’s words.

The Poemfield series relies on the intermingling of VanDerBeek’s accumulated visual languages to produce this overwhelming array of image and sound. These languages were gathered throughout the artist’s eclectic education, which appropriately began at the legendary Black Mountain College in the 1950s. He initially studied painting until, inspired by instructors such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham who combined disparate media in performative and immersive staging, he began conceiving physical environments to screen his experimental films. In 1965, he completed the immersive Movie-Drome — a Buckminster Fuller-like geodesic dome covered with moving-image murals — which he wrote about as encouraging an “expanded cinema.” VanDerBeek’s writings on his work and his hopes for the future of cinema are not unlike his Poemfields, where a systematic form is filled with playful content and ultimately relies on the viewer’s individual experience.

Exhibited in simultaneous loop, the Poemfields require active and solitary engagement from each viewer. I entered the gallery and found the space empty and undisturbed, as if stumbling upon a naturally occurring digital phenomenon. The walls flicker off kilter as the points of light scatter across each wall in systematic motion, shifting between bold phrases and abstract disorder. The erratic sounds cloak the spaces that the light fails to touch. My presence only adds to the gaps of the darkened space, filling it with my movement as I shift my perspective between films. VanDerBeek’s technological experiments result in a physical maze, where every component of the Poemfields requires an all all-encompassing encounter. Phrases pulse on the screens, awaiting consumption and interpretation. Patterns of light become arbitrary and subjective. Overlapping sounds momentarily combine into one deafening tone. VanDerBeek uses his technology to create physical manifestations of the imagination, forming real environments of jumbled thoughts. The experience is a walk through a manifestation of one’s own mind.

In the darkened room of the gallery, two walls momentarily return to black before the credits begin to roll. The audio is noticeably less muddled, and the words “free fall” are uttered in surprise over sounds of wind and digital sighs. The purple grid shrouding the screen of Poemfield No. 5 begins to deteriorate, replaced with fields of red. Images of falling bodies materialize behind the newly colored wall. Then the letters F R E E F A L L litter the screen in varying compositions. To free fall is to move through space, impelled by nothing but gravity. VanDerBeek’s films encourage the imaginative leap from convention and expectation (in both the act of creating and of viewing), and provide a regenerative space in which to fall.

[1] VanDerBeek, Stan. “New Talent: The Computer,” Art in America (January 1970): 86.

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Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

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May 19 to June 30, 2012
525 West 24th Streeet, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-627-6000

Josiah McElheny, a wizard at merging conceptual art with high craft, has consistently looked to historical contexts in a variety of fields to shore up and expand his beautifully made glass containers. In his current show at Andrea Rosen, he has built human-height vitrines to present his assemblages of glass sculptures created in response to a wide variety of artists, modernist heroes such as Popova, Fontana, and Schlemmer among them. Everything about the exhibition is keyed to its contextualization, which adds a distinct layer of complexity to the works in the wood-and-glass boxes. The show, entitled “Some thoughts about the abstract body,” relates to the way clothing and costume design have been abstracted, transforming the person into an abstract entity as much as possible. McElheny has come up with variants on this idea, enclosing within eye-level vitrines and glass sculptures that respond subtly to the inspiration of the artists named in each work’s title. According to press materials, the general idea of experiencing abstraction through the medium of the body might result in a dialogue about the original intentions of those committed to such a transformation.

But the problem, as has happened before in McElheny’s art, is that sometimes the context seems so removed from the actual art that it fails to elucidate the artist’s strategies and motivation. Clearly, McElheny is a master artist, someone capable of creating most anything in glass. Yet the relations of his conceptual bias to his artworks are sometimes obscure. For the less historically minded among us, the artist has produced a marvelous show whose impulses have to do with form rather than the history of design. But, even so, the subtle changes from one glass work to the next depend upon the conceptual frame with which the artist has formed his undertaking. Maybe McElheny’s art is best understood as possessing levels of accessibility, in which one may experience the design as forming a ladder of ascending intellectual difficulty. If we look at the vitrine entitled Models for an abstract body (after Delaunay and Malevich) (2012), we see an upright construction with an austere steel pedestal supporting a box made of wood and glass. Within the box are two examples of hand-blown and carved glass, ostensibly created in response to the works of the two artists mentioned. The two shapes, one rather cone-like and the other molded in an hourglass form, are stunningly beautiful. Still, it is hard to gauge just how the glass forms adapt to the art history brought to bear on their construction.

This is not to question the genuine achievement of McElheny’s projects, generally speaking and including this one. It is just to say that like any good works, McElheny’s art can be understood on different levels. The level of craftsmanship is remarkably achieved, with black and brown vertical striations creating moire patterns that delight prolonged study of the glass. One box is particularly attractive—the one containing works influenced by Delaunay, Rodchenko, and Vialov. Here the vaselike forms, given dark vertical stripes, demonstrate a gracefulness and sophistication that places them in the highest reaches of design and art—and this would be true even if they were not related to the art of historical artists. All in all, it seems the complexity of McElheny’s historical understanding of the abstract body works in two directions: pulling his art back, toward the legacy of modernism; and pushing it forward, toward a statement unified by its context, which enables the artist to do whatever comes next in his imagination. The artist even has some wearable art: life-size, mirrored, vertically oriented rectangles anyone can wear with the help of straps attached to the inside of the art. McElheny’s notions of modernity and democracy in art are put to good use in his sculptures, and now we have a fine show to consider his ideas.

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David Grosz, Carol Kino and Roberta Smith joined David Cohen to review Gillian Carnegie at Andrea Rosen, Lisa Hoke at Elizabeth Harris, Josiah McElheny at Museum of Modern Art, Philip Taaffe at Gagaosian and Corban Walker at PaceWildenstein

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John Coplans. Serial Figures.
May 21 – June 26, 2004
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th St.
New York, NY 10011

John Coplans: Early Photographs
May 8 – June 26, 2004
Per Skarstedt Fine Art
1018 Madison Ave., 3rd Fl.
New York, NY 10021

The extraordinary 18 year span of austere photographic self portraits that the late John Coplans undertook from the age of 64 to 82 has come to a close. This spring 2004 in New York, two exhibitions of the self portraits were scheduled to coincide with Coplans’s memorial tribute, held at the Great Hall of Cooper Union on May 20th, 2004. He might have been pleased. The exhibitions, one uptown of early prints and one downtown of the last series, bookend the final phase of this singular individual’s life in the arts.

Coplans had at times described himself as “an atheist Jew” and didn’t want a religious service upon his death. Instead, he left instructions for his son Joseph Coplans to make packets of his ashes and distribute them, at Joseph’s leisure, furtively, inside cathedrals and temples all over the world.(1) Beyond that, he encouraged those who survived him to simply “go out and have a drink.” And so, Amanda Means, John’s widow, a photographer herself, organized a memorial tribute seven months later at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Means arranged for speakers’ remembrances to alternate with dvd clips of previously shot film and video footage of John as art critic, artist, and beloved husband. The images and the speakers’ live tributes rekindled his spirit in all its rough and refined detail.

Joseph Coplans, a writer, spoke first. Joseph’s remembrance of his father was full of wry and affectionate observations. A propos the self portraits, he retold one of John’s tall tales with its sly concoction of fact, fiction, wordplay, and imagination. Coplans announced to the adolescent Joseph one day that he had been traveling back in time to visit his ancestors while he slept. The point of the story is that we became human by developing the ability to recognize each other, to face, confront, and negotiate with each other- that is, by standing up. John vowed that he would acknowledge the wisdom of the Ape-ess who had visited him in his dreams. Her presence does indeed seem to lurk in some of Coplans’s photos of his aging body.

Following Joseph, speakers included Michael Kidner (in a film clip), a painter from John’s postwar days in London; Robert Bell, an economist and writer also speaking for the 1960s artist Larry Bell; Irving Blum, the art dealer formerly of Ferus Gallery in 1960s LA; Max Kozloff, a distinguished critic who worked with John at Artforum. Critic Ben Lifson spoke for Brian O’Doherty, who had been Art In America’s editor when it was Artforum’s rival in the 1970s. Next, there was Gregory Allgire Smith, who was on the staff of the Akron Art Museum during John’s tenure; Editha Mesina, John’s first studio assistant; Anne de Villepoix, John’s Paris dealer, who first showed his work at her gallery in 1993, and noted that in 2001 Coplans had received the ribbon and medallion of France’s Officier de L’Ordre des arts et des lettres at a ceremony held at the Pompidou. Richard Calvocoressi, the son of one of Coplans’s fellow trainee Camaronian soldiers in Scotland during the 1940s, having become in adult life director of The Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art located in Edinburgh, Scotland, recalled the series of coincidences that led to Coplans’s solo exhibition there in 1999. Amanda Means then closed the speakers’ tributes and introduced the moving images to follow on the program.

Group portrait of members of the Coplans studio at the Cooper Union memorial in May, from left to right: Joe Rodriguez, photo mounter; Editha Mesina, studio assistant 1984 – 1994; Amanda Means, Coplans’s widow; Bradford Robotham, studio assistant and estate matters; Jennifer Sawyer, printer; and Ernie
Smith, photo mounter; photograph © Deborah Garwood, 2004

These clips from film and video footage of Coplans at various points in his career were fascinating in themselves. As mentioned, Means integrated them into digitized format for the memorial (assisted by Fountainhead Films). They included a grainy, black and white film of the professorial Coplans lecturing enthusiastically on Weegee’s photographs and films during a Berkeley teaching stint ; a video of Coplans working in his studio during the 1980s with assistant Editha Mesina and then commenting on the exhibition of his work at MOMA in 1988; the artist with his second assistant, Bradford Robotham, who is now hard at work on estate matters; clips describing Coplans’s 2001 award from the French Government; installation shots of the solo show at The Dean Gallery; and last but not least, there was Amanda Means’s eloquent poem and visual love letter of her ongoing memories of John. All this was followed by a sequence of the self portraits alone, unto themselves.

At the memorial nearly all of the speakers mentioned Coplans’s wartime adventures. Coplans had told these stories often to make various points, but also because he relished them. The gist of it all is that during WWII he had been a British soldier serving with the King’s Rifles in East Africa, Burma, and Ceylon. The peripatetic soldiering was something like an armed version of his childhood experience, which had entailed moving between London and South Africa several times.

In retrospect, the nomadic pattern of Coplans’s childhood and military service formed an indelible template. After the war he embarked on an artistic career in London, then emigrated to the US at the age of 40, and established new career phases in San Francisco as a co-founder of Artforum and editor; in Pasadena and Akron as a museum director; and finally in New York as an artist entering a new critical discourse that he had helped shape. When he was finally tethered to a studio in New York after the age of 60, he began to conceive of his photographic self portraits as yet another form of travel – a portal to time travel. By this he meant going back in time. For Coplans, the primordial cauldron of human consciousness was bottled in the body, not the head. He brought out the body’s elixir of archaic, classical, modern, and postmodern figuration through physical gestures drawn from the interplay of life and art.

John Coplans. Serial Figures.
Andrea Rosen Gallery

Coplans’s last series of self portraits dates from 2002. The upright posture of the human body was Coplans’s final pose as his eyesight began to fail and he had difficulty walking. One after the other, 23 works measuring 77 inches x 34 inches overall line three of the gallery’s walls. Coplans’s intention had always been that viewers would decipher the portraits perceptually – by which I think he also meant viscerally – rather than rationally. Part of the conceptual interest of his work, as critics have noted, lies in the way separate photographic frames break the body into sections. Involuntary perceptual responses strive to integrate them. In this installation, for example, the eyes quickly recognize a standing figure that is actually composed of 3 rectangular prints separated by 1″ intervals mounted upon a single mat within a narrow black frame. The kinesthetic impluse then tries to connect the parallel intervals that separate individual figures, but never quite succeeds due to the interruptions. The figures are forever on the go.

Pugnacious, vulnerable, majestic, their animated rhythm recalls themes Coplans had explored in other serial installations. Allusions to sculptural friezes of antiquity, Matisse, or Rodin, marching or dancing in a crowd come to mind. More to the point, this series poignantly conveys the memory of physical strength and metaphysical battles with aging.

In the anterior gallery, a synopsis of Coplans’s roles as a writer, curator, and editor can be found. It’s wonderful to see an early copy of Artforum, with a quote from Coplans’s editorial explaining why the magazine adopted its unusual square format, silkscreened onto the wall. This gallery contains works by artists Coplans had supported at this phase of his life, shown alongside his critical catalogues and monographs. From Ellsworth Kelly to Weegee, Warhol, Smithson, Brancusi’s photographs, Carlton Watkins’s photographs, and the eccentric ceramic vessels of George Ohr, his taste for extremes of earthy chaos and sublime form is evident.

John Coplans: Early Photographs
Skarstedt Fine Art

The exhibition at Skarstedt covers a time when Coplans was experimenting with size and scale, from 1984 to 1988. He had not yet hit on the idea of using seriality in his own work, for all he had written about it as an art critic. His first compositions recall aspects of Brancusi, Rodin, and ancient sculpture in their fragmentation and truncation of rounded form. One of Coplans’s most often reproduced photographs can be seen in its modest actuality. “Self Portrait (Back with Arms Above),” (1984) is a great stupa of flesh topped by two tiny fists. This early print of it measures 28 inches x 22 inches, but its scale is huge. Coplans later enlarged the image for other exhibitions.

“Self Portrait (Three Quarter Back, Hands Clasped)” (1986) when Coplans was 66, is part Greek decathlon athlete and part Degas bather twisting up from the tub. The slightly creepy “Self Portrait (Hands Holding Feet)” (1985) calls attention to opposed thumbs and the infantile reflex of curled toes in its close cropping and clinical isolation. Rather than an art historical allusion, it is perhaps a witty allusion to 19th-20th century theories of human evolution and behavioral psychology.

But the truncated view of his feet in “Self Portrait (Feet Frontal)” (1984) measuring 54 inches x 35 inches, deserves special note. It enlarges life scale by almost a factor of five and evokes Egyptian monumentality. Yet unlike an Egyptian figure in flat-footed profile, this individual is hoisting its body up as if to reach for something very high. Toes clench the lower edge of the composition as they ground the stout, tall pillars of the upraised feet. A metaphor for the body’s roots in the earth, it sums up his work quite well. Coplans’s deep engagement with his own body over nearly two decades gradually became a visual disquisition of his ideas about the human figure in all of its carnality, modes of expression in contemporary perception, and transcendent presence in art throughout anthropomorphic history.

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“Duncan Hannah: Stolen Moments”
JG/Contemporary until March 6 1014 Madison Avenue at 78th Street, 3rd Floor, 212.535.5767

“A Triple Alliance: de Chirico, Picabia, Warhol”
Sperone Westwater until February 21 415 W. 13th Street, between TK and TK, 212-999-7337

“Now Is a Good Time”
Andrea Rosen Gallery until February 21 525 W. 24th Street, 212-627-6000

I seem to have fallen in love. Teresa Ann is a prepubescent blonde with a luminous complexion. Her coyly vacuous gaze belies the provocativeness with which she lifts her skirt to reveal tender thighs and white stockings. But there’s no need to call 911: It’s not this Lolita herself I’m smitten with, but her creator, Duncan Hannah.

Mind you, for a critic serious about painting to fall for Mr. Hannah is plenty perverse enough. Here is a painter who pushes deadpan to the point of necrophilia. He seems to will himself into Sunday painter mode.

Most kinky of all is his anglophilia, an idyll of clipped and cramped Englishness: “Brideshead Revisited” meets Enid Blyton meets the quirky, tonal aloofness of Walter Richard Sickert. Mr. Hannah’s touch is as bland and affectless as English weather and English cooking combined. His twin shows at the uptown and Chelsea premises of JG Contemporary are titled, respectively, “Stolen Moments” and “The Spell of London.” (The tender portrait of Sickert in the latter show, incidentally, is Mr. Hannah’s riposte in paint to the balmy blood libel leveled at Sickert by “Ripperologist” Patricia Cornwell.)

Mr. Hannah’s retro style and pre-war subject matter are derived not so much from fine art as period illustration, particularly the advertising for film noir. -like Nova Pilbeam, the Hitchcock starlet-rendered, like Picabia’s cinematic paintings of the 1940s, in that kitsch shorthand that denotes glamour and sensuality. Politically tainted period pieces are coyly referenced: “The 39 Steps” is playing at Mr. Hannah’s 2002 Gaumont Cinema, while a pupil of Miss Brodie is portrayed in “In Her Prime,” (2001).

A political reading is bolstered by a striking resemblance between the glowing yet frigid portrait of Pilbeam and R.B. Kitaj’s ambiguously sexy, iconic portrait of Unity Mitford from 1968. Both painters are midwesterners for whom London is, or has at some point, proven a locus of romantic nostalgia.

The enigma of Mr. Hannah is that he has made a remarkable body of art out of unremarkable individual pictures, discovering the marvelous in the mediocre without having to resort to the uncanny. This description makes him sound like just another iconoclast, a “bad boy” of painting in the mold of the younger John Currin. But Mr. Hannah isn’t simply striking a pose: He has discovered a genuine source of visual poetry in wilfull nerdishness.

Mr. Hannah is a metaphysical painter in direct descent from de Chirico and Magritte. To paraphrase Dalí on madmen, the difference between him and a Surrealist is that he is not surreal.

His genius is to meld oddity of vision and execution. There is a kind of earnest irony in Mr. Hannah, in which painting becomes a “boy’s own” adventure. His images of youths masquerading as adults, not to mention of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, present an allegory of alienation, in which painting itself refuses to grow up.

Others have noted his striking resemblance to Hopper in terms of unexpressive painthandling and period setting. The affinity goes deeper, to a poetics of boredom. In both painters (as in Sickert)), ennui pervades depiction and what’s depicted alike.

Ultimately, Mr. Hannah is in a place beyond irony, where the very failures of expression are poignant. In “Regarding Teresa Ann” (2002), a tender awkwardness unites the painter with his invented or appropriated sitter – as if *he* were as ambiguous about painterliness as she is about sexuality.

***

If Mr. Hannah seems to exemplify postmodern attitude in his intentional cackhandedness, a stunning exhibition at Sperone Westwater, , suggests that “Bad Painting” has a long pedigree. “A Triple Alliance” presents Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, and Andy Warhol as a triumvurate of the nonchalant, aspiring oxymoronically, like Mr. Hannah, towards mastery within the mediocre.

Fun connections abound in this thoughtful kitschfest (for which Robert Rosenblum’s curatorial input has been acknowledged). Visually, Warhol’s abrasive Pop palette and garish commercialism throw the exhibition somewhat out of key, but in such company do we really want harmony anyway? The catalog and hang alike make a persuasive case for linking him with these early exemplars of modern iconoclasm.

De Chirico was notorious for “forging” his own earlier, canonical proto-surrealist cityscapes, and for revisiting mannerist moments in the history of art. Picabia, the one-time pioneer of a Dada machine aesthetic, flirted shamelessly with film-poster realism. Both were forebears of the Warhol anti-aesthetic.

The Warhols include a set of homages to de Chirico from 1982, based on the *Pittura Metafisica* painter’s “The Poet and his Muse,” “The Two Sisters,” and “The Furniture in the Valley.” They look to a discredited late period of the Italian’s career, pointedly so, as a kind of rebuttal to the contemporary efforts of the Museum of Modern Art to tidy up de Chirico’s reputation as a modernist.
Technically, Warhol’s layering of misregistered lines and patches of color on top of photographically appropriated originals marries with Picabia’s legendary “transparencies,” in which an overlay of line drawing that is a bit like the filigree of a stained-glass window at once accents and deconstructs the painting underneath. The absurdist machine aesthetic, common to Picabia and de Chirico, makes a new, occult sense of Warhol’s banal, mechanical hand.

***

If you can’t get enough “Bad” painting, be sure to catch the last days of “Now Is a Good Time” at Andrea Rosen, which closes Saturday. Curated by Dean Valentine, a Los Angeles collector, its floral theme seemed timed to his saintly namesake’s feast day.

Most of the works were apparently made specially for the show. Included are various stars in the firmament of the kitsch and the fey, including Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, and John Currin, as well as more interesting members of the LA scene, such as Rodney McMillian.

Knowing that Mr. Currin was included, and having a rough idea from the checklist where he would be placed, I had a momentary Road to Damascus experience, thinking that I’d spied and been smitten by his entry from 40 feet away. But the creamy, Manet-like gem in an Amédée Ozenfant palette turned out to be “January” (2004) by Maureen Gallace. Mr. Currin’s reassuringly boring pastiche was “Rosebush” (2003), just next to it.

One of the few voluptuous paintings in the show was Alisa Margolis’s “We love you all,” (2003-04), an array of smudged blooms on a dark, almost submarine-feeling ground, redolent of both Rococo painting and Ross Bleckner.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 19, 2004.

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