The magnificent painter Elisabeth Condon, who in early October met me at her show at Lesley Heller Workspace, did her best to console me when I broke into tears. I had been expressing my hope, shared among all of us who cared about Walter Darby Bannard, that he would be able to attend the opening for his exhibition of recent paintings at Berry Campbell Gallery, eleven days away. Those hopes had been banished that morning. He had succumbed to complications ensuing from treatments for liver cancer. Elisabeth remarked sagely: “He’ll have the last word. That was always his way.”

Darby did make it to his 2015 opening at Berry Campbell, which featured his reductive work from the late 1950s and the early- to mid-1960s. That’s how I’ll remember him, standing near the front desk in his red suspenders, smiling triumphantly. He had, after all, outlived three decades of undeserved critical disregard. And he had spent the meantime doing what he loved best, painting.

His painting continued unabated until shortly before his death. Brian Curtis, his colleague at the University of Miami Department of Art and Art History, spoke with him several days prior in the hospital, and Darby expressed eagerness to get back into the studio and the classroom. It gladdens me that his spirit was on a forward trajectory even as his body failed. That suited him far better than a maudlin decline, though it cruelly got our hopes up that he’d recover this time like he did every other.

His 2015 exhibition occasioned my interview with him for artcritical, in which he described his particular take on abstraction embodied in the reductive paintings. “There was this impulse to put a simple thing right in the middle of the picture and it wasn’t Cubist simplicity, it was presentational simplicity. Something was staring right back at you like it was another person. That idea just fascinated me. I thought, this is the best way to present color – make it into a painting, but just barely.”

That this was not a Cubist approach (nor, as he later mentioned, a Bauhaus one) was an important distinction, and I should have asked him to explain it more thoroughly because he would have done a better job than I’m about to do: there was a crucial relationship between materiality and opticality, and with the possibilities of gesture having been temporarily exhausted by 1960, minimalist simplicity was necessary to make that relationship plain again. Cubism was an unrelated optical process, and Bauhaus was an unrelated formal process. The problem that needed solving was how to get the effect of gesture without resorting to gesture, not the superficial brushy effect itself, but the goodness that resulted from it in the hands of the more able Abstract Expressionists.

His paintings at the time hinged on that material-optical relationship and that alone. (It’s possible that any painting made for visual reasons hinges upon it.) As Darby wrote for Artforum in 1968, “if the art-making attitude assumes that art quality arises from the use of the materials of painting to make the painting, then the artist will strive to equip himself with a method of picture construction contrived in terms of these materials, and develop, discover or invent material units of construction – pieces or parts from which the painting can be made.”

Last year’s reconsideration of his 1960s work seems to have refreshed those concerns for him. Of course they never left – he noted that his interests had hardly varied since he arrived upon them at Princeton. But the big, obvious, presentational shapes re-emerged from the brushed-out textures of gel and poured medium over the last year. Trapezoids, circles, even a couple of rounded rectangles pop back up into the foreground in a way that recalls the pieces from fifty years ago.

Though it’s not officially in the exhibition, Orange Blacksides (1959) is hanging nearby, and it’s instructive to compare it to Recamier (16-10A) (2016). If you can perceive the circle in each of them as a material phenomenon with an optical effect – that is, a presentational shape – then the other features of Recamier appear as further variations thereof. For that matter, Recamier recapitulates his entire oeuvre. There is the presentational circle from the ’60s, the materially distinct foregrounds and backgrounds from ’70s, the scalloped shapes he developed in the ’80s by subtracting from deposited areas of gel with a squeegee, the taste for intense chroma that had always affected his work but became a permanent feature in the ’90s, the aggressive, multi-directional application of broom-strokes that appeared in the 2000s, and the linear, wet-into-wet pours that he began using as an organizational element in the Teens. The whole army of his talent was on the attack.

There remain significant distinctions between various optical, formal, and material approaches in abstraction for artists to explore and critics to ponder. That of course depends on seeing them and reflecting upon them in a productive way, both for which Darby had stellar capacities. But those powers are rare, and remain scattered throughout an underground that he described in the interview: “The abstract painters ought to recognize that they have their own art world, and should have their own magazines and have their own critics and all that so they don’t have to reconcile what they’re doing with everyone else. If that could come about you could get a Renaissance of abstract painters competing against each other, not giving a damn about the other stuff, and you could start getting abstraction to take advantage of all the things that got cut off back in the early sixties when Pop Art and Minimalism took over the market. There are a lot of people not in the market who understand good painting and can recognize it. They’re all over the place and they just need their own family.”

That family just lost a patriarch. But it grows, and its members quietly find each other and connect over shared affinities. The opening at Berry Campbell wasn’t a wake, it was a reunion. What Darby practiced, which we call “modernism” as a shorthand but is more fundamental to human existence than the term connotes to most people, is as robust as ever.

Modernism isn’t a style, he insisted, it’s a working attitude oriented toward visual excellence. “Modernism is aspiring, authoritarian, hierarchical, self-critical, exclusive, vertically structured, and aims for the best,” he wrote in 1984. But the aspiration has a terminus, as he clarified in his aphorisms: “Great art is immutable, placid, complete, unchanging, and content to let life rush around it in its perpetual race.” That exquisite union of journey and goal is preserved in his paintings, each which stares right back at the viewer as if it were another person, having the last word.

Walter Darby Bannard: Recent Paintings remains on view at Berry Campbell through November 12, 2016, 530 West 24th Street, New York

Correction: The photograph of the artist and friends at his 2015 exhibition at Berry Campbell by George Sierzputowski was wrongly attributed in our original post.

The post Modernism isn’t a style, he insisted, it’s a working attitude. Walter Darby Bannard, 1934 to 2016 appeared first on artcritical.

It is an axiom that art as a whole does not improve over time. Art changes but good art is always good art.

However, it is clear that modernist innovation over the last 150 years has brought extreme changes, vastly enlarging the range of what will be accepted as art, and this, in turn, gives artists freedom to choose what form their art will take. This freedom does not mean art gets better; it is more a burden than a gift. But it does mean that a painter’s most fundamental choice – what and how to paint – must be worked out from a great number of choices at the inception.

All painting – one could argue that Ann Walsh’s are more collage than painting, but it is inconsequential – especially innovative modernist work, asks that you accept the artist’s formal choice as a precondition for judging their success. Walsh has always been inventive with materials.

I recall her “reverse” pictures painted on clear polyethylene. In recent years she has been making pictures that juxtapose 2 or 3 carefully adjusted shaped and abutted sheets of colored vinyl, originally rectilinear and recently beginning to curve internally somewhat. Everything is subsumed by color. In fact, these pictures can almost be said to be nothing but color; her brilliant choice of colored vinyl sheets rather than paint amounts to working with a vehicle as close to dematerialized color as anything could be, and recalls Jules Olitski’s wish to spray color in the air and experience it as such.

Dematerialized color is a physical impossibility and monocolor – a simple one-colored surface – is an ineffective cliché and by now overdone, so the prerequisite for a “color artist” such as Olitski or Walsh, or perhaps Morris Louis, who threw color against the edge to keep it pure and unmixed, is to contrive a work that insists on color as the primary expressive vehicle as such. Olitski did it with low-variation sprayed surfaces and edge-drawing that proclaims the work as a painting, and Walsh does it by putting forward uninterrupted expanses of pure color in carefully adjusted combination. Recently she has introduced mild curvature into an originally rectilinear format, eliminating real-world intimations of stability, and turning structural dynamism into casual delicacy – less a “tough” visualization of lateral tension than the sudden beauty of a windblown curtain.

Color in a Walsh picture may be separated from its usual role of area differentiation but this only activates their pictorial function. They talk to each other in the language of color, and once you adapt to the radical intentions of Walsh’s art you enter into the discussion. Guess (2014), for example, centers a highly saturated green in a surround of a highly saturated red/pink – close opposites on the color wheel – surrounded in turn by a less saturated tint of the red/pink color as a kind of buffer or coda. It’s like a discussion among friends presented in a format that allows one to “hear” it visually.

Walter Pater said, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. Ann Walsh’s pictures, like music, sensuously adjust and contrast singular elements of visual art for your delight. They are wonderful pictures. Enjoy them!

Alexander/Heath Contemporary Art Gallery, 425 Campbell Avenue SW, Roanoke, VA 24016. alexander-heath.com

The post Sound Waves: The Paintings of Ann Walsh appeared first on artcritical.

March 18 to April 18, 2015
530 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

The majority of what I know about art is owed to two things. The first is making a lot of paintings and drawings. The second is conversations with Walter Darby Bannard.

Bannard is a third-generation Abstract Expressionist who came to prominence in the mid-1960s along with his friends Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. Clement Greenberg was close with all of them. Though Stella’s reputation held, Bannard’s fell along with Greenberg’s over the course of the 1980s, which concluded with Darby leaving New York and taking over as chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Whatever this meant for Darby’s career, it was immensely good fortune for me, as I was able to work with him as a graduate student.

Darby possesses a rare combination of taste, intellect, and verbal acumen. His writings, an archive of which I have edited, contain some of the most astute observations about art I’ve run across outside of Greenberg’s. Indeed, Darby could and would argue with Greenberg to their mutual pleasure.

Having quietly nurtured talent at UM since then, the silence around his legacy broke on the evening of March 19 of this year, when an exhibition of his reductive paintings from the late 1950s and early ‘60s opened at Berry Campbell. At one point, hardly another body could have fit in the gallery. Darby stood at the front desk, greeting well-wishers (and a few ill-wishers, too) with his customary jocularity. I spoke with him the following morning.

Franklin Einspruch: Did you have an initial “aha” moment about abstraction? How did you know that it was something that you wanted to be involved in?

Walter Darby Bannard: It just seemed more exciting, that’s all. It’s kind of like food, you discover that something tastes good and you want more. At Princeton in the mid-’50s I had an instructor who was an abstract painter, Bill Seitz, who later became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He did the “Responsive Eye” exhibition, which was an Op Art show. The people I was friends with liked abstract painting. Then Frank [Stella] came along, a couple of classes behind me, and he was an abstract painter. Mike Fried was there, and a guy named Dave Comey, who loved autos and killed himself in a car crash unfortunately. We all just loved abstract painting and went to New York and looked at abstract painting.

Abstraction bewilders a lot of people when they first see it. It did me. You didn’t experience that.

I was brought up in an atmosphere with a lot of music in it, which is an analogous interest. When I was seven years old we lived in the country, at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a black church. I was a kid in the country and I would wander around. One Sunday I was next to this black church. I heard this music coming out of it. I was – what’s the cliche? – riveted. I’d never heard anything like it. I actually went during the week and broke into the church to look at the pump organ and stuff they had there and pushed it and wondered at it. I thought these machines were making the music. I was only seven years old.

That’s how it is with abstract painting, it just takes you over. I remember looking at one of these little intellectual magazines when I was sixteen and I saw a de Kooning painting, and thought, wow, that’s really cool.

When I was eleven I saw a picture in the rotogravure, the color section of the Sunday paper. This magazine had a page that said, “which kind of art do you like?” On one side there was a picture of a painting of a clown, and on the other side was a painting by Ben Nicholson. I said to myself, well, I sure know what I like. In fact I’m going to cut it out and put it in my wallet. I loved this Ben Nicholson so much and before I had no idea that there was any such thing as that. It’s like falling in love. I had no idea that there were any social consequences to this. The magazine only did it to get people upset, presuming that everyone is going to like the clown, and I didn’t even know that, I just thought the Nicholson was a beautiful painting. It was in a rotogravure that had all the quality of comic strips, but I just loved it.

Do you remember the frame of mind that you brought to this work in the Berry Campbell exhibition, the impulse to make a painting as simple as possible?

My professor at Princeton told Frank, David, and me that we should go look at Rothko. So we went to look at Rothko, and we thought it was idiotic. It was just a lot of yellow – this show happened to be a bunch of yellow squares. But it affected me mightily and pretty soon I was painting Rothkos in our little studio. I was interested in all kinds of painting. I was very interested in Pop Art, for instance. Rauschenberg in particular turned me on. And I did lots and lots of Pop Art things. I did “event”-type art. We were all anti-de Kooning, who for us represented sensitivity, and we had decided that we were not going to be sensitive. I got the idea that it would be really cool to get a big balloon and shape it as a de Kooning woman, fill it with hydrogen, let it up in the sky right before dawn, and when the sun came up, to fire tracer bullets at it so that the whole thing would explode like the Hindenberg.

The Beat poets, Corso and Kerouac and Ginsberg and a few others, came down to Princeton to give a reading. So I had decided that I was going to make a big hit with these guys by telling them my Blow Up de Kooning idea. They were nice, quiet, polite people. They weren’t wild at all. I told the whole room, which turned utterly silent. LeRoi Jones, who later became Amiri Baraka, turned to me and said, “Man, you really are crazy.” I was so hurt and abashed. They just thought I was nuts.

Before I was making Pop Art stuff and doing drawings of figures floating in the sky. I had an obsession with that for some reason. Then I saw a Clyfford Still in Art News in 1958, and I was fascinated. It was a full-page red painting, a really good one. So I went right to my studio and did Clyfford Stills for a while. I was also interested in centrality and simplicity and this idea of presentation. I had this painting with a red circle and some Clyfford Still-y stuff on top and some Clifford Still-y stuff on the bottom. Frank said, you don’t need the thing on the top, and Mike Fried said, you don’t need the thing on the bottom, so I had a circle. I said, holy shit, that’s really all I need to make a total, in-your-face presentation. I thought that was just wonderful.

Then I went to see the Barnett Newman show at French & Co. I saw that there was another person doing the same thing, only with a line instead of a circle. That told me that I had permission to do what I was doing. Back then if you did a painting like that people wouldn’t even take it as a painting. The closest they could come was to call it Bauhaus, which was not only out of fashion but didn’t interest us at all. That was an absolutely different motivation altogether.

So you made these paintings before you saw Ad Reinhardt.

I did see Reinhardt, but I didn’t like it. I saw one of the black paintings in the Modern, and all the black paintings have this faint, slightly different value and design on them. But this one had wrinkles, and the light from the window was making the wrinkles the strongest component on the painting. All you saw was light wrinkles and blackness. I said, “That sucks, that’s a cop-out, I hate that.” In my journal I wrote, “NO REINHARDT!!!” But Reinhardt was one of the people doing this presentational work.

And by presentation you’re talking about..?

Simplicity that’s not Cubist-derived. Mondrian is Cubist-derived, and Bauhaus is Cubist-derived, and Malevich and all the Russian constructivists all came out of Cubism. It was taking cubism to an extreme. Me and Frank and Frank’s buddies, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, didn’t have any interest in Cubist-derived simplicity. Ellsworth Kelly was doing it and Rauschenberg was doing it in a way with his early, simple stuff. Gottlieb was doing it. There was this impulse to put a simple thing right in the middle of the picture and it wasn’t Cubist simplicity, it was presentational simplicity. Something was staring right back at you like it was another person. That idea just fascinated me. I thought, this is the best way to present color – make it into a painting, but just barely.

Did anyone push back on the idea that that was painting? Did you encounter resistance?

I didn’t encounter resistance because nobody had any idea what I was doing. I was painting in my basement and didn’t have any interest or exposure until ‘64, which is about five years after I started doing it. My first exposure was at Tibor de Nagy in 1965. Of course, there were people who looked at the paintings and said, “This is awful, this is stupid, this is not even painting,” but not the art world, because the art world didn’t know who the hell I was. When I got started with this it was just a matter of developing color combinations so I was happy as a clam for four or five years, painting these things. But nobody really cared except for people like Frank and Mike.

Why did you stop making them?

Boredom. It was laborious to make these paintings. They required layer after layer after layer of paint. Otherwise you wouldn’t get the simplicity and the lack of brushstrokes. It was like Chinese lacquer, you needed the layers to make it work. And then I saw Olitski’s paintings, and I was knocked out. I had a crisis in the mid-Sixties, and I decided I had to do something new. The problem with abstraction is that when you have a crisis in painting you have to start from scratch. Everybody thinks it’s easy but when you begin something new you have to get yourself a whole new set of conventions and methods.

I’ve been telling students for years that being an artist and feeling bored with your work is like being a doctor and killing your patient. You’ve gone into a fundamentally incorrect place with regard to your work.

It’s an element of seriousness about your art. If you’re getting bored with your art and you recognize it, I think you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise you’re just churning out stuff forever. That would make me go nuts.

Clem came out to my house where I had all my circles and squares, and he pulled out some older paintings that were more painterly and said, “This is what you’re going to be doing in ten years, this other stuff is temporary.” I thought, this guy’s full of shit. Those circles and squares, he liked them all right, but he didn’t think there were long-lasting. And he was right.

When did you first meet Greenberg?

At the Gauss lectures at Princeton in 1958. Mike Fried was very interested in these lectures so Frank and I went with him. I didn’t understand a thing that he was saying, which wasn’t his fault, but I got to talk to him later at the after party.

I was working in a gallery that was also a frame shop and a print shop, and my boss was a huge admirer of Clem. My boss was already getting impatient with me because I would paint and I would work as little as I could. This guy was in the front of the gallery, I was in the back, and Clem walked in and this guy was absolutely beside himself with pleasure. And Clem said, “Where’s Darby?” He came in the back because he was interested in talking to me. He liked what I said about Gottlieb at that initial meeting, I remember. He said, “You understand Gottlieb better than anybody I know. That’s great.” He sought me out at the store and that was a huge ego boost for me and the opposite for the guy who owned the gallery. I thought that was really cool. So I kept up that relationship. We used to sit and argue and talk all the time. It was wonderful to have that kind of brain to work with.

We disagreed about a lot but not the fundamentals. He underrated American artists, oddly enough. Winslow Homer, Milton Avery, Edward Hopper he didn’t think much of, and I thought and still think they’re wonderful. I thought he had a little too much appreciation for the newness of the mechanical operations behind Pollock’s drip paintings. A lot of his admiration for Olitski was the same kind of thing. There were a lot of artists he liked that I thought were second-rate. He underrated [Giorgio] Morandi and he overrated [Georges] Matthieu. Horacio Torres was an interesting artist but that whole business of cutting off the head and the legs is such a corny thing. Torres was okay but Clem just went wild about him.

Clem liked the old masters better than the abstract artists. If we were at a museum he’d say, “Let’s go see the old masters.” I’d say, “Oh, come on, Clem, I don’t want to see the old masters, I’m tired of them. They’re all brown. Let’s go see if there’s anything modern.” I always liked modern artists better than the old masters unless we’re talking about someone like Rembrandt, who’s a goddamn jumping genius. Most of them really are just brown and dark and gloomy.

Something I’ve come to appreciate in Clement Greenberg’s writings is that after a while he not only knew that he was going to be misunderstood, he knew the manner in which he was going to be misunderstood. So he started to try to preempt the misunderstanding, then finally gave up on the prospect of ever being correctly read.

Yes, he said several times in his writing something like, “Of course what I’m saying won’t be understood.” Even last night at the opening there were people who wanted to make big points to me about Greenberg. They absolutely detest him and completely misunderstand him. This thing is still going on, even now, with people claiming that he found artists who were cooperative and told them what moves to make, and that they became his little clique. I said to one of these people last night that I used ask Clem all the time what I should do in my studio. I’d say, “Tell me what to do!” And he’d say, “No! I’m not going to do that. All I’m going to tell you is that I like this and don’t like that.” And that’s all he ever did. He never had any suggestions like, “There’s too much red over there.” But nobody wants to believe that.

Why do you think that is?

That’s a very interesting question. What Greenberg did infuriated the art world. It had something to do with the authority and the quality of his writing. I can’t say forcefulness of his writing because it wasn’t forceful writing.

He admitted to its being declarative, as he put it.

It was declarative but that derived from his eye, and his certainty about the rightness of his eye, his ability to see what was good and not so good. He wrote so clearly and so transparently that it just got people enraged.

If you don’t have commitment to good art as such, and you don’t believe the idea that there’s very little good art, you’re on the defense against anyone who does believe it. And if that person has power and influence he becomes the villain. If you’re in the art world, and you’re on the side of crappy art, which 99% of the art world is, it’s an automatically inimical thing to have a voice like that around. Anybody who embodies this is an enemy. That attitude is killing the messenger because that’s basically what Greenberg was. This is the guy who said that Jackson Pollock was one of the strongest painters of our generation back in the 1940s. And lo and behold, it turned out to be true. This pisses people off. I had a friend who went around saying that Jackson Pollock couldn’t be a good painter because he didn’t use a brush. So if Jackson Pollock becomes a million-dollar painter and everyone says he’s great, you were wrong, you’re a jerk. People don’t like that.

Your motives for making art have stayed constant from almost the beginning, it seems.

Following my eye and impulses, that’s all. Everybody’s gone off on other tangents, but to me that’s the most interesting thing. Painting survives because of its restrictions. I like to compare it to games. If you go out and play a football game and people get a bat and say, “let’s use this instead,” you’re going to have an audience that says, “I don’t like this.” They want something that has conventions and supports those conventions.

The first panel I was ever on was “Painting Is Dead” in 1966 at New York University. I was sitting next to Robert Rauschenberg, and the moderator, Barbara Rose, was in between us and Donald Judd and Larry Poons on the other side of the table. Of course, I was all for painting, Poons was all for painting, Judd said that painting was completely abolished, and Rauschenberg didn’t give a damn. We went through the whole thing, the question of whether painting was dead, and of course we didn’t decide anything, but we had a good time.

Everybody was very sincere back then. They asked for questions after the panel discussion and people would get up and make speeches. This one guy got up and began making a statement. Rauschenberg yawned and he started sinking down in his seat. So I started sinking down in my seat too. We were both looking at each other and sinking in our seats until our faces were at the level of the table. The audience was looking at us and howling with laughter, and this guy thought that he was being funny, so he got into it and thought he was a comedian, that everybody was laughing at what he said. It just turned into chaos. The point is that 1966 is fifty years ago and painting isn’t dead. So there you go.

The third-generation abstractionists were not hostile to Pop Art. You yourself were making Pop-inspired paintings for a time. The stereotype is that the circle of Greenberg recoiled at the very sight of Pop, but it wasn’t that way at all.

Even Clem, he thought Robert Indiana was okay, and Jim Dine a little bit. He thought that Lichtenstein was a good designer. He would always give everybody their due. He just didn’t think that Pop Art amounted to very much. Clem was much more generous in his taste than people give him credit for. He used to tell a story about himself that when he juried an exhibition – and he was asked to jury a lot back then – he was always susceptible to giving out too many prizes and being too inclusive, to the point of putting the little old lady flower paintings in the show. He wasn’t black and white about things at all. There was more of that spirit back then, that Pop was just another development, and the same for minimalism when it came along. There were all these happenings, like the ones with [Claes] Oldenberg and Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainier. I thought they were really very interesting.

It hardens up when somebody gets successful. When Pop Art got successful it seemed to be overvalued. Nobody liked that very much. The idea gets around that a few people are getting too much of the pie. It’s human nature. We need a social scientist to write about this dispassionately and give us a real cultural history, somebody who looks at us as specimens, the way Margaret Mead looked at the South Sea Islanders.

These things don’t get worked out in the short term, and the short term is fifty years. Look at Andy Warhol. People are paying millions of dollars for his work. I keep wondering, When are people going to get tired of this guy’s paintings? They’ve turned into the ultra-tchotchke. If you have a Warhol you’re a hotshot collector. The quality of the thing, whether it’s good art or not, is absolutely beside the point. So there’s no selection being made on that basis. Things actually change very slowly now in the art world. People think that it’s very fast, and it is fast in the sense that it’s so big and there’s churning on the edges, but meanwhile most of it stays the way it is.

But things are beginning to separate. There’s a whole underground of abstract painting that doesn’t get any publicity. With everyone going in so many different directions, it’s getting to the point that you can choose your own genre, and the genres will be able to split off into their own tribes. The enlargement of the art world means, I think, that the pie is getting bigger for everyone. The abstract painters ought to recognize that they have their own art world, and should have their own magazines and have their own critics and all that so they don’t have to reconcile what they’re doing with everyone else. If that could come about you could get a Renaissance of abstract painters competing against each other, not giving a damn about the other stuff, and you could start getting abstraction to take advantage of all the things that got cut off back in the early sixties when Pop Art and Minimalism took over the market. There are a lot of people not in the market who understand good painting and can recognize it. They’re all over the place and they just need their own family.

If that tribe of abstractionists comes together, what are the possibilities that were cut off that they could work on?

Well, color is one. Nobody really gets into the mechanics of color. Even very good painters never got into the mechanics of color. Abstract painters shunted it aside because they considered it unimportant. As a consequence they used colors out of the jar. And they used color for area identification rather than coloristic effect.

Even someone like Kenneth Noland?

Oh, Noland would be a supreme example of someone to follow. He was influenced by Paul Klee, another one who did very interesting things with color. Noland was able to do just magical stuff putting colors together. I envy him endlessly. It’s like Matisse, you can’t point at what’s good about it, it just hits you, bam, right in the eye. Why his colors worked, how he used shapes and symmetricality to make his colors effective, all that could be explored further.

There’s also the idea of using open space to make paintings, like in [Mark] Rothko and [Morris] Louis. There are a lot of things that [Hans] Hofmann did that nobody was able to follow up on. It seems like there’s no end to the possibilities of hard edge combinations. Another thing would be the sophisticated use of new mediums, materials that weren’t even around in the Sixties. There are so many things you can do that haven’t been done because it doesn’t have the support.

Innovation has collapsed into weirdness that doesn’t have any lasting quality to it. Innovation in abstraction used to be recognized. That’s what happened in the Forties. Everyone knew how good de Kooning was. We have to build our own art world in which people recognize when something is good and new. The example I always use is Rex Stewart. According to a friend of mine, when Stewart heard Louis Armstrong he said he was never going to play his horn again. He just sat there at the table and cried. It took three seconds for him to recognize how good Louis Armstrong was because of the cultural structure around the conventions. That’s what does it. Without that you have nothing. You need a tribe and a big family and art teachers and writers. Get smart people together who can create something worthwhile.

The post Presentational: Walter Darby Bannard on his early reductive paintings appeared first on artcritical.

There remains a circle of modernists working in New York who trace their roots back to postwar abstraction on Tenth Street and consider themselves to be working with its fundamental concerns. Modernism, it turns out, may be inherently revivalist, and thus a form of permaculture. The problem from the beginning was to look back in order to find a way forward. As Walter Darby Bannard noted, “Any art that is truly radical must also be in some way conservative.” [1]

The newly arrived Berry Campbell Gallery has taken an interest in such work, and is currently showing James Walsh and Susan Vecsey. It’s too soon to call Walsh a senior member of the circle with lions like Bannard and Larry Poons still making beautiful paintings, but he’s been involved and productive within it since the 1980s. Vecsey is younger, but no less invested in Color Field abstraction, though she comes to it by way of the Tonalist landscape.

Walsh’s paintings are smallish by the standards of modernism, but the containment showcases a range of application from thin stains to eight-inch-thick crests of acrylics. Over the years his palette has moved from smoky and dour to cheerful, even tart, and his painterly command, judgment and taste have become exceptionally refined. Somehow the paint sloshes over the canvases without looking incidental. They are as orderly and yet unpredictable as the sea.

Case in point is his 2002 Turn of Color, just 18 inches high but seven thick. The berm of paint on it is built from slathered layers of pure yellow, royal purple, and a splat of iridescent copper. But Walsh folds a cream color around so that it dominates the pile, and tops it with a gray dollop, forming an organic symmetry that pulls the canvas together. It is as if a Georgia O’Keefe flower study was given the dimensionality and assertiveness of a John Chamberlain sculpture.

Among the recent works, Greenscape (2014) is especially forceful, with a mighty left-to-right sweep of paint that builds to a wave, leaving behind it a weightless slick of aqua, lime and ocher. A resinous green crackle has formed over the lower half, and with blue and white smears above, it alludes to landscape, but volume and gesture tow it back into the objective physicality of paint.

Susan Vecsey provides a restrained counterpoint. I had wondered why no one had yet picked up on Helen Lundeberg’s sunlit minimalism and run with it — perhaps it had to wait for another landscape painter like Vecsey to become interested in geometric abstraction. In any case we need wait no longer. This new series has her making satisfying pictures out of three or four colors, modulated with the surety of someone who has painted her share of skies. In Untitled (Gray/Blue Vertical) (2014) a sumptuous azure block sits atop a field divided by an S-curve into a lighter and a darker gray. Nothing else is needed.

It may sound strange to say so, and reproductions won’t back me up, but this is virtuoso painting. With the right viscosity of turpentine, oils bleed into one another in a way that leaves little branch-like shapes at the edges, such as those in Untitled (Gray Waves) (2014). The burlap-colored warmth of the sized linen is allowed to show through from behind the application of cool grays, producing a rich atmosphere. This all takes enormous control. If anything, Vecsey’s new paintings feel a little too premeditated, but she’s in an early stage of her abstract oeuvre and more chromatically pumped-up pieces like Untitled (Blue/Red) (2014) indicate that some unruliness is on its way in. Thus the constant revival continues.

1. “Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman and Still” (1971), Artforum, Vol. 10, (June 1971): pp. 58 – 66.

The post Radically Conservative: Franklin Einspruch on Susan Vecsey & James Walsh appeared first on artcritical.

It was only Thursday, December 1, but Vixen, a Shiba Inu belonging to Miami collector Sean Gelb, had had enough of the fairs. She lay on her side, panting, at the foot of a pedestal holding one of Patricia Piccinini’s mutant babies. People crowded the booth of Conner Contemporary Art at the Pulse Art Fair to gawk at it, but Vixen remained steadfastly unimpressed.

I’ve been through the trial of fair going in Miami enough times to have worked out a two-part strategy that forestalls the moment when I start feeling like Vixen. Part One is to proudly not see everything. My list for this year was Art Miami, Pulse, Scope and Art Asia (combined in the same circus tent this year), Seven, and Edge Zones. Skipping the main fair may sound like treason, but it means enough art-viewing impetus is left to appreciate the plenitude on offer at six others, which is considerable.

Part Two is to accept the fact that you are at the art equivalent of a farmer’s market. You are there only to admire and sample some minuscule fraction of its bounty.

On Thursday at Pulse, some critical part of my brain titled like a shoved pinball machine when I saw the actor Michael Douglas and the comely rear view of Catherine Zeta Jones making their way through a corridor of art made dark by one of the power outages that plagued the early days of the fair. This is no way to see art, I thought, nor perhaps Catherine Zeta Jones. I wandered toward the exit, where Paul Kusseneers, whose eponymous gallery was showing atmospheric, filmy, grid-based abstractions by Stefan Annarel, stood fuming in the half-light. Even in the dim booth Annarel looked good, but imagine coming all the way from Antwerp and having to present them that way. A longtime Miami artist speculated, without evidence but not without cause, that the fair organizers hadn’t adequately greased the city’s palm. I overheard a man in a black suit, clutching a walkie-talkie, explain to a gallery director in romantic lighting that a generator was being installed posthaste and they were not going to wait for the local utility to restore power.

By Sunday, this or better had been accomplished. I make a habit of asking dealers whether they’re having a good fair, without detailing what I mean by that. Everyone, even Kusseneers, answered yes and seemed sincere about it. So with that problem solved, it was time for a second pass at the art.

Duane Hanson, whose work I had seen the day before at Bridge Red Studios Project Space in North Miami, came to mind upon reviewing Piccinni’s animal-human hybrid infant at Conner Contemporary. How much more difficult it must have been for Hanson to achieve sculptural photorealism with 1970s materials. This new take speaks to an imminent biotechnological future in which more and more things are going to demand human treatment despite their categorical position at the edge of humanity. As art, though, it was too illustrative and sentimental. (Charming and patently illustrative work by Maira Kalman, executed for author Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” and appearing at Julie Saul, somehow escaped a similar fate.) Also at Conner was a meticulously painted lesbian orgy on a picnic table at night by Erik Thor Sandberg, inexplicably executed on a dramatically curved panel. Doubtless there was some allegory at work – there usually is in Sandberg – but it resisted deciphering, and not to its credit.

Conner also had a handsome Leo Villareal, which I mentioned while admiring a small, animated LED piece, amber and flickering, by Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery. This turned out to be a bit of a touchy subject – the gallery noted Campbell’s earlier work with the medium. Better works of technology-driven abstraction, which is still at its early stages, is at least as successful as its better constructivist counterparts. Bitforms showed a work by Zimoun in which cardboard chits were mounted on little spindles and made to spin and collide in a crowded grid. It was charmingly low budget and seemed to have a determined personality.

There was a note of controversy around some non-technology-driven abstraction as well. Daniel Weinberg Gallery had some small geometric abstractions that looked as if they were studies for Frank Stella’s protractor series, both in shape and pastel palette. They turned out to be works by Walter Darby Bannard, whose art and writings I have studied at length, and they actually predate Stella’s series.

Flirting abstractly with both paint and technology were Michael Laube at Kuckei & Kuckei, Sharon Louden at Morgan Lehman, and Markus Weggenmann at Thomas Taubert Contemporary. Laube had painted a variety of stripes and marks on layers of superimposed Plexiglas, and despite an initial impression of excessive trickiness they held up to repeated viewing. Louden’s deliberate, spare paintings in oil on paper on panel distantly recalled Julius Bissier, reinterpreted in high-key materials. The attractive sensibility refused to translate into her video or sculpture, as evidenced by examples thereof placed alongside them. Weggenmann sends out designs for simple abstractions and semi-abstractions to be executed in high-gloss coatings on aluminum. The lack of touch looks good in enamel-like paints like this, and big, simple shapes tend to stand out at the fairs as visual respites. Jus Juchtmans at Margaret Thatcher Projects served this purpose as well.

At a certain point of art viewing, patterns emerge unbidden from the surfeit of material. Was there an architectural trend at Pulse, exemplified by Gregory Euclide’s whimsical wall-mounted landscape sculptures at David B. Smith, Sarah KcKenzie’s luscious studies of house framing in oil (better than her larger, deadpan treatments of finished buildings) at Jen Bekman Projects, Isidro Blasco’s snappy urban photo-collages at Black & White Project Space, and Ayssa Dennis’s delicately drawn architectural fantasies at Kesting Ray? Was there some kind of weird angle on female sexuality, given data points that include Erik Thor Sandberg, Jeff Bark’s C-Print of a bosomy nude oddly arrayed in kneeling profile among strips of Super-8 film at Hasted Kraeutler, and Hillary Harnkess’s Sinking of the Bismark (2002), a naval disaster acted out by scantily uniformed crew in a style reminiscent of early Renaissance masters, at Daniel Weinberg?  Or was it just time to go home?

But not before stopping in the Impulse section of the fair, dedicated to single-artist installations. Ellen Miller Gallery, for instance, were showing the work of Deb Todd Wheeler, whose photogrammed cyanotypes of plastic bags hauntingly evoke sea life, despite their origins as garbage. Teresa Diehl closed off the booth of Galerie Anita Bekcers for a installation of predatory mammals and fighter jets, cast in clear glycerin, arranged over a spotlit, rotating mirror and covered with a camouflage net of flowers. She made it in response to the revolutions in the Middle East this year, but it grew into a transcendent, timeless narrative. I came to rest at the work of Alia Malley at Sam Lee. Her Frederick-Church-inspired photographs of the Los Angeles County landscape, either deserted or literally desert, presented inviting vistas, refreshingly free of crowds and, well, art.

Now it was time, like Vixen, to find a floor to lie on.

The post Miami at a Gentler Pulse appeared first on artcritical.