November 4 to December 22, 2017
15 Rivington Street, between Chrystie Street and Bowery
New York City, bettycuninghamgallery.com

Because our visual culture is supersaturated with representations of all kinds, contemporary figurative artists need to be resourceful to survive. Some do this by appropriating imagery from advertising, while others borrow from old master or modernist art. The paintings and works on paper in this mini-retrospective present a now familiar modernist theme, beach scenes. And so, merely identifying Graham Nickson’s theme may suggest that he is a very traditional artist. As a teacher, I should add, he loves to talk about the importance of drawing; and in this exhibition’s catalogue he discusses the importance of working from direct observation – both, of course, traditional concerns. But look at Bather with Reflector (1982-83), with its dramatic horizontal division, the intensely artificial sky above the sand and reclining bather. Here you see how much Nickson owes to Brice Marden’s monochromes and to the blank colored backgrounds in Alex Katz’s portraits. Observe, too, how Departure (1977-1994), another enormous painting, plays an intensely lit sky against the darkness of the foreground, where the fisherman and beach goers stand. This, too, is a most untraditional composition. Or consider Tracks (1982-91), an enormous near-monochrome in which the tracks in the sands run out to the horizon in a daring perspectival construction. Originally this much-reworked picture was done in full color. A nineteenth-century painter might show this motif from a distance. By taking us close up and eliminating local color, Nickson reveals the strange visual qualities of his tracks. And I love the daring way that the delicious Maine Grey: Yellow Jacket (2017) places the back-turned standing figure in the immediate foreground, presenting another untraditional motif.

Nickson is a very varied painter – and this exhibition provides an effective introduction to the range of his artistic interests. What then links together all of these works is a highly personal, most effective vision of the artist’s goals. He has said: “The entire process of creating art is abstract, but the finished work is a metaphor for the artist’s experience and direct observation of nature.” If I understand him correctly, this statement helps identify the difference between the five paintings in this show and the various smaller watercolors and charcoal drawings. These works on paper are relatively immediate responses to his chosen motifs, while the paintings are more considered developments in which reworking of these products of direct observation is mediated by prolonged reflection. ‘Abstract’ here thus is a shorthand way of identifying his active concern to develop these motifs, in response to his governing aesthetic. This, I think, is why Nickson is not interested in the psychology of the people he depicts – they are just his subjects. And it is what makes the beach such an ideal site for him, because of its location between the urban world of culture and nature. We may enjoy beaches because we think of them as timeless, unspoiled places, but of course they too, as much as the city, are, in part, modernist urban creations – they too thus are artificial. I believe that only a contemporary artist would understand figurative images in these terms. What then seems to me distinctive (and highly original) in Nickson’s art is his passionate pursuit of immediate visual experience. You don’t imagine that he searches the Internet for motifs. In that way, allowing for the qualifications that I have offered, he can be identified as a very belated modernist.

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Like the fabled American nineteenth-century artist Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Lees often works on his paintings for years, even decades, overlaying the canvases with what the French call “couches” of pigment (a word relating to “couch” in English—to lay down on). And he modifies, eliminates, paints over, peers at, thinks about, thinks more about, changes again, scrapes, puts aside (facing the wall), looks at yet again, adds more paint to, further edits, revises, and so encrusts the surfaces in a richly heavy and sometimes bumpy or gravelly, sometimes willfully crude, scumbled textures that may glow with colors both luxuriant and subtle from beneath. So these paintings age with him. For drawings he may add panels as he scours and redraws and radically changes compositions. Lees’s canvases and worked over drawings literally partake in and show the vicissitudes of the passage of time. With their fresco-like effects many seem to be artifacts from antiquitythat have marvelously, even heroically, endured.

Whether a landscape, a picture of a dour old man, buildings, or the title of an old movie writ large, each work, in part through the accretion of paint and its own range of tonalities, emits its own special aura. One repeated motif in the current exhibition is that of a bald old man, Lees’s father, an ever so slightly comic but melancholic figure, a sort of cartoonish stumblebum seated in an unprepossessing easy chair in a dark, somewhat airless interior. With superb visual intelligence, Lees invokes his own personal mythologies, the figures with which he grew up: he pays heartfelt tribute to Porky Pig, from animation; or the naïve and awkward boy puppet Dilly Dally, with whom he identified (from the popular Howdy Doody show, 1947-60). His celebratory images are often very American in their references: the strains of mellow jazz from a sax, cartoons, Hollywood films. But however varied the subject, these paintings are deeply considered, the antipodes of glib. Through the density of their presentation they become meditative, contemplative, themselves iconic.

At a recent public lecture at the New York Studio School (where we both teach), the self-deprecating Lees spoke with winning familiarity, simply and marvelously informatively as well as eloquently of his background in art and of his methods.

Early on he was taken by the work of Georges Rouault, the seriousness and density of that of Milton Resnick, the work of Chaim Soutine. He also gave a spirited description of his experiments with technique including flicking gobs of paint on canvas, on furniture (yes, an arm chair such as he has had his father inhabit and the subject of other paintings by him), and a rug; and painting thickly enough to enable him to excavate forms—a fish—on the worked up surface. All this described with a gentle, sweetly comic and endearing humor. After he came to live where the landscape was important, he made that the subject of his work, having carefully looked at Chinese landscape painting. And it shows.

With all but offhanded seeming charm and lack of pomp, John Lees manages to establish strong presences and worth in the most unassuming and unexpected images. He pays tribute to the least presumptuous or ladida and renders them for the ages. He knows how to create even via the most transient of subjects, a sense of wonder, the transcendent, and gravitas.

Exhibition continues through November 28, 2015 at 15 Rivington Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street, New York City, 212 242 2772

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October 23 to November 28, 2015
15 Rivington Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street
New York City, 212 242 2772

In 1906 the critic Philip Hale remarked that he perceived a “fine insanity” in the work of Marsden Hartley, by which the artist took him to mean “a strong insistence upon the personal interpretations of the subjects chosen.” While Marsden might not be the first name to come to mind in viewing John Lees’ fourth solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Lees does harness his unequivocal mastery of paint into building images that speak of a similar, profound commitment to inner reflection.

A sense of gravitas pervades these somber works. The paint itself is what is initially so striking and so momentous, inexorably annexing the viewer’s attention through its almost unbearable beauty of crusty and pitted layers of rich pigment. Clown in a Frame speaks this exalted language of densely textured paint- the language of Georges Rouault- without reservation, even absconding with Rouault’s decorative framing. Yet the source of the sentiment informing the subject transcends easy reference to the French master and is deeply personal for Lees. Lees was the clown. Lees was Dilly Dally (the puppet from the Howdy Doody show of the 1950s). The relationship between subject and artist is direct. These two characters, that of the Dilly Dally and the clown, are primary sources of identification for the artist in his childhood and adolescence. Resurfacing in his work over the years, they have become an integral part of what Lees refers to as “purging” himself of his past. Clown in a Frame and Dilly Dally are images born of memory, densely processed through years of labor in the studio. However, the note that Lees seeks to sound is, in the end, less about memory, less about Time recollected, but rather about the ongoing effect of Time, the process of aging. The clown and Dilly Dally show severe signs of the wear and tear of Time passing—especially in the mournful watercolor Ghost of Dilly Dally, 2007, where the image of Dilly Dally is especially haunting, the surface of the paper barely retaining a few traces of the hapless puppet who has been literally effaced.

These images, are, however, but an introduction to Lees’ most powerful treatise on aging, the portraits of his father. First evoked in a fine series of tooled drawings on the first floor of the gallery, the father assumes true iconic form downstairs in five fiercely moving paintings in which the remorselessness of Time gnaws and gnaws at this simple fellow sitting in his armchair with his Lucky Strikes and drink. Four of those images are quite small and so tactile that if this was a museum show there would be a barrier keeping them at at safe distance from the public. The persistent process of toil that produces these savage, mottled surfaces could, in a lesser artist’s hands, suffocate the image. Indeed, even in the work of Frank Auerbach sometimes the paint itself has a tendency to dominate and overpower the image, reading as paint before it reads as form. Here, as in Rouault, the endless layering is constantly felt in service of form (It is of considerable interest that Lees cites Rouault again and again as “the door” that he found and opened and led to his becoming an artist). Lees proves himself skillful at resuscitating his work time and time again over the years, often scraping and scouring with chemical removers until the surface reawakens. For to Lees, it is all about the paint. “If the paint does not go bumpity bumpity, what’s the point?”This pitiless working of the paint is best witnessed in Man Sitting in an Armchair (Red Dog), 2008-2015, where the greater part of the back plane of the picture has been scraped entirely off. The most evocative of all these smaller portraits of the artist’s father is Man Sitting in an Armchair, 1971; 2013-14. Here the head is processed completely out of focus, dissolving into the stream of passing time, the red dot of the cigarette package glowing like a dying ember.

Dominating the lower gallery is the largest painting of the exhibition, Man Sitting in an Armchair, 2008-2015. Here, again, the focus of the picture seems not so much about a memory of a man, a father, but rather about the diffusion of the form through aging. Miraculously, as the edges of the forms dissolve, the forms themselves seem heightened and fulfilled. Indeed, the forms assume a feeling of inherent necessity in terms of the pictorial structure, as opposed to the diffuse forms that often may actually weaken the structure of an Impressionist work. The content of Lees’ portraits is also somehow mysteriously sustained, despite the vagueness, despite the exaggerated or caricatured features. One still feels the keenness of his pain in confronting his feelings of his father and the need to purge those feelings is palpable.

Perhaps the most curious work of the entire exhibition is In the Park, 2008. A figure of an old man with a cane is seemingly morphing into a man playing a saxophone. The fractured image is riveting. What is the meaning of this? Lees cites the old man as a self portrait, the image as a refection on the inevitable aging process, mixed with his love of jazz. He feels that his pictures, at their best, touch on the big sound of saxophonist Ben Webster: “big sound, big tone, but played out in paint.” Again, the working of the paint itself in this mysterious work is ravishing, every quadrant of the canvas alive and rich. An orange cat tightens the right foreground, its paws almost fixed into the frame. A tiny black glyph becomes another cat, a white limbed runner dashes in from the right with a radiant yellow shoe and a spectral palm gloomily closes the top left which makes the completely scraped opposing right corner breathe into infinity.

The theme of aging continues with the series 42nd Street, pieces dating from 2014 and 2015, and not bearing the full burden of Lees’ incorrigible work process. Still, the play of surface and color powerfully and inventively reverberate and the text of the actual 1933 film of the same title, painstakingly scripted throughout, adds a poignancy to these more brazen images. The mood is significantly lightened, however, and the gravitas reduced to an understanding of the cinematic scene introduced in the text.

There is a reason for this lightening of tone. The 42nd Street series has its place in Lees’ vision, heralding in a new season of more immediate and hopeful, less troubled and inflicted work. After a long, long and often dark road, confronting and wrestling with his personal demons and trying to reconcile himself to his past, Lees speaks of wanting to “pay attention to life here now” and purge himself of all the unpleasant associations he has with his youth. He wants to, in a word, move on. The new wave of images will literally be born out of the older images, the artist incapable of starting on a virgin surface. Rather, he can already visualize transfiguring existing, unfinished works into new configurations- figures morphing into trees, trees into figures, cats into birds. Through a new lens, Lees is now willfully seeking to repudiate the weight of previous themes or subjects.

And that shall indeed be a much anticipated development for those of us who have enthusiastically followed Lees’ journey thus far, through the glass, darkly.

This show has also been reviewed by Aimee Brown Price

The post A Fine Insanity: John Lees at Betty Cuningham appeared first on artcritical.

Experiencing this marvelous show of works by Andrew Forge (1923-2002) at Betty Cuningham Gallery, the second they have organized, something of an epiphany brought composer Morton Feldman to this visitor’s mind. I am not suggesting a co-extensive relationship between music and visual art – even Kandinsky, in his correspondence with Schoenberg, refuted that notion – but there are parallel qualities and ideas explored by Feldman and Forge that sustain this connection.

It is notable that both wrote on their respective fields. A polymath, Forge was also an articulate and insightful writer and teacher. His extensive, as yet uncollected writings include books and essays on a diverse range of significant artists: Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. Feldman also wrote on painters and poets who had influenced his development and those pieces have been collected in Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Central to both were the examples of John Cage and Rauschenberg on how to escape from the binding aspects of their respective traditions.

At the Cunningham Gallery we have been offered a selection of three types of work: watercolors of floating and touching dots and dashes, some coalescing into fields of color; watercolor grids of shifting columns; and oils of densely worked color fields opening into ever changing networks of shimmering atmospheres, telegraphing to our eyes Forge’s sense of mapped sight and motion.

Seen broadly, the watercolors offer a way into Forge’s thinking process. He created them as a release from the dense complications of his oils. In the four works of strictly gridded columns, thin quivering strokes slide laterally across the vertical columns, sometimes partially overlapping others and playing against the rigidness of the interval. This mosaic-like tessellation of color notations carry melodic movements, punctuated by accents of dark or opposing saturated colors. All of these works are in dialogue with Klee’s magic squares, and the North African rugs that inspired him.

Feldman also expressed an interest in Near and Middle Eastern rugs: “Music and the designs or a repeated pattern in a rug have much in common. As a composer, I respond to…a rug’s coloration and its creation of a microchromatic overall hue…for most artists the structural concerns are uppermost and out of it comes content….” (Crippled Symmetry (1981)

For Forge, the objective process of making a painting by following a set of rules for structural development was a means of paralleling nature’s ways of forming. Writing on Klee (1954), Forge quoted from the latter’s essay, On Modern Art (1922): “With the gradual growth of such a structural image before our eyes an association of ideas gradually insinuates itself which may tempt one to a material interpretation.” This quote would become key to his mature process and it is telling that it was used in a discussion of Klee’s Classic Coast (1931), one of the great mock-mosaic works employing only dots and bars of color in an extensive, shifting, asymmetric grid. In his struggle to find a satisfying relationship between looking, making and meaning, Forge ultimately discovered that the notational marks were charged with an expressive quality that ultimately “generates … subject, not the other way around,” as he later wrote in the brochure for an exhibition he curated at the New York Studio School, Observation: Notation (2000).

This relationship with Klee and other artists is what Forge referred to as his “internal audience” where work speaks to work, across time, space and culture. Seen this way, a work of art is part of a greater whole. Each new work may change our sense of the past, even as the past may change the present. This continual restructuring can also manifest within the history of an artist’s work. This kind of thinking is what Forge thought “distinguished an artist.” (891, 1985)

A small vertical landscape of heavy atmosphere is titled Aurélia (1985) in allusion to Gérard De Nerval’s famous Romantic account of his descent into madness. This seems to parallel Forge’s desire to form a method of mapping the world that was objective in process and subjective in affect, all while not being representational. Two works from the same year conjure Roman torso fragments portrayed as spectral emanations appearing or dissolving into simple notation.

Where Forge moves further away from recognizable forms, his landscape titles allow us a way into the work even as it may suppress our access to his inner dialogue. In Willow (1999) Forge synthesizes Monet and Jules Olitski into something unique and radiant. In both versions of the dark Heavy Hemlocks (1999) Forge approaches Morris Louis’ veils with a suggestive energy that has an existential intensity.

As I began to move back and forth between two large and transcendent works by Forge, April (1991-92) and November (1980-81), each painting opened up slowly, illuminated by a synthetic, intellectualized light. April evades prettiness in an airy softness of buzzing pulses, echoing Pierre Bonnard’s more apparitional works, and in November, a shadowy palette yields an ocean of chromatic patterns. Exceedingly dense, both works are lightened by the amount of white ground variously peeking through, creating a Bezold effect. With their flowing networks of shifting hues, these paintings are polyphonic in the way they changed radically from a distance of 3 feet to 6 feet and again from across the room. As one moves back certain configurations appear and then disappear as one’s brain synthesizes the color oppositions. At the furthest remove, the canvases have an atomized geometrical structure.

It was during this immersion that I was suddenly aware of a parallel experience, an extraordinary evening at New York City Opera (2011), listening to Feldman’s monodrama, Neither, for soprano and orchestra based on a short text by Samuel Beckett. As the composer noted in his last interview (1987), with Everett C. Frost, “The subject essentially is: whether you’re in the shadows of understanding or non-understanding. I mean finally you’re in the shadows. You’re not going to arrive at any understanding at all: You’re just left there holding this—the hot potato which is life.”

This stunning music sustained a chromatic atmosphere which had drawn me in, repeating phrase fragments that seemed to have much in common with Forge’s networks of dots and dashes, billowing into varied densities of space and light. In this hour long piece, Feldman achieved a moment held in duration–vertical time–unexpected in music, but central to painting. Every luminous chord changed so gradually that what seemed movement in the moment, was reflected in repeated patterns subtly shifted by tempo and his orchestration of instruments. Here too, segments of listening time resembled my various positions in relation to each canvas. Or as Feldman put it, “I am involved with the contradiction in not having the sum of the parts equal the whole.”

Both Feldman’s and Forge’s works achieve lucid-dream states. In my experience, it was the especially large scale, whether spatial or durational, that produced profoundly transporting totalities. The disquieting mood for Feldman had “to do with instrumental images,” whereas the indistinct inner worlds in Forge rely on the diffusion of color into unnamable but apprehensible feeling. After a number of gallery visits, I haven’t come to the end of these works: all their secrets hide in plain sight.

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Two years ago I met Jake Berthot in Chelsea, outside Ruth Miller’s show at Lohin Geduld Gallery on 25th Street. We were both in a state of awe at what we had just seen. “You have to paint a lifetime to make paintings like those,” Jake said.  And I had to agree as we talked about the ways in which Ruth used color and, even more importantly, light to create a vibrant sense of time and place.

Last year I found myself back on the same street, this time to see a genuinely masterful group of paintings by Jake himself, at Betty Cuningham Gallery, that were haunting, haunted, living, breathing, and absolutely undeniably alive. I could borrow from Whitman and say that they contained multitudes, but while that would certainly be true, how much better to admit that I found myself quoting Jake to his own paintings: “You have to work for a lifetime to make paintings like that.”

What I loved so much about them was that they went very far beyond the sense of sight. As your eye travelled across the painting, you felt the paint, the marks holding you in space. You felt distance, a longing for light, a sense of yourself being transported into another realm. In this day and age it might be anathema to say this, but they were sublime, in the most raw and American kind of way.

Before Jake moved up to the Catskills in the early ‘90s he was an abstract painter, and a city painter. But once he was in the country, settling in Accord, New York and taking inspiration from the surrounding woodlands, he truly shocked devotees as his work took a radically new direction.

At that point he did the thing that can be done only by the most relevant artist: he pissed people off. I certainly remember talking to many a crestfallen artist who felt that their mentor/idol/hero had stopped making the paintings that had inspired them — as well achieving critical and commercial success for Jake, including international acclaim as far afield as the Venice Biennale. As I listened to the teeth gnashing I remember thinking of the folkies booing at Dylan going electric in Newport. What could be better than that?

And when Jake went electric with his paintings it meant light, with a capital L, as he brilliantly looked for illumination in the place one is least likely to find it: the darkness. The evidence not only abounds in his work, but in recent comments about the upstate terrain that clearly entranced him, in an interview with Jennifer Samet: “I have never seen woods as dark as the woods in the Catskills. They are in constant flux.”

During a recent studio visit with Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy, in a video posted at their website, Gorky’s Granddaughter, Jake said, “I’m interested in painting. I’m not interested in theory. I’m not interested in historical possibilities… I choose to be free.”

With Jake’s passing on December 30 we have lost a wonderful man, and a brilliant artist. But the paintings that he used his freedom to create continue to live among us. As Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats: “…he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities, and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.”

We will miss the man no small amount, and for no short time.

But Jake, as a painter, has, indeed, become his admirers, and there are enough of us who feel an altogether familiar affection for his work to be certain that his accomplishments will be celebrated for a long, long time to come.

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Stanley Lewis’s work is the obverse of what one might think of as a downtown aesthetic. His paintings and drawings, now on view at Betty Cuningham’s new Lower East Side home, carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects — backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua — transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition.

The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and a very contemporary, almost sculptural painting process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality. Cloth and paint are built up by cutting and repositioning pieces of worked canvas that will be reconnected, at least partially, with a loaded brush, painting wet into wet, layer upon layer. This often leaves bare staples, gaps, and deep scars that resist integration with the image.

In his larger works, Lewis is often seen trying to correct initial estimates of how much surface is needed to chart the movement of the eye from near to far, so that the space of the picture can make sense as a world. As he focuses on a specific area, it expands to fill his field of vision, fragmenting a sense of the whole. If Lewis wanted to cover the tracks of his labors he easily could, but the point of his work, evidently, is not a view of nature alone, nor is it just a correspondence between built up paint and the presence of things. Instead, we are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process. Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to his inner experience of looking and making, to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.

As I was looking back and forth between three terrific works in the gallery’s back space, Lewis’s distinct quality of light on partly cloudy days became evident. In Boat on the Beach, Lake Chautauqua (2013) and even more so in Backyard Jeykll Island, GA (2014), a subtle pink tone suffuses the air, transforming the everyday into a glimpse of reality enchanted. This surprisingly recalled Jess’s magical Translation paintings, which also share with Lewis a charmed light and an irrational play between image and a lapidary surface of thickly applied paint, erupting here and there into incongruous lumps. The third painting, Winslow Park, Westport (2010-2014), and the most recent work at the gallery’s entrance, Matt Farnham’s Farm with Truck (2014), share a cooler blue-green quality no less captivating than the others.

Structural ideas vary from picture to picture: a traditional repoussoir of dark trees frames the central vortex of space in Farm with Truck; in Winslow Park, a tree masked by a telephone pole serves as a pictorial axis using wires above and the gated fence below to extend their reach backward and forward into space. A network of silhouettes and shadows orchestrates Jeykll Island and diagonal paths of thickly worked rivulets of grasses and clouds open the space against the horizon in Boats on a Beach.

Perhaps the most unusual and surprising structure is featured in the show’s largest work, an elaborate paper bas-relief, Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow (2007-2014), made with pencil on layers of cut and carved print paper. This irregularly-shaped snowbound landscape is partially modulated through the physical modeling of the paper, allowing the dominant central tree to float, as if we were watching a slow motion explosion of limbs moving outward in all directions. This is the show’s knockout punch. His master work captures the eerie grey light of a soft snow fall that carries an unmistakable air of fatality.

Thinking about this and other fine drawings on view, it is hard to miss correspondences between Lewis’s work and School of London artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Closer to home and recent innovation are the drawn mappings of Dawn Clements and recent tree photographs of Mike and Doug Starn. All these artists share with Lewis an interest in the reinvention of realism by piecing together literal fragments of paper that re-synthesize the image. Lewis’s crazy-quilt painting process stands for the dignity of his unique experience. This is the source of what is so disconcerting, so irritating and so crucial in his work.

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Greg Drasler described a previous body of work in terms that hold good for his current raucous fun fair of a show of paintings: “packed like luggage, appointed like rooms and driven like automobiles.”  Unexpected pockets of poignancy lurk, however, amidst the visual wit of these busy allegories of transport.  Similarly, an initial impact of strident design and glossy resolution belies quirky, almost dainty handwriting gently energizing his surfaces.  The show and its presiding painting are titled “On The Lam” and the fugitive eye is indeed sent on a jolly yet desperate flight as it ricochets from dislocated wheel to gaudily decorated caravan, from Harlequin diamond to devil’s stripe, seeking refuge, in vain, in fields that are flags or in a plaid sky.

Greg Drasler: On the Lam remains on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery until October 15 (541 West 25th Street, New York City, 212 242 2772)

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By the weekend, however, her naked simulacrum was not so easy to see as the painting had been pulled from the show and replaced by another.  This writer had to request a private audience with Model with Choohoo Weathervane and African Chair, 2010, now consigned to the gallery racks.  The explanation given was that collectors from out of town needed to see hung the replacement work but that the one featuring Mills would soon be back in its rightful place.

The original hang was not restored the following weekend, however, and soon a new explanation emerged.  Visitor-friends of the model had been asking to see “Candace naked.”  This, according to Pearlstein, was “the wrong phrase to use” with his dealer and her staff, lowering the tone of the exhibition in their eyes.  When asked if he was saddened to see his depiction of Mills removed the artist expressed indifference because the work that replaced it is also of merit.  “I like all my paintings equally,” he told me.

The response of Mills, however, has been a little less laconic.  She has posted the following to her Facebook page: “just learned that the gallery took down the painting I’m in because too many people were coming by and asking about the “naked Candace” painting. Thanks, dudes. Way to be classy. You want to look- BUY IT!”  Mills is a professional artist model whose clients have included Paul Resika, Sallie Benton, Duncan Hannah, Mari Lyons, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Alex Katz, Will Cotton and Inka Essenhigh.

Pearlstein points out, in the meantime, that the painting will be included in a show in Paris and that Mills will feature in his next work, also destined for Paris, a double figure composition, which is coming along somewhat slowly, he laments.

His exhibition at Betty Cuningham, with or without the “naked Candace,” continues through December 18.

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Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch, and Andrea K. Scott joined David Cohen to discuss Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman, and Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham.

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Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now at Betty Cuningham Gallery

June 26 to August 8, 2008
541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212-242-2772

Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost retrospective overview of his career at Betty Cuningham, “Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now,” suggests in 13 canvases ranging from 1964–1969 and 1988–2008.

And yet, for all the pounds of flesh and claustrophobic constructions of actual, lived in and worked in space these pictures present, the paintings are imbued with such a denial of emotion, connection or purposeful activity as to rob them of the defining characteristics of the interior genre, such as social intercourse, productivity, leisure.

The sense is that, despite the human presence and the architectural frame, Mr. Pearlstein is actually a still life painter, his intense gaze zooming in upon specific objects, their formal relationship with one another, their visually challenging proximities. In more recent canvases, the props, which reflect his avid fascination with Americana, toys, and folk objects, take on star roles. The nudes are overtly reduced to object status, splayed around the inanimate things in mercilessly matter-of-fact compositions whose construction — starting with a focus of the artist’s attention and ending wherever the edge of the arbitrary frame of vision falls — leaves no room for sentimental humanistic notions of the integrity of the figure. “Nude on Rusty Chair” (1969), on view in the office, nonchalantly decapitates the seated figure and robs her of her feet.

But even in his paintings from the 1960s — with which Mr. Pearlstein first came to the attention of the art world and in which nudes held unrivalled mastery over their prosaic domain — the passivity of the models, the drastic cropping, and the willfully perverse perspective ensured that objectification was the order of the day.

Mr. Pearlstein’s audaciously clinical anatomy studies earned him Irving Sandler’s epithet, shared with Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, and others, of “new perceptual realism.” These artists’ return to traditional subject and means was understood as being closer in spirit to the strategies of the contemporary avant garde than the academy with which it seemed to make superficial connection. If you keep in mind the all-American objects that were to follow as their canvas-mates, Mr. Pearlstein’s early nudes relate to that most blatant of commodity objects, his Carnegie Tech classmate Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box.

The “academic” nude held a similarly remote proximity for fine artists as the design on a carton of household dry goods — under their noses, yet out of bounds. Mr. Pearlstein broke a modernist taboo by reinvestigating the most traditional of subjects, the passively posed nude, but he imported from cutting edge contemporary art strategies for abstracting perceived things. Primarily, this had to do with radical shifts of scale and context. Mr. Pearlstein’s nudes equally connected with Color Field painting and Minimal Art as they did with Pop, on several counts. They were larger than life (typical canvases here are 6 by 6 feet, 6 by 5, 7 by 7); the lighting was stark even to the point of blandness; and the insistence of painting exactly what is seen without capitulating to the comforting tricks of perspective or foreshortening meant that a realization of the flatness of the picture surface jolted rudely into viewer consciousness.

The selection at Cuningham stresses continuity but also dispels the put down (one of many endured by the ever controversial Mr. Pearlstein) that he has been painting the same work for 40 years. The front gallery sandwiches a recent canvas, “Two models with Large Whirlygig” (2006), between “Nude on a Blue Drape” (1964) and “Two Nudes with Red Drape” (1965). The continuity points to the perceptual realist’s affinity with one of abstraction’s absolutists, Piet Mondrian, answering Barnett Newman’s question (in the title of one of his works): “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.” In Mr. Pearlstein, the first and third of these primaries are stridently represented while yellow comes in a contingent form — fleshtone.

These rugs notwithstanding, the early canvases are stark in their tonality and anticlimactic in their light modulation. “Two Nudes with Camp Chair,” (1969) for instance, allows enough shadow play to identify without any ambiguity the synthetic light source, which is offstage left, but the contrasts of light and shade are kept to a minimum within the figures, whose pallid complexion melds with the off-white walls and yellow carpeting.

“Model, Neon Mickey and Bouncy Duck” (2007), by comparison, is by Mr. Pearlstein’s standards a riot of chromatic complexity. There are striking juxtapositions of texture and tone — the metals of the iron garden seat, the sprung toy and its foot rest, and the armature of the neon mickey, lit up red, yellow, blue, and white; the different woods of bench and base; the brittle knots of dreadlocks against the shine of glass and metal and the softness of flesh; the different kinds of shadow from neon and overhead light. As he typically does with his black models, the nude flesh is up against a paragon of whiteness in the toy duck. Her rich skin tones bounce back the synthetic colors that surround her.

The extreme objectification of the human figure is accentuated in the paintings of the last 20 years by the increasing animation, by way of contrast, of his still life motifs. So many of his toys are animal characters, and even his furniture can have animal life. “Model with Horn Chair” (1990) pushes the organic-inert dichotomy to an almost symbolic extreme: The baroque furniture writhes with life while the nude, forced tortuously to negotiate a space for herself amidst these absurd protrusions, seems skewered by the horns. His flesh, with heavily defined ribs and muscle, has a statue-like stillness, while the sinewy, glistening horns seem to perspire.

What is less than lively in Mr. Pearlstein’s art is his paint surface, which is deadpan to the point of necrophilia. It is ironic that an artist whose modus operandi is to paint from life, with models posed in an actual space in real time, should produce distilled images that are effectively out of time and space. By rendering what he sees at the expense of what he experiences he drastically compresses space, eschewing any realist tricks for suggesting depth and recession to insist, instead, on the stark reality of the canvas as a film of vision. Architecture is akin to the cropped nudes as Mr. Pearlstein almost never gives a room its corners, rendering surroundings as flat ground rather than as volume. Similarly, the breathing flesh, quivering plastic blimps, and mechanical toys, which must present themselves to the artist in his studio with actual or implied movement, are frozen in paint. A painterly, impressionistic touch would find a metaphorical equivalent of the pulsating signs of life that Mr. Pearlstein denies. His objects — animate or otherwise — are divorced from lived experience. Despite his fanatical perceptualism, his art is anti-empirical — essentially abstract.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 3, 2008 under the heading “Philip Pearlstein, Objectifying the Nude”

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