Thank you, dear Holland, for bringing some civilization to New Amsterdam. The European Fine Art Fair is familiar to collectors and trade as Maastricht, the southern Dutch border town that has hosted the fair, on and off, since 1988. TEFAF has now joined the global franchising trend that gives us Basel in Miami and Hong Kong and other geographical marketing wonders. The fair had reportedly been looking for a big enough US venue – Maastricht takes place in cavernous fair grounds – for some time. In settling upon the unique charms and strategic location of the Park Avenue Armory they have come up a cropper.

If you think you are familiar with the Armory from the countless fairs staged there, the transformation of the landmarked drill hall will take your breath away. TEFAF are beneficiaries of the top notch restorations of the Armory that have been taking place recently, but they have brought their own style sensibility to bear on the Victorian interiors. By compressing the entrance lobby they have carved out new exhibitor spaces on the first and second floors. Whiting out the regimental paraphernalia behind semi-opaque cloths was a super classy move. The galleries lucky – or tony – enough to secure these eccentric spaces have been able to exploit the sheer theatricality of these backdrops to spectacular effect: Di Donna, for instance, with what they bill as a Surrealist banquet, in which such later visual-edibles as a Wayne Thiebaud rubbed salon-hang shoulders with canonical Surrealist treasures. The Palazzo Fortuny in Venice came to mind for the way modern and antique treasures were offset with at once sumptuous and raw décor in this and other rooms, Hauser & Wirth’s for instance.

The median quality of materials on view at TEFAF was pretty staggering, but consistently there was the pleasurable frisson of antique and modern juxtaposed, of blue chip taking its chances with a given new discovery or revival. Some stands were cabinets of curiosity, some haute bourgeois living rooms, some museum quality white cubes, and the back and forth between these various experiences added to the sense of a well-ordered visual feast. Black African, pre-Cycladic and modern furniture were first amongst equals amidst the eclectic mix on offer.

Stand outs for this visitor: a louche, mannerist portrait by Otto Dix at Richard Nagy of London, standing guard to a packed display of Klimt and Schiele drawings; a spare, elegant pairing of Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley at another London dealers, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert; mouthwatering Egyptian carvings and trinkets at Charles Ede; a powerfully focused selection of Carmen Herrera from around 1950 at Lisson; fascinating Russian and Ukrainian works from the late Tsarist and early revolutionary period, 1890-1934 (a to-die-for early Kandinsky on incised wood) at James Butterwick; a wall-mounted bureau by Jean Prouvé from his Villa Saint Clair, with Laffanour Galerie Downtown from Paris. Quite the coup was to be found at Bernard Goldberg, presenting three Thomas Hart Benton mural-sized canvases from a suite (the remainder of which are now in the Nelson Atkins and Terra museums) painted early in his career to show prospective clients, scholars propose, that he had the chops to handle mural commissions. Another really memorable booth was Hidde van Seggelen’s where early works by Dutch neo-conceptualist Pieter Laurens Mol were to be savored. (An ’80s star, he was a discovery for me.) At once learned, thoughtful, playful and exquisitely crafted, Mol felt perfect as a solo presentation at this truly connoisseurial fair.

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April 27 to June 15, 2012
The Carlyle Hotel
981 Madison Avenue?, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, 212-259-0444

Le rêve du prisonnier (1924) finds André Masson (1896 -1987) deconstructing classical cubism. He inserts into the center of this portrait images of fragmented organic forms, shapes like those that soon will dominate his compositions. For now his palette is predominantly pale brown. Nature Morte (1925) contains many objects—playing cards, a guitar, and an apple– associated with cubist still lives. But now some of these things are brightly colored and they spill out of the picture, pressing beyond the boundaries of the frame. Very quickly, Masson’s style then goes through a bewildering variety of changes. Torse de femme (1926), a slyly erotic charcoal drawing moves into Salvador Dali territory.  Jeaune fille soufflant sur le feu (1927) sets wandering lines on a intense flat yellow background, not unlike that found in some paintings by Joan Miró. And Nus (1928), with its green and violet forms bordered by gracefully drawn curves resembles an unusually large Paul Klee. None of Masson’s French contemporaries showed greater capacity for innovation.

In the 1930s, when Masson lived and worked in Spain, his style changed dramatically. Some of his images of bullfights and monsters, Pasiphaé (1937) for example, appear indebted to Picasso’s paintings of this period. But Corrida au soleil (1936), a close up whirling image of bull, horse and matador is a resoundingly original composition. And Aube à Montserrat (1935), an intensely red, molten hot Surrealistic landscape with a whirling spiral in the sky comes from a world which Masson created. The same is true of La ronde (1937), a close up view of ferocious insect life.  And L’homme emblématique (1939), with arcing energy rays flowing from the genitals of the central male figure and the breasts of the woman on his right, figures set against a cool blue background is a remarkable body image. “Desiring-machines are binary machines,” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)), “because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow . . . . “  Masson very presciently illustrates this worldview in which “desire causes the current to flow.”

Set Masson’s Les Captives (1932) alongside Jackson Pollock’s figurative paintings from the late 1930s, and you see how much that American artist learned from him. Indeed the long horizontal  L’histoire de thésée (1943) is strikingly similar to some early Abstract Expressionist pictures. Sybille (1944), for example, resembles Arshile Gorky’s last paintings, but with hot Spanish colors enclosed in graceful black waves. But if some of Masson’s all-over figurative compositions lead towards Abstract Expressionism, his late 1930s works lead in a very different direction. They anticipate the neo-expressionist painting which made such an impact in New York during the 1980s. His Portrait du poète Heinrich von Kleist (1939) is a truly over-the-top anticipation of Julian Schnabel’s aggressively anti-aesthetic paintings of the 1980s.  

Masson has a modest place in the familiar histories of modernism because when during World War Two he (and the other Surrealists) were exiled in the United States, they inspired Pollock and his peers. That part of his story is very familiar. This marvelously ambitious exhibition shows that there is more to be said. Because Masson learned how to put the bad taste associated with ‘kitsch’ at the service of serious art, this exhibition speaks cogently to the situation of painting right now.

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