Bruce:  May 11 to September 1, 2019
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, Connecticut,  brucemuseum.org

Blum & Poe  June 27 to September 14. 2019
19 East 66th Street
New York, blumandpoe.com

Our love affair with Milton Avery’s work began in 1967 when Donald Morris and his wife Florence introduced us to his paintings in their gallery in Northwest Detroit.  Today, after seeing more than two dozen exhibitions of his work over these fifty plus years, our attachment remains strong.   So we lost no time in driving to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut (less than an hour from New York City,) to see this unusual show that brings together a dozen paintings each and numerous sketches by three members of the Avery family: Milton, his wife Sally Michel, and their daughter March.   This triple treat was curated by Kenneth Silver with Stephanie Guyet.

The Averys spent virtually all of their summers together in favored locations in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire as well as in more distant destinations in Mexico, Canada, and Europe.  In each place they sketched the mountains and the seas, the forests and the beaches as well as family members and friends.   Often, they were able to complete watercolors of those scenes while still on vacation.  They would then take their drawings back to New York where Milton would develop many of his into oil paintings during the winter months. Why this show is so significant is that it provides an opportunity to appreciate what Robert Hobbs has called “the Avery style”, common to the three artists.

First and foremost, Milton, Sally and March are outstanding colorists.  Milton was called, early on, “the American Matisse” because of his use of extremely vivid, often unnamable colors.  Whether subtle and serene like Sea Gazers (1956) from the Whitney Museum or agitated and restless like Breaking Wave (1959) from the Neuberger Museum, Milton’s colors range from strikingly vivid to peacefully harmonious.  Other characteristics of this family’s style are the flat picture plane, often interlocking simple shapes and over time, greater simplicity of forms.  The Avery Style was far more than charming.  As Milton grew older and more frail, one could see in his solitary figures or animals his acceptance of isolation and his recognition of impending death.  But then, each of the artists seemed comfortable with painting figures who did not communicate with each other.

On the occasion of Milton Avery’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1982, Hilton Kramer suggested that Avery was slow to receive his deserved reputation partly because his work was “Too realistic for the avant-garde during his lifetime and too abstract for the realists.”   Milton came as close to total abstraction as possible, but never wanted his paintings to depart from nature.  He left it to his friends, Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko to make the complete break.

Milton grew up near Hartford, Connecticut and in 1920, at the age of 35, he spent the first of several summers in Gloucester in order to be able to sketch from nature.   Four years later, while there, he met Sally Michel, an aspiring painter and illustrator who was almost 20 years his junior, and followed her to New York City in 1925.  They married the next year and Milton  painted every weekday for close to forty years, reserving their weekends for galleries, museums and trips to friends.  Seeing Matisse and Picasso opened up new options for Milton in color and form and he continued to experiment with flattened surfaces, interlocking forms and both bold and muted colors throughout his career.   Taciturn by nature, Milton’s sketches and his paintings often provided an outlet for his wit and humor.  Milton belonged to no art movement or art school and continually forged his own path, a trait greatly admired by Gottlieb and Rothko.

MILTON  AVERY

The fourteen paintings and multiple sketches in this exhibition provide a mini-retrospective of Milton’s career.  The earliest three paintings have cruder figures with more literal and defined facial features.  The first mature painting,  Gaspé Landscape (1942), with its spacious open feeling features a graceful line of foam encircling an agitated blue sea along with several carefully placed tiny houses and grazing animals under a dark restless sky.  Swimmers and Bathers (1945) is a more serene painting that features a strong horizontal format with four well defined areas.  At the bottom is the lilac beach with two female figures sitting on a towel and beach blanket that interlock with the sand.  Their backs are toward the viewer as they gaze at the dark grey sea.  A highly abstracted and whimsical orange swimmer has just swum past them. Beyond the water is a horizontal line of light blue and white boulders and above that at the top of the painting, is a dark olive-green abstracted forest.   As in Gaspé Landscape, the various elements in Swimmers and Bathers appear to be harmoniously coordinated, another Avery trait.

Two other outstanding paintings by Milton are Woman and Palm Tree (1951) that incorporates the more vivid colors that he began using in the mid-1940s and Dunes and Sea II, 1960, owned by the Whitney Museum.  This late seascape is his largest painting in the exhibition at 52 by 72 inches –  a simplified masterpiece with a light purple foreground and a strong diagonal sand dune set against a restless blue and black sea under an animated cloudy grey sky.  Avery spent considerable time over the years in the company of Gottlieb and Rothko, and he acknowledged that in Provincetown in the summers of the late 1950s, he wanted to paint large like “the abstract  boys”.  Toward this end, while there, he completed a series of major oil paintings. Rothko said of Avery’s great canvases that they “have always a gripping lyricism and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”

SALLY MICHEL

There are 15 paintings and multiple drawings by Sally Michel in this exhibition, all   done between 1946 and 1988.  Unfortunately, with no paintings by Milton from their 1946 summer in Mexico, the only two paintings from their six weeks in San Miguel de Allende were done by Sally.  Also included are two of Sally’s lyrical and poignant sketches of Milton: Artist as Ease (1949) and Striped Napper (1959).  Her painting, Man and Wife (c1950s) best depicts “the Avery style” with its highly abstracted figures, flattened forms, and vivid colors.  But, the exhibition equally enables us to appreciate the differences between Milton and Sally’s work.  In Spring 1956, with its rich blue, green and yellow foliage, we see the much greater detail that Sally incorporated at a point in time when Milton’s work was already highly streamlined.

It is hard to imagine what Milton’s career might have been like without Sally Michel. Sally recognized Milton’s potential when she married him and did everything she could to allow him to develop both his craft and his style.  She served as his model, his constant companion, his provider, and the hostess of their frequent dinner gatherings.  Restricting her own painting to summer vacations with the family, she sublimated her talents as a painter to the pursuit of a career as an illustrator, becoming the breadwinner of the family.  In this context, it is illuminating to view her keen-eyed illustration for the New York Times, The Care and Handling of Parties.  Sally’s efforts enabled Milton to paint almost every day, sometimes completing as many as four paintings before supper.

It is just as hard to imagine what Sally’s career would have been like without Milton.  She and Milton shared similar views about painting when they first met and, over the years, her work was influenced by his.  Sally learned much from Milton, such as it is sometimes the artist’s last gesture that turns a good paining into a great one.  Because Sally believed that Milton was the superior painter, she always shone the spotlight on her husband’s work when artists, critics and collectors came to visit.  It is, therefore not surprising that while she participated in some group shows, including those of the Avery family, Sally did not have a solo show of her own until 1973, eight years after Milton’s death.  Sally continued to paint for more than another decade and enjoyed several exhibitions of her work until she died in 2003 at age 100.

MARCH  AVERY

As March was growing up, absolutely everyone she knew, and not just her parents, was an artist.  She explains in a lengthy catalogue interview that she thought that making art was the only thing people did.  And so, from an early age, each summer modeling her parents’ behavior, she sketched and painted alongside them without paying attention to the content of their work.  Aware that “the most important thing was my father’s painting”, March served as his model.  Milton exhibited many of these paintings in a 1947 show entitled My Daughter March.

Today, at age 87, March  is still painting six days a week.  Twelve of her paintings and numerous drawings from 1967 to 2017 are included at the Bruce.    Her work, like Sally’s, reflected many of the characteristics of an Avery style while also showing her unique vision.  The Dead Sea (2009) contains a reductive seascape of vivid and unusual color combinations emanating from the light purple sea, the aqua sky and the deep gold beach.  As in many of her parents’ works, the sea is thinly painted with several white areas of blank canvas visible, perhaps in this case representing salt.   However, the mix of both abstracted and more defined black mud-clad figures, demonstrates the particularity of her own vision.   Whereas the segmented uppermost floating figure is as abstract as the orange swimmer in Milton’s Swimmers and Bathers, the two more realistic lowermost figures entering and leaving the water appear to have been captured with a stop-action camera.  In fact, March acknowledged that in addition to using sketches like her parents , she departs from them in both using a camera to help her remember scenes she might like to paint and sometimes even working from her imagination.

Luckily, March is the subject of a concurrent show in New York at the Blum & Poe Gallery with more than two dozen paintings done between 1963 and 2018.  It provides several examples of the mature Avery style in her domestic scenes, still lives and landscapes.  Several reveal the simple interlocking shapes and bold colors of Milton’s advanced paintings such as her Family Tea (1965), Ruth in a Sling Chair (1985), and Card Players (1983), but they are clearly her own.  For example, Family Tea (1965) is perfectly balanced with a series of subtly combined colors in the mother’s jacket, lap, and seat.  But, the facial features of both the mother and the older child as well as the pitcher and tea set are more realistically drawn.

Since Milton Avery’s death at the age of 80 in 1965 his reputation has continued to grow.  His decision to hold onto reality is no longer seen as a drawback and his simple forms and quirky and imaginative use of color have been a source of inspiration to many beyond Sally and March.

At Avery’s Memorial Service, Rothko described him as “a great poet ….  His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.   This alone took great courage in a generation which felt that it could be heard only through clamor, force, and a show of power.  But, Avery had that inner power in which gentleness and silence proved more audible and poignant.”

The post ”The Poetry of Sheer Loveliness”: Milton Avery, Sally Michel and March Avery appeared first on artcritical.

No matter what medium she is working in, artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda’s gift has always been for bringing to light the story that exists in the margins, previously unseen. Considered one of the foundational directors of French New Wave, she began her career in the early 1950s as a photographer before moving on to make such iconic films as Chloe from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I. For the past fifteen years or so, she has focused her interest on art.

While it is too small to properly be considered a retrospective, Varda’s first New York exhibition at Blum & Poe spans all the decades of her career. It begins with 18 vintage black-and-white photographs from her personal archives, which she first showed in the courtyard of her house in Paris (where she still lives) in 1954. These stylized images demonstrate that from the beginning Varda possessed an acute eye towards framing, placing her firmly within the pantheon of 20th-century photography. One can see the influences of earlier photographers like Edward Weston, Josef Sudek, and Henri Cartier-Bresson just as clearly as one can see those whom she, in turn, has influenced. Mardi gras (1953), for instance, depicting three children wearing unnerving facemasks, seems to foretell the career of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

This insight into Varda’s earliest work sets the tone for the remainder of the show. Each image tells a visual short story, or perhaps more to the point, each one gives just enough information that individual viewers can’t help but imagine a story for what they see before them. The impulse towards narrative throbs.

Such allowances for viewer interpretation are arguably most evident in her interactive work, Le Triptyque de Nourmoutier (2004-2005). A three-channel video tableau, inspired by Baroque Flemish painting, unfolds on hinged wall panels. An old woman, a younger woman, and a middle-aged man sit in silence around a country kitchen table. Each is absorbed in an activity: the old woman untangles a ball of twine; the younger works her way through a heap of potatoes, meticulously peeling and chopping; and all the while the man steadily downs a glass of beer. On the left-hand panel, a sea licks the sandy shore as two children emerge and disappear from the frame, playing and digging on the beach. On the right-hand panel, a well-stocked dishware cupboard, seemingly in an anteroom to the central kitchen, sits in wait. The methodical undertakings in the kitchen are interrupted by various comings-and-goings of the three adults (who as a result sometimes enter into the tableaux of the side panels), but never by their voices. Though they are silent their actions unveil singular personalities. But lest the viewer become too complacent with these characterizations, Varda has incorporated another component on the work. The audience is welcomed to close one or both of the hinged side panels at will, which necessarily redirects the onscreen action, changing the perceived story and shifting its tensions at whim. The work plays with that most human of binaries: the need to know a story and the need to interject oneself as a participant.

Shrewd as it may be for Varda to point this binary out to her audience, she is equally willing to turn the notion upon her own imagination. In Les gens de la terrasse (2012) she attempts to recreate her 1956 photograph, La terrasse du Corbusier, Marseille, using a set designed to look like le Corbusier’s terrace and actors portraying the unknown figures of the original image. Acknowledging that she always wondered about the back story of the people she captured in the older photo, Varda stages on film a mini-play (with sound, which gallery visitors can listen to through headsets) imagining a family setting up for a photograph of new parents and their baby in this picturesque spot. Alongside the video short hangs a copy of the original black-and-white image.

Which of these renders as more accurate, one might wonder? But this question begs another: can any experience ever be distilled to a baseline truth once it has been filtered through human perception? A rejoinder to both queries comes implicitly in the form of three self-portraits dating from different points in her life—at 20, 40, and 80—that preside over the entire show. Each is radically different, so much so one could be forgiven for thinking the photographs were of three distinct artists, except that each one is also incontrovertibly Agnès Varda. Truths are always subjective, Varda seems to imply, the “truth” being a constant evolution even within our own selves.

The post An Impulse Towards Narrative: Agnès Varda at Blum & Poe appeared first on artcritical.

For the New York-based art critic, the galleries of Los Angles seem exotic, grandiose spaces spread throughout that expansive city. If your cicerone is knowledgeable about local history, as mine was (thank you Paul Foss!) you drive past some important film industry sites.  Prism is on a posh section of Sunset Boulevard. A movie star who wandered in would feel right at home. Clare Rojas  a much in demand mid-career artist based in San Francisco very effectively uses two stories of the large, oddly unwieldy gallery spaces.  The main floor has immovable pillars, which she incorporates into her installation by setting images on those structural elements so that they visually mate with pictures on the distant walls, creating a dazzling perspectival effect. Up the stairs in the back room are a number of smaller paintings. And when you exit a towering commercial billboard on the high wall to the left of the gallery nicely complements her art.  If Alex Katz collaborated with Edward Gorey, in consultation with Jacob Lawrence doing domestic scenes intermingled with decorative patterns, they might produce this display.  Like Katz, Rojas sets figures against flat monochromatic color fields; like Gorey she has a sly sense of humor, though hers involves showing woman in enigmatic poses isolated in upscale up to date fashionably empty houses; and like Lawrence, she creates visually compelling assemblages of small, intensely colored paintings. [Clare Rojas: Inside Bleak, at Prism, February 26 to April 2, 2011, 8746 W. Sunset Boulevard. West Hollywood, CA 90069, 310.289.1301.]

Sam Durant’s title, “let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself,” which comes from Vincent de Gourney, a mid-eighteenth century French commerce secretary, alludes to free market ideologies. The show is in three gigantic galleries. The first contains six large globes, five new and one a handsome antique suspended from the ceiling or floor, which are marked to allude to such economic issues as money laundering, gold mining and pork producing. The second, moving clockwise, displays on the wall altered and collaged maps, which are covered with political texts. Then, finally, you get to a twenty-four foot long sheet map, using a Goode homolosine projection that allows you to imagine standing outside the world and looking down on its surface. Like Carl Andre’s sculptures, this is sculpture that you can walk on. Durant’s general concern, showing that geography is politically important is, of course very familiar both within the art world and from the leftist literature. To map is to control: he dramatically shows the power of that idea. Mapping has its own history, parallel to but normally distinct from the history of representation. This critical presentation of mapped information creates a visually impressive installation with great aesthetic power.  [Sam Durant:?”Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme,” at Blum & Poe, February 19 to April 2, 2011, 2727 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, Ca 90034. 310 836 2062.]

That “Black Swan,” curator Dominic Sidhu’s exhibition inspired by the film of that title,  included works by Matthew Barney, Walead Beshty, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Katharina Fritsch, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Wade Guyton, Pierre Huyghe, Sergej Jensen, Anish Kapoor, Karen Kilimnik, Rachel Kneebone, Glenn Ligon, Nick Mauss, Richard Phillips, Richard Prince, Ugo Rondinone, Wolfgang Tillmans, Banks Violette, and Christopher Wool merely identifies it as an upscale exhibition of the visual art seen in the movie. But what transformed it into a dazzling gesamtkustwerk, far more interesting than the sum of its fascinating parts was the installation. When you enter, the room looks like a standard white cube. But actually the room has a mirrored floor, cunningly designed so that as it is stepped on, cracks appear. Women’s stiletto heels are especially effective in causing this web of lines in the mirror to spread. April 9 was the date for the Academy Awards—this  is LA, after all. ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back’: am I the only visitor who remembered that saying? I have never seen a more subtle commentary on the ‘mirror stage’ of human development without which the narcissism, which propels our film industry and thereby inspires our shared fantasy life would not be. [Black Swan: The Exhibition, at Regen Projects, February 25 to April 16, 2011.]

The post Swanning Around Ahead of the Oscars: Three Shows in LA appeared first on artcritical.

If Blum & Poe’s gallery one is thought of as the face of a clock, the first of Julian Hoeber’s nine acrylic varnish and sumi ink paintings, moving clockwise, would occur at 40 minutes past the hour. The final piece would be at 20 past. Cumulatively this suggests pictorial time that picks up near the middle and ends somewhat before the end, which thereby temporalizes our experience of the show as tenuous. Tenuous too is the Bridget Riley-like optical effect of each piece: a background of black concentric circles that at once float and hover both on the ground and above it.  The moment we enter the gallery, then, corralled by empty wall space at the beginning and the end of the four walls, we plop in amidst 20 minutes of unaccounted time.

Hoeber’s lost time recalls St. Augustine’s conflation of temporal and absolute time. Each piece (all 2008) puts you in mind of a CD designed by Roy Lichtenstein with its caricature sketchiness, its grooves, its implied and constant whirring (which echoes the drone of the overhead lights). Hoeber works with the perpetual and circular flow of time. His images refer to things that are ephemeral: the carnal, the banal, the witty.  He gives us a couple of Durer-esque nipples (Centered Tit, Toilet Breast); the physiognomy of a goofy, George Carlin-esque mug (Stupid Face); a kid’s drawing of a wedding; a reproduction of a Cézanne painting of two card players next to a sketch of the same piece which, when folded over, mirror each other (Cezanne Rorshach).  Bullet-shaped holes perforate the surface  ofFading Spiral with Holes), while a head centrifugally spins blood away from the center, to pool at the bottom  in Head with Drips.

The theme of absolute temporality resumes in gallery two, with 10 polished bronze skulls in various stages of utter destruction. One head looks as if it were blasted with a mortar shell (they’re all untitled), so the skull looks like a crenellated crown. One lacks the entire back of the head, the face pocked with shotgun pellets. With jaws, chins, bridges of noses, tops of heads, backs of heads, and eye sockets variously disfigured with gashes, entry and exit wounds  they look like soft boiled eggs, placed in a holder, covered with a cozy, and then mauled with a jackhammer. Intact (and intimate) neck folds constitute Bronze Age versions of the draped marble folds of the Winged Victory of Samothrace; negative space (of which there is much, including mouths and eye sockets) describes shadowed irregular shapes, the purity of the opposing white wall, the floor below.  The stainless steel pedestals reflect the viewer from the waist down as if to announce“You’re next!” as well as confirm the title of the show, “All that is solid melts into air.”

Collectively, these sculptures look like death masks cast from Aztec sacrifices. Each embodies the magical absurd-beyond-belief-because-it’s-so-true realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Along with the contents of the first gallery, they suggest a serially surreal Day of the Dead, laden with art historical references (Op Art, Pop Art, Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism).  They are a grand way to garner our attention to matters beyond our quotidian ken.

The post Julian Hoeber: All That is Solid Melts into Air at Blum & Poe appeared first on artcritical.