February 28 to August 27, 2018
Millbank, London SW1
tate.org.uk

No matter how big the curator’s umbrella, some of the artists huddled under it in “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” seem destined to slip on London‘s rain-soaked pavement. In Tate Britain’s blockbuster summer show, which revolves around London-based painters, there’s an unruly range of representational imagery. So missteps are not surprising. What is surprising is how much power huddles beneath this exhibition‘s leaky umbrella.       

One huddler is a Swiss artist who never lived in Great Britain. Why is this show’s only sculpture even here? Granted, Giacometti inspired several key players in All Too Human, but so too did many other artists who are not included. Perhaps  Woman of Venice IX (1956), whose feet are almost ten times larger than her head, kicked and stomped her way in.

There’s a high voltage figure/ground sizzle jolting many of the paintings in this show. It runs from the group of complex compositions of R. B. Kitaj, an American expatriate who lived in London for almost forty years, to the turbulent canvases of Cecily Brown, a Londoner presently living in America. A more probable justification for including Woman of Venice IX, therefore, is that she melds place and person. Textured like tree bark, earth, and rocks, she is landscape incarnate. I never thought about a standing-straight-up figure so clearly in this way before — with an earthy surface, a faraway head, a middle ground body, and foreground feet.

Giacometti’s figure-ground “Woman” stirs the center of a gallery filled with portraits by Francis Bacon. Eyeing her, a prowling, ravenous Dog (1952) growls beneath its breath and saliva. Female as food. I couldn’t decide if the erect figure was scared stiff or impervious.

Mostly, Bacon’s cast of characters are “not only far from divine but all too human,” a phrase of  Friedrich Nietzsche’s that provides this exhibition with its title. Curator Elena Crippa’s choices are often grippingly rude and unpredictable, as are some of the nonhuman subjects included here, like Bacon’s dog and a bloodthirsty baboon.

While there are no feral animals in Brown’s Teenage Wildlife (2003), two youths – the male  dressed, the female naked – peek out amidst tangled flora. The zestful rhythms juicing the painting’s skin revel forward and back, as shapes and spaces pop and recede, a marked difference in speed and spirit from Bacon’s downbeat Portrait (1962), where a physiological figure/ground flip-flop prevails. Internal organs of Bacon’s sometime muse and lover, Peter Lacey — who once, in a fit of fury, flung the artist through a plate glass window — appear outside the man’s ripped-open body.

Emotional darkness colors Jenny Saville’s Reverse (2002-03). Saville literally overturns conventions of self-portraiture. The bruises and blood — even coating her teeth — make you want to look away. But her unblinking, glassy-eyed stare is riveting. After getting used to seeing this battered, in-your-face face in magazines and on computer screens, it was good to be reminded  how overwhelming this nearly eight-foot visage can be when viewed in person.

Celia Paul’s self-portrait, Painter and Model (2012), like Saville’s Reverse, breaks from traditional, male-gaze norms in respect to its gray, utterly unflattering portrayal. We sense blood and bruises beneath the skin rather than on it. Freud’s more comely portrait of her graces the front cover of the exhibition’s catalogue.

The psychological bruise of loss is the subject of Paul’s Family Group (1984-86), painted shortly after her father’s death. Highlighted in her checker-patterned skirt, the mother looks the same age as her daughters, and there are no younger or older sisters; this is time viewed through the prism of grief and gobs of pigment.

Family crowds a small bed. Survivors on a life raft, mom anchors the middle. Each remains in her isolated space, not sharing so much as a glance or word. Yet the group feels closely knit, drawing aid from its strength-in-numbers union.

Many of the artists in All Too Human were good friends. Some painted one another. Lucian Freud and Celia Paul were lovers. Others enjoyed a teacher/student relationship: Sickert taught Bomberg; Bomberg taught Auerbach and Kossoff; William Coldstream taught Paula Rego, Euan Uglow, and Michael Andrews; Freud taught Paul. It’s an impressive litany of begat-ing, biblical-sounding lineage. Yet, while friends like Auerbach and Kossoff are of like mind, brush, and chops, how they relate to the brilliant Sir Stanley Spencer and Walter Richard Sickert, or the lesser lights of F.N. Souza, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and the one photographer in the show, John Deakin, beats me.

I appreciate that Auerbach and Kossoff were inspired by (among many others) the Belarus-born Soutine, who lived his adult life in Paris — never in Great Britain. Was he Giacometti’s plus-one? Or vice versa? Neither RSVP’ed. Either way, for me, these great artists are welcome party-crashers.

This show boasts a trove of first-rate works by first-rate artists, Paula Rego and her multi-figure narrative compositions ranking high among them. They are overwhelming in scale, skill, and heart, her stories breathtaking, even as they keep us guessing.       

Despite the “figure painting” way All Too Human is being promoted, there are numerous still lifes, as well: Examples by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow stand out. So too do the landscapes and (rainy) cityscapes of painters who seem not only to have traded in their smocks for raincoats, but their brushes for shovels, slathering simple recognizability into scabrous mystery in the process.        

Accordingly, the subject of  much critical attention is what Freud said he wanted paint to work like: flesh. That’s where inside meets outside. Psychic skin. Where  figure and ground merge.

Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996) is a case in point. The artist seems smitten by his model’s nuanced skin colors. We’re seduced by the sensuousness of the encrusted pigments, as well as the savage scrutiny of the painter’s scientific eye.

The dozing Sue Tilley (or Big Sue as she is also known) and the huge canvas she commands are part of a delicate public/private blend playing out in a small chair. The model looks unfazed by the queens or kings of the jungle lounging behind her like kittens on a rug. (Or are they a pair of wild beasts poised to attack a pair of gazelles?) There’s a raw beauty of raw form here, dignity free of pretense. 

While Freud’s reclining, little-footed Big Sue and Giacometti’s standing, big-footed, skinny Venetian represent different visions and looks, they share as much as they don’t. Forty years apart, both are ephemeral and earthy at once. Making their way through the museum’s rooms, they nod at other artistic sisters like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Celia Paul, who display little family resemblance.

Grand and idiosyncratic, this show includes all too human inconsistencies. Yet, a slew of powerful, brave, and unruly umbrella huddlers sometimes rise to realms not far from divine.

The post A Big Umbrella: “All Too Human” at Tate Britain appeared first on artcritical.

DAVID COHEN
Julie, on Facebook you described a painting by Jenny Saville on view in her show at Gagosian Gallery as “the most beautiful painting I’ve seen in a long time” and 150 friends liked or loved that post. In the comments section, Dennis Kardon wrote: “You and David Cohen are going to have an interesting discussion,” referencing no doubt my highly critical artcritical review of her last New York show. Dennis wrote enthusiastically about her work in 1999 (it was his first piece of published art criticism, and was edited by Walter Robinson.) What is it about her new show, Julie that, as you put it on Facebook, “knocked you out”?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Up to this point I hadn’t been much of a fan of Jenny Saville’s. She’d cornered the market on paint-as-flesh, no doubt, but I never felt like she cared much about what was inside the figures she was painting, or showed us anything deeper than bloated, mottled and dejected skin. But several paintings in her latest Gagosian show blew those notions away and stopped me in my tracks. Her Fate paintings (Fate 1, Fate 2 and Fate 3) went somewhere I didn’t expect – melding abstraction and figuration in a way that furthered the scope of both, and bringing black bodies and white bodies together into new-fangled icons through muscular paint and sheer pictorial power. To my mind these paintings raised the bar on figuration, and that’s rare.

Painterly stylishness had limited Saville up until now, but in these Fate paintings I’m not as conscious of her style as much as her intelligent pictorial choices that give me the sense that she’s gone beyond realism (or expressionism) towards the iconic. Where before she would mask out areas in order to break up the integrity of the figure, and thereby sidestep realism, now she’s using those masked areas to complicate the figure’s integrity, suggest the mess inside, or alternatively provide it with extra appendages to increase its capacity to express multiplicities.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Maybe because of the peculiar emptiness the ugliness in earlier work seemed manipulative. Many of these new paintings stopped me in my tracks! The scale, color, content and play with abstraction are exciting and original. They refer to so many different things but they’re entirely their own.

This is the first show of hers, I should say, that I’ve had a positive response to. I’m a big fan of abject beauty: I taught myself to paint by viewing cadavers in the medical school and a boyfriend even moved out on me because of the pig’s head (and a few other specimens) in the freezer. I adore Soutine’s still life paintings, Rembrandt’s sides of beef and Lucian Freud’s paintings of Lee Bowery. While I was impressed by the scale, and of course the paint handling, her previous paintings for the most part have seemed ugly in a calculated or gratuitous way.

DENNIS KARDON
Almost twenty years ago I wrote:

Saville simply overwhelms the viewer with paint as flesh. The specificity of her subject matter raises issues about the nature of spontaneity and control in painting. And because these bodies are painted, and therefore inhabited by the artist…they don’t have the distanced quality of the photographic work of other artists who have dealt with body image and gender issues.

As her career progressed however, I became gradually disenchanted with what I perceived as strategic employment of painting conventions that started to feel a bit rote, and an increase in scale for the sake of filling up a mega space. David’s review, though a bit scathing, generally captured my feeling about what had occurred in her work.

My remark about the discussion was a reference to a chance encounter with David and Barry in Chelsea after first seeing the current show. My immediate reaction was that she had redeemed herself a lot, and I had taken a lot of detail shots of memorable moments. But David was so negative it made me reconsider, until at least, he compared her unfavorably to Tracey Emin at Frieze which I am pretty sure was an unmitigated waste of perfectly nice white walls.

WALTER ROBINSON
If it’s beauty, it’s beauty of an abject kind, which has always been her thing — heavy models, grossly presented. A rather ugly beauty, I would say. Lisa Yuskavage is a good pendant here. Beauty also lies in her mastery of an academic drawing style, which recalls a 19th-century formula in service to a classical ideal. Those are her avant-garde bona fides, the rehabilitation of an essentially conservative technique for subjects of contemporary relevance, notably the body and gender identity.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I’m the opposite of Julie and Brenda in that I’ve always been interested in Saville’s paintings, and sometimes like them quite a lot. People always used to compare her to Freud, and I understand why, but to me that was the wrong analogy. She was more like Anselm Kiefer—I mean the really good Kiefer, the one from the 1980s. The body was to her as the landscape to him. I didn’t find his wounded landscapes ugly, nor the tormented paint by which he depicted it, and I never found her abject bodies or her storms of paint ugly either—quite the opposite. But I didn’t care for these new paintings at all. I don’t like the self-evident “painting of collage” trope, and she seems to be drawing in a more conventional way as well as being more restrained in her paint handling.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
It’s interesting that you compare her earlier work to Kiefer. I agree, they are more Kiefer than Freud because her figures have little physiological content. They were all surface, same as Kiefer. And same as Kiefer, you think they’re about something else and then discover that they’re equally empty.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
It might be worthwhile to keep the discussion to the three Fate paintings since I agree with you all about the other works in the show, but thought those three Fates were of a different order altogether.

WALTER ROBINSON
A generous reading is a good thing. It reminds me of Richard Prince’s goofy brilliant combos of de Kooning and gay porn.

Julie is certainly right about the paint-as-flesh thing, but sections of these works were basically deft contour drawings filled in with even defter Ab-Ex-style brushwork. Interesting, but a bit silly?

I didn’t even notice the race thing, since I was only there a few minutes, and the overwhelming impression is pink. (An artist works for a year on a show; a critic walks in and after two minutes says “it sucks.”) But I’ll go right now to take another look. What about her pseudo-cubist figures? There’s a new move.

DAVID COHEN
I went back yesterday for a proper visit after coming to a comparable conclusion to Walter from two minutes at the opening reception, and I’m afraid that closer examination and doing my utmost to sit openly with the work has not led to epiphanies. I find these to be disingenuous academic machines. Look, there is no question that Jenny Saville has exceptional technical abilities and genuine intellectual ambition, but I suspect that the adulation that has followed from these rare qualities has been corrupting. Her early work married painting chops and youthful feminist indignation to produce startling, if shallow, results, but she has “matured” into a shameless crowd pleaser. I can’t believe such sensitive individuals as the artists here aren’t seeing the wood for the trees. Photos have been projected onto canvases and lines traced; paint has been slathered in gratuitous faux-expressivity to generate effects; images have been chopped up to connote visual deconstruction. But there’s no real drawing, painting or collage going on in these concoctions.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Well as a painter I was respectfully floored by that piling up of paint, plus wiping, scraping, knowing when to stop and when to pile more on.  That’s not easy!  In her earlier work I knew exactly how she made those paintings, but this new work is so layered and the decisions about when to stop and when to keep going so seamlessly articulated – that’s amazing painting.  You try it!

As for David’s contention that there is no real drawing going on – look at Fate 2  and the deft placement of that thick blue line forming a square right in the middle of the figure, and what it’s doing to cause the whole assortment of body parts to pivot around it. It’s doing so many things: It’s the thing that allows the icon to be both passive and active, asserting the power of that body to suggest a kind of centrifugal movement of becoming, while also exuding a marmoreal presence; it’s also reinforcing the presence of the left breast, now lost to scraping and turned into negative space. That one squiggly line comes totally out of the blue (as it were) but is doing so much to power up the form and reinforce this idea of multiplicities.

Regarding the black and white bodies: Yes, she pulled it off! She deftly insinuated a white body into (onto) a black body, and vice versa. In one, the white body is in the middle of black limbs, (all the heads are either of black women or, in the case of Fate 3, from an African sculpture of a woman) but not overwhelming them or dominating in any way—they’re both equally present in the form. In Fate 3 the “limbs” are more like weird appendages that take the form to places I’ve never seen Saville go. She’s forged an icon of a black and white Shiva-like woman with the many limbs. Glorious!

WALTER ROBINSON
I feel you David but is it really fair to presume success has gone to her head? Artists are always having things in their heads, and success breeds confidence and ambition, etc. And what is “real” painting, drawing and collage, and why privilege it? Collage is giving new energy to abstract painting at the moment, why not figuration?

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You admire her bravura technique, but what is the project at the service of which she puts it? To me, the equations she makes between different kinds of representation and different kinds of abstraction, as well as between different kinds of imagery, seem pretty flat and familiar.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s such a weird question, Barry, “what is the project at the service of which she puts it?” Put the question aside and approach them more visually. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had and for that might to enough.

DAVID COHEN
Pleasure is never enough.

Julie, I don’t doubt that the pyrotechnics here take bravura and acumen to pull off. But really, we at Gagosian Gallery looking at massive canvases by an international art star for sale at top dollar; it is the painterly equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster. If the movie sucks we don’t applaud the music and special effects.

Walter is right that one should indeed use any device that works if the result is a powerful image. But “real drawing” is where the lines are put down with purpose, where the energy is one of inquiry and/or assuredness. Her line is gimmicky. She generates false pentimenti to make the drawing look “old masterly”. Her paint slathering is like pushing a button in Photoshop marked “AbEx”; they don’t come out of the existential maelstrom of creativity. Her collage is saying, we are made up of this and that; real collage is about opening oneself up to the marvelous and the unknown.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
It’s interesting that you and I, David—the two non-practitioners here—are much less sympathetic to these paintings than the painters here. That’s something that makes me think I should reconsider my response— though I still don’t know how!

SUZY SPENCE
It’s interesting to me that in her piece dedicated to Linda Nochlin is sort of squirreled away in the back, when Nochlin’s ideas should operate as the catalyst for the entire show. Ancestors, yes, Saville seems obsessed with the problematic of “genius”, but rather than destroy that concept she’d rather run a race with every great man who made a mark in the Western canon to see how she measures up. She paints extraordinarily well, but that’s actually beside the point. Chapter (for Linda Nochlin) in charcoal on cotton duck canvas, recalls the particularly beautiful study by da Vinci, The Virgin and Christ with St. Anne. But Leonardo’s women are locked in high-minded, existential conversation and seem incredibly connected to one another whereas Saville’s women are piled on one another anonymously, beautifully drawn as forms with a fullness and accuracy. But I don’t understand who these women are, and why we should care about them.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I guess I should now take back what I just said about the critics vs. the painters.

SUZY SPENCE
And I agree with David about special effects. Nicole Eisenman steals more effectively and is just as nimble a virtuoso. By comparison I would say Saville is a mannerist, and less able to fully employ the styles she robs, at least not in this show.

DAVID COHEN
The thing that I found especially irritating about the piece Suzy is talking about, Chapter (For Linda Nochlin), is the way she spray painted trompe l’oeil extra sheets at various junctures in emulation of Frank Auerbach (another of her early mentors) who sticks extra paper on when he wants to extend an image or repair a support punctured by incessant correction. There’s no correction here; the image is totally calculated, along with its arsenal of effects.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, I never think beautiful paint is enough. Press releases in recent years try too hard to align her with a list of great (dead) white men, which must be some incredible weight for her to bear. I wish Saville would make an escape to the woods where she could return to the introspection she’d invested in earlier. She used to reach into her soul and hand it to us, but I’m not seeing that now.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
The so-called project she is serving in these three paintings seems to be of the utmost importance right now, post Dana Schutz and even vis a vis Kara Walker’s show where so many black bodies were made to look as foolish in places as the white bodies looked malign. These Fates are proud bodies and full of fluid possibilities.  I always thought the real reason Dana’s Emmett Till painting didn’t work ultimately was because it wasn’t painted well enough, with the kind of weird surprising paint and drawing that, for instance, her Michael Jackson painting had. We’re not here to go over Schutz again, but it was really interesting to see someone with such good intentions fail so miserably at trying to bridge the race gap, whereas here now with these Fate paintings no one is making any noise at all about a white artist’s right to depict a black body. That’s an important project, Barry

BRENDA ZLAMANY
The problem with Schutz’s Open Casket is that it was decorative to the point of insulting the viewer. I remember at the Whitney opening noticing the painting from the corner of my eye and registering it as an attractive painting but having no feeling for the subject whatsoever. There was nothing about it visually that hinted at the horror of the content. I don’t want to say it lacked empathy but to take a horrifying event and turn it into attractive paint is bad painting at best.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Making no noise is a great accomplishment? I don’t think so. When the conflict blew up over the Sam Durant sculpture at the Walker, I was surprised when I read that it been exhibited at Documenta, because I’d seen and written about that Documenta and didn’t remember the piece. I read back over what I’d written and confirmed that I hadn’t mentioned it. Then I got curious, and read all the other Documenta reviews I could find online. Not a single one mentioned Durant’s sculpture. That didn’t make me think it was harmless in Germany but volatile in Minnesota. It made me think that the piece was so mediocre no one felt obliged to think about it— until a different context focused a different kind of attention on it. I guess Saville, being British, won’t be included in the next Whitney Biennial, but if she were, there might be some interesting responses. Oh, and by the way, Dana’s Emmett Till painting is a very good work.

DAVID COHEN
Saville isn’t depicting a black body directly, but an African carving. The flesh montaged over the fetish is Caucasian, as best one can tell—or race is at any event not axiomatic. The incorporation of the carving recalls David Salle to me. These Fates are interesting images. But can we get past white-woman-painting-black-people silliness and just ask what it means, what it is really saying?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Fate 3 and Fate 2 have heads of black women; they’re not carvings. And what they’re really saying is totally prosaic when put into words: “out of all these multiplicities we’re also one.” How boring is that when distilled down to mere words. But that’s where the art comes in – she’s created a medley of fluid bodies and I revel in it! I so appreciate when an artist takes on big themes, unwieldy problems, and does it unstintingly, and more importantly, without irony! And Barry, you cannot just claim the Schutz Open Casket is a good painting without saying why.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think she was reaching into her soul in the earlier works and they were not beautiful. By putting aside the content of the previous work and focusing on the excitement of the paint, I think she has a chance of saying something less calculated and more authentic and in the end, more ambitious. I agree with David though, the drawing is a bit flat.

David Salle is a good comparison, and not just because of the African carving, but also because of the random layering of images. When I made etchings with David, we would print the plates, each with different images on them in various combinations until something happened. When they worked, they worked. But we were not asking what they were saying.

DAVID COHEN
Salle is a formalist to his fingertips; they “worked” because they clicked into something startling and satisfying in equal measure, no doubt. But Saville isn’t a formalist. She’s always been interested in themes. I take issue with the dismissal of her early work – the fat self-portrait in Propped and the liposuction paintings. They were totally authentic in the personal and political urgency of their issues and persuasive in marrying painterly marvel and bodily discomfort.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Thank you, David. I agree with what you say about Saville’s earlier work!

DAVID COHEN
Dennis assumes, incorrectly, that I must have been joking in finding Tracey Emin’s figuration more convincing than Saville’s. I think both artists, in their latest works, are dealing with the body through mark making. Both are mannerists, but Emin is served well by restricting herself to mannerisms of abstract expressionism. She was channeling Roger Hilton, an English abstract painter who struggled with – and exploited – alcohol addiction in his figurative experiments. There’s plenty to fault in Emin’s results but it is a kind of escape to the woods, in Suzy’s sense, that Saville isn’t up for.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, her early paintings seemed distinctly feminist to me and feminist artists are Man Repellers by nature. In her early work there was no willingness to please; she wanted to repel you with her fleshy body and suck you in with her painting technique at the same time. That tension no longer exists, and so the work is flat as Barry says.

WALTER ROBINSON
Julie’s mention of Schutz is apt since Dana especially activates the decorative quality of her paint strokes, which are little masterpieces in themselves. In the meantime, objections to these works because of an absence of “soul” is, well, retardataire and romantic. Postmodernism is about a human world without such constructions. Some viewers prefer the art without the mystification! Do we look for “soul” in Salle or Sherman, for instance?

SUZY SPENCE
Well then you should love this work Walter! It’s perfectly postmodern and cold.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Not cold enough by a long shot! The depiction of faces in particular seemed to invite empathy in a really blatant way. And how sentimental the use of the pietà idea!

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, especially that schlocky pietà of a guy coming out of a war zone with a sexed-up infant in his arms, pure pompier.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wish I hadn’t seen that one.

DAVID COHEN
To return to Walter’s question, Salle and Sherman spare us any quest for “soul” because of their knowingly constructed style. Their tropes arrive and function intact. Saville isn’t deconstructing anyone else’s technique at this stage, she is merely tapping into effects. I agree with Julie that they are free of irony. They are anything but art about art, which is why their mannerisms are all the more egregious.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Yes she has a lot of effects in this show but towards a more interesting end than in earlier shows she’s had. Would you consider the wings and appendages in Fate 3 to be mere “effects”? Because to me those are essential components of the structure of the work, acting boldly to move it in space, to suggest hybridity and composite bodies, all necessary for the bigger project at hand.

DAVID COHEN
By wings to you mean the smudged arcs over the left shoulder of the amalgamated figure? I am reading drawing on a wall in the studio (pace the baseboard behind the pedestal) that serves the functional purpose of saying that the figure is an artificial studio-bound creation.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
I mean the chair-like appendage (in Fate 3) attached to her shoulder to the right, and the lobster claw shape to the left — those are essential components to the icon’s whole structure. The smudges behind the form just reinforce the integrity of the overall monolithic shape she’s trying to create. Notice also how the big strokes of yellow paint within the big reddish brown shape to the bottom right reinforces the horizontal ankle attached to the foot, that is also another pedestal for the icon, as well as a pivot point for the whole structure above, and also causes the mars red shape to turn in space, and thereby shift the plane of that shape from horizontal to vertical, like a chair. So it’s a multiplicity of things – a chair-like thing, a cape-like thing, a drooping wing-like thing: super interesting!

WALTER ROBINSON (from the Gallery)
Standing in front of the paintings, my second look, I have to say they’re awesome. The sense of play is overwhelming — the artist in the studio, making pictures one at a time, doing this and that — a big hand expertly tendered here, some scratchy Twomblyesque marks there, a witty pose overall — amusing herself, pleasing herself — it’s just so good — artists have an alibi, all they really have to do is represent the individual subject, not be the World Shaper.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wow, great Walter! But what about the pietàs? Blue Pietà is icky in an Odd Nerdrum way.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I wish we could be having this discussion in front of the paintings.

But I want to go back to something said a little while back and register the fact that I don’t understand the idea of saying one artist is a formalist and another is something else. A combination that works for David Salle is one that conveys a certain feeling, I think. Why is that “formalism”? What made Saville’s earlier paintings work for me were formal aspects— these conveyed her themes in ways that worked for me. The themes without the forms wouldn’t have done that.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s an important point, Barry.

WALTER ROBINSON
Somehow, David, I don’t think they’re projected. If they are, she’s definitely unparalleled at it.

How a viewer sees these things is totally parti pris. They can seem kitsch or heartfelt. You know the head in the pieta is a kouros. And four-armed dead body carried from the ruins by the chap in Seventh Seal garb is too clean by half. Other works look like her friends posing nude together — warm and real, and a real subject. In the end, she’s an artist; she can do what she wants, and the hell with piffle from the critics!

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Hear! Hear!

DAVID COHEN
Hmm. Well, I certainly don’t like to project moral outrage at any means employed if the results are convincing.

WALTER ROBINSON
These people…

DAVID COHEN
OK, well let’s talk about that scribble in and underneath. What is it trying to say? Are these automata from Westworld and this is the machinery where their viscera should be? I don’t think so. Did she do some scribble underneath to get her juices flowing, and then started her beaux arts painting on top of that and then Gagosian came and whisked the picture off before she could finish it? No, this is effect. a way of saying this is a contemporary painting, not the academic, anachronistic figure painting it would otherwise look to be, because squiggles are modern. That’s mannerism at its worst to me. But if someone could offer me a reading of the use of this device that energizes their understanding of the image, I’m all ears.

SUZY SPENCE
Walter and David, I don’t think they are projected onto canvas. I imagine an athletic event that called for giant easels and enough space and light to study her subjects who she actually asked to recline on pedestals and chairs. I think she’s working from life; I imagine a string of models, most of whom appear in her studio the way actors come in for an audition. I sense she doesn’t know many of them, as there is such similarity of body type and age, like she’d advertised the project on Craig’s List. People in their late 30s, some black, mostly white. My favorite piece was Vis and Ramen I, who are both in recline like Manet’s Olympia. They sink deeper into their pedestal than her other subjects, their genitals almost touch, and I was fascinated by her decision not to establish that contact.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think that’s true. In the 2003 press release from her Migrants show it mentions that she prefers to work from photographs rather than living models. “Saville calls herself a scavenger of images.” Her studio is a repository of images from old medical journals of bruises, scars, images of deformities and disease. In this sense her relationship with her subject matter is more Salle then Soutine or Freud and it’s evident in this newer work.

DENNIS KARDON (returning to the conversation)
Sorry to weigh in so late. I got sidetracked.

Although I am sure she couldn’t possibly be working from life, even twenty years ago I was unsure how she got from the photo to the canvas, though now it seems obvious computers are involved. Even then Saville seemed to challenge the improvisational constraints of either grid or projector. Both then and now the paint seemed spontaneously slapped on, but without the flatness of most paintings made from projected photographs. It is what makes them look so contemporary. They have all they dynamics of spontaneous paint handling, and the specific sureness without any of the uncertainty of where to put the paint. Something that Walter, can surely attest to. But though it would certainly indicate a super human talent if they were painted from life, I think it hardly matters conceptually how she manages to accomplish her paintings.

I think beauty, abject or otherwise, takes us nowhere productive.

Barry squarely solves the problem with his question about content, because this kind of analysis is the error that takes us away from what is actually happening in the paintings. This what has confused me. I will look at the paintings and be totally taken in, and even studying the details, I am amazed at the frisson between spontaneity and specificity. Then I get home and try to answer analytical questions about “to what end” and the project starts to fall apart. Walter had the perfect response, he was dismissive at first, in his critical self, but when his painter self went to study them again, was impressed.

I have to say when all is said and done, in all probability the details are stronger than the sum of their parts. They direct us to considerations of emotions that are constructed out of touch, rather than conception. I think David Salle is an apt referent, but because of the authenticity of the paint, they do not have the distance and irony of Salle, who does (a la David Cohen) see paint as a mere illustration of itself.

DAVID COHEN
Dennis and Walter prove that you can make better images by photographing bits of Jenny Saville than Jenny Saville can in a completed canvas.

DENNIS KARDON
This is where we disagree David, I don’t sense those “scribbles” are supposed to have meaning in the representation sense, but in the sense of trying to marry an arbitrary spontaneity with a mark making that is directed to represent stuff and break down the moment when one kind of gesture transitions into another. As Walter mentioned, Manet could do this flawlessly on all levels, no one has been able to attain that complexity since (except Matisse, but in a different way).

BRENDA ZLAMANY
In spite of the authenticity of the paint, I think one can still judge the work with the same criterion that one might apply to Salle, and they’re better that way. Besides, I never felt much emotion in her touch.

DENNIS KARDON
The emotion is not in the touch itself but the construction of what the touch conveys. Like the hand touching the leg. It’s in the economy of gesture, and specificity of the shape of the mark. Manet is what the ideal looks like, but again, old fashioned compared to contemporary issues of representation and scale:

DAVID COHEN
I wonder what’s contemporary about painting on a huge scale, considering the fact that we actually process images on small screens in this era, and outside of art galleries and museums have very few sacred and civic spaces in which we look at large oil paintings. Saville’s command of size is certainly impressive, but what value does blown up charcoal drawing convey, beyond the acrobatics of its delivery?

DENNIS KARDON
I have been concerned with your willingness to demean what Saville does by cavalierly referring to “acrobatics” or “blown up charcoal drawing” when what I, Walter, and others in the discussion have constantly pointed out is thought in action. The whole point of painting is confronting the physicality of an image in the world and its relationship to the body of the viewer. How it metamorphoses as it is approached, the scale of a mark to one’s own body as an image breaks apart upon close inspection. It is why the overall conception, as seen as a coherent image is so up in the air in this work. It is easy to use language to name and then devalue, but I think what is really good about Saville is that she seems to be constantly trying to go beyond any singular idea or conception.

WALTER ROBINSON
Many of our pros and cons show how easy it is to marshall any kind of argument against any kind of thing, especially with aesthetics. Why not praise Saville’s works for going counter to digital socialization, for instance?

You could also say that she graffitied her own work so the taggers won’t have to.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You’re right! and of course the opposite is true too, if you are good with words you can use them to make any old thing sound good or interesting. I would really like to be convinced to like these paintings but it’s not quite happening.

WALTER ROBINSON
This person — so nutty!

DAVID COHEN
Really? I don’t see the person as nutty at all. It is a very nice, respectable old-fashioned 19th-century painting done after a photograph of a woman over which the artist has inscribed some red dashes and black hatching. Half the students in the New York Academy of Art MFA show that opened last week could have knocked out that head, though none of them would have done the dashes on top

BARRY SCHWABSKY
That would be the first thing they’d try after leaving the Academy.

DENNIS KARDON
There is no NYAA grad student (or few painters anywhere really) that could accomplish what she has accomplished.

WALTER ROBINSON
Yeah, you overestimate the skills of the NYAA grads. And you object to the random marks? It’s all marks, at any rate, and they’re nutty in the way they’re deployed — since Manet painters have toyed with the codes of representation of facial features. But we all use the codes — Saville just keeps to the academic conventions more than most. Still, there’s play, and I think it works.

As for the rest of the chazerai, it’s functioning in several ways, as we all know. Animates the surface. Stands in for entrails. Enlivens the academic figuration. Represents the triumph of humanism over abstraction (as Donald Kuspit might argue).

My original reaction was that the marriage of academic and modernist elements was a failure. I like my quotations clean and unfussed with, generally. But then I decided I didn’t care.
BRENDA ZLAMANY
This one is much ‘nuttier’.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
As a detail, it does look pretty yummy. But is there a painting in the show that does that as a whole?

DAVID COHEN
Nuts being the operative word, Brenda. But isn’t this just the trope of unfinish? We are to read the (oilstick?) marks underneath as an armature, and then some figure bits are in grisaille, and the testes are then nicely worked up with shadows in place, behaving properly. The whole concoction is saying, I’m an old master, I’ve got the chops

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That might all be true, David. But as Barry says, it’s still ‘yummy’. And I think the red dashes are good in this passage. Why not just enjoy it? And I think the Fate paintings do it as a whole.

DAVID COHEN
Brenda: You misread Barry I think. He’s saying there are lots of corners of pictures that are appealing in their dispatch, but the overall images don’t convince. If you follow the curate’s way of eating eggs you’ll end up in the emergency ward.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Ha!

SUZY SPENCE
Much as I love her ambition, I really wish she’d find new artists with whom she’d like to be compared. The genius thing needs to go.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Like if she started channeling Florine Stettheimer? That would really throw an interesting money wrench into things.

SUZY SPENCE
Yes it would.

WALTER ROBINSON
What about the scarlet skewed halo? That’s new. Also, relative to the notion that this stuff is familiar and tired, don’t forget she totally owns this niche.

DAVID COHEN
I think she has some competition, actually: Odd Nerdrum, Adrian Ghenie, others whose names I didn’t feel a need to remember. There is a big market for this kind of thing, especially beyond the Urals.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Odd Nerdrum is almost completely detached from modern painting. But Ghenie and some of the other Romanians do have more in common with her—maybe also some of the Dresden school. But none of them have this fascination with the corporeal, which is what’s made Saville’s best work so compelling.

DAVID COHEN
Cecily Brown at her best marries paint and flesh more convincingly, though neither of them is Rubens

BRENDA ZLAMANY
I hate Rubens, except for the small studies.

DAVID COHEN
OK, enjoy Jenny Saville then.

By this stage, Julie Heffernan and Suzy Spence have signed off.

DENNIS KARDON
I need to interject another issue which seems new in this work. It seems she is taking a piece of sculptural representation and trying through paint to capture the living aspect of what the sculpture was originally trying to represent. The bringing of the visceral to the constructed has always been her territory, and she is now trying to expand on the ways signifiers of bodies moving and being represented in the world convey actual feeling. And she is really trying to break it down brushstroke by brushstroke so that it is totally appropriate to focus on the details of moments in her paintings where she is getting her hands dirty. I don’t even know if we can evaluate the total effect of these paintings yet. That’s their provocative moment. This whole discussion of how the micro becomes macro is not just a trendy concept. It is crucial to how we move and represent in the world, and the heatedness of the discussion reflects the divides she is trying to bridge. Anything that provokes this much disagreement must be elucidating something important.

DAVID COHEN
I think we are all agreed that the Fates series attempts and achieves something new and substantial, and is the highlight of the show (yummy details notwithstanding).

These composite images remind me strongly of early work by Richard Hamilton, which itself was a Pop extension of earlier Dada strategies. What stands out in Saville is that she is doing it all in paint, but ultimately, so what? A photomontage based on paintings, a painting based on computer-generated collage: it is just a technical distinction.

I don’t think one can play with issues as loaded and potent as racial identity, gender representation, the lived-in body etc. in large, resolved public images and not have a forceful message one is ready to stand behind, or that others who admire the results can express coherently. Saying that these images are provoking a debate and we can’t decide what they mean yet doesn’t cut it for me. We don’t have to have a definitive interpretation, but the onus is on defenders to offer a start.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I disagree about the Fates series. They are not as bad as the pietàs, but that’s it.

WALTER ROBINSON
I would want to cite the group of British artists who took illustrative techniques and tricked them out with painterly effects — R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, even Hockney, along with Hamilton.

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, she is totally a footnote to School of London painting, both the grubby existentialist end of the spectrum (Freud and Auerbach) and the Pop end (Hamilton and Kitaj). But she chickens out of the middle point, which is where she actually needs to concentrate her efforts if she wants to paint rivers of flesh: Francis Bacon.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Just back from a break. Did anyone mention George Condo?

DAVID COHEN
Someone should have done, with the African statue. This is what irony-free George Condo looks like, Julie. Pastiche minus irony equals kitsch.

DENNIS KARDON
One problem here seems to be that David sees what Saville does as merely facilely co-opting a kind of historical mark making. Yummy sticks in my throat as well. While I hate yummy, I don’t think Saville is that, nor do I think what she does is facile. In my experience of the paintings I have seen, it doesn’t seem like that. But it is the conflict of everyone’s own imagined histories, which for the painters in the group, is how we construct our own genealogies that make this discussion so confounding. I can easily see how David and Barry might find this work deficient, yet when I look at it, I don’t think so. On some level all painters at this point could be considered pastiche, and yet nevertheless, no one really, despite the many comparisons, looks like Saville. So to attack her for her method seems beside the point, and why authenticity reared its ugly head.

I think kitsch is becoming one of those words like beauty and soul, that people use to justify value or non-value, which pretend to be objectively agreed upon concepts but are really just an attempt to universalize an opinion. To me Bacon seems emotionally overblown kitsch, and yet he is immediately recognizable. I must, despite the condescending Nochlin groans, feel that a male painter would not come under so much negative scrutiny. I don’t believe Larry Rivers, who was genuinely facile, got this dismissal.

Asking the questions, “what is it really saying?” or “to what end?” sounds like critical thinking, but are not really applicable to artists or their work. They are questions viewers might ask of themselves but not of the artist. The ability of an artist or work of art to embrace ambiguity and not provide definitive answers to those kind of questions is a mark of quality to me. After her first show Saville faltered in this area for me, but seems to have regained her ambiguous footing in this one.

WALTER ROBINSON
Saville is also taking real people sitting in front of her and immersing them in a whirlpool of painterly effects on canvas. A pointed, literal definition of what her painting is, and an uncommon one.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
What Dennis said could start a whole new round. But rather than going there, I just want to point out that “to what end” (which I said) and “what is she saying” (which I would never say) are utterly different things. “Content is a glimpse,” said de Kooning; “to what end” means, What is that thing she’s got a glimpse of and that she is pursuing? It’s nothing to do with a verbally paraphrasable message (such as one that came up in this discussion, “We are all one,” I think it went). In the end, we can only agree to disagree, but the thing Saville seemed to glimpse before— I feel that she’s lost sight of it here.

DAVID COHEN
There’s a kind of sophistry in hitting on innocent phrases like “she is saying such and such”; we are all adults here, we know that intentions aren’t the final arbiter of anything, that artists at their best generate ambiguities of intention as much as form. But Saville very deliberately, pointedly, and publicly deploys rhetorics of style and method in ways that I find completely removed from any historically or psychologically informed understanding of their value.

Dennis, in your writings on artists you are hardly shy to interpret, including – rightly – ambiguous or unintended elements in the finished works. I was simply asking Saville’s defenders to take a stab at interpreting images in ways that make sense of her methods. I think only Julie began to do that in her reading of the Fates series.

DENNIS KARDON
All of my reviews are certainly about how the work speaks to me from my perspective of a painter and not an attempt to explain ultimate meaning. I do think Saville, in my interpretation, is trying to address the gap between representation and life. She starts with painting a lifeless statue, substituting real people using our criteria of realness, photography illuminated by paint, trying to turn stone to flesh, and then turning to a remake of cubism to address how that metamorphosis is unsuccessful. This may seem, in the ideas department, not original, but it has always been pertinent and comes out of her work. In Barry’s terms what she is “trying to reach for” is the connection of real humans to representations. She probably fails as this distance really cannot be bridged, but in her case her insufficiency is where her art lies. Which is why the details are important to me, as I think trying to capture the complexity of looking at her work through one reproduction of an entire work on our devices is bound to be reductive of the experience and demean the enterprise. Salle takes the impossibility as a given and the “irony” that everyone perceives is just trying to make those failures expressive. While I think Saville is frustrated by the failure.

I think we disagree about the stylization of the “pentimenti,” which to me are not pentimenti exactly, but underpainting. Since they do not seem like actual attempts to describe the final subject, it seems arrogant not to give her the benefit of the doubt about the why of their existence. They might be part of an unseen aspect of the image, or a change of mind about the image, but I feel she doesn’t use them to call attention to her mastery, but the artificiality of what is left on top. This is where I think you question her sincerity, and I simply won’t make that call. You may be totally correct and the whole thing is completely contrived. I don’t feel that is the case, but I couldn’t say.

WALTER ROBINSON
To Dennis I would say representations are reality, and to David I’d exclaim, “values? I don’t need no stinkin’ values!” That is, she puts plenty of intention in her paintings, not the least of which is libidinal play and, as yet another afterthought to our colloquium, a challenge to Hirst and Kapoor, her bloviating male colleagues on the new “British Rich List.”

Jenny Saville: Ancestors at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, gagosian.com, May 3 to June 16, 2018.

David Cohen is Publisher/Editor at artcritical.com. Julie Heffernan is a painter, represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York. Dennis Kardon is a painter who shows at Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York.Walter Robinson is a painter, represented by Jeffrey Deitch, New York.Barry Schwabsky is art critic of The Nation, a poet, and author of The Perpetual Guest and other works. Suzy Spence, Executive Publisher at artcritical.com, is a painter, represented by Sears Peyton Gallery, New York. Painter Brenda Zlamany’s most recent commission was unveiled in 2018 at Davenport College, Yale University, and her series of watercolor portraits, 100/100, will be shown at the JCC, New York, in the fall. 

The post Jenny Saville ROUNDTABLE: Julie Heffernan, Brenda Zlamany, Dennis Kardon, Walter Robinson, Barry Schwabsky, and Suzy Spence appeared first on artcritical.

October 22 to December 2, 2017
534 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Instagram must, in part, be credited with the popularity craze for Yayoi Kusama in New York right now. In her whimsical multi-venue exhibition, “Festival of Light” the Japanese artist has cultivated the quintessential environment for the age of the selfie. Beyond the perfect selfie backdrop, these rooms foment a phenomenological encounter between participant and environment. The primary physical encounter with Kusama’s spaces induce mental stimulation, be it destabilization, escapism, or even simple enjoyment. And while there continue to be numerous painting shows this season, with the preponderance of Kusama-like immersive environments, contemporary painters are steeped in an art world that anticipates a certain kind of spectator immersion.

Perhaps this is why Cecily Brown’s new paintings, presented at Paula Cooper in her first solo show with the gallery, is such a revelation. Brown produces an absorptive mental and physical experience that rivals interactive art. Owing to the dictates of her elaborative painterly process, works in this exhibition ensnare the viewer in a state of sustained looking. This activity is not unidirectional as Brown’s undulating canvases simultaneously reveal and withhold visual data.

The centerpiece of the sold-out show is also its title piece: “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!” (2016), a triptych, is the largest work to date in Brown’s oeuvre. While critics have pointed to the art historical references at play in this canvas, including a stated homage to the shipwreck scenes of Géricault and Delacroix, the philosophic underpinnings of Brown’s process are what unlock potential for sustained looking.

An heir of Francis Bacon, Brown is, as it were, an intellectual relation to Bacon’s great interpreter, Gilles Deleuze: her work echoes the French philosopher in the translation of sensation onto canvas. Brown’s most recent works seem especially in dialogue with Deleuze’s conception of the fold—an unrelenting maneuvering of existing material, inter alia the folding and refolding—which allows preexisting matter to transform into a form of expression. Brown’s processional practice, in which she continually remediates her strokes, covers her previous marks, and often returns to her works after months-long hiatuses, is an artistic translation of this philosophical concept. The artist’s additive process is an accumulation of luscious gestures and abrupt strokes, ultimately rendering an assemblage of fractured forms that produce a rhythmically pulsating whole.

Sifting through the canonical imagery of Géricault’s’ The Raft of the Medusa, Brown’s immersive method allows her to splice her art historical allusion with swaths of paint and encoded gesture which complicate the discrete categorization of her work as figurative or abstract. Relishing in the instability of her own mark-making, her phantom-like forms emerge from the depths of the painting, only to recede into the cyclonic mass of abstract forms. As the viewer walks from edge to edge of her painting (which is the only way to fully absorb the behemoth masterpiece) both body and eye activate as the ambulatory motion reveals recognizable traces of flesh, wreckage, and the elements. The single reading of the painting proves insufficient. Iterative looking is continuously rewarded in Brown’s canvases: each additional viewing unearths new discoveries and destabilizes old observations. Mirroring the artist’s own additive painterly method, the absorbed viewer returns to the same zones of the canvas only to see it anew. Whereas Brown is most frequently understood to be in dialogue with Willem de Kooning, another New York School name comes to mind at Paula Cooper: Barnett Newman, who avowed that the most salient aspect of his paintings was not their monumental measure but their relationship to human scale. These works were successful if they produced reverberations of the human figure and prompted an introspective consideration of one’s own bodily presence. Rendered to human scale, Brown’s A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! (2016), brings the physical body of the spectator into the mass of forms and flesh, implicating the viewer in the chaos of the shipwreck.

Beyond the physical absorption of the viewer, Brown’s content subsumes the visual field. In much the way that Newman’s iconic “zips” serve to orient the viewer at the center of the visual field, so too does Brown’s most clearly rendered human form near the center of her composition. Acting as an anchor, the figure both centers and envelops the viewer in the visual content. The distinction between painted figure and viewer is collapsed, a sensation heightened evermore by the orientation of the figure with back turned to the audience. Indeed, Brown’s most prominent figure seems to survey the damage of the shipwreck with the gallery-goer. This back-turned figure repeats in another painting in the exhibition, the equally enigmatic Madrepora (Shipwreck), (2016).

While Brown deals in plastic media, her mesmerizing canvases elicit the immersive environments and absorptive states which characterize the most successful installation art around today. Even more than these Instagram-friendly environments, Brown asks the viewer to slow down and participate in the unfolding of her canvases. A true interlocutor with artists and philosophers past, Brown’s subject matter nevertheless expresses an engagement with the demands of contemporary art. Where Kusama gives you infinity in a room, Brown paints you into her shipwreck: You are a material form in the process of becoming, alongside the flesh, wreckage, and masterfully applied brushstrokes.

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Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

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Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone
April 25 to June 6, 2015
630 Greenwich Street (at Morton Street)
New York, 212 431 4977

There are two great exhibitions of painting on view at Maccarone Gallery; one bucks a characteristic trend of its creator and the other is just plain bucking. Cecily Brown’s show, “The English Garden,” is a rarity for the intimate scale of the work. For an artist who generally puts up enormous canvases that dominate entire rooms, it is something special to see almost 30 paintings that could each be carried under arm. More so because these small paintings seem to casually maintain the artist’s robust visual swagger. Nearby, Rosy Keyser’s “The Hell Bitch” approximates in 13 new pieces what profane sanctification might look like. It is thrilling and violent, truly sublime in the most classical sense.

Both shows have a totally different genesis, though in a sense the works themselves share a process-oriented methodology. Brown’s show includes paintings made over a span of years — 2005 to 2014 — that were brought together thanks to the suggestion of Jim Lewis, an acclaimed writer and friend of the artist. By contrast, almost all of the works in “The Hell Bitch” were created in 2015, and in that sense represent a consciously developed body of work. The synchronicity is in the visual vocabulary of two artists who do not know when they begin a painting what it will come to be when it’s finished. Each uses her tools to greatly different ends, though both imbue their work with a sparky primal energy that could light up a forge.

Brown is a British artist, so it’s fair to assume she knows a thing or two about English gardens. The gallery’s take is that if her big paintings are considered landscapes, then these smaller works are gardens. It’s a nice analogy but it falls apart when we consider that English gardens are essentially idealized landscapes. But what’s impressive is the work, which is lush, busy, burning with kind of anti-gravity. The wonderful gestural quality of Brown’s characteristic full-body brushstrokes is carried out here with flicks of the wrist. Occasionally a figure or a face will emerge from the zippy mix — in one work there is a teepee — but more often the paintings hew to a firmer abstraction.

This is the case in two paintings I thought particularly good, Land of the Free, (2008) and Oh I do like to be beside the seaside (2014). Both seem to have been drawn from inside the eye of a tempest, with the paint laid out in a slashing multi-directional bend. The colors are many but the chromatic range is tight. A black-hole kind of density is established, as if the thin layers of oil paint were formerly room size and have been condensed to fit the diminutive frame. They seem at once very serious and utterly reckless, which is exactly how great art looks: daring and effortless, though we know implicitly that this is the illusion of a master.

“The Hell Bitch” is equally forceful and certainly more visceral than “The English Garden.” If Brown’s aesthetic calls to mind a raging storm, Keyser’s brave paintings suggest frozen moments of collision. Any given work might include many materials: rope, tarp, cork, fur, sand, twisted metal, gobs of sawdust, paint applied like handfuls of cement, and, of course, canvas on a wooden stretcher. As the gallery explains, all 13 paintings are born from the hell bitch Keyser keeps in her studio, a “living palate” that the artist uses to test out different ideas.

One may surmise that three basic formats are derived from this unseen matriarch. The first, and most exciting, are those in which the canvas is utterly torn and shredded, appearing to hang onto the stretcher bars like half-flayed skin. In a second range of works the canvas is less distressed, though Keyser’s boisterous brushwork gives the impression of a vehement visual outcry. The third format is a smart juxtaposition: angled metal welded into rectilinear designs and powder-coated in muted monotones. These pieces provide moments of comparative rest. They look like the framework for something, but what that might be is ungraspable. Stitched and stuffed plastic tarp bags dangle from these metal works and lend their otherwise machined aesthetic an organic quality.

Music for a Drowned World (2015) displays the finest qualities of the first format, which include an incredibly savvy manner of blending materials to transform a single gesture. From the upper right corner, out of a busy nest of black paint, a dark line jettisons. It starts out as paint and becomes a bar of bent and painted aluminum. The materials merge at a distance and one only sees the composition, which suggests a spider-webbed windshield.

The way these paintings change given one’s physical proximity is remarkable. Distance flattens depth, but up close is like having your head neck deep in a dangerous tangle. This is less true with the two metal pieces, Between the Hips and Between the Knees (both 2015), though a relation to one’s physical body remains. Somehow these works seem rigorously formal and yet surprisingly sexual. There is dualism between the right angles of the cleanly cut metal and the dangling roundness of loose sacks filled with sand and seed hulls.

Bird of Paradise (2015) is a good example of the third format Keyser is working with. Here the canvas is left almost entirely intact, punctured only by a plate-sized cork. Blue and black paint ferociously mix and smear from top to bottom, as if clawed by an agitated animal. Bird of Paradise might just as easily be a reproduction of one square inch of a de Kooning woman, scaled up. However one interprets it, there is no denying its raw, primal quality.

Now here’s the question: are these feminist paintings? I wouldn’t have thought to wonder were it not for a panel hosted at Maccarone on the topic of Feminism and Painting with Brown and Keyser sitting alongside Joan Semmel and the distinguished curator Alison Gingeras. The house was packed, suggesting the question might be more urgent than I realized. And the conclusion was more curious than I expected. Neither Brown nor Keyser claimed to make conscious artistic decisions based on their gender or politics; a simpler adherence to aesthetics drives their decisions. It slowly emerged that what the women of Semmel’s generation fought so hard for was being taken for granted by a younger generation, who were privileged enough to have been taught as children that women could do and be anything. I don’t think of these paintings as feminist, but I do think these are two tremendous painters who could one day be great artists.

The post Dangerous Tangles: Cecily Brown, Rosy Keyser and the Undoing of Images appeared first on artcritical.

March 1 to April 19, 2014
257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets,
New York City,  212.999.7337

If you have any trouble imagining what a cross between Pieter Brueghel the elder, André Masson, Wilfredo Lam, Gerhard Richter (in his abstract idiom), Walt Disney, San Francisco-style graffiti and a Mughal miniature looks like, don’t worry, Ali Banisadr can put you in the picture in a New York minute. This painter of rich-hued, busy, noisy tableau fills three floors of Sperone Westwater, in his first solo show with the Lower East Side powerhouse, with luridly raucous action dramas.

Iranian-born, California-raised, New York-educated and Brooklyn-based, Banisadr comes with a cv as cosmopolitan as his painterly influences.  Ali grew up against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war before leaving Tehran with his family, immigrating via Turkey to the States at age 12.

The adolescent refugee soaked up the energy of 1990s graffiti in its golden age under the aegis of Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen, although the vibe that survives in his own handwriting is less the elaborate figuration of the Bay Area street artists as a more calligraphic tagging, again perhaps tapping his ancestry.

In New York, as Jeffrey Deitch observes in his catalogue essay for the present show, Banisadr maximized his time at the School of Visual Arts and then the New York Academy in the acquisition of manual skills; at SVA, for instance, he enrolled in illustration classes, while clearly reveling in the beaux-arts pedagogy of the Academy.  The debut of this wondrously dexterous artist took place in 2008 at Leslie Tonkonow, where he showed again in 2011, and he has had solo shows in Europe, too.

Our Hieronymus Bosch of graffiti typically delivers his loud crowds in a massed cluster at the base of a tripartite composition.  Despite the all-over energizing of his canvases, Banisadr achieves a strong sense of pictorial depth, with fore, middle and long distances, a clear horizon between sky and ground.  There is an added sense of depth in the variety of scale amongst his heaving horde.  They are a bestiary of varyingly gruesome, comical, menacing and preposterous personages formed in an equally fulsome array of gestures – artful smudges and splatters, striations and strokes, virtuoso flicks of wrist and bravura sleights of hand.

This throng forms a writhing gestalt that itself becomes a singular monster agitating the picture, sometimes sending shock waves of conflict into the anyway rarely very peaceful heavens.  In Motherboard (2013) for example, the title piece of the show, a sharp, vertical band of red streaks out between the scrum below and the sliver of turbulent sky above reading like some barcode of blood.  Or in Ran (2014), the triptych that dominates the ground floor of the gallery, the sky witnesses a strange mottled grid of red impasto that reads like a cross between Richter squeegee and fragments of long-lost cuneiform script. Banisadr’s combatants recall great renaissance depictions of conflict like Leonardo’s now-lost “Battle of Anghiari” (1505), known from presumed copies, and Michelangelo’s “Battle of Cascina,” also lost, except in the place of the naked, idealized combatants supplied by the Italians, Banisadr betrays a more northern penchant for caricature along with his pronouncedly eastern (as well as West Coast) palette in a modern-medieval sensibility.  But what he has in common with the high renaissance masters is a way of enlisting the mass into a singularity while retaining an energetic thrust.

Despite the figuration and the action, and the traditional heaven-and-earth, figure-ground compositional structures, these are essentially abstract paintings.  They are about all-overness, balance, movement, harmony and dissonance, detail and whole.  Their cartoonish gestures — the schematic swishes of air current left in the wake of bodies darting to and fro – adds a kitsch element as do the knowingly vulgar color schemes but the sheer skill and vibrancy with which he marshals technique has us forgive these as surely as we do or ought to do in his surrealist or populist mentors.  In some ways he is a flatter, cleaner version of Cecily Brown, replacing sex with war.  He looks to Matta where she looks to de Kooning, which is to say that his skills are more linear and spatial and less fleshly or voluptuous.

And like Matta, Banisadr has a disconcerting ability to combine a fast read with meticulous, painstaking execution.  It is this disconnection between execution and effect that surely accounts for a slickness some will find worrisome.   It is not that he is postmodern even, so much as unmodern.  This may be why, despite their galvanizing turmoil and breathtaking technique and at once abrasive and retina-soaking chroma, these are ultimately very distant images, emotionally strained and cold.

Banisadr has one stated ambition that he achieves with uncanny force: to generate visual noise.  Somehow, his sheer velocity gives off audible sound.  It is as if, caught up in the excitement, the beholder can’t help but supply, if not a soundtrack at least rather noisy sound effects.

And if you do find the drama does deserve a score, it is up to you whether to bring along heavy metal or a Berlioz symphony.

The post Brueghel Meets Mughal: Ali Banisadr at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

September 15 to October 22, 2011
980 Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-744-2313

Jenny Saville’s “Continuum,” her first show in New York since 2003, will delight her many fans with a bold new theme (her art newly energized by the experience of motherhood) and an invigorated interest in drawing.  Those fans happen to include people in high places.

Word has it, for instance, that John Elderfield entered the collectors’ evening of his MoMA de Kooning exhibit with Jenny on his arm, as if to say: the belle of the ball is the Dutchman’s successor. Elderfield is author of the catalog essay for Bob Dylan’s show of paintings, sandwiched by Saville’s, on Gagosian’s Fourth Floor.  (A drawing in her Pentimenti series acknowledges de Kooning in its title, alongside Velazquez and Picasso.) Simon Schama is another devotee.  Writing in the Financial Times of September 24, his opening salvo diminishes Lucian Freud in comparison with Saville.  Next he insists that her only peers in the depiction of babies are Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.

As I’m beginning to have a Dr. Frankenstein moment, a confession is in order.  Years ago, as a cub reporter on the Times of London, I was sent around Britain to investigate the state of art education. They told me to assemble a roster of talented students to feature in a side bar to my article in their Saturday magazine.

At the Glasgow School of Art I was seduced by Saville’s work.  Who wouldn’t have been?  Deploying an assured, preternaturally effortless painterly realism, her oversized paintings of oversized women were not just visually arresting, but smart.  Into the surface of one of her obese sitters she has inscribed defiant words by Luce Irigaray, the French feminist theorist much in vogue at that time—except the words were in mirror writing. Saville then erected an actual mirror some distance from the canvas.  To get the text the right way around you had to see the image reflected, with an attendant loss of painterly luxuriance.  This literalized a tension between texture and text, form and content.

The Times picture editor loved the painting, bought it from the degree show, and ran it on the cover.  Charles Saatchi must have flipped over his breakfast reading.  He wasted no time in prizing the painting into his own collection.  Evidently the advertising mogul felt no compulsion to read Irigaray, however, as he ditched the mirror.  The rest, as they say, is art history.

This is not to insinuate that when she acquiesced to her powerful new patron’s structural change to her intended installation (progressing, so to speak, beyond the mirror stage) she lost her subject but found her form. That would be churlish as there was no descent from theoretical or political high ground in her work.  On the contrary, her fascination with the strengths and vulnerabilities of modern women grew as she explored self-image through such themes as liposuction and transgender. She rapidly became immensely and understandably popular.  She found a way to niche gender studies within a late flowering of the grand tradition of the swagger portrait.

Tracing antecedents to Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck, this genre reached its zenith in the belle époque with John Singer Sargent.  Modern exponents included Augustus John.  The sitter is surrounded by trappings of worldly success matched in sheer opulence by the artist’s masterfully dashed off brushstrokes.  Saville’s provocative twist was to extend the bravura technique and monumental scale of such painting to naked and isolated (or in some cases sardined) young women.

Like Sargent and John, part of Saville’s problem is that she has always been too good for her own good.  This is what causes Schama’s crass comparison with Freud to backfire.  It is precisely the crabbed, cramped, awkward-to-the-point-of-absurdity knottiness of Freud’s obsessive gaze and tortuous touch that elevates his peculiar work to old master status.

David Sylvester, writing in the 1950s about Freud’s School of London peer Michael Andrews in terms that apply equally to Freud himself, detected “the awkwardness of almost every modern painter who has not been content to solve his problems by simplifying them… The modern artist who aims at the inclusiveness of traditional European art runs up against the difficulty of recovering that inclusiveness without embracing what have become the clichés of the tradition, and the awkwardness arises from trying to have one without the other.”

There is no awkwardness in Saville, but there are many historic trappings of it, precisely indeed the clichés to which Sylvester refers.   An extended drawing series, examples of which are included here, is titled Pentimenti.  In these, ostensibly provisional and retained charcoal lines are not merely expressive but axiomatic.  True pentimenti arise in the struggle to find position, to define form; they are retained either because the artist has no interest in disguising what led to the discovery; or else, sometimes, because they add texture, and thus heft, to an image (think Matisse, whose pentimenti somehow never undermine the illusion of single shot miracle in his charcoal drawings).  Or else, a tolerable mannerism, pentimenti can signal the effort and time that were necessary to fix the image and thus are part of that image (Larry Rivers, Frank Auerbach, Eugene Leroy.)

But in Saville there is simply no resistance to her Midas-touch genius.  Her pentimenti have nothing to do with process, everything to do with look. Appropriated from tradition but recalibrated in purpose, they now become an animation device.  As in Futurist painting, not to mention comic strips, they denote the swish across the picture plane of bodies in motion.

The effortless repetition of near identical figures from canvas to canvas, or page, incidentally, points to the use of an overhead projector.  The same head from 2006 of a girl with a birthmark – the image used on the cover of The Manic Street Preachers album Journal For Plague Lovers that proved too disturbing for British supermarkets who covered it up – recurrs in several canvases on Gagosian’s sixth floor.  Nothing wrong with projectors: artists should use whatever works.  And Saville’s girl provides a powerful, compelling, evocative head.  But the brush marks that differentiate iterations of this head one from another, like the charcoal pentimenti in other images, bear no relationship to the discovery of form.  The latter is almost a form in the bureaucratic sense, something to be filled out.  This in turn renders the brushstrokes meretricious.  In real painting, the quasi-abstraction of manipulated material, its pleasure-inducing stresses and strains, the improbable juxtapositions of hatches of color, the alternations of meticulous construction and desperate dash, all arise from the struggle to achieve plastic equivalence to perceived or imagined reality.  Saville, on the other hand, merely deploys a battery of special effects to achieve an appropriated look of painterliness.  That’s why she is impeccably slick where Freud is self-questioning to the point of being cack-handed.

(If you want to gain an art historically accurate context for Saville’s technique, by the way, forget Rembrandt, da Vinci and even Freud and direct your attention to her British contemporary, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, and his handsome, serviceable depictions of Seamus Heaney and John Mortimer in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)

That Saville disintegrates in comparison with Freud is as sad for Freud himself because, as Alex Katz surely understood when he decamped recently to Gavin Brown to keep company with the likes of Silke Otto-Knapp and Elizabeth Peyton, nothing galvanizes attention for a senior male artist quite like hot young protégés.  The School of London suffers deeply in reputation from its near-overwhelming (thank god for Paula Rego) maleness.  Nothing could better boost a blockbuster museum survey or book on expressive figuration in Britain than the chronological and alliterative sweep implied by the subtitle “From Walter Sickert to Jenny Saville”.  Luckily, “From Francis Bacon to Cecily Brown” remains plausible.

The post The Dutchmen’s Heir: Jenny Saville at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

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James Gardner, Walter Robinson, and Alexi Worth joined David Cohen to review Petah Coyne at Galerie Lelong and the Sculpture Centre, Diana Thater at David Zwirner and Zwirner and Wirth, James Hyde at Brent Sikkema and Cecily Brown at Gagosian.

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Whether writing, curating, advising or collecting, he was an arbiter of taste. The role this complex personality created for himself within the British and international artworlds was multifaceted, but what will come to be considered his lasting contribution, in my opinion, is his criticism. Simply stated, he described art as well as any writer in English since Ruskin.

Actually, let me qualify this, not to backtrack but to get in sharper focus the particularity of his talent. It is not so much objects per se that he described so well – though his “ekphrasis” (the putting into words of what is seen) was crystalline – as the impact of the said objects. He was a man with an enormous ego, yet his artwriting, while intensely empirical – personally experienced, sensed, measured – was not encumbered by the confessional. Eschewing formalism as a reductive system, he nonetheless “cut the crap” (as he himself might have put it) by going for the mechanics of how art works. He could talk about quality without being prissy. He dramatized the sense of his having intensely looked at and experienced the art he was writing about.

He was in many senses an existentialist. Firstly, like the best of his generation, he was profoundly influenced, intellectually and temperamentally, by the Parisian philosophy and culture of the postwar period. He tempered an early affection for voluptuously high flown French thought with a rough and tumble English empiricism. After a precocious start as a reviewer for George Orwell at the New Statesman while still a teenager, writing about sport and jazz as well as art, he spent a formative period in Paris in the 1940s. He befriended Giacometti, a repeated subject in his writing and exhibition making. Sylvester in turn was the subject of a painting by Giacometti. He found his voice back in London as a critic championing artists for whom personal authenticity and a struggle to come to terms with reality were of utmost concern. Francis Bacon, obviously, was one of these, but so too others who, later, would be classed under the rubric “School of London” (a construct he had no truck with), including Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. Later in life he would express doubts and reservations about some of the School of London painters he has previously written about so persuasively, although he also did belated justice to two he had neglected, in print if not in personal encouragement or behind the scenes maneuvering, namely Euan Uglow and Leon Kossoff.

His taste expanded greatly, especially as he came to terms with abstract and pop art and became increasingly interested in American art, but he brought similar existentialist values to the appreciation of, say, an American minimal artist like Robert Morris as he had once applied to English realists. And there is another sense in which he was existentialist. He was far more concerned with what great art tells us about occupying a body, facing death, being sexual, engaging in relationships, feeling isolated, etc. than he was with, say, epistemological concerns – what art is or isn’t, its relations with language, etc. – which might more readily seem to apply to an artist like Morris. But the great thing with Sylvester was that he wrote about these issues without sentimentalizing art. Existentialism was no excuse for romanticism, in his case. The search for truth and presence were values he managed to invest in his writing. Looking at Giacometti is an extraordinarily crafted book. It is made up of texts from across a career of heroic failures – failures, according to the author’s standards, to capture its subject convincingly – texts which by his own account were obsessively revised. In its “exhilerated despair” (a phrase of Bacon’s from the legendary interviews with Sylvester) Sylvester’s prose and project shadow Giacometti’s own working process and angst. The book, which could have been called “Sylvester’s Doubt”, also represents a critic’s progress, from an elegiac, full-blown, French-influenced literary approach in the opening text from 1955, “Perpetuating the Transient”, to increasingly unphilosophically encumbered writing that gets to the heart of the Giacometti experience.

His 1968 Henry Moore exhibition and catalogue built on twenty years thinking about that artist that began with a period as Moore’s private secretary. It exemplifies a phenomenological approach to sculpture. Just as the Giacometti text has the kind of tentative determined realism of its subject, so the Moore text at once generalizes and particularizes, again like its subject.

As I said earlier, he was a man with a big ego, and his personality filled a Sydney Greenstreet-like frame. He often wore the fraught expression of someone ill at ease within his own body. Physicality imbues his prose, for his analysis invariably draws attention to the body, whether the maker’s or the perceiver’s. His aesthetics were grounded firmly in the sensorium: prone to draw analogies, his favorites were with sex and food. Even to hear him think about something on the telephone was a visceral experience, with pregnant pauses, heavy breathing, and Rabelaisian outbursts. He could swear prodigiously, and in public too, at least in later years. (This didn’t stop him from being a connoisseur of etiquette, which he could discuss in minute, analytic terms, as if a latter day Baldassare Castiglione.) There was a marvelous panel at the Tate Gallery once, moderated by Joanna Drew, in which Sylvester and another veteran British pundit Bryan Robertson, reminisced. Sylvester peppered his sentences with the “f” word so frequently that when at a certain point the dapper and gentle Robertson himself felt moved to explete he used the word “bugger”. “If you’re going to “f–k” I’ll “bugger”, he said in parentheses, to the delight of an audience already high as a kite on the bombast of this pair.

Despite such egotism, Sylvester was a very good listener. His interview technique should be studied by anyone concerned with the art of public dialogue. Besides the immortal exchanges with Bacon, titled in its last collected version as The Brutality of Fact, Sylvester conducted dialogues with countless giants of postwar art, including De Kooning, Giacometti, Serra, Katz, and Johns.

You could say that he was a giant who liked other giants. But readymade giants. Surprisingly absent from his bibliography is any evidence of the role of discoverer. Look at the names of the art stars he wrote about – and he seemed exclusively to concern himself, in print, with the successful – and rarely, when cross referenced to the artists’ own résumés, does it turn out that Sylvester was the first to write about them. Here was a man with a voracious appetite for new art, a determination to shape public taste through writings and exhibitions, an eagerness to advise important collectors, public or private, a desire to be up to date, and clearly an eye on immortality. He exemplified Constable’s assertion that a half taste is no taste at all. Criticality permeated everything he thought about. And yet he didn’t scout for new talent. Fearless in the unexpected analogy, willing to risk friendships for an aesthetic assertion, he was timid in the elective process. A Ruskin, a Greenberg, a Peter Fuller can go horribly wrong with their Kate Greenaways, their Larry Poonses, their Glyn Williamses, but whether viewed as a lapse or a consistent cock-eye, their passionate and personal and original avowals actually enhance their critical status rather than detracting from it. Van Gogh said, “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that mistake”, and we can end up feeling this way about our favorite critics when they startle us with questionable tastes.

The irony with Sylvester – and a biographer one day will usefully deal with this – is that existentialism and a fondness for artists willing to pursue a lonely path to authenticity did not breed in him a corresponding individualism. For all that his writing has the feel of belligerent independence, he was drawn inextricably to the establishment, the canon, and prevailing powers. That he was heavily involved with big institutions such as the BBC where he was a prolific and innovative arts broadcaster, or the Government-sponsored Arts Council, for whom he curated numerous landmark exhibitions and served, for long terms, as chairman of the visual arts panel, is of course only commendable, public spirited, worthy. But at the same time, in a critic, slightly perturbing. Of course, it is a tremendous honor to have been the only critic ever to receive a “golden lion” of the Venice Bienalle, the artists’ “oscars”, but who awarded it him if not the international artworld’s Council of Ten (the politburo, in other words, of official taste)? Later, his inseperableness from big time collectors like the de Menils and Charles Saatchi, not to mention his intimacy with dealers like Anthony d’Offay in London (who married Sylvester’s secretary) and Larry Gagosian in New York (who exhibits his daughter, the young painter Cecily Brown) seemed to make him the most plutocratic arbiter of taste since Bernard Berenson.

It probably attests to my besottedness with the man, however, that I find something psychologically compelling in Sylvester’s moth-like attraction to the glow of money and power. It is right that critics should be more concerned with the consumption of art than its creation, even if, usually, the critic himself is the end user. Sylvester was a passionate collector of Oriental rugs (of which he curated groundbreaking Arts Council exhibitions), antiquities, and so on, which he would install with exquisite taste in his museum-like home. I would venture that it was a desire to experience art decision making in its vested human fullness, and not in a rarefied aesthetic vacuum, that attracted him to the apex of artworld power.

But this is to moralize beyond hard evidence. We can await a Meryle Secrest-style bio with bated breath. In the meantime, we must mourn a critic who persuaded the best minds of his day to look harder at painting and sculpture, which is what criticism is about.

The post The Golden Lion of English Artwriting: David Sylvester, 1924-2001 appeared first on artcritical.