After that it took us 45 minutes to travel three blocks, with Nick marveling at each new encounter. That is how it was with Nick. He possessed a complete alert attentiveness to the world around him, had a great passion for art, and his enthusiasm for life was all-encompassing.  He was completely immersed in the world of art precisely because, for him, art was life, art was experience and every moment contained the very present possibility of new ideas and new inspiration.

Nick was born in 1917 and grew up in Hoboken, NJ.  He began his studies in art at the age of 11 with the Leonardo DaVinci school in downtown Manhattan, and later he studied at the National Academy and served as Leon Kroll’s apprentice and model.  His classical training allowed him to develop a sure and elegant drawing hand.  He could carve out form beautifully.

But it was during the War years, when he was traveling at night from his post out on Long Island to 8th Street to study with Hans Hoffman that he developed his understanding of plastic space. And that understanding not only opened up a whole new world for him, but also launched him on a singularly creative career as an artist.

When the War was over Nick was honored with the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship, and those prizes enabled him to work in Italy for several years.  He met a wide range of artists, including Matta, who introduced him to the surrealists and, as a result, became a major influence on his work and life.

Back in New York Nick reconnected with friends from his time in Italy, including Conrad Marcarelli, Philip Pavia and Philip Guston, and took part in the famous 9th Street Show, helping to usher in a new era of painting in New York. He began to work with Eleanor Ward as a director of the Stable Gallery, and created the hugely successful Stable Annual Show, which was modeled on the 9th Street Show, and he brought new young artists into the Stable giving Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg their first one-man shows.  He also brought John Graham into the fold.  Nick himself had two solo shows at the Stable, and then moved to Staempfli Gallery.

He was a sought after educator, teaching at Cooper Union, Yale, Brandeis, Cornell, Columbia, S.V.A.  and the New York Studio School, where he was a founding faculty member and taught for 20 years.  Later, he founded his own art School in Umbria, Italy, the International School of Art.

And while the hundreds of students he taught through the years would easily testify that he was a dynamo in the class room, it was after he retired from teaching that his work gained an astonishing new energy and momentum.  Several recent shows at Lohin Geduld Gallery and Chelsea, and at Washburn Gallery on 57th Street, showed an artist at the absolute peak of his powers.

In 2007 Lohin Geduld Gallery showed monumental head sculptures that Nick carved from field stones that he found on the ground around his house in Umbria. The heads are haunting, shocking, emotive, and with their hypnotic gaze they demand a connection with the viewer on a real human level.  Nick claimed that the heads were already present in the stone, and that he simply liberated them into the light of  the present day. Perhaps that’s why they have all the enigmatic appeal of the ancient and archaic, while remaining, in the end, entirely modern.

When it comes to Nick’s work, it’s exciting to know that there is a lot more to explore: three small wax figures featured in that same show give just a hint at a branch of his oeuvre which hasn’t yet been shown to its best advantage.  These fragile, subtle wax sculptures are torsos – some with limbs some without – which are some of his most intimate and sensual works.  They beg to be held in the hand and turned.  I was lucky enough to visit him in the studio while he was working on these sculptures, and my small glimpse into his process is now etched on my brain.  He laid the sculptures out on his work table, some individually, some seemingly in a pile, next to a Bunsen burner, some pots of wax, and a series of strange bottles and jars filled with odd mixtures. The forms that he touched into being were tightly crafted, and they were almost translucent, literally shining in the light. I’d like to see them cast and exhibited.

New large-scale abstract paintings shown at Washburn Gallery in 2009 were bold, lyrical, and mesmerizing in black and white and muted tones.  John Yau wrote of them in the Brooklyn Rail: “Every move is purposeful, while all of it feels improvised; this is the magic that Carone has achieved in the syntax of Abstract Expressionism, particularly because he has made that language specific to his concerns. His lines are simultaneously elegant, unhurried, understated, and child-like.”

Nick’s painted “Psychic” portraits – that is portraits of men and women who never existed – that have been included in group shows, but have not yet been given a solo showcase.  And that’s a pity. Nick spent 50 years making these paintings, starting with his early years in Italy and continuing on to the end of his life.  You could say they are strange – because they are – and you’d have to admit that they are more than a little bit interesting. Some of them are clowns, and others are temptresses, ogres, aristocrats, sages, androgines, and modernized renaissance men. They fall somewhere between figments of the imagination and flights of fancy. Like the very best portraits, they seem to encapsulate a lifetime of experience, which is fascinating since their subjects never drew a breath outside of Nick’s imagination. They also have the strong undercurrrent of Eros that permeated all of Nick’s work – something akin to the tension and longing that occupies the moment before a first kiss – and all of those factors demand that they be treated to a truly ambitious show in the near term.

But through his career, the figure was enormously important to Nick. It was his fuel, his inspiration, his tool. The figure is the building block that shapes and drives the abstract painting: the figure is the process and the figure is the form.

Just last June Nick said to me “Don’t forget.  With the figure, anything is possible.”  I saw this idea come to life in that visit when Claude and Chris Carone, Nick’s sons, showed me his last psychic portraits, which were filled with the physical intensity, turmoil and anxiety of an artist struggling to continue his work at the end of his life, and even then, unafraid to go into the metaphysical realm.

Nick was a living legend, and that he was not out in the forefront of the art world was always hard for me to understand. But I believe that his low profile freed him enormously, and there is no question that when he re-emerged with the shows at Lohin Geduld and Washburn his work was triumphant. No question – here was an artist who was at the very height of his career, whose work was, and is – thoroughly contemporary, multidimensional and unapologetic.

The post “With the figure, anything is possible”: Nicolas Carone, 1917-2010 appeared first on artcritical.

A visitor to Nicolas Carone’s show  may feel momentary confusion over whether this is a typical Washburn Gallery exhibition featuring some master of Abstract Expressionism as in previous shows like the prints of Jackson Pollock or the work of Leon Polk Smith. A quick glance at the labels, however, reveals that these big paintings date from 2006- 08.

But actually, the visitor’s first impression was not so wrong.  These works, by a skilled and energetic 90 year old, recall that Carone was a fully-fledged participant in the 1950s scene, was a friend and neighbor of Jackson Pollock’s and exhibited successfully (notably at the legendary Stable Gallery), if intermittently, during that time.

Though Carone has always enjoyed professional respect among his peers, his work has long been difficult to see. He had long been a popular teacher of drawing at the New York Studio School where he was also a bit of an enigma.

An enigma, because though the classroom corrections and thumbnails were obviously practiced and masterful, and his knowledge and passion for painting and drawing were undeniable, curious students (full disclosure- I was one! ) saw only small but intriguing tidbits of his work.

Things have changed recently, as Carone has been very productive and showing frequently, notably at Lohin Geduld and David Findlay Jr. In fact, due to his vigorous rate of production, the show is overhung, the huge paintings triumphantly covering into every available wallspace, an evident surplus of work.

The paintings resemble the sort of automatic abstractions Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning practiced in the 1940s, such as the latter’s “Attic” (1949), in which the beautiful shapes suggest fragmentary glimpses of the figure. In Carone, too, an underlying classicism combines with a freewheeling painterly cubism.

In fact, this show approaches orthodox Abstract Expressionism more than is normal for Carone and perhaps the splattery free use of acrylic, the black mixed to resemble glossy household enamels, is intended as an hommage to de Kooning’s work of the mid 1940s.  In the austere paintings “In Orbit” (2007) and “Psychic Blackout” (2007-08) the forms are closely cropped within the rectangle, the looping muscular lines standing out as white on a black field.

Even closer to de Kooning are “Over the Threshhold” (2007) and “Not to Be Touched” (2006), with black lines on white, the largeness of the cropped forms reading more abstractly, with negative and positive shapes trading priority, and erasures and drippings emphasizing process and physicality.This “automatic writing” approach also resembles the methods of bebop jazz:, Gershwin’s “I Got Rythm,” for instance, is stripped of the cues that make the tune recognizable to point up the pure abstract musicality.

The large “Lost Tribe” and “Shadow Dance” both from 2007 seem to resemble groups of dancing figures in the classical style of Ingres, the ‘legs’ lost in the cascades of black drips against the white background. On extended viewing, surprisingly precise glimpses figure parts appear, jostling negative shapes in the elegantly free calligraphies derived from his lifelong practice of life drawing in the context of the classical tradition.In other recent shows by Carone, there were a number of works on paper incorporating subtle pencil and red chalk notations that make this connection even more personal and explicit.

This classicism seems to be particularly natural baseline for Nicholas Carone, encouraged as it was by the cultured Italian American family he was born into.  Local artists, writers and musicians were constant visitors to his childhood home, encouraged by his extraordinary mother, who also enrolled him at the Da Vinci art school on Eighth Street in the village and allowed him to quit school at 14 to pursue an artistic career.  During World War II he studied at the Hans Hoffman School, a seminal experience, and after the end of the war lived in Italy (where he still maintains a residence) where in the postwar period he astonished the Italians with their first glimpse of the American Abstract- Expressionist style.

This American treasure, born June 4, 1917, continues to astonish us today.

The post Nicolas Carone: Recent Paintings appeared first on artcritical.

This review first appeared in The New York Sun, July 21, 2005.

Black is the primary color of the creative classes; every artling sports it. Now Betty Cuningham Gallery is trying it on the walls in a “search for resonant symbols”. Despite curator Phong Bui’s unsmiling jargon (“centralizing black as a mediating agent”), the search turns up merrier widows than expected.

Dead black barely exists in nature and is often ignored by painters as a palette color. Lustrous blacks can be created from colors that lose their identity mixed at full intensity and, touched with white, create inimitable grays. Everything here looks straight from the tube, surprising for work intended to “broaden the meaning of black.” But not to niggle. Good painting is on view, even some color.

The pictorial language of Forrest Bess and Thomas Nozkowski, a dialogue between abstraction and description, suits this scant palette. An isolated, self-described visionary Modernist, Bess (1911-1977) exhibited with Betty Parsons from 1949 to 1967; his work is rarely seen anymore. This small untitled painting (c. 1952) evokes moonlight over water by adjusting textures heightened by a few well-aimed strokes of white. Simplicity of form, refined edges and command of paint quality combine in Mr. Nozkowski’s untitled oil (1995). Luminous egg shapes play against a series of tenebrous, filamented placentas, each one bounded by subtle threads of near-purple.

One arresting (untitled, undated) painting by Nick Carone, haunted with elusive color, hints at human form emerging—inchoate and with difficulty—from unlit chaos. It makes Terry Winters and Phiilip Guston, nearby, look facile and dull. Joan Waltemath lends optical interest to tube black by manipulating refractive capacity with iron filings, interference pigment and metallic powders. Her “Universe is a Square” (1996-99), rectangles of pure color floating over a beautiful surface, is the single geometric abstraction with emotive power. In Norman Bluhm’s “Silent Vamp” (1980), undulant ebony forms press against each other with volumptuous abandon, squeezing high color through the interstices.

Displayed in its own niche, Bill Jensen’s “Black Madonna” (1978) is a ghostly tar baby surrounded by dripping slashes. It has the necrophiliac charm of an album cover for a death metal band: Our Lady Queen of Demonstealers. What was Jensen listening to in ‘78? Alice Cooper? Black Sabbath? Judging from “Death’s Door” (2003-4), he’s still listening.

Christopher Martin’s prominently positioned “Here (For Wallace Berman and Hilma AF Klimt)”, 2005, is an over-amplified cipher crudely inscribed in white and bisected by a cable-like line with a box in the center—a dumbwaiter to nowhere. The thing reminds us how far art has traveled from obligation to the visual. Art is now the mark of an artist’s presence: something left behind, like paw prints. It also reminds us that the word curator is misleading. Less the disinterested expert of popular piety, a curator is frequently an agent for artists, dealers or collectors.

The post Paint it with Black appeared first on artcritical.

February 17 to May 7, 2005

The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture is housed in a nationally land marked building on 8th Street – a maze-like architectural wonder that combines four Victorian townhouses, mews carriage houses, and Art Deco frontage – which has always been a dynamic center for intellectual adventure. It began as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio, then became the original home of the Whitney Museum. In the late 1960s, artists and philosophers (including Buckminster Fuller, Meyer Schapiro, and Morton Feldman) gathered there around the Studio School’s founder, Mercedes Matter. And these days, current Dean Graham Nickson leads an Evening Lecture series, which has brought hundreds of leading art critics, thinkers, and artists to the school.

On the occasion of the school’s 40th anniversary, I was asked to curate an exhibition about its history. As an art historian, my research centers around a generation of New York-based, painterly figurative artists, many of whom taught at or were even founding faculty members of the school. The exhibition, “The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” whose first part opens today, will examine the institution’s history, via the work of approximately 100 faculty members and alumni.

The school was founded in 1964, after Mercedes Matter published a harsh critique in Art News of the state of current art education. She criticized art schools for their fragmented, busy curriculum, and for teaching students about “what is going on” in the art world but never actually “how to draw.” Matter taught at Pratt at the time, and a group of her students prevailed upon her to start a new school based on the ideas she outlined in print. The students then took an active role in locating a space – originally a loft at Bleecker and Broadway – constructing worktables and modeling platforms, and even paying the rent. The school moved to its current home in 1967 (a move made possible through a student who died young and left her inheritance to the school).

Although the school has always emphasized working from life, and many teachers avoided discussions of content, the divide between abstraction and representation was indeed fluid and dynamic. A teacher like Nicolas Carone (who taught for nearly 25 years and has been hugely influential within the school) claims an ideal art to be “abstraction with content.” Charles Cajori’s “Seated Figure”(exhibited in part one) hovers at the edge of abstraction and sets the tone for the conversation around these issues. Esteban Vicente, the noted abstractionist, was also a founding faculty member.

Drop by the school this week, and you will note in the galleries work by these artists, as well as Leland Bell, Alex Katz, George McNeil, and Matter – all dating from the period – a quick course in early faculty aesthetics. In those days, Studio School students learned “plastic values”: the creation of form on a two-dimensional space. The object, whether the still life or the figure, was basically an armature – an excuse – for organizing forms in space. This teaching was based on that of Hans Hofmann, who had his own school on 8th Street in the 1940s and 1950s, and with whom many Studio School teachers, such as Matter, Carone, and McNeil, had themselves studied.

In the 1970s, a generation of influential abstract artists began to emerge from the school, including Andrea Belag, Emily Cheng, and Christopher Wool. Faculty included rigorous abstractionists Milton Resnick and Jack Tworkov. Philip Guston – another founding faculty member – was a particularly powerful influence at the school (he was making his own transition from abstraction into more personal imagery at this time). He encouraged his students to develop their own personal vision. Steven Sloman, a student of Guston’s in the 1960s, became a teacher in the 1970s.

The 1980s were a time of transition. Sculptor Bruce Gagnier became dean for several years and was followed briefly by painter and future MoMA curator Robert Storr. Mr. Gagnier brought in a new group of teachers. Ophrah Shemesh embodied the cultural mix of the 1980s: Her paintings take on sexuality and the body and have a European, neo-Expressionist feel. Ross Bleckner taught at the school and curated an important exhibition there, “From Organism to Architecture.” The mystically inclined monochromist Frederic Matys Thursz, a faculty member who did not believe in drawing, provided a very different kind of guidance than the founding teachers. This period seemed to open up the school to influences that were swirling around at the time outside its doors.

In 1989, Graham Nickson became dean. Mr. Nickson, who is British, brought to the Studio School the influence of his own training at the Camberwell School of Art, where he had studied with Euan Uglow, who in turn worked under William Coldstream at the Slade. The tradition developed by Coldstream is based on intense observation, working from life, and employing an exacting system of measurement to scale down what the artist sees be fore him onto the page. The influence of Coldstream, Uglow, and the Slade – brought via Mr. Nickson and other British teachers he has employed – is a new element in the mix of teaching ideologies at the school.

Mr. Nickson pioneered the Drawing Marathon, an extraordinarily intense two-week, full-day course of study, which he has taken around the world. British emigre students have included such figures as Matthew Ritchie and Cecily Brown. The latter purportedly once complained that the charcoal smudged Studio School students didn’t understand her dressing up to attend parties, yet her work displays an undeniable Studio School painterly panache.

Although Mr. Nickson’s own style of large-scale, complex, psychologically suggestive figural painting has certainly made its mark at the school, there still is no single “Studio School” vision. More recently, teachers have included Rosemarie Beck, Paul Resika, and British artists Carole Robb and Garth Evans; works in the final show of this series will include these artists as well as John Walker’s muscular abstraction, a seemingly alchemical abstraction by Bill Jensen, and densely painted, evocative works by Jake Berthot, Eric Holzman, and John Lees.

Teaching and painting are the two principal legacies of the school – and in most cases, the artists selected for this exhibition are actively practicing, exhibiting, and often teaching, not only at the Studio School but also around New York City, nationally, and internationally. The common denominator, in the face of diverse artistic output, is an extended tradition of seriousness and innovation; a willingness to utilize the timeless languages of painting, drawing, and sculpture; an engagement with art of the past; an appetite for intellectual adventure, and a devotion to sustained studio practice.

This is what distinguishes and marks the New York Studio School.

The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School, Part 1 (1964-1971)

“The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School,” will be held in four separate parts, between today and May 7. The installations move chronologically through the decades of the school’s history, combining the work of faculty and students and presenting a glimpse into four periods of the School’s history. Many of the selected works date from the periods represented, but others are more recent. Grounds for these decisions were aesthetic as well as historical: to convey both a sense of the educational system at the time, as well as communicate the possibilities for what an artist who trained there might become.

Part one (1964-71), opening today, includes the work of founding and early faculty members, as well as founding and early students. Themes presented in this show include a group of works about the body, in the entrance halls to the school, such as George Spaventa’s “Walking Woman” bronze; cutout figures by Mark Zimetbaum; Carl Plansky’s self-portrait, naked in work boots; feminist works by Marjorie Kramer and Irene Peslikis; Judy Rifka’s post-September 11 skeleton meditation, and Chuck O’Connor’s 1968 classic Studio School style nude.

In the galleries, works by Charles Cajori, Gretna Campbell, Louis Finkelstein, Sidney Geist, and Alex Katz set the tone for discussions around abstraction and figuration, planar form, and active drawing; while heads by Earl Kerkam and Nicolas Carone examine the soulful possibilities of Studio School aesthetics.

Selecting the works for this exhibition was fascinating: it very much contradicted the idea of a unified “Studio School style.” It was my own “marathon,” a la Mr. Nickson, of research, interviews, studio and gallery visits. But this is only the beginning of the story.

this article originally appeared in the New York Sun, February 17, 2005

The post The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School appeared first on artcritical.