When Eugene Thaw first tried to give a drawing to the Pierpont Morgan Library he was told, ‘We don’t take gifts from dealers’. Although understandably crestfallen, his regard for the highmindedness of this great New York institution only intensified. Founded by the legendary collector and ‘robber baron’ J.P.Morgan, the library is a stupendous treasure-trove of rare books, manuscripts and works on paper from across the centuries. Thaw persevered in his attempt at generosity, eventually managing to donate an entire collection of over 250 drawings, as well as the cash, some years ago, for the purchase of an adjacent building. He is now a trustee, one of very few dealers on the board of a major collecting institution. ‘I have steered things their way and saved them on occasion from the foibles of the art market’. There is no conflict of interest, because when he collects it is with the Morgan in mind.

Eugene Thaw, who will be seventy next year, was until his retirement one of the leading dealers in old master pictures. His clients included many of the major North American collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to which he has also bequeathed works), the Frick, the Art Institute of Chicago, and such mega-collectors as Norton Simon and Andrew Mellon. But as wealth and opportunity have allowed, he also amassed his own stunning collection of drawings.

He has no trouble admitting to the fact that he prefers drawings that are complete aesthetic experiences in themselves, very full and involved compositions. He even jests that he is a ‘paintings collector manqué’. ‘There are two kinds of drawing: the sketch for something, and the drawing for its own sake. Lots of connoisseurs are much more concerned with the art of idenfification, with ‘who dunnit’, doing detective work and making the right connections. That doesn’t interest me so much as the aesthetic impact of the sheet.’ With characteristic modesty, though, he adds that, ‘Being human, I react more strongly if I know who the artist is. I can’t claim to be so brilliant an eye that I respond just as strongly as if I knew the work were but by Durer.’

Thaw muses on how attitudes towards dealers have changed so demonstrably during his time in the trade. ‘You were one step above a push-cart peddler. Now every young debutante that comes out of college wants to work in a gallery. In my youth the professions for a polite and venturesome young man were Wall Street and advertising – both rather demoted these days. Art dealing has come a long way. Most art dealers who are any good are real scholars and know their field thoroughly.’ Thaw himself is the epitome of the dealer-scholar. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and numerous publications including the Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonne, of which he is co-author. ‘With some dealers, their eye is equivalent to the best academic scholars, or better, because they actually learn from the objects.’

How does he feel about the infamous Mr Morgan with whose legacy his own is now entwined? ‘Of course I have mixed feelings about him as a human being, and don’t know that he would have accepted me as a friend. He was a tyrant, but he was a great collector. But you know, the robber barons like Morgan actually gave their fortunes back to society in the collections they bequeathed. Today’s billionaires are only worried about their ratings with Forbes. With all our moral superiority, Morgan belonged to a better episode in the history of wealth.’ Mr Thaw and his wife Clare have done their bit for philanthropy this end of the century, however. Besides their gift to the Morgan, they have donated a major collection of Native American art as a museum at Cooperstown, in upstate New York, and in Santa Fe, where they now live, they sponsor the restoration of historic adobe churches.

Since parting with his drawings bequest, keeping just a few around him ‘to decorate the apartment’, Eugene Thaw has started collecting in new areas, such as nineteenth-century plein-air oil sketches. With the mixture of bemusement and pride of a true collector, he notes how, thanks to a current exhibition of Corot’s followers at the Brooklyn Museum, many of these forgotten figures are fashionable again.

Mantegna

‘I’m especially proud of this Mantegna because of the difficulty for any collector to get a capital sheet of this early period’, says Eugene Thaw. There is little representation of Italian renaissance or even baroque drawing in his collection because he would have been hard-put to match the superlative holdings of the Morgan in this area. But when this presented itself, he couldn’t resist, and ‘luckily happened to have the funds at the time’. Like many Mantegna drawings, this had previously been attributed to Bellini, but relatively recently the matching of a related work to a Mantegna print led to reattribution of a whole group of drawings. ‘But anyway, I wouldn’t have minded if it was by Bellini’, he remarks with good humour. ‘I don’t collect for the value of drawings. I never resell – that was my whole career as a dealer, which gave me the money to collect these things. I’ve had the thrill of my eye being vindicated by selling again’.

Rembrandt

‘This is one of my earliest Rembrandts. It has such a sense of colour, he is able to use the medium to bring out such liveliness and light. It comes from a set of four sketches he made watching a parade; it’s a band of black musicians. It just says everything about his graphic powers, that he is able to put down so much in such a small sheet.’ ‘Rembrandt is an artist who is being rethought and torn apart by attribution these days. Seymour Slive has said that if there is one more conference, Rembrandt will cease to exist as an artist. Some of my pieces have not survived the various rounds of reattribution’, he concedes, although the four selected for the Academy exhibition are still reckoned to be by the master himself. ‘Actually, if they are great drawings by the best pupil, it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, if they are good enough to be in the Morgan Library, the next generation may put them back [in the oeuvre]!’

Goya

‘This is the peasant who loses everything. She is a universal, even an archetypal figure of suffering’. Thaw sees the grace and fortitude of the peasant who can say ‘Leave it all to Providence’ reflected in the tenderness yet monumentality with which Goya has drawn her, ‘the wonderful silhoutte of the figure against the page, the fullness of emotional content. It could be lifesize, and yet it is only ten inches high’. He doesn’t accept that there is any irony in the title. ‘Goya sympathized with these people. He was a figure of the enlightenment, a humane man like Goethe or Beethoven, but he also has a dark side. This really comes out in some of my other Goyas, in his sharp satire of the Majas, or in the cutting depiction of a monk being fleeced by card-sharks, but here the sentiment is different. He really sympathised with members of the lower orders. This woman is the victim of wars and revolutions.’

Cézanne

Eugene Thaw bought back this late watercolour, one of the set of around a dozen of this unusual size, from his client, Norton Simon. Simon was a collector who believed in hanging everything he owned, Thaw explains, but was worried that such a fresh and delicate watercolour on such a large, clean white sheet would suffered exposed to the California sun. ‘I managed to trade it out of him’. For many years this still-life took pride of place over the Thaw mantlepiece in their Park Avenue apartment. ‘This is one of the miracles of an artist’s hand. Cézanne who started as such an inept performer with a brush and pencil became the subtlest and most magical artist, almost oriental in brilliance of touch. It is so refined, its what the mind’s eye would see. Trying to refine a motif, he draws out of it a kind of abstraction; its a picture created by a mind rather than just a recording eye. This watercolour is just a miracle.’

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Imaginative responses to art can be scarce during bleak times. Unmediated responses are even less likely, thanks to the internet. A lot of contemporary discourse hinges on art-market trends, (e.g. Zombie Formalism), cultural analysis, and too little of the imaginative attention that can make talking about and looking at art more enjoyable. This aspect of enjoyability is what charms me about Swiss-born writer Robert Walser’s art writings, collected in a new book titled Looking at Pictures. The book was translated by the redoubtable Susan Bernofsky along with Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton. Walser’s art writings are playfully subjective, absurd, and they reveal a writer more engaged with pictures than artists and their educations or backgrounds. These musings, often not “about” the paintings, render art historical genre distinctions useless — at least while in the whimsical nowhereland of Walser’s vernacular.

Marcel Duchamp said “there are two kinds of artists: the artist who deals with society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it.” The latter is how I’d characterize Robert Walser. But unlike the dadaists, he celebrates aesthetic values, with a distinctive rigor of discernment and impassioned description, in place of frigid academicism or conventions engaged to meet expectations. Walser’s work is on his terms, ones that in contemporaneous eyes seem childish and strange. It’s a strangeness not for the sake of cuteness, but to point out the strangeness already built into things and situations.

In 1910, Walser wrote that the “imagination that counts is not the external sort, it’s an inward one.” This is a good way into his art writings, done from 1902 till the end of his career in 1930, a few of which were never published. In Looking at Pictures, context can be tenuous, but that’s OK: we don’t come to this kind of book for news or intellectual rightness, much less the truth. I don’t recommend a total lack of critical context, art historical or otherwise. Rather, I find that certain of our earlier belletrists remind us how to look in new ways. Like Giorgio Vasari’s writings about the artists of his times, Walser’s characterizations of people and the art of the past show a depth of feeling and a surprising poetic consciousness.

His takes on paintings by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Éduoard Manet, and his brother Karl Walser, among others, are often entirely irrelative to an art historical canon and can seem critically nascent; as Bernofsky and Christine Burgin point out, in Walser’s review titled “The Van Gogh Picture,” his intentions to compose a clear review are dashed by his having realized “that art criticism is not possible.” Walser goes on to add that “Not only is it impossible to say anything about the work — it is impossible even to begin to ’see’ it.”

One of my favorite parts of Looking at Pictures that had me doubled over, crying with laughter is Walser’s take on a tragicomedy, “The Brueghel Picture.” There’s nothing all that funny about Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Parable of the Blind (1616) — six blind men in a line stumble over one another — but Walser’s turn of phrase, his oblique point of view and illogical descriptive methodology relative to the painting’s subject, make seeing it now a different experience — as if the painting has transmogrified. Suddenly, each man in procession appears to be simultaneously guiding and jostling one another into his demise. The pit into which the men fall is now inevitable, irresistible, spellbinding each of these nincompoops: “Blind men are quarreling … people blindly hacking away at each other’s worthy, respect-worthy heads.” Walser adds, quite dumbly, that, “in a certain sense, all of us are blind, even though we have eyes to see.”

Elsewhere, Walser makes imaginary tableaus. His “analysis” of Rembrandt’s Saul and David (II) (1655–60) begins with a critique of power, a send-up of the contradictory state of a man having everything but “assailed by melancholia.” Walser leaps into a two-page fantastical scene wherein David’s harp plays a quoteworthy, aphoristic spectacle. One statement that “anger lacks greatness” is followed by the observation that “those in power must not forget that they are powerless, because they’re human. A thousand times more beautiful than living life is living for others.” These are worthy of the timeless wisdom of someone like Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō. “When we all have made peace with ourselves, no one will be left with an adversary,” Walser writes, presumably still gazing back at Saul and David.

Walser is at his best when he writes about the paintings of his brother Karl, as in his review of Portrait of a Lady (1902), a painting of a young woman reading in a park: “The green of the meadow is rich and warm, and speaks a romantic and adventurous language, and the whole cloudless picture inspires observant, quiet contemplation.” This gives insight into why, given his wont for flights of fancy in other of his prose forms, writing about art finds Walser at home. He ends with the assertion that “every living thing in the world should be happy,” and in case he hadn’t been clear enough, he punctuates it: “No one should be unhappy.”

A proletariat, son of a shopkeeper, Walser spent his later years in a mental institution (willful to the vicissitudes of modern society; no doctor was able to diagnose Walser as having any illness). He’d vow never to write again, resolved to live out the rest of his days so-called “mad,” obstinate to the end. “Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice by others” he wrote in 1926. 30 years later, some kids found Walser frozen dead on Christmas Day; he’d escaped from the hospital to wander. It’s not hard to imagine Walser looking at his world, then Switzerland, sufficed to take it in and appreciate it without having to describe it. Just like an artist, “He feels it, that’s all,” as Walser wrote in 1921, “and that’s how he finds it.”

Walser, Robert. Looking at Pictures. Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton (trans.) (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2015). ISBN: 9780811224246. 128 pages. $24.95

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October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

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October 29, 2014 to January 25, 2015
235 Bowery (between Stanton and Rivington streets)
New York City, 212 219 1222

“Chris Ofili: Night and Day,” the first major solo museum exhibition in this country devoted to the artist, is staged on four floors of the New Museum. At the lobby façade is his vinyl on glass Afro Waves (2002-03). On the second floor, there are 17 paintings from the 1990s, 26 small watercolors and pencil drawings, and a couple of sculptures. On the third floor, the pencil on paper Afro Margin drawings and an enormous room full of dark blue paintings. And, on the fourth floor, seven large pictures made in the past decade. Because these galleries are very large and extremely high, and so best not subdivided, they can be a difficult painters. But Ofili’s tall works really command the setting. This generous installation provides a really good understanding of his career.

In the 1990s, he favored single figures in a vertical format: the Madonna, some other women, and the phallus of Pimpin’ ain’t easy (1997). In the first decade of the next millennium, when Ofili moved from London to Trinidad in 2006, came the dark narrative scenes such as Blue Night Watcher (2006). And then more recently, inspired in part by a commission from the National Gallery, London, he began his compositions after Ovid — Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), for example — in response to the Titians recently accessioned by that museum and National Galleries of Scotland, the former Bridgewater loan of Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (1556-59). A large number of contemporary artists were been invited to respond to old master art in the National Gallery. Ofili responded empathetically and most successfully to this commission by enlarging the narratives of his earlier painting. In place of his icon-like frontal scenes from the 1990s, and the political ‘blue night’ pictures, he began to develop more complex narratives, some based upon Ovid, others presenting sacred texts.

As this masterful exhibition demonstrates, Ofili has a rare capacity for decorative, room-filling ensembles of paintings. Because his sources, in both old master and contemporary art, are so very varied, his ability to create an effective synthesis of the two, which cannot have been uncomplicated to achieve, is all the more impressive. If it is not easy, sometimes,to read his retelling of these stories, that is because this ability to generate decorative schemes doesn’t support focus on individual works:without knowing the titles The Raising of Lazarus (2007) and Ovid-Actaeon (2011-12), it wouldn’t be easy to identify these (very different) narratives. Because these pictures are gathered together by the high-pitched pastel colors of the recent narratives on the fourth floor and the very dark blues on the third, the net effect of his installations on both floors is much great than the sum of the individual pictures.

In Reflections on the Nude (1967), the British art writer Adrian Stokes speculatively described Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (1894-1905), recently acquired by the National Gallery as “among the first and perhaps the greatest works of a deeply founded cosmopolitan art which . . . (is) to pre-figure the eventual evolution of a multi-racial society.” He was thinking of its anticipation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon “and upon all those works that were so soon to forge the easiest of links with Negro sculpture.” I see Ofili’s recent painting, which makes excursions into such diverse sources as hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings and Blaxploitation films as an answer to this hopeful prophecy.

No service is done to the present reputation of this ambitious, wonderfully successful mid-career artist, however, by replaying the story of the reception of his The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum, as it is at length by several writers in the New Museum catalogue. Since, in that unhappy political controversy, the true merits of his art were not really at stake, why look back to 1999 when right now he is a heroic artist to reckon with? Having provided a magnificent installation, in its catalogue the museum has let him down. But that is a minor problem.

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Cézanne Site/Non-site was at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, February 4 – May 18, 2014

In this exhibition, curated by the museum’s artistic director Guillermo Solano, two concepts coined by the New York artist Robert Smithson during the 1960s have been used to explore aspects of the landscape and still life paintings of Paul Cézanne. For Smithson “site” was the outdoors and “non-site,” the studio. As well as nearly sixty watercolors and paintings by Cézanne, this exhibition includes twelve paintings by artists associated with him, including Pissaro, Gauguin, Derain and Braque. In 1967 Smithson argued that Cézanne’s formal achievements had been over emphasized — beginning with the Cubists — at the expense of the important relationship he believed the paintings held to location and environment. Although it might actually seem impossible, to overestimate Cézanne’s formal impact on painters who came after him – only two names need be mentioned, Matisse and Picasso – the consideration of the physical context in the production of Cézanne’s painting is indeed very rewarding. The exhibition rigorously explores the dialectic between open air and studio, convincingly demonstrating an eventual synthesis of the hitherto mutually exclusive experiences.   Whereas the impressionists concentrated on landscape alone, Cézanne consistently painted both landscape and still life, eventually seeking to integrate the two, erasing the boundaries  (both imaginary and physical) of inside and outside.

The exhibition has been sub-divided into five parts each addressing specific aspects of this two-way traffic. Portrait of an Unknown Man, which opens the exhibition,presents just a single painting, Portrait of a Peasant, 1905-1906.  One of the last paintings he is known to have completed before his death, the identity of the sitter is unclear and could easily be the artist himself,. Its inclusion illustrates how – given that the wall on which the figure sits is effectively dividing the studio area from the out doors beyond –the subject is situated at the juncture between inside and outside. There is much intermingling between broken brush mark and echoed color: the blue jacket, sky and rocks appear as if made of the same material and are treated across the surface in the same way, conflating distance and proximity. Cézanne appears to be proposing that human beings are just as much part of their environment as other organic elements are.

The point being made in the second section of the exhibition, The Bend in the Road is that rather than use the disappearing road as a means to lure the viewer into the recessive space of landscape, as is traditional in a landscape painting, the exact opposite happens in Cézanne. Rocks or trees block the view effectively closing off distance like a screen. A focusing of the gaze within a shallow picture plane is noted extensively by Michel Foucault in his lectures on Manet (Manet and the Object of Painting,2011) and this rejection of renaissance space and perspective that had already begun in Manet continues with Cézanne. In the studio, the “non-site,” still life is the structural mode.

Nudes and Trees explores the possible equivalence of these motifs. A key difference between the two, however, is that over a period of 30 years, Cézanne never painted a nude from life, in clear contrast with trees.  In the Chestnut Trees of Jas de Bouffan, (1885) with its sequence of trees through which – rather like the shaped, negative spaces between things in Piero della Francesa’s paintings – the relationship between figure and ground is clear but equal, with the ground acting laterally, a shape in itself. His trees can be viewed as sublimated anthropomorphic substitutes, again proposing the simultaneity of man with nature. The Phantom of Sainte-Victoire segment of the exhibition returns to the integration of landscape and still life by identifying the motif of Sainte Victoire in some of the still life paintings. The Buffet (1877-1879) and Stoneware Picher (1890-1893), both have crumpled, raised areas of tablecloth that in their faceted surfaces and silhouettes recall the mountain. Much as in Matisse’s paintings of his studio, the introduction and increasing use of cloth to cover angular forms suggests a desire for a less structured, more fluid subject. The control possible with the intimate space and form of still life rather than the expansive size of landscape is no longer seen as an alternative approach as structures from one can now be found in the other.  This leads directly to the final rooms of the exhibition titled Construction Game.

In still life, Cézanne brought haptic, concentrated and relational qualities to the fore.  Each object is precisely measured and visually placed so as progressively to undermine and transform their relationship, treating the objects and their closed surroundings to the same restless interrogations as geological contours found in mountain and rock surfaces. In the other direction, Cézanne finds equivalence in the use of built structures – houses and walls – when he isolates them like still life elements in the landscape. The house of House in Provence (1885) sits between vertical mountainous background and a horizontal grass foreground as if an object on a tablecloth, surrounded by comparable folds and layers. Smithson’s description of his studio sculptures as “indoor earth works” resonates with this commonality of still life and landscape, generating an unanticipated exchange between Cézanne and an entirely different engagement with landscape on another continent and half a century later.

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