April 7 to September 5, 2016
700 Independence Avenue SW (at 7th Street NW)
Washington D.C., 202 633 4674

“All the Rules Will Change,” a retrospective Robert Irwin’s art is the first to survey his oeuvre in the 1960s, and his first museum show outside of California since 1977. We get a thorough survey of his astonishingly swift development in that tumultuous decade. And there is a major new site-specific installation, Square the Circle (2015–16), which shows how Irwin made art after he abandoned painting in 1970.

In the late 1950s Irwin responded to, and critiqued, New York School Abstract Expressionism. From 1958 to 1960 he painted small, gestural abstractions, using oil paint, set in heavy, dark wooden frames. One, Form for Tomorrow (Gray) (1960) looks like a diminutive Cy Twombly. Sometimes, as in Lucky U (1960), Irwin depicts a painted form against a field of color. But he also constructed fields of gestural painting, as can be seen in works such as Untitled (1959–60). Irwin wanted that these hand-held paintings be picked up and examined from all angles; now, of course, when that’s not possible, they are mounted in a vitrine. Soon he did much larger paintings: Ocean Park (1960-61), just over five-feet square, is a good example, with heavily painted horizontal lines in brilliant background fields of color.

By 1962 he was making radically simplified large pictures, with a small number of parallel horizontals running almost the width of the painting. And within a couple of years he did near-monochromes in white — the dot paintings. When you stand back, they look pure white; when you get close, you see tiny red and green dots, concentrated around the center and thinning out at the edge, optically mixing colors that cancel each other out. Then, in 1967 Irwin did untitled acrylic paintings on thin shaped aluminum discs, four or five feet in diameter. Finally, at the conclusion of this period, Irwin painted columns, like Untitled (1970-71) in this show, which were illuminated from above with natural light. One can see in this development the seeds of Irwin’s later, large-scale installations, which create austere spaces that manipulate viewers’ perceptual facilities.

The Hirshhorn is a notoriously difficult site, more difficult even than Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling Guggenheim. The building is elevated on stilts and is shaped like a donut — the toroidal, curving walls presenting a significant challenge to a medium like painting. The best part of the museum is outside, in the sculpture park extending towards the mall. Irwin proposed an installation on the plaza beneath the museum. Judging just from the two small images in the catalogue, this would have been a marvelous use of a rebarbative site. Unfortunately, though, his plan was rejected. And so we have instead Square the Circle (2015–16), a scrim that runs along the inner wall of the galleries for about 120 feet in a straight line. Looking through the scrim, you see the curved inner wall; on the other side, you view the museum’s curved outer wall. I remember fondly Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light (1977), a transparent, bisecting wall reconstructed at the old Whitney three years ago. Suddenly a gallery in that too-often-claustrophobic museum was opened up in a liberating demonstration of the pleasures made possible by physically empty rooms. Square the Circle isn’t that good. Where Irwin’s Whitney installation drew your attention to the visual potential of the Breuer Building’s galleries, Square the Circle just reminds you of the problems inherent in the Hirshhorn’s architecture. This exhibition very effectively reveals Irwin’s dramatically swift development in the 1960s, and the essential continuity of his concerns since that time: having moved from quirky Abstract Expressionism to near-monochromatic paintings, his subsequent installations, removing any painted objects, draw attention to the setting itself.

A special genre of history writing is devoted to alternate histories In that spirit, imagine an alternate history in which in 1960, the New York art world disappeared, but with its concerns taken up by Irwin. Then the history of Modernism might look quite different. Art historians would explain how the Abstract Expressionists’ interest in gestural paintings led inevitably to the disappearance of the art object in favor of focusing on the gallery setting. It turned out, they would argue, that all the distinctive aesthetic features provided by the abstract paintings of the New York School could be presented more economically by scrims. And so the history of Modernism would take us from Henri Matisse through Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, forward to the singular figure who worked out the implications of that Modernist tradition: Robert Irwin. One reason that this exhibition is challenging is that it asks us to imagine that the entire recent history of art might have been different.

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Barry Schwabsky’s new anthology, The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), collects his columns for The Nation between 2006 and 2014, providing a clear record of a surprising variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. We get his response to shows of old masters and modernist heroes — Diego Velázquez, Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse — and his often-critical views of famous senior contemporaries, such as Alighiero Boetti, Dan Graham and Ai Weiwei. We also get his sympathetic take on a number of lesser-known and emerging artists, including Laurel Nakadate, Zoe Strauss, Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. And in the introduction, as well as in many of the reviews, readers get brief, instructive statements about the present-day role of art criticism, the contemporary art market, and about the role of art schools — three of the art world’s perpetual quandaries.

As art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky may be reasonably compared with the most famous holder of that post, Clement Greenberg. When Greenberg championed the Abstract Expressionists, calling them the only legitimate heirs to early French Modernist tradition, he appeared a prophet. By contrast, Schwabsky, modestly recognizing in his introduction that contemporary art critics have only a marginal practical role, aspires “to open up […] perspectives without, I hope, belaboring them.” While Greenberg provides a skeleton history of Modernism from Edouard Manet to Jackson Pollock, it’s abundantly clear that no such master narrative can conceivably extend into the present. But now, Schwabsky suggests, thanks to “an inner transformation in the nature of art itself,” it solicits “participants, collaborators, communities.” For this reason, the role of politics has also changed. Greenberg’s art writing, guided by Marxism, sententiously contrasts high art and kitsch. For Schwabsky, however, the goal is to “let the critical distance between art and politics — between my writing and its context — display itself.”

Schwabsky’s presentation of these important arguments is very elliptical, so I hope that elsewhere he will spell them out. Here is how I would place them: after art history became an academic subject, in the 1960s Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss (and her followers at the journal October) attempted also to turn art criticism into a discipline housed in the university. In pursuit of that goal, they introduced a methodology and technical vocabulary into writing about contemporary art. But this project failed. And so nowadays our best critics are poets (like Schwabsky), journalists, or perhaps moonlighting academics such as Schwabsky’s immediate predecessor at The Nation, Arthur Danto. And this means that Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire and even Adrian Stokes (the maverick 20th-century English writer who is repeatedly cited by Schwabsky) remain the most relevant role models for critics.

Schwabsky is an eloquent, compulsively quotable writer. His essays, he says, “aim to keep art unfinished.” Without ever seeming to try too hard, he is very effective at summarizing artists’ achievements in tightly coiled felicitous phrases. Kara Walker’s “instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist,” he nicely observes, is “the aesthetic equivalent of what the marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition.” Gauguin’s Polynesian women, he suggests, are “almost indecipherable. […] Something in them remained as mysterious to him as he was to himself.” I love it when he calls Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) an “immersive and synecdochical painting.” And I admire him when, in a surprising review linking the abstract paintings of Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries, he suggests that they both “aspire to grandeur — with a pictorial vocabulary that to some may seem painfully narrow.”

Critics, whose raison d’être is to scrutinize particular works, need to have a sensibility — which is to say that they are unavoidably more personal in their enthusiasms than art historians. But art historians deploy a method, and so generalize. Suppose, then, that an art historian devoted to contemporary art were to read The Perpetual Guest (as many no doubt will). What general view of the subtitle’s “art in the unfinished present” would she come away with? Schwabsky’s account of how Nancy Spero’s “effort to unmoor painting from the Western tradition finally did converge with Matisse’s earlier one” would show how our best critics link contemporary art with its antecedents. Reading in his discussion of Christopher Wool that “The price of things is crowding out the value of things” would reveal how skeptical our critics are about our overheated art market. And studying his account of Gordon Matta-Clark — “artist of fragments (who) left an oeuvre that feels whole” — could inspire the art historian to resist conventional critical clichés. Above all, I would hope that the contemporary art historian responded to his very dry sense of humor. His analysis linking the prospects of abstraction with Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?,” for example, is worth more than a lot of formalist or sociological analysis. “A dominant aesthetic,” says Schwabsky in his account of the 2009 Venice Biennale, “always undermines itself.” At this time — when older formalist and Marxist theorizing is no longer applicable, but has not, as yet, yielded to new approaches to art writing — he offers a reliable, necessarily unfinished guide to the dilemmas of the present.

Schwabsky, Barry. The Perpetual Guest. Art in the Unfinished Present (London & New York: Verso, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2. 304 pages. $24.95

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Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture at Michael Werner Gallery
January 28 to March 26, 2016
4 E 77th Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York, 212 988 1623

Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
March 3 to April 23, 2016
515 W 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage at Alden Projects
March 5 to May 8, 2016
34 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)
New York, 212 229 2453

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) was a late starter, only becoming a visual artist when he was 40, having spent 20 years trying to make a living as a poet. And he died relatively young, on his 52nd birthday. But as demonstrated by three concurrent shows — at Paul Kasmin, Michael Werner, and the Museum of Modern Art — he was highly productive during a short period. An additional show at Alden Projects displays exhibition invitations, posters, letters, and other similar materials.

There are 200 works, on view at his MoMA survey, including books of poetry and photographs, works made before Broodthaers formally entered the visual arts. His transition can also be seen there, when he turned the unsold copies of his last volume of poetry into the sculpture Pense-Bête (“Memory aid,” 1964), his first artwork, for his first solo exhibition. Once he turned to making art, he created a number of sculptures, which recycle mussels and eggshells, his signature materials. They are ordinary, used-up organic forms. Mussels are often served in Belgian restaurants and he thought of them as poetic. Mussel shells, he wrote, are hulls, two conjoined complete forms. And eggs, of course, are symbols of life and fecundity.

He put eggshells on furniture in Armoire blanche et table blanche (“White cabinet and white table,” 1965), on painted canvas in Untitled (Triptych) (1965-66), and in a box labeled as containing exhibition invitations, in Je retrouve à la matière, je retrouve la tradition des primitifs, peinture à l’oeuf, peinture à l’oeuf (“I return to matter, I rediscover the tradition of the primitives, painting with egg, painting with egg,” 1966). Cooked mussels are found piled in a pot in Grande casserole de moules (“Large casserole of mussels,” 1966) and displayed in crates in Parc à moules (“Tray of mussels,” 1966).

In 1968, announcing that he was no longer an artist, Broodthaers appointed himself director of his own museum: Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (“Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”), an installation project that began in his home and was later restaged at documenta and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. MoMA displays documentation — announcements, films, slide shows and also objects — generated by that career. One finds postcards of paintings, maps of the museum, photographs of the exhibitions, slide shows and display cases. Untitled (General with cigar) (1970), features a found thrift-shop painting of General Philippe Pétain (treasonous Chief of State in Vichy France) with a cigar stuck in his mouth, part of Broodthaers’s recurring interest in smoking and its prohibition as poetic and bureaucratic propositions.

Four years later, in 1972, Broodthaers announced that he again was an artist, and hired a sign painter to print words on canvas, and on the walls and ceiling of a gallery. He made Série en language française (Series de neuf peintures sur un sujet littéraire) (“Series in the French language, Series of nine paintings on a literary subject,” 1972), which includes “Andre Gide smoking,” “Paul Valery smoking,” and so on. And, written in English, he produced nine painted canvases, Série anglaise (“English series,” 1972): a set of prints featuring the names and birth and death dates of English luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and others.

Starting in 1974, he recycled his earlier work, employing old-fashioned displays with palm trees, carpets and 19th-century display cases, in exhibitions that he documented on film, calling them “Décors,” which can be translated as “installations” as well as “film sets.”

The gallery shows provide a valuable supplement to the MoMA exhibition. Uptown, “Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture,” at Michael Werner, focuses on his writing, one of his major concerns, and includes collages, drawings, films, collage, sculptures and one of his décors, Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (“Say Everywhere What I Have Said,” 1974). In Chelsea, Paul Kasmin presents paintings on plastic and Broodthaers’s books, along with the reconstruction of another décor, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas it- Le Perroquet (“Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So — The Parrot,” 1974), a recording of him reciting his poem “Moi Je Dis Mois Je Dis Je…“

Starting with Hegel, and extended by Marx and, more recently, by any number of Marxist critics, the idea that history (and art) proceeds by critical negation has become received opinion among many leftists. This is how T. J. Clark understands Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, and how Theodor W. Adorno described Modernist music. And it is how Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who contributes to a catalogue produced for the MoMA retrospective, understands Broodthaers.

By now, however, it should be apparent that art-as-critique has become a ritual, just another artistic tradition. Our museums (and art galleries) embrace their most distinguished critics. Just as the once-feared “death of painting” has yielded an ongoing tradition of painting, so the deconstructive art of Broodthaers has become part-and-parcel of both the gallery system and the public art museum, though he certainly aimed to upend this dialectical narrative by such acts as the destruction and/or reuse of his own previous work. Duchamp showed that any banal artifact might become a readymade; Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons demonstrated that a replica of a commercial product might become art. Hans Haacke made commercial art critiquing the commercial gallery system, and Broodthaers (among others) revealed that anti-art might itself be the subject of display and commerce.

I suspect that some leftists are frustrated by this situation. I’m fascinated with the ways that our culture honors and supports its critics. The narrative of the Hegelian dialectic, which is the conceptual basis for this process of negation, has come to a standstill, which isn’t to say that the history of art has ended, as Hegel feared-and-hoped, but only that the seemingly radical pursuit of negating gestures, having become an end in itself, is a source of objects which are as aesthetically delectable as any Modernist masterpieces. Broodthaers critiques the art world from within, and so leaves its practice, to which he contributed, more firmly in place. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh argues that Broodthaers disputes “the false and preposterous claims that artistic practices could engender radical political or cultural transformations.” That, I think, is not quite correct. In fact, the present apotheosis of Broodthaers as an artist is a radical cultural transformation, just not the liberatory one that people of the arts so often talk of in vague and longing terms. Indeed, in a marvelous posthumous revelation of the reach of Broodthaers’s idea, MoMA is publishing a limited-edition facsimile of his book Atlas (1975). The deluxe version, which contains a supplement, the uncut press sheet included by Broodthaers in the original publication, is sold exclusively at MoMA stores.

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From late Antiquity to the advent of modernism, the story of art in Europe was, mostly, the tale of Old and New Testament sacred art. Religion inspired the subjects for much of the most ambitious painting and sculpture—and churches, the sites for this art. Nowadays, however, the art world and religious people are only rarely in productive contact. Hardly any of the canonical modernists were religious. Indeed, the best-known exemplars of twentieth-century sacred art, Henri Matisse’s Vence Chapel and Mark Rothko’s Houston chapel paintings, were created by men who were not personally religious. And so it is singularly unfortunate that in the 1980s the ambitious project for an Italian chapel by Andy Warhol, who was a practicing Catholic, remained unexecuted. Given, then, this history, these publications of ambitious religious art by two well known mid-career artists are most welcome. A book-length commentary would be needed just to inaugurate a full account of the thirty-seven images from Genesis by Bell and the six hundred and fourteen (a cover illustration plus the 613) pictures of regulations of Jewish law by Rand. As it is, here we must be limited to describing just a very few.

Who, thinking of God’s creation of Adam, cannot almost involuntarily recollect Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image. How wonderful, then, that Bell creates a wholly original image, setting the naked, standing first man within a field of yellow containing the shapes of the animals and birds Adam is naming. And when we get to the Garden of Eden, another so much represented scene, how imaginative of Bell to show the serpent in the foreground, egging on Eve as Adam sleeps in the background. The scene of Noah’s ark is perhaps less familiar. (I recall a very fine, though much decayed Uccello fresco, depicting the flood, in Florence.) It depicts Noah in the foreground, carrying a stout plank to the construction-in-progress. Bell, it may seem, is a figurative artist with a rather traditional style. And yet, how imaginative, indeed how boldly original are his pictures, and how varied! A singularly dark picture shows Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac. And when he gets to the scene of Isaac blessing Jacob, he creates a fluttering field of light-and-darkness, a marvelous way of illustrating the frailty of Isaac’s eyesight. Bell’s subjects may be very traditional, but his figurative style is, so I believe, very much a product of late modernism. See his backgrounds, which sometimes derive from 1960s abstraction, and the ways that sometimes he flattens the images of his actors; and, as I have noted, in the dramatic way he foregrounds some of his human figures, not unlike Philip Pearlstein, with the frame cutting across their limbs.

In the Introduction to The 613 Rand tells the story of his youthful lessons in Hebrew and Jewish Scripture, and how, more than four-decades ago he invented an iconography for his painting of the entire interior of a Brooklyn synagogue. Why now six-hundred-and-thirteen commands? If you’re as “umvisndik” as me, you’ll find that Wikipedia answers that question:

these 613 mitzvot can be broken down into 248 positive mitzvot (one for each bone and organ of the male body) and 365 negative mitzvot (one for each day of the solar year).

Obviously Rand had a lot of work on his hands. His visual style owes a surprising debt to comic books, though minus the word bubbles. And the fully saturated colors perhaps derive from German expressionism. As for his visual sources—they are many. “27 Not to worship idols” riffs on Edouard Manet’s The Spanish Singer at the Met; “31 Not to make Gods of Silver or Gold” alludes to Henri Matisse’s early visually-luxurious paintings of textiles, in a nice comment on that commandment; “283 Not to systematically pick fruit in the seventh year” borrows Edgar Degas’ nubile ballerinas; “44 Not to prophesize falsely in God’s Name” tells the fairy tale of Humpty Dumpty’s Fall—its visual source eludes me. And the bird in “177 To be careful to eat only clean birds” seems to come from Pablo Picasso, as does the woman in “456 “To observe the laws of impurity caused by an irregular discharge.” Only, so far as I can see, he never alludes to Marc Chagall, perhaps because the latter’s images are by now clichéd.

But if there are such allusions for most of the rest of these images, I cannot identify them. Perhaps that is because many of the commands themselves are a little obscure—like “79 To wear phylactyeries so the laws will be a pendant on your forehead.” (Why is there a rocket ship in the background of the image of that mitzvah?) Or maybe the problem is that I cannot remember enough comic books, for they seem to be a fertile source of Rand’s art. “566 Judges must not accept testimony unless both parties are present” cites Andy Warhol’s Dick Tracy. Superman, as everyone surely knows, is Jewish, which helps explain, I am not kidding, “439 One who is cured of a skin disease must bring an offering after immersing in the ritual bath.” Often the images are funny—“91 To remember and sanctify the Sabbath by blessing wine and lighting the conclusionary candle,” for example, has to be seen to be believed. So too does “139 Not to have relations with your mother” in which a man is sawing through the tree limb on which he sits. Or look at “115 On that night to explain the meaning of Passover” which is aptly characterized by the blurb from Art Spiegelman on the cover of Rand’s book: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Wow!’” Many of the commands must have been real challenges. Who else would dare to illustrate “158 Not to have homosexual relations with your father,” a command which inspires a ‘fishy’ response from Rand? The horn of plenty, the shofar, is said to be notoriously difficult to play. Rand is a virtuoso instrumentalist—I am in awe of his inventiveness, essential good will and his sense of humor. I can’t believe that every reader of this review isn’t going to rush out and purchase The 613.

What’s the right visual style for presenting Christian or Jewish texts? Because there aren’t many recent artists offering answers to this question, Bell and Rand have had to innovate. Neither of them suffer from any anxiety of influence. Why should they, when no earlier artists have created such manically strange images? At the conclusion of his great, long art history survey Mirror of the World (2007), Bell writes: “What happens next in art is up to you.” Now, as if they were both responding upon that statement, he and Rand offer a challenging view of what will happen next: artists could turn to illustrating sacred texts.

Julian Bell, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (Lewes: St Anne’s Galleries, 2015) ISBN 978-0-9934321-0-1, £45

Archie Rand, The 613 (New York: Blue Rider Press: Penguin/Random House, 2015) ISBN 9780399173769, 640 pp, $45

The post In the Beginning was the Image: Julian Bell and Archie Rand Paint the Bible appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 3, 2015
515 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 244 2579

It’s customary for galleries to display their artists’ newest works. That is understandable, for we want to see how these figures are developing; we usually leave it to museums to offer a broader historical perspective. But it can be very instructive, also, to study the origins of a now-celebrated artist. Bill Beckley started showing art in 1968, at the moment when change was in the air in New York. He was one of a group of now-legendary artists associated with the pioneering Soho Gallery at 112 Greene Street — they included Louise Bourgeois, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dennis Oppenheim. This densely packed exhibition provides a good overview of his first decade of artmaking.

“The Accidental Poet” included Myself as Washington (1969), a photograph that anticipates Cindy Sherman’s playful studies of personal identity; and the text with photograph Joke About Elephants (1974), a precursor of Richard Prince’s joke paintings. There is Rooster, Bed, Lying (1971), a bed underneath a chicken wire cage housing the live rooster who was present at the opening. In Photo Document for Song for a Chin-up (1971), which was performed by a tenor at the opening, a tenor sings while doing a chin-up. Artists of the previous generation, the Pop painters and Minimalists, who came of age in the 1960s, defined the unity of their concerns by creating distinctive visual styles — a Warhol, like a Lichtenstein or a Donald Judd, is unmistakably their personal product. Early on in his career, Beckley, as a figure of the next generation, thought differently. What links these visually varied early works together is what might best be called a consciously eccentric poetic sensibility, his irony-laced fascination with unexpected sensory pleasures.

Beckley is interested in the relationship between the ways that words and images tell stories, as in Cake Story (1973), in which a photograph of a piece of cake is accompanied by a short funny story musing on the commonplace expression, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” And he is fascinated with juxtapositions of events in the news with his photographs and texts — Mao Dead (1976) is a good example, with its reproduction of a headline announcing Mao’s death; two mysterious photographs and a short story about reading a newspaper. One basic, longstanding rule governing the visual arts is that pictures and words tell stories in essentially different ways, and so should not be mixed together. This is why the comic strip, that bastard art which promiscuously mixes image and text, is generally thought a marginal art form; comics, it is said, are books for weak readers who need help from images. By bringing words into his visual art, Beckley—along with some other artists of his generation such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner- decisively demonstrated that this traditional way of thinking was all wrong. In De Kooning’s Stove (1974), for example, his written account of de Kooning supplements our understanding of the accompanying picture of a red stove. And in First Sexual Experience (1974), the photographs play against the text, which they frame.

Beckley is an unusual figure — a visual artist who can write — and so it’s worth considering the meaning of the title of his exhibition. How did he find himself to be accidentally a poet? Beckley perhaps answers this question when he tells this story: in 1969: he was walking while painting lines directly onto the ground, making From Sunrise to Sunset, recording his work in photographs. He then imagined a more ambitious plan, painting a line across the Delaware River. Halfway across, however, the current took away his camera, and so, with no visual documentation remaining, his telling of the story became the work of art. When he got to ground on the other side, he discovered that he was at the spot of George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware, a scene archived in Photo Album—Washington Crossing, March 10 1969 (1969), which consists of a postcard showing Washington accompanied by Beckley’s written commentary. By presenting the record of how he avoided making his painting, he thus created this elusive work of art, a story that (for all I know) may be totally fictional. Near the end of the period presented in this show, the first decade of his career Beckley expelled words from his art.

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain (1975-1994) leaves just the visual narrative with the red (hot) faucet on the left and the blue (cold) one on the right, with the yellow drain in between. He discovered that images alone allow him to tell stories. Recently, however, it’s worth noting, he’s returned to writing. The story-telling impulse, so it seems, is not easy to suppress.

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Understanding the origins of artistic genres is tricky. When is the first pure European landscape painting? To answer that question, we might need to exclude the landscapes appearing behind narrative pictures presenting New Testament stories. When is the first still life? To resolve that debate it may be necessary to look beyond Renaissance storytelling scenes in which still life objects are present in the foreground. The creation of a novel artistic form does not merely depend on the development of artistic skill. Piero della Francesca painted landscapes within his narratives — and Raphael showed still life objects within his. But they didn’t make landscape or still life paintings. What matters is when artists created autonomous art form.

Identifying the first abstract painting is also tricky. A great deal of pre-Modern decoration now looks abstract. But if abstraction in painting is identified by the rejection of figuration as artistic goal, then such designs are not really abstractions, even if they look like abstract paintings. An abstract work of art, it would seem has to be made intentionally. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish artist who, starting in 1906 and inspired by the theosophical writings of Rudolf Steiner, made many large non-figurative images. She also produced conventional landscapes and portraits, exhibiting as a professional artist. Her will stipulated that her abstract works should not be seen in public for at least 20 years after her death, because she felt that the world was not ready for her spiritual message. Her abstractions were displayed in the group exhibition “On The Spiritual in Art” in 1986 in Los Angeles, and, more recently, in 2005 in the exhibition of three women at the Drawing Center in New York. They were shown in a recent large-scale solo exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction,” which toured in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. This book complements that show, documenting an eponymous symposium. The images are fascinating: biomorphic forms or geometric diagrams connected by curving lines and accompanied by words float on pale-colored backgrounds. Whereas it’s easy to see that Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian’s more-familiar early abstractions are derived from landscapes, it’s not obvious how to interpret these pictures. Steiner is a not a theorist usually read by present day art critics, but his writings, and those of other theosophical figures, were a major influence on early Modernism.

The 19 essays in this book, all clear and all interesting, cover some topics: the early abstractions of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian; J. W. Goethe’s color theory; and the story of Rudolf Steiner’s visual ideas, which are only tangentially related to the theme at hand. And while there are 42 good color plates showing her art (along with many black and white plates, some duplicating those presented in color), we’re not given dimensions of these works, nor information about their location. The real trouble, however, is that the personality of af Klint doesn’t come into focus. Some commentators treat his images as works of art — others disagree. While I can understand the desire of the publisher to present diverse points of view, this presentation, with frequent repetitions of basic information, is simply confusing. It’s not clear how she wanted her images to be understood. Some of the writers call them works of art, while others disagree. She wrote extensively, but most of her notebooks have not yet been studied. Neither are we given a full account of the Swedish art world of her time. And so it is still hard to evaluate these images on her terms. These images have some claim to be the first abstractions, pioneering works by a previously marginalized woman artist. But if they are really diagrams — large, colored versions of the pictures found in spiritualist books — then maybe they are not meant to works of art at all. If in fact the surviving documentation is unlikely to answer these questions, then why not say so in as many words?

Ultimately, of course, these complaints are beside the point: now that her works are well known, we may reasonably hope that they will attract more scholarly attention, as they deserve. In the catalogue for the 2013 Venice Biennale, in which af Klint’s art was presented, Massimiliano Gioni, who was the exhibition’s director, offers an interesting perspective. His show, he writes,

Blurs the line between professional artists and amateurs, insiders and outsiders, reuniting artworks with other forms of figurative expression—both to release art from the prison of its supposed autonomy, and to remind us of its capacity to express a vision of the world.[1]

Perhaps, then, to understand af Klint we need to avoid a rigid distinction between spiritualist diagrams and abstract painting. After all, Renaissance altarpieces, which originally served sacred functions, nowadays are treated as works of art and so placed in museums.

[1] Gioni, Massimiliano. “Is Everything in My Mind?” Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), vol. 1, 23.

Almqvist, Kurt and Louise Belfrage, eds. Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible. (Stockholm, SE: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0989890212, 348 pages, $46.50

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April 9 to May 9, 2015
547 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 242 7727

How can abstract painting develop — and what kind of history can this art form have? Figurative painting proceeds by identifying new subjects, and, also of course, by painting familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways. Obviously non-figurative art cannot develop in an exactly similar way. Kandinsky and Mondrian backed into abstraction by stages, as did Jackson Pollock. And then once abstraction became an ongoing tradition, working in series provided one way of keeping going. Such otherwise diverse figures as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Mangold develop a composition, rework it until it is exhausted, and then move on. What abstract artists legitimately fear nowadays is falling into a signature style, the repetition of a basic composition in varied colors — Kenneth Noland’s chevrons in various colors would be a good example of that. If abstract art is to transcend mere decoration, it is essential for it to find some deeply imaginative way of developing.

Sometimes an exhibition review must deal with such general questions. The gallery publicity for “Transgressions” cites Bill Jensen’s very numerous inspirations — African tribal art, Chinese poetry and philosophy, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, and Russian films. And it offers an eloquent description of his surrender to a fascination with process, and his striving to avoid “preconceived outcomes.” The critical question, then, is how these very disparate influences can be synthesized in his paintings. We have the heavy black line drawing of Transgressions (Flesh) (2013), the brilliant colors of the triptych Loom of Origins (2014 – 15), the blood reds of Mountain Tiger-Sky (2013); and the drips and painted hands of Angelico, Angelico (2012-15). And the nearly all black Now I believe it peak (Huangshan Mountain) (2014 – 15). Each of these paintings is splendid — each of them could, I believe, be one work in a strong show. But seeing them together is like seeing a group show of oddly diverse artists.

Jensen is a much admired senior artist. By sticking to his guns at times when abstraction has been beleaguered, he earned our respect — and the right to be boldly experimental. That said, this is the strangest show, by miles, of a famous artist that I have seen in a major gallery. It’s a very daring exhibition, for it’s as if Jensen wants to put everything in his paintings. Up the street from Cheim & Read is Thomas Nozkowski’s show at Pace. Nozkowski is regularly praised (or blamed) for the variety of his compositions, for his refusal ever to adopt a signature style. His pictures are very varied, and yet, a Nozkowski is always identifiable. What, by contrast, I find in Jensen’s show is a boldly promising incoherence. This is why I admire Transformations even as I fail to understand it. But who knows what I’m missing: I have been wrong about ambitious artists before.

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Lawrence Carroll: “Ghost House” was at Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, December 12, 2014 to April 6, 2015

In the late 1970s, when I was making my way from academic aesthetics to writing art criticism, I was vastly influenced by the magnificently original series of “Iconicity” essays published in Artforum by Joseph Masheck, who then was editor of that journal. Masheck argued that to properly understand contemporary abstraction, we need to revisit the entire history of Western art. According to Clement Greenberg’s account, which remained influential, abstract painting is the ultimate product of the flattening of the deep old master picture space. When there no longer is any room for figurative subjects, then art had to become abstract. Rejecting this analysis, Masheck rather drew attention to the ways in which the Byzantine sacred tradition was involved with literal uses of the stretcher and the picture surface. Guided also, perhaps, by some precedents in the revolutionary Soviet avant garde circa 1917, some contemporary abstract art (what he called “hard-core painting”) embraced that seemingly forgotten tradition which was concerned with the literal properties of the medium.

Masheck’s very imaginative commentary was not easy to follow. And, ironically, the contemporary figures he championed who now are most distinguished — Jonathan Lasker, Thomas Nozkowski and Sean Scully — have developed in ways that have little to do with his concerns. But history can sometimes be surprising, for Lawrence Carroll, who arrived in New York around 1984, has, apparently entirely unconsciously taken up Masheck’s concerns. This ambitious retrospective, in a former bread factory, presents 63 paintings, some of them very large. At the entrance, on the diptych Untitled (1989-90), are the words “I am alone.” Here is a box mounted on the wall, Untitled (1990); the Untitled floor piece (1992-94), the skin of a painting on the corner of the floor; and the Untitled, table painting (2006-2014) a construction on a pedestal which has a slight resemblance to Anthony Caro’s tabletop sculptures. As you walk through the 10 rooms, you can see Carroll taking painting apart in its components, and reassembling it. Mostly his paintings are untitled; when there are titles, often they are descriptive. He inserts one panel into another, as in Untitled, insert painting (1986); constructs a vertical assemble of frames, in Untitled (1988); draws black bands across the surface in Untitled (1986); presents a box on the floor in Yes (Floor Piece) (2000) or, in Untitled Yes bag (2014) as a bag on the floor; installs the painting on the wall, Untitled shelf painting (1985) in one example or, as in Untitled flower piece (2014) leans it on the wall. Occasionally, as in Untitled light painting (2014) a light bulb is attached to the picture plane. Sometimes panels extend off of the wall, as in Untitled hinge painting (2013). One singular work, Untitled No. 51 (1993) consists of canvas folded on the floor. And some of the pictures, Untitled box painting (2006-14) is one example, are wall-mounted boxes. These paintings are very varied.

Carroll is always a painter, never a sculptor, and that’s a statement compatible with the fact that he sometimes works in three dimensions. In the almost 30 years of work on display here, there’s no obvious sense of development. You sense that from the start he’s known how to proceed. He owes something to Carl Andre and Donald Judd, but unlike these Minimalists he always retains a personal touch and is not interested in repetition as such. And although he has some affinities with Robert Ryman, he is a more varied and, I think, a more sensuous painter. Upstairs on temporary display is the collection from Museo Morandi of a very different, very relevant figure, whom he admires greatly — Giorgio Morandi. Interested in the varied qualities of his medium, Carroll almost never is concerned with image appropriation. “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on,” he has said, “so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting.” This statement does not, I think, entirely explain his ongoing originality. More, perhaps to the point, he speaks of his desire to anchor himself to the world. “I needed to find my own way with the materials I was using.”

Recently MoMA presented “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” a much discussed exhibition. According to the curator, when now everything has been done, all that is left to artists is to recycle prior visual discoveries. “The obsession with recuperating aspects of the past,” Laura Hoptman writes, “in the condition of culture in our time.” When I started writing criticism, the same claim was presented: everything has been done, we were told, so artists are doomed to merely recycle. It’s hard not to see this as a very pessimistic worldview — who would care about visual art if genuine originality were in fact impossible? No doubt this is a very New York perspective, from a city in which there are so many competing young artists. But this vision of art is demonstrably false, for much remains to be done. In movies, black-and-white defines a flashback, taking us back to an earlier moment prior to the main narrative. Perhaps this is how we should understand Carroll’s lack of concern with being a colorist — he takes us back to the 1980s. He has said: “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on, so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting.” Carroll is as good as anyone anywhere I know who is painting right now. Compared with him, almost all contemporary artists are noisy, lacking in trust for their medium. The happiest contemporary painter whose art I have had the pleasure of viewing recently, a very American artist, he’s not had a solo exhibition in New York for 15 years.

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The Space Between at the New York Studio School
February 13 to March 22, 2015
8 West 8th Street (between Macdougal and 5th Avenue)
New York, 212 673 6466

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition. And the juxtaposition of a little two-sided painting Woodland Stream, Martha’s Vineyard/Chilmark Landscape (1922) by Thomas Hart Benton with a glorious drawing from his pupil, Jackson Pollock Untitled (folded greeting card) (1946-47) is a marvelous demonstration of how varied art whose making is part of its meaning can be. So too are the 23 drawings by Kit White, as illustrated in his book 101 Things to Learn in Art School (MIT Press, 2011), which present details from works by such varied painters as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol.

The press announcement for “The Space Between” identifies a key theme in Studio School teaching. Between-ness, this text suggests, may allude to the space between forms in the picture plane, between abstraction and representation, and, also, between pictorial symbols and the three-dimensional space they symbolize. Here, then, we find a variation on FreedmanArt’s theme, for speaking in these varied ways about betweenness is to allude to awareness of the process of art making. No wonder, then, that Bill Jensen and Graham Nickson are in both shows, for Jensen’s abstractions and Nickson’s figurative images provide pleasure thanks to both their subjects and our awareness of the painting process used to present those subjects. The same is true, comparing two other works on display at the Studio School: contrast, I would suggest, Margrit Lewczuk’s magnificent large Untitled (2009) with Stanley Lewis’ View from Studio Window (2003-4). Sometimes the most revealing survey displays are found not in our museums but in the galleries — here in small galleries. You could teach a whole history of Modernism using just the art on display in these two richly suggestive shows. That is a great, generous achievement.

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January 8 to February 7, 2015
515 W. 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

When viewing a painting, we usually have some conception (perhaps vague) of how it was made. We know that doing frescos required marking off sections of the wall, starting with sinopia, the underdrawings underneath the painted surface. We realize that an old master easel painting done in oil pigment involves a different manner of making, one more readily accommodating of reworking of the image. And we are aware that Modernists, too, employed diverse techniques — Morris Louis poured his abstract acrylics, as if making a tie-dyed shirt, working in a studio too small to allow unfurling his canvases, while Andy Warhol used silkscreens made from his photographic images to paint portraits in the Factory. In this marvelous show we see that Dokoupil, too, has added to the repertoire of art-making techniques. Starting in the early 1990s, he has made soap bubble paintings by placing metallic pigments and diamond dust on soap-lye, and allowing these forms to settle on his canvas. To properly understand the expressive significance of these works you need to know how they are made.

Everyone knows the children’s game in which you plunge a shaped wire into the liquid solution, and then wave it in the air, making small soap bubbles, which float upward, capturing the colors of the rainbow as they swiftly vanish. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (1733-1735) shows such a game. Viewing his painting, you are reminded that sometimes visual beauty, like life itself, may provide only fleeting pleasures. Dokoupil’s much larger, industrial scale bubbles, they are a-foot-and-a-half across, glow in high-pitched, pale colors set on an absorbent black background. Because normal soap bubbles are transparent, you look through them. In his big paintings, the largest are three meters square, those fleeting soup-bubble effects are fixed permanently, as if depicting glowing enlarged microscopic images — but of what? The pictures look like abstractions, but it could be argued that they are representational pictures with an unfamiliar subject. However we identify their content, they certainly are very beautiful works of art. And being presented in Kasmin’s magnificent 27th Street gallery, one of the most visually welcoming Chelsea spaces, significantly enhanced this exhibition. Looking from the street through the glass entrance wall, even before entering you could see the glowing paintings lit from the row of skylights.

Contemporary art, Dokoupil seems to be saying, can still have the magical power to give pleasure by making transient visual effects permanent.

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