February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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While there are only eight objects on display in “Irving Sandler: Out of Tenth Street and Into the 1960s” at Loretta Howard Gallery, the spare installation amplifies the presence and power of each of them. Together they form a sacra conversazione of high modernism. A large-scale Ronald Bladen and a small, two-part George Sugarman share a visual sensibility but differ wholly in attitude. Phillip Pearlstein and Al Held meet along two adjacent walls and trade ideas about how to use large shapes to divide the rectangle. Paintings by Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, and Alice Neel discuss their commonalities in figuration, while a faintly figurative Mark di Suvero sculpture holds itself aloof.

At the center of this conversation is Irving Sandler, who witnessed the labors of these artists as they set down their individual paths in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. With figures such as de Kooning and Pollock having established themselves as giants, there was enormous interest in – and heated arguments about – what younger artists were to do in their wake. On the eve of the show I spoke with Sandler in his Greenwich Village apartment not far from where it all happened a half-century ago.

Franklin Einspruch: The exhibition at Loretta Howard Gallery represents a fascinating time, in which some of the most important developments in modern art are taking place around a tiny cluster of cooperative galleries on Tenth Street. Ambitious artists with big personalities are lending their elbow grease to make it all work.

Irving Sandler: Tanager Gallery started in 1952 and moved up to Tenth Street in ‘54. I worked there from ‘56 until around ‘59. The artists in Tanager, I grew up with them — Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd. Mostly Phillip and Alex. Across the street you had Brata Gallery, which had George Sugarman, Ronald Bladen, and Al Held. They became very close friends, all three. They were my closest friends on Tenth Street except for Mark di Suvero, who was next door from Brata, at the March Gallery. So these were my guys, this show I put together. I thought I chose pretty terrific artists to be best friends with.

Of course, Alice Neel was older and pretty mean. She constantly needled me for not writing about her. But I wanted her in the show to indicate that Tenth Street was not one thing. Clement Greenberg identified something called the Tenth Street Touch, which he meant as the School of de Kooning, or action or gesture painting, but it wasn’t all like that. There were 200 artists showing there. Art was very much all over the place. Although there was a dominant style and that was gestural painting.

By the time Greenberg was referring to the Tenth Street Touch, he meant it as a pejorative.

Definitely. We all considered it a pejorative. People began to regard gestural painting as having run its course by ‘58. Greenberg of course was promoting — I use that word “promoting” deliberately — color field abstraction. Here in the apartment we have one artist who probably did it first in ‘52, Ben Isquith, now all but forgotten.

But by 1958, certain artists, particularly the guys in the Loretta Howard show, felt that gestural abstraction was used up. Katz and Pearlstein thought that figuration was in crisis, and that they had to move it towards literalism, fact, and specificity. For Ronnie Bladen and George Sugarman, welded construction didn’t offer any new possibilities and they began to do other things. There was no consensus, but they felt for personal reasons that they wanted to do something new.

Of course there was Robert Chamberlain working in kind of an action or abstract-expressionist mode. There was also di Suvero. But they were thinking of people like David Hare and Ibram Lassaw. These were leading sculptors of the ‘50s, now forgotten. Theodore Roszack and Seymour Lipton have had major shows of their work. Hare not yet, Lassaw not yet.

You’ve seen contemporary art history operating for long enough to have witnessed some artists getting taken into the institutions and preserved, while other artists are forgotten. Is that process historical and thus in some way fair, or is it more political and arbitrary?

It’s hard to say. My next book will be about that, why styles change. There’s an audience that wants for reasons of its own to see new pictures. It’s these reasons I’m trying at this point to figure out. Of the group who became the so-called New Realists, Katz has become the most prominent. Do I think it was justified? Absolutely. Phillip too in an entirely different way.

How about the people who have been forgotten?

I don’t think that’s at all justified, it just happens. Some of these people are very fine artists. There are older abstract expressionists, artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, who’s wonderful, or James Brooks, or William Baziotes, who in their time were considered major figures. But it seems that art history has a way of constantly narrowing the field, and wonderful artists end up languishing in doctoral dissertations. But they can be rehabilitated.

Does that winnowing process happen in the same way as it used to?

I don’t know. We are in a time of such total pluralism, it’s hard to know why lightning strikes where it does. In my day, in the days of high modernism, things developed rather more regularly and we could see a kind of progression. That didn’t mean that we liked it, and that didn’t mean that we didn’t go out and really hammer it, because it was competition. I think of my response to Frank Stella, for example, which was: if that’s art, then anything I stand for is something else, and vice versa. But we very quickly saw why it was happening, and the necessity for it.

But after 1970 it becomes very difficult to understand. The modernist era splays open. I wrote that at one point it looked like a mainstream, and now it looks like a delta. It’s all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with that, it makes artists freer than ever before. The problem is, how do you get attention? My students put that up as the major problem of their careers, to get somebody to look at their work.

It’s hard to comprehend how much larger the art world is now than it was in 1958.

In 1959, when I counted, the entire New York school consisted of, at tops, 250 artists, probably closer to 200. You could know everybody. I knew everybody. There were twenty galleries worth seeing, and you could visit them all in an afternoon. There are what, 600 galleries now? In Bushwick, upwards of fifty! We didn’t have to look past Manhattan. And we had a community, a real community. These 200 people had The Club, which I ran from 1956 to 1962. We had our bar, the Cedar Tavern. There were the openings, and there were constant studio visits. We were geographically concentrated in a very small neighborhood.

Today it’s all over the place. That’s why I said that past the 1970s, I followed developments closely, but I can’t think of it in the same way as I did before. It’s very difficult for artists to come up with anything new in the modern sense. They can make wonderful art, and there’s a great deal of wonderful art around. But you go to Chelsea today and you have to move fast, there’s so much to see. Your whole way of looking has changed. You can’t stop too long.

If you visit twenty galleries, you’ll see nineteen shows that are okay, maybe. A lot of them are bad, and the rest are nothing to change your life. From this you can conclude that American art is in the pits, that nineteen out of twenty shows didn’t move you, or you can say, “Hey, wow, that one show!” Take your choice, it’s the donut or the hole.

Which way do you lean, the donut or the hole?

Oh, I definitely lean to the donut. I cannot believe, many of my former best friends notwithstanding, that art suddenly stopped short. There’s more of it, and much of it is really very good.

How important is community to the advancement of art? You could look at the show at Loretta Howard and theorize that you need the likes of Dodd and Katz and Pearlstein together, that caliber of character and intensity of connection, in order to make art go forward.

You see, you’re talking about a modernist idea. I’m not sure whether art goes forward. At one time we thought it should go forward, and there was an avant-garde, and we were embattled, and among ourselves we fought bitterly. But I don’t think art goes forward. It’s either interesting or not, moving or not.

Is it possible that art was moving forward in 1959, but after 1970 it stopped?

I think so, or it moved in different directions, and you could see a kind of progression, but only in retrospect.

If you were an advocate of abstract expressionism as I was, and then in 1959 you were suddenly confronted with the black paintings of Frank Stella, that was another world. If you were committed to art, you were shaken up. The same thing with Warhol and Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, particularly Warhol in 1962. Even artists who weren’t quite that radical but in their own way using common objects like Oldenberg and Dine, that stuff looked unprecedented. Our idea was that high art and low art just didn’t meet. Read early Greenberg and early Rosenberg on that — they called it kitsch.

Doesn’t Alex Katz’s work touch on that overlap? It must have been a bit of a shock at first to see him doing those aluminum constructions like the one at Loretta Howard.

Katz is an artist who is absolutely attuned to what he sees around him. He notices billboards and widescreen movies. He understands fashion, and how fashion changes. He is aware of being contemporary, Baudelaire’s idea of the dandy. Not that he’s a dandy, but he has the attitude of the flâneur.

Whereas Phillip Pearlstein is looking backward.

I see what you mean. Phillip looked back to the history of the nude and tried to figure out what had to be done. That turned out to be of interest to Pop artists and the hard-edge people, in that he had taken the painterly image like those of Elaine de Kooning and he made it specific.

There were all these arguments going on among the artists and the critics, and of course that’s part of the fun. But my suspicion is that people find that they have more and more in common as time goes on.

I don’t think they think so, but I think so. Al Held and Phillip Pearlstein, who were close friends, were aesthetic enemies. Pearlstein stood for realism, Al stood for hard edge abstraction, and they were at one another’s throats. They wouldn’t show together, but I showed them together at Cunningham Gallery because I was interested in the affinities.

Both you and Phillip Pearlstein were in the military. How long did you serve?

Three and a half years, in the Second World War. I enlisted in ‘43 and got out in ‘46. I was supposed to do the invasion of Japan, and was supposed to be killed, which had we landed would have happened in fifteen seconds. But Phillip was in Italy. I don’t think he saw combat, I certainly didn’t. After sixty or seventy years I still carry this.

For the record, I’m looking at Irving Sandler’s United States Marine Corps Certificate of Satisfactory Service. He is ranked as a lieutenant and identified by his thumbprint.

It’s called a Good Conduct Discharge. It happened so long ago they hadn’t even invented photography. Being a Marine changed my life, but that’s another world, and my memoir doesn’t go into any of it.

Was your going into the art world a reaction against your military experience?

Absolutely not. I enlisted when I was 17. When I was commissioned I was probably the youngest officer in the Marine Corps. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I loved the Marine Corps. Because they brainwash you, a lot of that love remains. I remember during the Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf punched the First and Second Marines through the Iraqi lines. The Second Marines was my marines. What an upsurge of pride! So those feelings are still there.

And yet the intellectual atmosphere around your artistic milieu was communist. There was a burgeoning interest in Marxism.

Well, that would have been earlier on, in the ‘30s and ‘40s into the ‘50s. In the ‘60s everything changed, and it became political, in a countercultural way.

But we could do something back on Tenth Street that you can’t do anymore. We could live on nothing, and have the so-called Bohemian life. My rent was $17 a month. You could get a good studio for $30 a month. At a dollar an hour you could pay your rent in seventeen hours. You were free! We could just look, do what we wanted, and try to find what it was that we wanted to do. And I found art.

Is the art world more political than it used to be?

Oh yeah. As a matter of fact, because of the hangover of social realism, the art world as I knew it tended to be relatively apolitical. Politics were not discussed at The Club. There was a kind of indifference to it. We talked about art, not politics.

What were the circumstances of your coming into Tanager?

I decided to enter the art world after an epiphany in front of Franz Klein’s “Chief” at the Museum of Modern Art. I didn’t know quite how to do it, but I knew I wanted to know more about it, and as I said I was free to figure it out.

After that a lot of accidents happened. I went up to Provincetown with a girlfriend. We were supposed to camp out on the dunes. One night of that and we got a place in town, and I got a job as a dishwasher at Moors, a very fine Portuguese restaurant. One of the waiters was Angelo Ippolito, who a member at Tanager Gallery. We became friends. When we came down to New York he got me a job at the Tanager. They needed a sitter. So I worked there, and was really well paid — $20 a week. This was when my rent was $17 a month.

I went to the Cedar Street Tavern every night, and nursed one 15-cent beer the whole evening. Even after I got married in ‘58 I still went. I got to know artists and listened to them, and got invited to galleries. But working at the Tanager was my real entry.

Anything that had to be done in the art world that nobody wanted to do, I did. So when The Club was on its last legs in 1955, there was a meeting to disband it. Elaine de Kooning said, “This has been going on since 1949. It would be wonderful if we could keep it going, if only someone would volunteer.” Silence. Then I said, “I’ll do it.” So not only was I running Tanager, I was running The Club, and soon after I was writing for Art News.

What was the attitude about criticism at the time?

We critics were sort of mildly inferior people. However, people like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were major intellectuals, and public intellectuals. They would be treated differently than someone like myself who was a kid on the scene. But the artists also liked admirers, and they liked whipping boys, and we fulfilled both functions quite well. Though Tom Hess, him you didn’t mess with because he was very smart and very fast and he ran Art News.

There was an interesting mixture of condescension and awe.

More condescension than awe. If you wrote a bad review, you made an enemy for life. If you wrote a good review, it was just assumed the artist deserved it. You couldn’t win either way. But that was okay because at one point I decided to write a history of abstract expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting, and for that I needed these guys. The information had to come directly from the artists. If I got condescended to, okay. Luckily I’m the kind of person who never knew when he was being condescended to, a quality which infuriates my wife. It never bothered me.

In contrast with other writers we associate with that era, you have a communitarian spirit. It’s almost as if you regard artists as family.

Yes. Criticism can be a lot of things. At Art News I could assume that the audience was sophisticated, and I only had to write reviews of a hundred to 300 words. But when I became the critic for the New York Post, my function as I saw it was to educate. I really didn’t care about what was good and what was bad. I wanted to know what the art was and present it to the public. The judgment came in when I chose what to write about. If I didn’t like an artist’s work I just didn’t write about it. Unless he was a big gun, and then I’d run after him. If I thought the reputation was unmerited he was fair game.

That’s the situation we’re in now in criticism, with so many artists working. The decision to write about one of them is the first and main act of judgment.

Art critics have been sidelined by the market. In the 1950s, when there was really no audience outside of our own group, taste was made by artists. De Kooning was considered one of the great artists because artists thought he was a great artist. In the ‘60s, art critics, particularly the younger art critics in debt to Greenberg and writing for Artforum, became arbiters of taste. And then in the late ‘60s the collectors and the dealers became the tastemakers. Now a handful of billionaires are determining taste by commanding attention.

Did you feel at some point that you had to deliberately cultivate a voice? Did you look at other writers to emulate or not emulate?

I personally didn’t. I think the critic-poets in the ‘50s like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara probably did. Frank became a model for younger critics like Bill Berkson. No, I had another process. I had no sense of style. I still don’t. I figured the only thing I could do was make my writing as clear as I could, and that’s what I did. No jargon, no bullshit, just make it clear. It was a terrible struggle to put down what I wanted to say in words that other people would understand.

The simple process of turning a visual experience into a verbal experience is difficult. Jargon can sneak in. Bullshit can sneak in. You get to talking about spirituality or God or all sorts of other nonsense. Although that’s what you’re really trying to say!

Did that put you at odds with what the artists wanted you to write about them? Bladen, I know, had a spiritual streak.

In Bladen’s case he did all sorts of specific things I could point to and say, “Hey, that looks spiritual.” You could know what I meant. Hans Hofmann said that when you put two colors together they create a sense of the third. That third color isn’t there, so it has to be spiritual, right? So you can do that.

What are the takeaway lessons for the contemporary art world in the exhibition up at Loretta Howard Gallery?

That’s a very interesting question. One of the things I was interested in was how fresh and terrific the work looked. In terms of the contemporary experience, I really don’t know. This is my history, and it’s the artists’ history. A few of the artists in the show no longer have the kinds of reputations they had in the past, and I like the idea of rehabilitating them. Even Bladen. Sugarman, possibly more. Of course neither Katz nor di Suvero need it, they remain very much in the public’s eye. Lois, who’s got a slowly building reputation, I would like to see more of her work. She is really very good. As a person she is about as modest as they come. She doesn’t say much, but she paints beautiful paintings.

It’s much harder today than it was back then because there were relatively so few artists. But I think that would be my main idea, to bring these guys up and say, “Hey, take another look.”

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January 23 to March 1, 2014
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
(The Fuller Building, 13th Floor)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Something mysterious happens when a painter commits impressions of nature to canvas. Even though the act of painting involves reductions—simplifications of form, omissions of detail—expressiveness is liable to expand. For an artist liberated by this re-ordering (and the best are), a richness of vision supplants the sheer plenitude of nature. Lois Dodd is clearly such an artist, and her latest paintings at Alexandre shows that even after six decades of exhibiting she hasn’t missed a step.

The thirty, mostly small paintings of houses, landscapes and flowers reflect her familiar, idiosyncratic outlook: the probing, often mischievous curiosity about the appearance of ordinary objects, and the peculiarities of translating them to a flat surface. As always, Dodd hides none of her process, rendering masses in broad planes that serve as foils for agile, darting detail.

In March Snow (2013), the artist captures the minimalist scene of a neighbor’s dormer window—glimpsed, apparently, from her own second-story window—with confident color and an appealing lack of decorum. The pale, dense yellow of the facade gives way to a slightly more neutral—but somehow vastly open—yellow of sky. Nature elaborates on this pas de deux, and Dodd relates: scraggly branches reach upwards beyond the house, while snowflakes filter downwards in the space between it and our point of view. Red Shirt and Window (2013) relishes the sight of a clothesline-suspended shirt, scrawny but exuberant, against the great, mounding arc of a bush.

Riddles of details punctuate the unfolding prose of Window with Amaryllis Plant (2012). A slender, green stalk winds sinuously in front of a house’s austere verticals. A conversation circulates between a window sash lock, the house’s chimney, and a twist of yellow-green in the flowerpot—all equal in dimensions on the surface, but thoroughly apart in space.

The exhibition includes nearly a dozen close-up paintings of flowers —floral portraits, really. In some of these, an evenness of color imparts a handsome, if not particularly urgent, graphic effect. More compelling is Bishop’s Children & Monarch Butterfly (2007), in which the variety and density of color impart a dramatic depth; the uppermost blossom hovers with vivacious breadth.

In fact, it’s the paintings with the densest designs and colors that reward the most. These include Foxglove and Wheelbarrow (2006), in which broad swathes of green—of various temperatures, and lightened in places by thinned brushstrokes—silhouette a wheelbarrow’s crisp, shadowed forms. It holds midway between a foreground blossom—close enough to touch—and a sky that hangs distantly despite its patchy texture of steely grays. In Barn and Bean Vines (2013), a far-away building, resting among small eruptions of trees, is dominated by the fantastically sculpturesque column of a bean vine in the foreground. With these paintings, Dodd is in her element, shaping complex rhythms with playful ease. They exude an affection for nature that never resorts to sentiment, and an occasional archness that never descends to the merely coy.

The post Nature, Reduced But Full: Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

July 20 – August 13, 2011
12 Elm Street
Rockland, Maine, 207-594-5935

The name of Lois Dodd has come up a few times in recent conversations with artists I respect. I finally got to see some of her work in person at a solo exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine. I was expecting the sort of painter’s-painter painting in which the very brushstrokes inspire admiration. Instead I found a picture of the Statue of Liberty working at an easel plein-aire.

Liberty Painting in N.Y. Harbor (2002) is no technical marvel. The easel is bent so as not to go off the edge of the panel and it appears to be resting on the outline of Liberty Island. Lady Liberty has no mouth for some reason. One can make no sense of the hand that holds the palette.  Yet there is something undeniably charming about it. Note the Twin Towers in the background, then note the date. This little painting is a terse summary of artistic defiance in the face of disaster. We are going to go on creating, it says. We can put the towers back as easily as daubing four gray lines.

Critics often lament that visual artists have not responded adequately to 9/11. Upon seeing this painting, I think Dodd delivered the appropriate message in full. Anything further would be unnecessary elaboration. The mauve shadow on the underside of the easel and the panoply of olive greens that make up Lady Liberty show that she has plenty of skill to get the job done. But there’s a more urgent matter at work. She has something on her mind that needs expression, and she isn’t going to let a couple of technical hiccups get in the way. That accomplished, she moves on to find the next subject. The quirkiness is the incidental product of a person being herself.

Consequently, her oddities are usually persuasive. The artist participates in a drawing group in Maine in which the owner of the property models outside, among the woodpile and gardening tools. Later Dodd paints from her drawings, creating works such as Nude and Bridge (2010). The figure is a violet silhouette modeled, slightly, with flesh tones. The face consists solely of a nose. She is posing with, of all things, a bicycle. The background is made of improbable greens. But it all works in its way. Dodd evokes Bay Area Figuration in miniature, with the human form reduced to bold sweeps of the brush and other playful re-imaginings of things seen.

The selection on view at Caldbeck dates to 1968 at the earliest, with a wide sampling of years between then and 2010. You can see her spending decades asking herself what around her is interesting, and answering differently each time. One day in 1993, it was Elliott’s Place, a tiny white house perched on the side of a hill. As architecture it is unremarkable, but Dodd found art there. The hillside curves downward just as the power line curves upward. Elms pick up the light gleaming off the facade, tapping out a rhythm of pale gray verticals across the rectangle. Greenish umber fills the foreground and the sky, unifying the scene with a forest shadow. On another day in 1976, it was two squirt guns and a swimming mask, arranged into a striking composition of blue and orange. Once in 1985, it was downed autumn foliage on a bright October afternoon.

One common thread is the paint handling, thin and brushy with a minimum of modification. Over the decades, her subject has varied from still lifes to burning houses to whimsical scenarios involving nudes, but her method operates within narrow confines. She’ll impose strong designs, but abstraction for its own sake is out. She’ll paint the figure, but she’s not interested in the traditional realism that figure painting entails. She’ll paint flowers, but she avoids botanical exactitude. She’ll invent scenes, but there will be no illustration.

Furthermore, the subject has to be interesting for no good reason. If there’s a reason, she questions whether it’s a good subject. The paint has to do nothing except exist as paint. If it becomes polished or fussy, she questions whether she’s on the right track.  There is nothing wrong with the concerns that she has excluded, except that they impinge upon a simple problem of determining what is presenting itself to her attention and then painting it. Dodd’s take on the one-shot style proceeds from a position of purity – a temperamental purity, not an ideological one. Although they didn’t say it in so many words, this is the reason good artists had me seek her out.

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Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to discuss Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery, Ellen Phelan at Gasser Grunert Gallery, Laurie Simmons at Salon 94, and Krzysztof Wodiczko at Galerie Lelong.

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“Ena Swansea: situation” at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert through October 9 (524 West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 807 9494)

“Lois Dodd: Flashings” at Alexandre Gallery through October 2 (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 13th Floor, 212-755-2828)

Will Cotton’s latest paintings give new meaning to the term “eye candy.” His four canvas show at Mary Boone continues a photorealist preoccupation with the motif for which he is best known, confectionery, but forcibly fuses it, this time, with what had been a second subject, the erotic female nude.

Mr. Cotton’s candyscapes collide the genres of landscape and still life, constructing spatially ambiguous vistas out of perceptual and digestive excess. Usually there is a gaudy overload of sweet things, whether icecreams, chocolates, familiar mass-produced goodies like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, or toffees and caramels in a molten state, rendered in suitably sickly, saccherinne hues. His modus operandi is to photograph complex constructions of such stuff and render a painted image in a deadpan academic hand.

“Cotton Candy Cloud,” (2004) confines itself, with twisted restraint, to a single treat, cotton candy, unless we semantically join his sexist orgy and classify the voluptuous reclining redhead as a sweet thing, too. The puffing pinkness cannot begs to be read as an eponymous stand-in for the artist himself: its folds have the feel of musculature.

Art historically, the image overtly references Cabanel and Bougereau, the nineteenth-century “pompier” classicists, and in so doing recalls Mr. Cotton’s own education, which was completed at the New York Academy, which promotes “technique” in the beaux-arts sense of the word. Mr. Cotton’s nudes, more Vargas than Velazquez, lag behind his confectionery in sexiness.

The problem with them is that they come with baggage: The more he tries to make them voluptuous, the more they recall a grand tradition of which, by painting with giant quote marks around his own expressivity and curiosity, he can but be a testy footnote. They aren’t at all convincingly drawn from life, but nor is there an interesting sense that they derive from a specific kind of artifice, in the way, for instance, Cecily Brown uses hardcore pornography.

This deprives them of the warped frisson of vitality enjoyed by his cookies and chocs, ambiguously poised as they are between reality and artifice, a readymade pun as they are on the synthetic. On their own, the still-life motifs were intriguing, if not enticing, in a Jeff Koons kind of way. With the addition of his lethargic classicism his ice-cream melts away into silliness on a par with Lisa Yuskavage.

His delivery contrasts with the great modern master of the creamcake and spandex nude, Wayne Thiebaud, whose still startling images of pies and cheerleaders found in such proto-Pop imagery an apt metaphor for painterliness. Mr. Cotton’s images have some initial energy thanks to their kitsch overload of slick rendering, but that turns out to be the pictorial equivalent of a sugar boost. A Thiebaud is good enough to eat, but a Cotton gives you very little, aesthetically, to get your teeth into.

Ena Swansea also treads ground between artifice and reality, though with radically different results to Mr.Cotton’s. Her figuration eschews academic formula, and endures the awkwardness that inevitably arrives in its wake.

Her show is consequently uneven: some canvases are belabored by nerdishly rendered inanimate objects like an automobile or an air conditioner that upset the delicate ratio between transparency and opaqueness. And yet, other images are energized and animated by an equally pronounced but expressively more convincing awkwardness. Despite a couple of turkeys, the best paintings make this exhibition one of singular power and importance.

Like Mr. Cotton, Ms. Swansea had, earlier in her career, achieved a slick, contained, fully resolved still-life style before succumbing to the temptation of human subjects. In her case, ambiguous shadows cast by flora and vegetation produced images of compelling beauty. Her turn to figuration seems less a style gambit than an expressive necessity.

Her shadowplay led to experimentation with elaborate set-ups, in her case utilizing the camera oscura. The new imagery extends the photographic metaphor. One picture, of a child’s head, is entitled “color negative,” (2004): like all the works in the show, it is painted on a ground of graphite, a material of sinister ethereality, at once leaden and other-worldly.

Ms. Swansea can paint with exhilerating facility: “devil on the road,” (2004) an ambiguously poised, goggled and spandex-clad red demon casting his shadow on shimmering, near-molten asphalt is a suitably devilish display of convincing, beguiling and deft painterly sleights of hand.

The real show stopper, though, is a 15 foot long dinner party scene that recalls a Tintoretto last supper in its compressions and foreshortenings. This image, at once timeless and a painting of modern life, offers an appropriately enebriated perspective: the distorted still-life arrangements and stilted figure poses have the eye lurching between ease and alienation, speed and arrest. In its fusion of fluency and awkwardness this rich, complex work recalls Manet at his weirdest.

Short mention must be made of a compact display of tiny oil sketches by Lois Dodd at Alexandre, the septugenarian’s third show at that gallery in two years. Actually, the show, propped on ledges in the gallery’s foyer, warrants close attention-critical and appreciative: it is exquisite fun, and surveys 50 works from as far back as 1990.

These plein air paintings are done on roofer’s flashings, thin, aluminum panels of five by seven inches. As such, they are like postcards from the front line of observational painting. The medium, eccentric and yet practical and effective, is true to this artist’s character: Ms. Dodd is one of the true mavericks of American painting, a quietly audacious realist whose quirky, enigmatic, yet empirical and heartfelt observations of the rural scene make her the supreme “artist’s artist” of the New York school.

These lyrical yet hardnosed sketches capture, in completely unaffected simplicity, such phenomena as floral color contrasts, subtle noctornal lighting effects, movements of water, a shimmering breeze. At this size and speed, the artist’s affinities with her better known contemporary, Alex Katz, and their mutual mentor, Milton Avery, are clear, but so too is her utter individuality.

In scale, slickness, and “attitude” Ms. Dodd could not be further removed from either Mr. Cotton or Ms. Swansea, but she does share with the younger artists an intuitive sense that oddity and credibility can make happy bedfellows.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 16, 2004

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“brush, pencil, chisel, knife”
511 Gallery, 511 West 25 Street (212.255.2885).

Industrial Beauty
George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street (212.645.2621).

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration
Axel Raben Gallery, 526 West 26 Street, (212.647.9064).

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions
George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57 Street, 212.644.5665).

Versions of these reviews originally appearedThe New York Sun on Thursday, July 22 and Thursday, July 29, 2004

Willard Boepple: Sculpture

Willard Boepple is a sculptor whose vocabulary draws from the look and language of architecture. Architecture is a social art, a reflective instrument of the society for which it builds. Any sculpture that aggressively refers to it, leaning on the prestige of the architect’s craft, makes itself vulnerable to distinctions between the communal aims of architecture and the more individualistic ones of fine art. It risks the charge of mimicry, which is what remains once structural complexity, weight-bearing concerns and purposes of shelter and assembly are removed.“Room” (2000) is a nine foot high skeletal house-shape in patinated aluminum. Light on its feet and open like a trellis, each of its four sides resembles the leading of Frank Lloyd Wright’s characteristic stained glass windows. Here are the same closely paired verticals on each side of a broader rectangle, joined at intervals by short parallel bars. Where quadrangles of colored glass might be, Mr. Boepple drops aluminum panels perpendicular to their posts to serve as shelving.

Viewers are likely to wonder where on the lawn this shining gazebo would show to best effect. Seen straight, unfiltered through the lens of stylish discourse, it is unmistakably an upmarket garden folly. Picture it covered with wisteria vines, shelves stocked with dahlias and wild strawberries in Italian pots. Yes, I know the thought is inadmissible “in the ateliers of any pedantic fine art,” to use Wright’s phrase; and it is hardly what Mr. Boepple intended. But what an artist intends and what he achieves are not identical. It is a fallacy to confuse them.Mr. Boepple’s three dense, painted poplar “temples”, each from 2003, suggest compressed tabletop rearrangements of David Smith’s rectangular forms for “Cubi IX” (1961). Anyone interested in modern sculpture will be reminded also of the cubical variations of Jacques Schnier and Hans Aeschenbacher from the same period.

Designated as temples, Mr. Boepple’s block configurations assert kinship with the ancient megaron, precursor to Doric structures. (The megaron informs Wright’s Unity Church, which he referred to as a temple.) But Mr. Boepple’s suppressed entrances do not lead to any interior sanctum; they go clear through to the other side. Sacred space is displaced by a box puzzle, a simplified maze that exposes its own blind alley. If you rest a drink on top, no deities will be offended.

brush, pencil, chisel, knife”

511 Gallery (formerly Miller/Geisler) celebrates its name change with a group show of 13 of its artists. The exhibition is ambitious, aspiring to stretch common understanding of what constitutes painting and sculpture. It promises art that moves beyond crusty constraints to become more elastic in definition.

Lurking here is the assumption that tradition is an antique, like the stiffened antimacassar on the back of great-grandpa’s chair. It is an attitude aimed at audiences who comprehend tradition as a reiteration of the past rather than an inheritance to be interpreted by each generation for its own purposes.

511 showcases the fruits of that mistake. Post-industrial folk art is the reigning genre. Unlike the pre-industrial kind, made by untrained individuals, the post variant is a mass product forged in an art school vernacular. Outsider art is now insider art, a reversal enabled by pundits, promoters and academics for whom artwork exists as a mere incident en route to the commentary.

Jennifer Odem dyes a cheap crocheted table cloth red, soaks it in acrylic medium, then flops it on the floor to set. Ed Fraga takes the votive path with “Cathedral” ( 2001), a crude plywood construction that cobbles a headless Christmas ornament with a tiny landscape cut to the shape of a palladium window. Epoxy is his crucial medium. Matt Ernst’s series of small “Guideboats” (2002) gives a good imitation of the sort of thing children carry home from camp. Mark Cooper’s “Endless Column” (2002) is a roadside totem, cousin to ones that appear along the East River Drive under the overpass to the Triborough Bridge.

The most persuasive works are by those artists who are not straining for a style. Bryan Le Boeuf’s “Trois Bateaux” (2004), the centerpiece of his recent solo show, gives evidence of maturing to certain artistic convictions, something quite different from style. He combines sympathy for the human figure with a quirky, mildly surreal compositional wit. Watch to see where he takes it.

Sculptor Mark Mennin is similarly satisfying, mindful of the traditions of his craft. His single, small marble “Head” (2003) is a finely worked mask of a fleshy, homely male elevated by materials to a solemnity the model might lack in life. It projects from the wall at a slight angle, reminiscent of medieval gargoyles or a portrait head from the sedilia in Westminster Abbey.

Popular appreciation of landscape hinges on the romance of a good view. By contrast, the scenery of urban infrastructures—the natural setting of urban artists—is more challenging.

Even middling painters can produce attractive pictures of beautiful places. It takes more robust sensibilities to seek order and grace in city sights readily ignored. Easy pleasure is not available. Viewers are on their own to discover the emotional keynote to scenes that have nothing picturesque about them.

Industrial Beauty

“Industrial Beauty” exhibits cityscape paintings and drawings by 24 artists. So much intelligent work is here that there is not enough column space to give it its due. Let me start with Stephen Hicks who impresses with the beauty of his paint handling and the vigor of his perceptions. He brings emotional depth to ordinary street corners and mobile homes. Pitch-perfect color and careful drawing, disguised by the fluidity of his paint, elevate these small paintings above the random realities they depict.

Elizabeth O’Reilly draws magic out of the 3rd Street Bridge and derelict buildings on the Gowanus Canal. True as her paintings are to their locations in and around Red Hook, they serve as microcosms of the effects of modernity on the outer boroughs of every city. She shares with Mr. Hicks a lively brush and an optimism toward her subjects. Nicholas Evans-Cato’s wide-angled “Panorama” (2003) captures the atmospheric damp of rain-washed streets. Shadowless gray light, cool tonalities, gleaming puddles and sweep of space evoke Gustave Caillabotte’s Paris on a rainy day.

Ron Milewicz’ “Court House Square” (2003) is a coloristic tour de force, subordinating naturalism to the geometric structures of his motif and a high-keyed palette. The Citicorp building in Long Island City looks glorious in yellow. Geometry is also the hallmark of Rick Dula’s imposing cement factory, mathematical clarity of form taking precedence over subjective sensations.

Andrew Lenaghan negotiates the complexity and visual clutter of urban scenes with an ease of concentration that reminds me of Antonio Lopez-García’s great views of Madrid. So much is depicted, you barely notice how much is merely indicated or left out. Sudden touches of subtle color move the eye around the canvas; smooth surfaces belie the actual density of his paint.

Lois Dodd’s characteristic insouciance lends a hint of whimsy to factories in Jersey City. Richard Orient’s Long Island fish hatchery is touched with the same melancholy that informs rural barns. Thomas Connelly reveals the controlled order of a loading dock; his nightscape of a commercial lot is a harmony of brooding tones.

Diana Horowitz’ courtesy toward the man-made landscape is a constant pleasure. So is the work is Roland Kulla, Stephen Magsig, Constance La Palombara, Andrew Haines, Stanley Goldstein and others here.

Apart from Ms. Dodd, the show contains few names known outside New York painting circles. If celebrity is your guide to quality, you might as well catch the next Hampton jitney. But anyone with eyes will be glad to have seen this show.

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration

Collaboration in the arts has a long tradition; and pooling skills to extend the range of individual talent is a worthy activity. So I had hopes for this show.

I should have known better. Unlike the anonymous cooperation of the old workshop system, contemporary couplings exist to produce a two-headed prima donna. In Axel Raben’s exhibition of nine artist pairs, art work takes a rear seat to the synthetic dyads which are the true artifacts. Viewers are thrown into the faithless arms of the press release for guidance.

David Humphrey & Jennifer Coates have a game going: one suggests a subject; the other draws it. Thus, a “composite authorial self” is created. Drawings include a bare-bottomed Santa squatting to pass snowflakes; a cartoon cat biting a bunny beside a plateful of maggots. In this way “habits are disabled, inhibitions are dissolved … and skill-shortcomings encouraged.” Precisely.

Laura Lisbon & Suzanne Silver investigate “the mutual interference of layered mark-making.” They take turns scribbling on legal paper and post-it notes with colored pencil, likening their process to the Talmud (compiled over centuries by multiple commentators). To support their self-assessment, they exhibit their email correspondence, a text inclining to the grand.

Creighton Michaels, an otherwise attractive abstract painter, foregoes painting here for a conceptual gig. He inserts twig-like dowels individually into the wall, creating visual patterns similar to those in a kid’s book of mazes. Mr. Michaels’ installation is lit, sort of, by James Clark’s fluorescent bulbs in plastic bags. Bulbs are spotted with thumb prints, like a perp sheet. Team effort is deemed “an environment … a land of a thousand dances.”

Craig & Sean Miller provide handmade miniature shipping crates topped by a doll house gallery exhibiting a nano-sample of another artist’s work. These may be interpreted as “sculptures, performance pieces or a group portrait of contemporary art practice.” Unless a crate is just a crate.

The unspoken aim of all this conspicuous mutuality is to demonstrate that the artists make the grade as intellectuals. Art making is largely a platform for self-centered egos; the work of hands is a minor interest.

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions

Joan Brown ‘s work was a fey offspring of Bay Area figuration and funk art. Making and breaking rules to suit herself, she could be exasperating but she never bored.

On view at George Adams are works from the early 70’s: cardboard sculptures (begun in her kitchen from household materials while her studio was under renovation); a metal cutout; and large-scale paintings and drawings.

The more distant the post-60’s counter culture becomes, the more the paintings recede into the era and movements that generated them. But the constructions, rarely exhibited in her lifetime (1938-90), convey in full Ms. Brown’s distinctive inventiveness and humor. The fun of their making is still there to be seen.

Assembled here for the first time as a body of work, the constructions articulate a nimble faux-naif sophistication that survives the tropes of their times. Cutout couples dance around the deck of “Luxury Liner” (1973), a Noah’s Ark for party animals. The smokestack belches a musical score. “Divers” (1974) hangs from the ceiling so we can see the swimmers from above and below the water line. “Dancers on a Car” (1973 is just that: a couple waltzing across the hood of a 1940’s-style sedan, a Florine-Stettheimer-like fantasia in 3-D.

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Lois Dodd: Small Paintings
Alexandre Gallery
41 East 57th St. NYC  212 755 2828 www.alexandregallery.com
December 4, 2003-January 17, 2004

When one thinks about it, it’s a little sad how seldom women are presented as casual creatures in the mass media. Their images are usually sexualized (just look at any magazine rack) or they must seduce the masculine camera in some proper, presentable way. Or worse, they are depicted bonding together in not very funny Hollywood scenarios. These are several reasons why it’s refreshing to look at Lois Dodd’s paintings of female nudes. Here is a world that has no truck with the male gaze. Soft, blunt, occasionally ungainly, Dodd’s women wear their nakedness matter-of-factly. They have a dignity that Dodd presents as the true quality of the modernist nude.

In their habitation of a timeless summer afternoon, Dodd’s women sometimes pose en plein air for other women painters. In several works, such as Legs Up Against Tree (2002) or Figure in Hammock (2000) they insinuate their shadow-tattooed bodies into the surrounding foliage. Or they approximate backyard sculptures as in Three Nudes on Woodpile (1999) or Nude on Woodpile (1999.) They are always self-possessed. In Tennis Anyone? (1999 ) a little masterpiece that seems to nod toward Milton Avery, a nude woman lies on the grass, as unconscious and abstracted as the colorful laundry on the clothesline behind her.

Lois Dodd has a long history as a painter. She is 75 years old and works in NYC, Maine and Rural New Jersey. Along with her larger paintings she does many on-the-spot smaller works. Dodd is partial to the vignette but her works owe nothing to photography. In her various unpeopled small landscapes that make up her uptown show, Dodd demonstrates precisely how a deftly placed piece of paint functions in a picture. She is a concise observer who is at pains to balance her motif with the factuality of the mark and her materials. In other words, she wants to make paintings that look like an ordinary person painted them with typical art materials. This is, of course, a political statement–a friendly, democratic one. Behind these benign surfaces lies the scope and skill of a Mandarin poet.

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