Dominque Lévy has opened a jewel of a show of Alexander Calder in her Madison Avenue gallery. But careful when you say that. Calder’s protean inventiveness did in fact extend beyond his pioneering mobiles and stabiles to include bodily adornments. This isn’t a show of his jewelry, however, but of small sculptures, albeit that some are no bigger than a brooch.

Besides gathering over three-dozen works varying from the staggeringly minute to around a foot high, Ms. Lévy’s coup de grace has been to orchestrate a posthumous pas de deux between the legendary sculptor, who died in 1976, and living architects Santiago Calatrava and his son Gabriel Calatrava (counted as one for balletic purposes!) who have installed the exhibition with exquisite taste and commensurate verve.

The design has all the characteristic fusion of the voluptuous and the streamlined of a classic Calatrava bridge or pavilion while managing to showcase, and even subtly offset, the delicate robustness of Calder. Calatrava’s pristine curves and trademark whiteness offer the perfect foil for the rough-at-the-edges handmadeness of Calder’s sculptural forms in wire and plate in black and the primaries, forms lent further texture by splintery charred wooden elements, found pebbles and glass, and even, in one instance, a spoon retrieved from a dump. While the tinier stabiles are housed in gorgeously realized steel and glass vitrines along outer walls, larger pieces are supported in the middle of the rooms on small circular tables of varying height. These include the few suspended mobiles which each have their own committed table, a nice touch as it adds clarity and consistency to the display. The tables rest on amoeba-shaped steps, a detail that’s both very Calatrava and evocative of a midcentury moderne that in turn is perfectly attuned to Calder’s aesthetic.

Miraculous placement ensures that while there are conversations going on around the room, each piece occupies its own space, is free to generate its own internal scale. Frank O’Hara once said of early collages by Alex Katz that “the size is intimate but the scale is vast,” an apposite phrase for these smaller Calders. (Multum in parvo, the show’s title, borrowed from print connoisseur Carl Zigrosser, kind of says the same thing in Latin.) As Jed Perl, who is authoring a biography of Calder, astutely describes in his essay for the forthcoming catalogue of this show, Calder had varying reasons to work small. Some pieces were maquettes for architectural proposals; some, from the mid-1940s, took their dimensions and indeed mode of construction from the size restrictions of newly introduced air mail used to send works to his Paris dealer, Louis Carré. But some of the smallest pieces might actually have had philosophical purpose behind their diminutive scale:

For the inventor of the mobile, who was fascinated by the way objects move through space, the miniature was another way of playing with space, of dramatically shrinking space, of taking what might be vast and rendering it nearly microscopic.

The Calatravas’ duet with Calder bring to mind the audacious, sometimes provocative yet ultimately complementary gallery designs of the legendary Friedrich Kiesler, except that whiteness ensures that their position towards the art is the more modest. There is actually something mildly retro about Santiago Calatrava’s aesthetic, a yesteryear sense of what the future might hold. Although maybe that is just a way of saying that both Calatrava and Calder deviate from harsher, brutalist aesthetics with their soft and fluent curves, in that Calatrava is in the tradition of Alvar Aalto, not to mention Gaudí, more than Mies or le Corbusier, while Calder’s playful modernism stands in contrast to the sterner stuff of David Smith, another welder coming out of Surrealism, which evidently obliged Smith’s formalist champions to denigrate Calder at any opportunity. The pairing of Calatrava and Calder might subtly reference their mutual affinity, their soft modernism. Calder, meanwhile, is no stranger to the antics of forceful architects: in his own life he teamed up several times with Jose Luis Sert (the Loyalist Pavilion where his Mercury Fountain kept Guernica company for instance) while quite recently Frank Gehry did a striking good job of installing a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Calatravas are joining an illustrious line.

There is one Calatrava decision, however, that touches on intrusiveness: each vitrine and gueridon sports a mirror top, an effect that lends charm and luxury to the installation, for sure, but tends to coerce inverted readings of Calder’s sculptural forms. Sometimes the mirrors provide insight, allowing us to savor the engineering of Calder’s welded pieces, but there is already such a lexicon of formal possibilities in the way a Calder wobbles and bobs along that this mirror stage seems regressive. Also, doubling up each sculpture (the hanging mobiles are freed of this) with its mirror form denies the strong figural quality that pervades so many works. Not only are we policed into an abstract reading of these personages, the mirroring also denies the radically asymmetrical quality of Calder by saddling each completed gestalt with a Siamese twin. (Calatrava, Paul Goldberger observes in another catalogue essay, is a confirmed fan of symmetry.) But looking slightly askance or crouching to the level of the table eliminates this problem, if a problem it is.

I wonder if Calder would have minded this: he seemed to delight in creative misreadings of his inventions. He was happy to leave the naming of his new forms to his friend Marcel Duchamp who coined the terms mobile and stabile. Another friend, Herbert Matter, photographed his hanging mobiles with a long exposure such that the strobe effect traces their swinging action. The clean, almost clinical aesthetic with which the Calatravas package his works pluck Calder from his yankee Connecticut barn into an almost futuristic environment, but that’s fine: Calder belongs to both.

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Dominique Lévy supplies the back story to French-born Polish artist Roman Opalka with a show of works from 1959 to 1963 that precede his breakthrough to the series for which he is best known, 1 – ∞, also presented here: the precisely painted horizontal rows of numbers in white on a gray ground. Upstairs from the display of Infinity canvases are seven works on paper titled Etude sur le mouvement and two works titled Chronome, 1963. The Etudes are typical of European gestural abstract painting of that period in that Opalka is engaged in filling the surface of the paper with improvised black ink scrawls, marks and squiggles. The resulting compositions are irregular masses floating on the empty page. By the end of this period Opalka’s marks have become less and less expressionistic as he covers the entire canvas with small dots, resulting in black monochromes. He then abandons this approach, but not entirely, as he will continue to be concerned with filling the painting’s surface with marks for the rest of his life. The principle difference is that his marks are less subjective and more logical once they are numbers, which define their own structure and order as well as being both abstract and representational.

The infinity series was the result of Opalka deciding in 1965 to count to infinity and in turn, paint each number in sequence. By the time of his death in 2011 he had filled 233 canvases. they are all the same size and all inscribed with numbers drawn with near machine-like consistency. The count begins in the upper right corner and ends lower left. Each painting contains 20-30,000 consecutive numbers. Each numeral that makes up these numbers is slightly lighter then the previous one. The fade is a result of the diminishing amount of paint on the brush as he moves from one numeral to the next. The density of white signals the beginning of the next number.

At a distance the numbers’ differing densities form optical patterns as a result of which the works initially resemble blotchy monochromes. Opalka considered each painting to be a detail, a fragment of a continuum punctuated by small indifferent incidents. The earliest paintings were of white numerals on a black ground, but over the course of the years Opalka began to add one percent of white to the background color. By 2008 he was painting white numbers onto white grounds. According to gallery notes, Opalka recorded himself saying each number as he worked.

Accompanying the paintings, though much less interesting than them, are Opalka’s self-portraits in which at the end of each work session he would take a passport style photograph of himself. Subsequently, we have a history of his aging appearance.

Like Samuel Beckett, Opalka found incredibly economic solutions to making works that are seemingly about everything and nothing at all. Opalka’s paintings are at once formal, process oriented, personal, conceptual, optical, autographic, ethical, aesthetic, concerned with phenomena of repetition, variation, etc., and yet are not about anything more than filling the canvas, duration and persistence (obsession or compulsion) notwithstanding. The works are hermetic in that they tell us nothing about process, time, numbers, mathematics, art, or for that matter about their maker — excepting his resolute commitment to the singular nature of his project.

If parallels are to be drawn with other artists of the 1960s, the two that most immediately come to mind are Ad Reinhardt and On Kawara, both of whom were also committed to rigorous programs of repetition and variation — although each artist arrived at this everything-in-nothing position by very different routes and to differing ends. All three strip painting of subjectivity as much as they can, nearly reducing it to pure information. Reinhardt’s so-called “black” paintings are all squares divided into nine smaller squares and are uniformly painted in differing shades of black. Kawara’s paintings, also begun in the ’60s, conform to one of eight standard sizes, ranging from 8 by 10 inches to 61 by 89 inches and all horizontal in orientation. The dates are hand-painted and are always centered on the canvas and painted white, though the background colors variy. The front page of a newspaper, which corresponds to the day and place the painting was made, accompanies each painting.

Despite their aesthetic differences, however, beyond the repetitive format, each of them has taken as their subject a different aspect of time. For Kawara, time is punctuated by events; for Opalka it is a continuum; and with Reinhardt time is duration marking the transition from one state to another. Each artist seeks to use painting to generate that key existentialist concerns with “being” in time — that is of being present and encountering the real. Opalka uses interval as his means to index our relationship to Newtonian time as something measurable within which events take place and are experienced.

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February 27 to April 12, 2014
909 Madison Avenue at 73rd Street
New York City, 212 772 2004 

Germaine Richier (1902-1959), a pupil of Antonie Bourdelle was much honored in her native France and, also in the United States during her lifetime. Inevitably, she faced the struggles of a female sculptor but once she was photographed in her studio by Brassaï things looked up, and starting in 1948, she appeared in no less than five consecutive installments of the Venice Biennale and she was collected by many American and European museums. She started out in the figurative tradition in which she was trained with patinated bronze nudes such as Loretto (1934) and Nu ou La Grosse (1939) included here. Then, influenced no doubt by World War Two, which she spent in exile, in Switzerland, her subjects became stranger, as her expressionist figure, Don Quichotte à la lance (1949) testifies. And she did human-insect hybrids like La Mante, moyenne (1946), which has a woman’s torso above and the body of a praying mantis below. Inspired late in her too short life by collaborations with Hans Hartung and other painters, she applied color to sculptures, Le Couplepeint (1957) is one, or polished them- the golden La Spirale  (1957) is a splendid illustration of how boldly she experimented.

Soon after Richier’s death, her style of art dropped out of fashion. In the 1960s, the new American movements, Pop Art and minimalism, were alien to her concerns. Some of her peers remained much admired. Alberto Giacometti’s presentations of urban anxiety became canonical, and Marino Marini, who became her friend in Switzerland, achieved fame for his distinctive sculptures of a war victim. But her art, which is much more varied than Marini’s, and certainly more eccentric than Giacometti’s, has not recently attracted much attention in this country. In fact, this show is Richier’s first in America since 1957. When, three decades ago, I began taking an interest in writing art criticism, Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) made a great impression on me. In Krauss’s story of sculpture, which takes the reader from Rodin to Carl Andre, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, Richier can hardly have any place. Indeed, her name does not appear in the book.  But nowadays, of course, we tell that story differently. And Richier seems ready for revival: her bold development of figurative sculptural fantasies links her with Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and a host of other now celebrated contemporary figures.

It’s understandable that in presenting this revival of a prolific, recently marginalized artist that Lévy- Perrotin would want to show as much of her art as possible. But displaying more than forty sculptures, many of them large, in these two grand, but relatively small galleries made it simply impossible to focus properly on the individual works. Sculpture, especially figurative sculpture needs room to breathe. But in this setting, it was impossible to step back. A display of just one or two pieces on each floor would have been much more effective. But at least the exhibition inspires the hope that a full museum-scale retrospective of this important artist might be on its way.

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