If numbers alone indicate success, Robert Miller is probably one of the greatest art dealers who ever lived. But there’s another assay of greatness among art dealers, and it has more to do with having an eye for the outlier, a talent for selecting the unlikely but strangely right work, the ability to simply recognize vision, but above all, to be a Connector. If you happened to monetize these factors, all the better, your gallery’s doors stayed open.

But art history, and art gallery history, is more than a matter of who cashed in. There are those who truly mediate culture — in today’s scene Matthew Higgs and Lia Gangitano come to mind as prime examples — who cudgel creativity and platform things we’ve not seen before. These figures are Connectors, and theirs is a subtle and alchemical art. Swirl together an essence of Barnum, an ounce of Ezra Pound (for this job description a degree of insanity is not a liability), a soupçon of David Ogilvy, and the visionary who-says-we-can’t? style of a Sergey Brin, and you begin to see the skill-set required. One of the hallmarks of these wizards is that they’re almost always impecunious, and seeking backers.

Their gift is having an eye, and an ear, that sees and hears what others don’t. Their contribution rests in being there at key cultural moments, and having whatever combination of spark and grit that is required to reveal something truly new.

Meet Richard “Dick” Bellamy. Director and founder of the Green Gallery, who, in 1960, landed in the eye in a hurricane: the seismic upheavals called Pop and Minimalism. The odds were against Bellamy because unlike most founders of New York art galleries, he had little if any family backing, little if any formal art education, and pretty much zero business acumen. Growing up in the Midwest, he briefly studied at the University of Cincinnati, and later Columbia, but spent more time in Manhattan’s cheap bars than in classroom lectures. Desultory wandering in a Beat fashion, by the late ‘50s he decamped to Mexico and Provincetown, places where a lack of ambition and a talent for bohemian blather were perfectly OK.

Exactly what made him stop spinning his wheels is not exactly known, and it is just one of a long list of undiscoverables that stand out in Judith Stein’s new biography of Bellamy, Eye Of The Sixties, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One thing is clear: Bellamy took pains to cover his tracks, stay a shadowy figure, operate on the margins of society. Showing what he accomplished, and the lives he helped, and hurt, is wonderfully documented here. But as a portrait of a man, the book falls short. It is likely that the real Richard Bellamy is and will remain unknowable.

Stein’s biography stunningly fills in several yawning gaps of art history circa the early 1960s. We meet, up close and personal, artists such as Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Yayoi Kusama — artists who would certainly have found an audience eventually, though Mr. Bellamy brought them out into the light. More thrilling still are smell-the-smoke-and-sweat reports of Lee Lozano, James Lee Byars, Jo Baer, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Ronald Bladen. They may lack the epoch-making stature of Bellamy’s big guns, but there is still a lot to be discovered about each. Stein’s research reveals many avenues for further scholarship, and future writers will follow the trails she blazes here.

Each page contains nuggets of original research that are pure gold. The problem is that there are great artist-biographies, and this book, despite its absolutely fascinating and voluminous cavalcade of facts, is not in that company. Stein allows herself here and there to speculate, which leaves the reader slightly distrusting of the whole. What is to be made of an observation like “Dick must have read Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese, poems Lydia (his Chinese mother) would have praised for their delicacy and economy”? What is such a string of assertions based on? in other places, sweeping generalizations needed further edits.

Bellamy’s business practices were a slow motion cliff-dive, and on this subject Stein is at her best. Though he managed to find an angel investor to support the gallery, taxi-magnate Robert Scull, it became apparent in short order that the business aspects of running a gallery bored him — which led to a fast-approaching expiration date. He could often be found rubber-legged drunk in the early afternoon, hiding away in the back office but still open for business. We see him stoned or buzzed, lying full-length on the gallery floor; what affluent Midtown gallery visitors made of this leave little to the imagination. Sometimes he would simply abandon the premises, and head to a bar, leaving the gallery doors wide open.

Bellamy blithely made his own rules and followed his own code of ethics; his record keeping was spotty, he sometimes paid artists haphazardly, and he was known to enrage them, even retitling works as he saw fit. Is it any wonder that Oldenburg jumped over to Sidney Janis after a year?

Simultaneously, Dick Bellamy’s son Miles has put together a personal selection of his father’s letters, which document the dissolution of a life — “bludgeoned by alcoholism” is how he self-describes — while inviting us into a world more exciting than most of us will ever know. And it’s a beautiful, strange, sad and arcane little book. Now in his mid-50s, Miles was his father’s gallery assistant for the final five years of Dick’s life. As a boy, Miles lived mostly with his mother, and knew his father on a weekends and vacations basis. The letters from father to son are some of the most revealing; one winces at a letter written to the eight-year-old Miles, which includes this lovely line, “I love you sweet baby Miles no good louse scum.” Dick should have known that irony and sarcasm as humor are lost on a child. Doubtless he was off on his own chemical planet when he composed that cringe-worthy missive. That Miles struggled with (and overcame) his own substance-abuse issues comes as no surprise; the fallout from drugs and alcohol is a theme that permeates both Bellamys’ life stories.

Like the letters of Jack Kerouac (another victim of the hard-drinking artist’s lifestyle) these documents both shed light on and cast enigmatic shadows over their author. While Miles has provided helpful endnotes, these letters would have benefitted from close annotation. For example, in a letter to a Peter Young, dated 1970, Dick refers to “Dan painting well.” Later in the letter he says “I thought Mike’s show at Marlborough in May-June good. […] Saw Rolf a few weeks ago […] he was visiting Mickey Ruskin.” I happen to know that Mickey Ruskin was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, New York’s iconic artists’ bar in 1960s and ‘70s; who the hell these other folks are I haven’t a clue. This book is keyed to art-world insiders only, those with access to the inside of the inside.

It is, however, worth the price of admission for a 1996 letter to Barbara Rose, the seminal historian of modern art, who was, apparently, a close friend of Dick. It begins “Dear Barbara, Long time no see or hear. I hope you are still fucking. I am unable to. I wish I had been able to do it better when I could.”

Stein, Judith E. Eye Of The Sixties: Richard Bellamy And The Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0374151324. 384 pages, $28

Bellamy, Richard. Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy. Miles Bellamy (ed.) (Brooklyn, NY: Near Fine Press; Printed by Small Editions, Red Hook, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0-692-51867-0. 72 pages, $40

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January 26 — February 24, 2007

Tony Oursler
Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th Street
New York City

February 17 — March 24, 2007

Developing an eye for color as it is inextricably tied to form is a dominant theme in exhibitions at Pace Wildenstein and Lehmann Maupin. Although on the face of it, the Pace exhibition with its exquisite pairing of Josef Albers and Donald Judd would appear to be on a different planet from Oursler’s moaning, colored aluminum splatters, we propose that the interplay between color and form in the Pace exhibition can be understood at a deeper level if we consider aspects of Oursler’s project. But, first things first.

Pace Wildenstein’s Albers/Judd: Form and Color might just be the most ravishingly beautiful exhibition that the art scene has provided in many years. The show uses color as its organizing principle, e.g., a red and blue Albers hangs next to a red Judd and a blue Judd. Each of Albers’ works, painted with oil on masonite is juxtaposed with one of Judd’s objects made of brass, Douglas fir plywood, or anodized aluminum and plexiglass. The particular works selected not only sing in their own right but also take on a heightened aura when paired in this show. Given that these are at one level dry, highly intellectually designed creations, the chromatic effects they achieve are both a tribute to the works themselves and to the combinations, be they between Albers variants or homages to the square and Judd’s boxes (floor pieces and wall pieces) or his last series of carefully orchestrated colored metal rectangles, grid-like forms that are structurally closest to Albers’ variants. As pairings, they exemplify Smithson’s apt description of Judd’s achievement—“uncanny materiality”. Indeed, some of the combinations are so strong that one experiences a “meta-work”— a kind of hypothetical Albers-Judd collaboration. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon is the wall with three Albers paintings (a variant and two homages to the square) and a late Judd metallic wall piece with 8 interlocking rectangular units—all in combinations of yellows and browns. In such instances, the installation itself creates a new work of art. The people who designed these groupings are the unsung heroes of this exhibition, a fact dramatically captured in the layout of the excellent catalogue that accompanies the show.

Another dividend of this exhibition is the viewer’s greater exposure to Albers’ variants that are often treated as less well-developed demonstrations of his context effects compared to his homages to the square. The variants are particularly interesting because not only are they splendid chromatically, but because they reveal a more complex geometry. They are more architectural, with some works being titled, Study for an Adobe (1949) or Adobe Yellow Front (1959). This is not to say that at times the homages do not give us a sublime color experience as in the pair consisting of Albers painting with 3 reds (Homage to the Square: Soft Sign, 1957) and Judd’s Menziken box of clear and black anodized aluminum with transparent blue over red plexiglass (Untitled, 1991). The room to the left as you enter the gallery is both conceptually compelling and a visual knockout with four works in browns, cordovan, and black—an homage and a variant by Albers and Judd’s series of six Cor-ten steel rectangles with black plexiglass arranged vertically, facing a large wooden floor piece. We do, however, offer one caveat. At times, the pairings can move from “uncanny” to “canny materiality” as they border on the decorative, providing the balm for the eyes of a tired businessman that Matisse alluded to but never really painted (best illustrated by Albers’ 1947 Variant: 4 Grays and 2 Violets and Judd’s Untitled 1977 stainless steel box with purple plexiglass). Thus, an interesting challenge for the viewer is recognizing when this happens and why. Is it purely a function of the colors used or is there more going on?

Being decorative is less a problem with Oursler’s monochromatic splatters—their dynamic grotesqueness usually protects them, albeit even with Oursler there is one purple piece that perhaps borders on being too pretty chromatically. More interestingly, we think there is a clue in Oursler’s work that provides us with a deeper insight into the nature of the relationship involved in the Albers-Judd pairings. This is a rather surprising state of affairs given that Oursler’s grotesque sculptures are hardly known for their imaginative use of color.

All four walls of Lehmann Maupin’s large center room contain one or two brightly colored laser-cut aluminum shapes that hover between painting and sculpture. Within each of the seven large amoeboid shapes is one or two rhyming orifice(s) containing a DVD player and an LCD screen whose images (and muffled sounds from three of the works) project outward from the wall completely filling the cut out space. The colors and shapes in the small video mimic those of the larger static background mother splat and allow for a dynamic interplay between the ever shifting content containing eyes, mouths, teeth, and fingers. What is so intriguing about this work is that we are observing a process of chromatic morphogenesis — eyes morph into mouths and teeth into fingers, all beautifully tinted in colors that both enhance and are enhanced by the context color of the encompassing splatter forms.

And what does this add up to if not “uncanny materiality”, uncanny beyond that which one could ever imagine in Albers or Judd? We suggest that the shape shifting in Oursler’s creative exhibition offers a new way to frame the Albers-Judd relationship. As discussed earlier, one reason why the Albers-Judd pairings are so visually effective is that, at times they seem to imply an emergent new work. Particularly in the case of the variants, we can experience the morphing of Albers’ paintings into Judd’s objects or we can see a Judd as having been lifted out of an Albers variant. Viewed this way, there is a higher-order isomorphism that ties together the two exhibitions — they both deal with chromatic morphogenesis — one organic in the case of Oursler where the morphing is almost stem-cell-like, the other a geometric-architectural transformation that carries a similar color relationship from two to three dimensions. Most importantly, what the Oursler works do is to make us go beyond experiencing color as form to experiencing color as becoming. This treatment of color as process, in turn, provides a higher-order invariant that cuts across both exhibitions. Viewed thusly, color is not merely contained by form; color becomes an active marker for changes in form be it a shift from eyes to mouth in Oursler or in the case of Judd and Albers, where color organizes space rather than merely filling it.

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