“Seriously?” So someone had written in the guestbook at Churner and Churner shortly after the opening of Daniel Levine’s first solo exhibition there, “The Way Around.” Levine’s monochrome paintings can be difficult. All of them here are hues of white and although their facture and size vary they are nonetheless alliterative and austere in their obsessive working and reconsideration. The question may not be surprising, but neither is it an inert pronouncement. Levine is eager to engage with and talk to it. In speaking with him recently, he told me, “I like that. It can go any number of ways.” For Levine, “Seriously?” is a conversation starter.

He has a predilection for talking around subjects, employing metaphors about music and photography and history (both personal and cultural) to make his point. That tendency is in part reflected in his choice of the exhibition’s title: “The Way Around” connotes circumnavigation of obstacles as well as a directions to follow or explore, the artist’s process in his studio and the way an audience interrogates an image.

Monochrome painting can be forbidding for a lot of people. It’s hard to enter that exceptionally reductive space, emotionally or intellectually. And it’s hard to say immediately what the important differences are between Malevich’s White on White (1918), Rauschenberg’s polyptychal 1951 white paintings, Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped aluminum panels, much of Robert Ryman’s whole career, and the paintings that Levine’s been making since the early 1990s. But simply by thinking about what white monochromes by each of those artists look like, one can begin to note distinct differences fully apprehensible by their formal, temporal, and ideological qualities. Those subtle valences are essential, and so too the differences between two white paintings by a given artist. It takes some patience and openness though.

The show comprises several discrete lines of investigation for Levine, distinguished largely by each painting’s execution. The differences between a painting like Untitled III (2013), of one series, and Hester (2012-13), from another, are visible in their size and the way the paint is applied—Hester’s flat opacity and Untitled III’s large expanse of seemingly woven gossamer. The paintings are, despite first glances, time consuming and slow, and these variations in execution mean something. For instance, how does one convey a complex idea with only the sparest means?

One can assume that “Seriously?” asks whether Levine has made the same white painting over and over. He has affirmatively not. He’s said, only half-facetiously, that, “To start with, the decision to make a monochrome painting is a bad decision. And everything proceeds from there.” But it would also seem that what follows first from the initial choice to make a monochromatic painting—naturally and automatically—is that every subsequent decision is pivotal.

Levine regards the three rudimentary issues of his paintings as “structure, surface, and support”—the intellectual and emotional foundation, the paint, and the paint’s cotton and panel backing, respectively. He takes great care in thinking about what the possibilities are in tackling each of the three elements in a given painting. Whether the paint appears as thick impasto or thin as frost, he typically applies 15-20 layers, using various whites on cotton. The various techniques create different effects, different grades of opacity, thickness, and texture. The dimensions of his canvases are always just off square, which adds to their visual dynamism. Levine’s edges are taped, leaving a uniform margin of a few millimeters on each side. He carefully selects titles for each named work (only eight of the 19 on display here are untitled).

He puts a lot of multivalent content into his titles, registering them on cultural, art historical, and personal levels simultaneously. But he aims to keep them open enough for the audience to develop fruitful misunderstandings. Levine’s excited by the meanings people attach to his work, when they see it as something other than what he intends. The flexibility of interpretation, and the capacity of his titles to allude and point, allows Levine to direct viewers and keep them long engaged with the work and thinking about what it means to call one white painting Hex (2011-13) and another The Idle Hours (2010-12).

There are many entry points in Levine’s paintings and more appear in the comparison of one work with another. He’s said before that his paintings aren’t as apparently “friendly” as other artists’, though many viewers at the show’s opening remarked that the paintings are peaceful and meditative. Although that sounds contradictory, “The Way Around” provides strong evidence that rigor and tranquility aren’t de facto incompatible.

His relationship with the work remains a little unsettled. “Where do I fit in?” he asked, adding, “Some of the paintings are smarter than me. I don’t know what to do with that.” Although it’s hard to deal with, as a person, work being smarter than its creator is something to strive for. Looking at the paintings, standing first to one side, the middle, then the other side, various distances, squinting, one has to really think about these white planes for a long time.

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Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism,  Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism have heard of the great Italian art collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.  In many ways a modern day Medici, Count Panza passed away at age 87 in Milan on April 24, 2010.

Together with his wife, Giovanna, and with enormous love, courage, forsight and brilliance, the Panzas amassed three distinct collections totaling 2500 works from the mid -1950’s to the present, mostly of American art.  They mostly liked to acquire in depth from mature artists who were as yet not well known but would later be recognized as the major artists of their era.  These included such figures as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, James Turrell, Roni Horn, Martin Puryear, Lawrence Carroll and many many others. The Panzas were, in fact, the first major collectors of these artists and signaled to others that these artists were important.  Their vast acquisitions influenced American and world art history and art markets profoundly, as well as enhancing the collections of several American museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn.

In 1996, the Panzas made a gift of their 18th century home, Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, and its grounds in Varese where they had lived surrounded by works from each collection as they acquired them, to Fondo Ambiente Italiano. It is now, since being renovated and reopened in 2000, the Villa Panza Museum and holds 150 works in perpetuity, drawn mostly from the third of their collections, put together in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  Proudly, I have the great fortune to be one of the artists they chose for this third collection and have three rooms in the villa, two of which had been Rothko’s rooms in their first collection and Robert Mangold’s and Alan Charlton’s in their second.

My life as an artist was certainly changed, as was that of all the artists who preceded me, when the Panzas came to my studio, then on top of PS122 in downtown New York, accompanied by gallerist Eric Stark, in the winter of 1992.  I had known about the Panzas and their collection. At the time, I was respected as a painter’s painter in some quarters, but wasn’t yet part of the official “art world”. The Panzas had never heard of me and weren’t interested in where I had shown or such career concerns. They just wanted to see my paintings. They sat very close to each other, and when I put up the first painting, they held hands, and Mrs. Panza said in Italian, “What beauty!”  They were also able to detect that the painting wasn’t a monochrome, that there were pure color areas within the overall very complex color. Only one other person has ever been able to do that at first sight!  I showed them about 15 paintings. They asked me how long I had worked this way which was about 18 years, and they beamed at the answer.  They were amazed by the size of my body of works. Then they asked what artists I admired in history, and I answered that I was part of the classical line of painting and listed great artists from Piero della Francesca, Raphael and Poussin, a great favorite, to Cézanne, Matisse, Malevich and Mondrian, at which point Mrs. Panza interrupted me to say “and Ruth Ann Fredenthal.”   Well, you can imagine how an artist would feel to hear such words from the leading collector of one’s kind of art after years of being neglected in official quarters.  It was truly a blissful experience!  At the end of about 2 hours, Eric said “We have to go to the next studio, but we can come back.”  They said, “Oh, we have to come back.”  Eric said “Is there any particular painting you’d like to see again before we go,”  And they said “All of them.”  They quickly bought about 19 paintings after that visit and acquired through the next few years a total of 41 large paintings, spanning a period of 20 years, plus a few little ones.  I was lucky to see these wonderful, warm, generous people  fairly often  as I was included in many Panza exhibitions and long term loans from them to other insitutions, mostly in Italy, but also in the USA.

The last time I saw Giuseppe was with Giovanna in November of 2008. They came to my studio, as they did twice every year, now on West 37th Street, to look at paintings for an hour and a half.  On this occasion they bought a small painting as a Christmas gift for their son-in-law.  Then they took me to a delicious, leisurely lunch at Da Silvano on lower 6th Avenue.  Dr. Panza was saying that he was so happy just to still be alive and with Giovanna after 50 years.  Giovanna called him by her pet name for him, Beppino, and stroked the back of his head and neck.  I congratulated them on their fifty years together during which they created five wonderful children and one of the greatest collections of all time. They held hands as they often did and smiled lovingly at each other. Then they brought me home in a cab and continued on to their hotel.

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November 16, 2007 – February 24, 2008

There are two stories in this Albright-Knox exhibit.  The first is Giuseppe Panza’s inspiring quest to use collecting to realize Keats’ ideal world where “truth is beauty, beauty truth”.  The second is the magnificent installation of these 70 works by 16 artists orchestrated by Dr. Panza (over three years of planning) and expertly implemented by a wide range of people at the Albright-Knox, including most prominently, the director Louis Grachos and the senior curator, Douglas Dreishpoon.  The result is that they have created a series of rooms—each a kind of Rothko Chapel containing the work of only one artist.  Indeed, the result is an overall impression of light, color and joy whose only potential downside is that whole threatens to upstage the parts; the individual artists become role players in the Albright-Knox/Panza production.

In an age of cynicism and appropriation, how can one sustain our “truth and beauty”
framing of the Panza exhibition?   By truth we refer to the relentless use of painting as a form of experimentation, the outstanding modernist example being Cézanne.  Truth-seeking here becomes a way of constantly posing problems to oneself regarding the act of seeing.  With regard to beauty, our model is Monet’s exploration of light and color which eventually teetered on the edge of abstraction.   Using this framework, we first focus on the monochrome painters in this exhibition.  We suggest three visually striking examples in the Monet tradition.  Anne Appleby’s sensitive abstract oil and wax paintings of greens, rusts and creams evoke both the majesty and mystery of Nature’s march across the seasons.  Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi’s intense pure pigment paintings on porous Italian limestone create a riveting visual experience that is both timeless and contemporary.  David Simpson’s metallic interference paint creates romantic symphonies of lustrous color that constantly change with the movements of the viewer.  The result is sublime eye candy.

In the Cézanne tradition are the artists who achieve their visual seduction by building up an underlying structure that supports a layering of color.  These include Phil Sims with his Cézanne-like organization of brush strokes and Ruth Ann Fredenthal with her all-but-invisible, yet strong, underlying organization of regions of different colors that function as a foundation for building subsequent layerings of color mixtures that somehow create the illusion of a single overall color.  Fredenthal’s serene paintings are sensuous and contemplative; they give us chamber music for the eye.  Sims uses scale to make an architectural statement—his paintings capture color and light, functioning like stained glass windows that, depending on their color, texture and scale, are either introverted or extroverted.   If Sims and Fredenthal achieve their effects “bottom up, Winston Roeth and Timothy Litzmann work “top down”.   Roeth, in the tradition of Albers, plays with often unlikely combinations of color involving both a framing edge and an interior space.  His tempera paint on fiberglass and other materials creates surfaces that are both immaculate and sensuous, alternately cool and warm.   Litzmann, using either unnamable or delicious colors, paints on the back of very thin translucent cast acrylic structures.  By painting the side edges with a contrasting color, he literally traps the light inside these stunning paintings, thereby extending the American Luminist tradition.

Other artists in the exhibition literally created objects of color as opposed to colored objects.  Examples of this strategy are the tiny wall-mounted painted wood and steel cubes of Stuart Arends and the just larger than human scale standing columns of color constructed by Ann Truitt, both of which operate between painting and sculpture.  Arends oil and wax painted cubes have a rubbed surface that speaks to the effects of time and memory.  Truitt’s painted wooden columns with their thin contrasting edges on the bottom or sides can be seen as relating to the explorations of color framing effects by Roeth and Litzmann.

The simply complex character of much of this exhibition is well personified by Max Cole, who uses a rigorous interplay of dense small vertical strokes and complementary horizontal chords to create abstract paintings that hover between musical notation and elaborate weavings.   Cole’s restless visual exploration has a kind of austere beauty that is reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s grid paintings of the early 1980s.  Cole’s largely black, grey and beige paintings, like Seurat’s drawings, manage to derive the kind of color that exists when the first rays of light appear at dawn and the last ray of light disappears at dusk.  Her horizontal bands, reminiscent of the endless horizons of the great plains, are composed of hundreds of vertical lines that silently pulsate giving some of them an almost optical effect.  We also suggest that although Cole, Roeth, and Fredenthal differ in many ways, their paintings share in common the ability to slow the viewer down and reveal themselves quietly over time, requiring an observer who is almost as dedicated and obsessive as their creators.

If it appears from this description that Cole doesn’t fit the monochrome theme, it should be noted that she is not the only exception.  As if to remind us that Dr. Panza can never be pigeon-holed, we find other non-monochromatic art that plays with light and color.  These include Kosuths’ enigmatic phrases as embodied in neon light of red, yellow, and green and Bruce Nauman’s two rooms of bright yellow fluorescent lights that perform a kind of architectural Albers.  In one room, both the bright red wall and the viewer’s skin color becomes greenish brown when bathed in intense yellow light.  There is also a classic white cast and coated acrylic disc by Robert Irwin projecting from the wall with a thin rectangular band across its center.  Four lamps strategically placed on the ceiling and floor create overlapping mysterious shadows that cohabit with the white disc to induce a Zen-like meditative mood.  Dan Flavin casts a misty, almost sexy, red light with four groups of red and white fluorescent bulbs placed low on the long wall of a large dark room.  Near the exhibition’s egress, we pass a wonderfully subtle penciled wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, so ineffable that we walked by it several times before noticing it.  Robert Therrein’s four whimsical bronze sculptures of a hat, a pitcher, and snowmen are sometimes oversized and sometimes undersized.  Despite their beautiful surfaces, they seem out of place, a bit too playful for this exhibition—more entertaining than contemplative.

In sum, this celebration of light and color could not have come at a better time.  As the skies become grey, the sunlight becomes scarce, and the air becomes frigid, we find in snowy Buffalo at the Albright-Knox, a respite for all of this, an oasis of color and light that nourishes the soul, soothes the eye, and stimulates the mind.  We are transported into a special place where Keats’ world of Beauty and Truth comes to life.

Finally, while there is really little substitute for seeing this show first hand, there is for those who can’t visit the Albright Knox or make a trip to Dr. Panza’s villa in Varese, Italy, a beautiful catalogue with images of every work.  It also includes a sensitive historical essay by David Bonetti and excerpts from the videotaped interview with Dr. Panza that plays continuously at the show’s entrance under a majestic orange Phil Sims.

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