DAVID COHEN
Julie, on Facebook you described a painting by Jenny Saville on view in her show at Gagosian Gallery as “the most beautiful painting I’ve seen in a long time” and 150 friends liked or loved that post. In the comments section, Dennis Kardon wrote: “You and David Cohen are going to have an interesting discussion,” referencing no doubt my highly critical artcritical review of her last New York show. Dennis wrote enthusiastically about her work in 1999 (it was his first piece of published art criticism, and was edited by Walter Robinson.) What is it about her new show, Julie that, as you put it on Facebook, “knocked you out”?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Up to this point I hadn’t been much of a fan of Jenny Saville’s. She’d cornered the market on paint-as-flesh, no doubt, but I never felt like she cared much about what was inside the figures she was painting, or showed us anything deeper than bloated, mottled and dejected skin. But several paintings in her latest Gagosian show blew those notions away and stopped me in my tracks. Her Fate paintings (Fate 1, Fate 2 and Fate 3) went somewhere I didn’t expect – melding abstraction and figuration in a way that furthered the scope of both, and bringing black bodies and white bodies together into new-fangled icons through muscular paint and sheer pictorial power. To my mind these paintings raised the bar on figuration, and that’s rare.

Painterly stylishness had limited Saville up until now, but in these Fate paintings I’m not as conscious of her style as much as her intelligent pictorial choices that give me the sense that she’s gone beyond realism (or expressionism) towards the iconic. Where before she would mask out areas in order to break up the integrity of the figure, and thereby sidestep realism, now she’s using those masked areas to complicate the figure’s integrity, suggest the mess inside, or alternatively provide it with extra appendages to increase its capacity to express multiplicities.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Maybe because of the peculiar emptiness the ugliness in earlier work seemed manipulative. Many of these new paintings stopped me in my tracks! The scale, color, content and play with abstraction are exciting and original. They refer to so many different things but they’re entirely their own.

This is the first show of hers, I should say, that I’ve had a positive response to. I’m a big fan of abject beauty: I taught myself to paint by viewing cadavers in the medical school and a boyfriend even moved out on me because of the pig’s head (and a few other specimens) in the freezer. I adore Soutine’s still life paintings, Rembrandt’s sides of beef and Lucian Freud’s paintings of Lee Bowery. While I was impressed by the scale, and of course the paint handling, her previous paintings for the most part have seemed ugly in a calculated or gratuitous way.

DENNIS KARDON
Almost twenty years ago I wrote:

Saville simply overwhelms the viewer with paint as flesh. The specificity of her subject matter raises issues about the nature of spontaneity and control in painting. And because these bodies are painted, and therefore inhabited by the artist…they don’t have the distanced quality of the photographic work of other artists who have dealt with body image and gender issues.

As her career progressed however, I became gradually disenchanted with what I perceived as strategic employment of painting conventions that started to feel a bit rote, and an increase in scale for the sake of filling up a mega space. David’s review, though a bit scathing, generally captured my feeling about what had occurred in her work.

My remark about the discussion was a reference to a chance encounter with David and Barry in Chelsea after first seeing the current show. My immediate reaction was that she had redeemed herself a lot, and I had taken a lot of detail shots of memorable moments. But David was so negative it made me reconsider, until at least, he compared her unfavorably to Tracey Emin at Frieze which I am pretty sure was an unmitigated waste of perfectly nice white walls.

WALTER ROBINSON
If it’s beauty, it’s beauty of an abject kind, which has always been her thing — heavy models, grossly presented. A rather ugly beauty, I would say. Lisa Yuskavage is a good pendant here. Beauty also lies in her mastery of an academic drawing style, which recalls a 19th-century formula in service to a classical ideal. Those are her avant-garde bona fides, the rehabilitation of an essentially conservative technique for subjects of contemporary relevance, notably the body and gender identity.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I’m the opposite of Julie and Brenda in that I’ve always been interested in Saville’s paintings, and sometimes like them quite a lot. People always used to compare her to Freud, and I understand why, but to me that was the wrong analogy. She was more like Anselm Kiefer—I mean the really good Kiefer, the one from the 1980s. The body was to her as the landscape to him. I didn’t find his wounded landscapes ugly, nor the tormented paint by which he depicted it, and I never found her abject bodies or her storms of paint ugly either—quite the opposite. But I didn’t care for these new paintings at all. I don’t like the self-evident “painting of collage” trope, and she seems to be drawing in a more conventional way as well as being more restrained in her paint handling.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
It’s interesting that you compare her earlier work to Kiefer. I agree, they are more Kiefer than Freud because her figures have little physiological content. They were all surface, same as Kiefer. And same as Kiefer, you think they’re about something else and then discover that they’re equally empty.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
It might be worthwhile to keep the discussion to the three Fate paintings since I agree with you all about the other works in the show, but thought those three Fates were of a different order altogether.

WALTER ROBINSON
A generous reading is a good thing. It reminds me of Richard Prince’s goofy brilliant combos of de Kooning and gay porn.

Julie is certainly right about the paint-as-flesh thing, but sections of these works were basically deft contour drawings filled in with even defter Ab-Ex-style brushwork. Interesting, but a bit silly?

I didn’t even notice the race thing, since I was only there a few minutes, and the overwhelming impression is pink. (An artist works for a year on a show; a critic walks in and after two minutes says “it sucks.”) But I’ll go right now to take another look. What about her pseudo-cubist figures? There’s a new move.

DAVID COHEN
I went back yesterday for a proper visit after coming to a comparable conclusion to Walter from two minutes at the opening reception, and I’m afraid that closer examination and doing my utmost to sit openly with the work has not led to epiphanies. I find these to be disingenuous academic machines. Look, there is no question that Jenny Saville has exceptional technical abilities and genuine intellectual ambition, but I suspect that the adulation that has followed from these rare qualities has been corrupting. Her early work married painting chops and youthful feminist indignation to produce startling, if shallow, results, but she has “matured” into a shameless crowd pleaser. I can’t believe such sensitive individuals as the artists here aren’t seeing the wood for the trees. Photos have been projected onto canvases and lines traced; paint has been slathered in gratuitous faux-expressivity to generate effects; images have been chopped up to connote visual deconstruction. But there’s no real drawing, painting or collage going on in these concoctions.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Well as a painter I was respectfully floored by that piling up of paint, plus wiping, scraping, knowing when to stop and when to pile more on.  That’s not easy!  In her earlier work I knew exactly how she made those paintings, but this new work is so layered and the decisions about when to stop and when to keep going so seamlessly articulated – that’s amazing painting.  You try it!

As for David’s contention that there is no real drawing going on – look at Fate 2  and the deft placement of that thick blue line forming a square right in the middle of the figure, and what it’s doing to cause the whole assortment of body parts to pivot around it. It’s doing so many things: It’s the thing that allows the icon to be both passive and active, asserting the power of that body to suggest a kind of centrifugal movement of becoming, while also exuding a marmoreal presence; it’s also reinforcing the presence of the left breast, now lost to scraping and turned into negative space. That one squiggly line comes totally out of the blue (as it were) but is doing so much to power up the form and reinforce this idea of multiplicities.

Regarding the black and white bodies: Yes, she pulled it off! She deftly insinuated a white body into (onto) a black body, and vice versa. In one, the white body is in the middle of black limbs, (all the heads are either of black women or, in the case of Fate 3, from an African sculpture of a woman) but not overwhelming them or dominating in any way—they’re both equally present in the form. In Fate 3 the “limbs” are more like weird appendages that take the form to places I’ve never seen Saville go. She’s forged an icon of a black and white Shiva-like woman with the many limbs. Glorious!

WALTER ROBINSON
I feel you David but is it really fair to presume success has gone to her head? Artists are always having things in their heads, and success breeds confidence and ambition, etc. And what is “real” painting, drawing and collage, and why privilege it? Collage is giving new energy to abstract painting at the moment, why not figuration?

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You admire her bravura technique, but what is the project at the service of which she puts it? To me, the equations she makes between different kinds of representation and different kinds of abstraction, as well as between different kinds of imagery, seem pretty flat and familiar.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s such a weird question, Barry, “what is the project at the service of which she puts it?” Put the question aside and approach them more visually. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had and for that might to enough.

DAVID COHEN
Pleasure is never enough.

Julie, I don’t doubt that the pyrotechnics here take bravura and acumen to pull off. But really, we at Gagosian Gallery looking at massive canvases by an international art star for sale at top dollar; it is the painterly equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster. If the movie sucks we don’t applaud the music and special effects.

Walter is right that one should indeed use any device that works if the result is a powerful image. But “real drawing” is where the lines are put down with purpose, where the energy is one of inquiry and/or assuredness. Her line is gimmicky. She generates false pentimenti to make the drawing look “old masterly”. Her paint slathering is like pushing a button in Photoshop marked “AbEx”; they don’t come out of the existential maelstrom of creativity. Her collage is saying, we are made up of this and that; real collage is about opening oneself up to the marvelous and the unknown.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
It’s interesting that you and I, David—the two non-practitioners here—are much less sympathetic to these paintings than the painters here. That’s something that makes me think I should reconsider my response— though I still don’t know how!

SUZY SPENCE
It’s interesting to me that in her piece dedicated to Linda Nochlin is sort of squirreled away in the back, when Nochlin’s ideas should operate as the catalyst for the entire show. Ancestors, yes, Saville seems obsessed with the problematic of “genius”, but rather than destroy that concept she’d rather run a race with every great man who made a mark in the Western canon to see how she measures up. She paints extraordinarily well, but that’s actually beside the point. Chapter (for Linda Nochlin) in charcoal on cotton duck canvas, recalls the particularly beautiful study by da Vinci, The Virgin and Christ with St. Anne. But Leonardo’s women are locked in high-minded, existential conversation and seem incredibly connected to one another whereas Saville’s women are piled on one another anonymously, beautifully drawn as forms with a fullness and accuracy. But I don’t understand who these women are, and why we should care about them.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I guess I should now take back what I just said about the critics vs. the painters.

SUZY SPENCE
And I agree with David about special effects. Nicole Eisenman steals more effectively and is just as nimble a virtuoso. By comparison I would say Saville is a mannerist, and less able to fully employ the styles she robs, at least not in this show.

DAVID COHEN
The thing that I found especially irritating about the piece Suzy is talking about, Chapter (For Linda Nochlin), is the way she spray painted trompe l’oeil extra sheets at various junctures in emulation of Frank Auerbach (another of her early mentors) who sticks extra paper on when he wants to extend an image or repair a support punctured by incessant correction. There’s no correction here; the image is totally calculated, along with its arsenal of effects.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, I never think beautiful paint is enough. Press releases in recent years try too hard to align her with a list of great (dead) white men, which must be some incredible weight for her to bear. I wish Saville would make an escape to the woods where she could return to the introspection she’d invested in earlier. She used to reach into her soul and hand it to us, but I’m not seeing that now.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
The so-called project she is serving in these three paintings seems to be of the utmost importance right now, post Dana Schutz and even vis a vis Kara Walker’s show where so many black bodies were made to look as foolish in places as the white bodies looked malign. These Fates are proud bodies and full of fluid possibilities.  I always thought the real reason Dana’s Emmett Till painting didn’t work ultimately was because it wasn’t painted well enough, with the kind of weird surprising paint and drawing that, for instance, her Michael Jackson painting had. We’re not here to go over Schutz again, but it was really interesting to see someone with such good intentions fail so miserably at trying to bridge the race gap, whereas here now with these Fate paintings no one is making any noise at all about a white artist’s right to depict a black body. That’s an important project, Barry

BRENDA ZLAMANY
The problem with Schutz’s Open Casket is that it was decorative to the point of insulting the viewer. I remember at the Whitney opening noticing the painting from the corner of my eye and registering it as an attractive painting but having no feeling for the subject whatsoever. There was nothing about it visually that hinted at the horror of the content. I don’t want to say it lacked empathy but to take a horrifying event and turn it into attractive paint is bad painting at best.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Making no noise is a great accomplishment? I don’t think so. When the conflict blew up over the Sam Durant sculpture at the Walker, I was surprised when I read that it been exhibited at Documenta, because I’d seen and written about that Documenta and didn’t remember the piece. I read back over what I’d written and confirmed that I hadn’t mentioned it. Then I got curious, and read all the other Documenta reviews I could find online. Not a single one mentioned Durant’s sculpture. That didn’t make me think it was harmless in Germany but volatile in Minnesota. It made me think that the piece was so mediocre no one felt obliged to think about it— until a different context focused a different kind of attention on it. I guess Saville, being British, won’t be included in the next Whitney Biennial, but if she were, there might be some interesting responses. Oh, and by the way, Dana’s Emmett Till painting is a very good work.

DAVID COHEN
Saville isn’t depicting a black body directly, but an African carving. The flesh montaged over the fetish is Caucasian, as best one can tell—or race is at any event not axiomatic. The incorporation of the carving recalls David Salle to me. These Fates are interesting images. But can we get past white-woman-painting-black-people silliness and just ask what it means, what it is really saying?

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Fate 3 and Fate 2 have heads of black women; they’re not carvings. And what they’re really saying is totally prosaic when put into words: “out of all these multiplicities we’re also one.” How boring is that when distilled down to mere words. But that’s where the art comes in – she’s created a medley of fluid bodies and I revel in it! I so appreciate when an artist takes on big themes, unwieldy problems, and does it unstintingly, and more importantly, without irony! And Barry, you cannot just claim the Schutz Open Casket is a good painting without saying why.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think she was reaching into her soul in the earlier works and they were not beautiful. By putting aside the content of the previous work and focusing on the excitement of the paint, I think she has a chance of saying something less calculated and more authentic and in the end, more ambitious. I agree with David though, the drawing is a bit flat.

David Salle is a good comparison, and not just because of the African carving, but also because of the random layering of images. When I made etchings with David, we would print the plates, each with different images on them in various combinations until something happened. When they worked, they worked. But we were not asking what they were saying.

DAVID COHEN
Salle is a formalist to his fingertips; they “worked” because they clicked into something startling and satisfying in equal measure, no doubt. But Saville isn’t a formalist. She’s always been interested in themes. I take issue with the dismissal of her early work – the fat self-portrait in Propped and the liposuction paintings. They were totally authentic in the personal and political urgency of their issues and persuasive in marrying painterly marvel and bodily discomfort.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Thank you, David. I agree with what you say about Saville’s earlier work!

DAVID COHEN
Dennis assumes, incorrectly, that I must have been joking in finding Tracey Emin’s figuration more convincing than Saville’s. I think both artists, in their latest works, are dealing with the body through mark making. Both are mannerists, but Emin is served well by restricting herself to mannerisms of abstract expressionism. She was channeling Roger Hilton, an English abstract painter who struggled with – and exploited – alcohol addiction in his figurative experiments. There’s plenty to fault in Emin’s results but it is a kind of escape to the woods, in Suzy’s sense, that Saville isn’t up for.

SUZY SPENCE
Brenda, her early paintings seemed distinctly feminist to me and feminist artists are Man Repellers by nature. In her early work there was no willingness to please; she wanted to repel you with her fleshy body and suck you in with her painting technique at the same time. That tension no longer exists, and so the work is flat as Barry says.

WALTER ROBINSON
Julie’s mention of Schutz is apt since Dana especially activates the decorative quality of her paint strokes, which are little masterpieces in themselves. In the meantime, objections to these works because of an absence of “soul” is, well, retardataire and romantic. Postmodernism is about a human world without such constructions. Some viewers prefer the art without the mystification! Do we look for “soul” in Salle or Sherman, for instance?

SUZY SPENCE
Well then you should love this work Walter! It’s perfectly postmodern and cold.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Not cold enough by a long shot! The depiction of faces in particular seemed to invite empathy in a really blatant way. And how sentimental the use of the pietà idea!

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, especially that schlocky pietà of a guy coming out of a war zone with a sexed-up infant in his arms, pure pompier.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wish I hadn’t seen that one.

DAVID COHEN
To return to Walter’s question, Salle and Sherman spare us any quest for “soul” because of their knowingly constructed style. Their tropes arrive and function intact. Saville isn’t deconstructing anyone else’s technique at this stage, she is merely tapping into effects. I agree with Julie that they are free of irony. They are anything but art about art, which is why their mannerisms are all the more egregious.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
Yes she has a lot of effects in this show but towards a more interesting end than in earlier shows she’s had. Would you consider the wings and appendages in Fate 3 to be mere “effects”? Because to me those are essential components of the structure of the work, acting boldly to move it in space, to suggest hybridity and composite bodies, all necessary for the bigger project at hand.

DAVID COHEN
By wings to you mean the smudged arcs over the left shoulder of the amalgamated figure? I am reading drawing on a wall in the studio (pace the baseboard behind the pedestal) that serves the functional purpose of saying that the figure is an artificial studio-bound creation.

JULIE HEFFERNAN
I mean the chair-like appendage (in Fate 3) attached to her shoulder to the right, and the lobster claw shape to the left — those are essential components to the icon’s whole structure. The smudges behind the form just reinforce the integrity of the overall monolithic shape she’s trying to create. Notice also how the big strokes of yellow paint within the big reddish brown shape to the bottom right reinforces the horizontal ankle attached to the foot, that is also another pedestal for the icon, as well as a pivot point for the whole structure above, and also causes the mars red shape to turn in space, and thereby shift the plane of that shape from horizontal to vertical, like a chair. So it’s a multiplicity of things – a chair-like thing, a cape-like thing, a drooping wing-like thing: super interesting!

WALTER ROBINSON (from the Gallery)
Standing in front of the paintings, my second look, I have to say they’re awesome. The sense of play is overwhelming — the artist in the studio, making pictures one at a time, doing this and that — a big hand expertly tendered here, some scratchy Twomblyesque marks there, a witty pose overall — amusing herself, pleasing herself — it’s just so good — artists have an alibi, all they really have to do is represent the individual subject, not be the World Shaper.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Wow, great Walter! But what about the pietàs? Blue Pietà is icky in an Odd Nerdrum way.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I wish we could be having this discussion in front of the paintings.

But I want to go back to something said a little while back and register the fact that I don’t understand the idea of saying one artist is a formalist and another is something else. A combination that works for David Salle is one that conveys a certain feeling, I think. Why is that “formalism”? What made Saville’s earlier paintings work for me were formal aspects— these conveyed her themes in ways that worked for me. The themes without the forms wouldn’t have done that.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That’s an important point, Barry.

WALTER ROBINSON
Somehow, David, I don’t think they’re projected. If they are, she’s definitely unparalleled at it.

How a viewer sees these things is totally parti pris. They can seem kitsch or heartfelt. You know the head in the pieta is a kouros. And four-armed dead body carried from the ruins by the chap in Seventh Seal garb is too clean by half. Other works look like her friends posing nude together — warm and real, and a real subject. In the end, she’s an artist; she can do what she wants, and the hell with piffle from the critics!

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Hear! Hear!

DAVID COHEN
Hmm. Well, I certainly don’t like to project moral outrage at any means employed if the results are convincing.

WALTER ROBINSON
These people…

DAVID COHEN
OK, well let’s talk about that scribble in and underneath. What is it trying to say? Are these automata from Westworld and this is the machinery where their viscera should be? I don’t think so. Did she do some scribble underneath to get her juices flowing, and then started her beaux arts painting on top of that and then Gagosian came and whisked the picture off before she could finish it? No, this is effect. a way of saying this is a contemporary painting, not the academic, anachronistic figure painting it would otherwise look to be, because squiggles are modern. That’s mannerism at its worst to me. But if someone could offer me a reading of the use of this device that energizes their understanding of the image, I’m all ears.

SUZY SPENCE
Walter and David, I don’t think they are projected onto canvas. I imagine an athletic event that called for giant easels and enough space and light to study her subjects who she actually asked to recline on pedestals and chairs. I think she’s working from life; I imagine a string of models, most of whom appear in her studio the way actors come in for an audition. I sense she doesn’t know many of them, as there is such similarity of body type and age, like she’d advertised the project on Craig’s List. People in their late 30s, some black, mostly white. My favorite piece was Vis and Ramen I, who are both in recline like Manet’s Olympia. They sink deeper into their pedestal than her other subjects, their genitals almost touch, and I was fascinated by her decision not to establish that contact.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Suzy, I don’t think that’s true. In the 2003 press release from her Migrants show it mentions that she prefers to work from photographs rather than living models. “Saville calls herself a scavenger of images.” Her studio is a repository of images from old medical journals of bruises, scars, images of deformities and disease. In this sense her relationship with her subject matter is more Salle then Soutine or Freud and it’s evident in this newer work.

DENNIS KARDON (returning to the conversation)
Sorry to weigh in so late. I got sidetracked.

Although I am sure she couldn’t possibly be working from life, even twenty years ago I was unsure how she got from the photo to the canvas, though now it seems obvious computers are involved. Even then Saville seemed to challenge the improvisational constraints of either grid or projector. Both then and now the paint seemed spontaneously slapped on, but without the flatness of most paintings made from projected photographs. It is what makes them look so contemporary. They have all they dynamics of spontaneous paint handling, and the specific sureness without any of the uncertainty of where to put the paint. Something that Walter, can surely attest to. But though it would certainly indicate a super human talent if they were painted from life, I think it hardly matters conceptually how she manages to accomplish her paintings.

I think beauty, abject or otherwise, takes us nowhere productive.

Barry squarely solves the problem with his question about content, because this kind of analysis is the error that takes us away from what is actually happening in the paintings. This what has confused me. I will look at the paintings and be totally taken in, and even studying the details, I am amazed at the frisson between spontaneity and specificity. Then I get home and try to answer analytical questions about “to what end” and the project starts to fall apart. Walter had the perfect response, he was dismissive at first, in his critical self, but when his painter self went to study them again, was impressed.

I have to say when all is said and done, in all probability the details are stronger than the sum of their parts. They direct us to considerations of emotions that are constructed out of touch, rather than conception. I think David Salle is an apt referent, but because of the authenticity of the paint, they do not have the distance and irony of Salle, who does (a la David Cohen) see paint as a mere illustration of itself.

DAVID COHEN
Dennis and Walter prove that you can make better images by photographing bits of Jenny Saville than Jenny Saville can in a completed canvas.

DENNIS KARDON
This is where we disagree David, I don’t sense those “scribbles” are supposed to have meaning in the representation sense, but in the sense of trying to marry an arbitrary spontaneity with a mark making that is directed to represent stuff and break down the moment when one kind of gesture transitions into another. As Walter mentioned, Manet could do this flawlessly on all levels, no one has been able to attain that complexity since (except Matisse, but in a different way).

BRENDA ZLAMANY
In spite of the authenticity of the paint, I think one can still judge the work with the same criterion that one might apply to Salle, and they’re better that way. Besides, I never felt much emotion in her touch.

DENNIS KARDON
The emotion is not in the touch itself but the construction of what the touch conveys. Like the hand touching the leg. It’s in the economy of gesture, and specificity of the shape of the mark. Manet is what the ideal looks like, but again, old fashioned compared to contemporary issues of representation and scale:

DAVID COHEN
I wonder what’s contemporary about painting on a huge scale, considering the fact that we actually process images on small screens in this era, and outside of art galleries and museums have very few sacred and civic spaces in which we look at large oil paintings. Saville’s command of size is certainly impressive, but what value does blown up charcoal drawing convey, beyond the acrobatics of its delivery?

DENNIS KARDON
I have been concerned with your willingness to demean what Saville does by cavalierly referring to “acrobatics” or “blown up charcoal drawing” when what I, Walter, and others in the discussion have constantly pointed out is thought in action. The whole point of painting is confronting the physicality of an image in the world and its relationship to the body of the viewer. How it metamorphoses as it is approached, the scale of a mark to one’s own body as an image breaks apart upon close inspection. It is why the overall conception, as seen as a coherent image is so up in the air in this work. It is easy to use language to name and then devalue, but I think what is really good about Saville is that she seems to be constantly trying to go beyond any singular idea or conception.

WALTER ROBINSON
Many of our pros and cons show how easy it is to marshall any kind of argument against any kind of thing, especially with aesthetics. Why not praise Saville’s works for going counter to digital socialization, for instance?

You could also say that she graffitied her own work so the taggers won’t have to.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
You’re right! and of course the opposite is true too, if you are good with words you can use them to make any old thing sound good or interesting. I would really like to be convinced to like these paintings but it’s not quite happening.

WALTER ROBINSON
This person — so nutty!

DAVID COHEN
Really? I don’t see the person as nutty at all. It is a very nice, respectable old-fashioned 19th-century painting done after a photograph of a woman over which the artist has inscribed some red dashes and black hatching. Half the students in the New York Academy of Art MFA show that opened last week could have knocked out that head, though none of them would have done the dashes on top

BARRY SCHWABSKY
That would be the first thing they’d try after leaving the Academy.

DENNIS KARDON
There is no NYAA grad student (or few painters anywhere really) that could accomplish what she has accomplished.

WALTER ROBINSON
Yeah, you overestimate the skills of the NYAA grads. And you object to the random marks? It’s all marks, at any rate, and they’re nutty in the way they’re deployed — since Manet painters have toyed with the codes of representation of facial features. But we all use the codes — Saville just keeps to the academic conventions more than most. Still, there’s play, and I think it works.

As for the rest of the chazerai, it’s functioning in several ways, as we all know. Animates the surface. Stands in for entrails. Enlivens the academic figuration. Represents the triumph of humanism over abstraction (as Donald Kuspit might argue).

My original reaction was that the marriage of academic and modernist elements was a failure. I like my quotations clean and unfussed with, generally. But then I decided I didn’t care.
BRENDA ZLAMANY
This one is much ‘nuttier’.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
As a detail, it does look pretty yummy. But is there a painting in the show that does that as a whole?

DAVID COHEN
Nuts being the operative word, Brenda. But isn’t this just the trope of unfinish? We are to read the (oilstick?) marks underneath as an armature, and then some figure bits are in grisaille, and the testes are then nicely worked up with shadows in place, behaving properly. The whole concoction is saying, I’m an old master, I’ve got the chops

BRENDA ZLAMANY
That might all be true, David. But as Barry says, it’s still ‘yummy’. And I think the red dashes are good in this passage. Why not just enjoy it? And I think the Fate paintings do it as a whole.

DAVID COHEN
Brenda: You misread Barry I think. He’s saying there are lots of corners of pictures that are appealing in their dispatch, but the overall images don’t convince. If you follow the curate’s way of eating eggs you’ll end up in the emergency ward.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Ha!

SUZY SPENCE
Much as I love her ambition, I really wish she’d find new artists with whom she’d like to be compared. The genius thing needs to go.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Like if she started channeling Florine Stettheimer? That would really throw an interesting money wrench into things.

SUZY SPENCE
Yes it would.

WALTER ROBINSON
What about the scarlet skewed halo? That’s new. Also, relative to the notion that this stuff is familiar and tired, don’t forget she totally owns this niche.

DAVID COHEN
I think she has some competition, actually: Odd Nerdrum, Adrian Ghenie, others whose names I didn’t feel a need to remember. There is a big market for this kind of thing, especially beyond the Urals.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
Odd Nerdrum is almost completely detached from modern painting. But Ghenie and some of the other Romanians do have more in common with her—maybe also some of the Dresden school. But none of them have this fascination with the corporeal, which is what’s made Saville’s best work so compelling.

DAVID COHEN
Cecily Brown at her best marries paint and flesh more convincingly, though neither of them is Rubens

BRENDA ZLAMANY
I hate Rubens, except for the small studies.

DAVID COHEN
OK, enjoy Jenny Saville then.

By this stage, Julie Heffernan and Suzy Spence have signed off.

DENNIS KARDON
I need to interject another issue which seems new in this work. It seems she is taking a piece of sculptural representation and trying through paint to capture the living aspect of what the sculpture was originally trying to represent. The bringing of the visceral to the constructed has always been her territory, and she is now trying to expand on the ways signifiers of bodies moving and being represented in the world convey actual feeling. And she is really trying to break it down brushstroke by brushstroke so that it is totally appropriate to focus on the details of moments in her paintings where she is getting her hands dirty. I don’t even know if we can evaluate the total effect of these paintings yet. That’s their provocative moment. This whole discussion of how the micro becomes macro is not just a trendy concept. It is crucial to how we move and represent in the world, and the heatedness of the discussion reflects the divides she is trying to bridge. Anything that provokes this much disagreement must be elucidating something important.

DAVID COHEN
I think we are all agreed that the Fates series attempts and achieves something new and substantial, and is the highlight of the show (yummy details notwithstanding).

These composite images remind me strongly of early work by Richard Hamilton, which itself was a Pop extension of earlier Dada strategies. What stands out in Saville is that she is doing it all in paint, but ultimately, so what? A photomontage based on paintings, a painting based on computer-generated collage: it is just a technical distinction.

I don’t think one can play with issues as loaded and potent as racial identity, gender representation, the lived-in body etc. in large, resolved public images and not have a forceful message one is ready to stand behind, or that others who admire the results can express coherently. Saying that these images are provoking a debate and we can’t decide what they mean yet doesn’t cut it for me. We don’t have to have a definitive interpretation, but the onus is on defenders to offer a start.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
I disagree about the Fates series. They are not as bad as the pietàs, but that’s it.

WALTER ROBINSON
I would want to cite the group of British artists who took illustrative techniques and tricked them out with painterly effects — R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, even Hockney, along with Hamilton.

DAVID COHEN
Yeah, she is totally a footnote to School of London painting, both the grubby existentialist end of the spectrum (Freud and Auerbach) and the Pop end (Hamilton and Kitaj). But she chickens out of the middle point, which is where she actually needs to concentrate her efforts if she wants to paint rivers of flesh: Francis Bacon.

BRENDA ZLAMANY
Just back from a break. Did anyone mention George Condo?

DAVID COHEN
Someone should have done, with the African statue. This is what irony-free George Condo looks like, Julie. Pastiche minus irony equals kitsch.

DENNIS KARDON
One problem here seems to be that David sees what Saville does as merely facilely co-opting a kind of historical mark making. Yummy sticks in my throat as well. While I hate yummy, I don’t think Saville is that, nor do I think what she does is facile. In my experience of the paintings I have seen, it doesn’t seem like that. But it is the conflict of everyone’s own imagined histories, which for the painters in the group, is how we construct our own genealogies that make this discussion so confounding. I can easily see how David and Barry might find this work deficient, yet when I look at it, I don’t think so. On some level all painters at this point could be considered pastiche, and yet nevertheless, no one really, despite the many comparisons, looks like Saville. So to attack her for her method seems beside the point, and why authenticity reared its ugly head.

I think kitsch is becoming one of those words like beauty and soul, that people use to justify value or non-value, which pretend to be objectively agreed upon concepts but are really just an attempt to universalize an opinion. To me Bacon seems emotionally overblown kitsch, and yet he is immediately recognizable. I must, despite the condescending Nochlin groans, feel that a male painter would not come under so much negative scrutiny. I don’t believe Larry Rivers, who was genuinely facile, got this dismissal.

Asking the questions, “what is it really saying?” or “to what end?” sounds like critical thinking, but are not really applicable to artists or their work. They are questions viewers might ask of themselves but not of the artist. The ability of an artist or work of art to embrace ambiguity and not provide definitive answers to those kind of questions is a mark of quality to me. After her first show Saville faltered in this area for me, but seems to have regained her ambiguous footing in this one.

WALTER ROBINSON
Saville is also taking real people sitting in front of her and immersing them in a whirlpool of painterly effects on canvas. A pointed, literal definition of what her painting is, and an uncommon one.

BARRY SCHWABSKY
What Dennis said could start a whole new round. But rather than going there, I just want to point out that “to what end” (which I said) and “what is she saying” (which I would never say) are utterly different things. “Content is a glimpse,” said de Kooning; “to what end” means, What is that thing she’s got a glimpse of and that she is pursuing? It’s nothing to do with a verbally paraphrasable message (such as one that came up in this discussion, “We are all one,” I think it went). In the end, we can only agree to disagree, but the thing Saville seemed to glimpse before— I feel that she’s lost sight of it here.

DAVID COHEN
There’s a kind of sophistry in hitting on innocent phrases like “she is saying such and such”; we are all adults here, we know that intentions aren’t the final arbiter of anything, that artists at their best generate ambiguities of intention as much as form. But Saville very deliberately, pointedly, and publicly deploys rhetorics of style and method in ways that I find completely removed from any historically or psychologically informed understanding of their value.

Dennis, in your writings on artists you are hardly shy to interpret, including – rightly – ambiguous or unintended elements in the finished works. I was simply asking Saville’s defenders to take a stab at interpreting images in ways that make sense of her methods. I think only Julie began to do that in her reading of the Fates series.

DENNIS KARDON
All of my reviews are certainly about how the work speaks to me from my perspective of a painter and not an attempt to explain ultimate meaning. I do think Saville, in my interpretation, is trying to address the gap between representation and life. She starts with painting a lifeless statue, substituting real people using our criteria of realness, photography illuminated by paint, trying to turn stone to flesh, and then turning to a remake of cubism to address how that metamorphosis is unsuccessful. This may seem, in the ideas department, not original, but it has always been pertinent and comes out of her work. In Barry’s terms what she is “trying to reach for” is the connection of real humans to representations. She probably fails as this distance really cannot be bridged, but in her case her insufficiency is where her art lies. Which is why the details are important to me, as I think trying to capture the complexity of looking at her work through one reproduction of an entire work on our devices is bound to be reductive of the experience and demean the enterprise. Salle takes the impossibility as a given and the “irony” that everyone perceives is just trying to make those failures expressive. While I think Saville is frustrated by the failure.

I think we disagree about the stylization of the “pentimenti,” which to me are not pentimenti exactly, but underpainting. Since they do not seem like actual attempts to describe the final subject, it seems arrogant not to give her the benefit of the doubt about the why of their existence. They might be part of an unseen aspect of the image, or a change of mind about the image, but I feel she doesn’t use them to call attention to her mastery, but the artificiality of what is left on top. This is where I think you question her sincerity, and I simply won’t make that call. You may be totally correct and the whole thing is completely contrived. I don’t feel that is the case, but I couldn’t say.

WALTER ROBINSON
To Dennis I would say representations are reality, and to David I’d exclaim, “values? I don’t need no stinkin’ values!” That is, she puts plenty of intention in her paintings, not the least of which is libidinal play and, as yet another afterthought to our colloquium, a challenge to Hirst and Kapoor, her bloviating male colleagues on the new “British Rich List.”

Jenny Saville: Ancestors at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, gagosian.com, May 3 to June 16, 2018.

David Cohen is Publisher/Editor at artcritical.com. Julie Heffernan is a painter, represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York. Dennis Kardon is a painter who shows at Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York.Walter Robinson is a painter, represented by Jeffrey Deitch, New York.Barry Schwabsky is art critic of The Nation, a poet, and author of The Perpetual Guest and other works. Suzy Spence, Executive Publisher at artcritical.com, is a painter, represented by Sears Peyton Gallery, New York. Painter Brenda Zlamany’s most recent commission was unveiled in 2018 at Davenport College, Yale University, and her series of watercolor portraits, 100/100, will be shown at the JCC, New York, in the fall. 

The post Jenny Saville ROUNDTABLE: Julie Heffernan, Brenda Zlamany, Dennis Kardon, Walter Robinson, Barry Schwabsky, and Suzy Spence appeared first on artcritical.

Sesostris: March 8 to April 28, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

Drawings: March 8 to April 25, 2018
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com.

From the Iliad to Vietnam, Cy Twombly was fascinated by war. His epic, 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris (2000), is the singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, running concurrently with the same gallery’s landmark survey of drawings downtown. The legend of the conquering pharaoh, whose sanguine trails were recounted by Herodotus, is index linked by Twombly to the most elemental temporal cycle, the sun’s journey across the sky, as mythologized by the sun god Ra in his solar barge. Like Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Twombly’s Coronation dashes through a landscape of emotional extremes and pounding cadences, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic and the majestic.

With almost puerile glee, the opening panel delivers a blazing sun in cadmium red crayon contoured in Twombly’s signature jittery nonchalance, grandly enclosing a chaotic entanglement of bouncing lines. He then installs the same solar shape onto a schematic chariot, bestowing upon it the spindly inscription “SOLAR BARGE OF SESOSTRIS.” The vessel seems to fly into an immediate barrage, in the next panel, of spermatic deluge on the now febrile effulgence of red and yellow orb. A slanted, knotty inscription, obscured and shadowed in this gravitational rage of aqueous white acrylic paint, cites Sappho in fragments: “Eros weaver (of myth)/ Eros sweet (bitter)/ Eros bringer (of pain).” Eros, son of Aphrodite and Ares, seems to be Twombly’s entry point into the tragic carnality of human violence, union as Eros is of the gods of love and war. Yet this brief orgiastic moment is urgently checked in the fourth panel, where a simmering sun retreats to a wax crayon circle amidst emaciated pencil spirals and diminutive runnels of yellow paint. This is a symphonic tactic, an interlude of momentary calm priming the viewer for the explosive event that will span the next three panels.

The barge, now sprouting stalactite-like oars, reappears in full baroque sensuality. Rapid knots of watery brushstroke, at once floral and bloody, form a gold and roseate cascade. As others have noted of Twombly, his dripping motions are simultaneously temporal and spatial. On the next panel, a Patricia Waters poem about the departure of the gods is cursively inscribed in red pencil, and shrouded in a crimson lace of arrested paint projectiles. Climax is reached in the seventh panel, where the white deluge, sublimely touched with gold, reappears and submerges the now multiplied barges, dismembering and devouring the foreground boat with flaming yellow while pushing its discarnate companions into atmospheric recession. Everything sizzles in the splendid opacity of embodied light. This moment quickly collapses in the next panel into the obscurity of frosty purple and foggy pallor, an almost comic deflation of the preceding grandeur. The barge then morphs back to its own schematic vestige. Finally, lines from Sappho reappear in renewed clarity above a dark, brooding shape.

Image and text in Twombly’s oeuvre are never subservient, one to the other, as mere flourish or illustration. But the viewer often encounters a disorienting, almost vertiginous split between modes of reading and of seeing. Verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint—the soaring barges’ dripping flames and Sappho’s lamentations—alternate in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance their tango. Text tunnels through materiality to treasure troves of cultural evocations, while paint hints beyond what can be verbalized. Perhaps Sappho’s words themselves provide a clue. According to poet Anne Carson, Sappho’s notion of the bittersweet (glukupikron) describes the “sensational crisis” of joy and pain coexisting. It reveals the essentially paradoxical nature of eros. Lack, the space between the actual and the possible, activates eros in the way voltage activates electric charge. And like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, Eros reach for his object but never consummates it: “Perfect desire is perfect impasse,” as Carson puts it. The lover’s vision is stereoscopic: reality and potentiality, self and other, what is and what is not, are all projected upon the same mental screen.

Comparably, in Twombly image and text can never have a proper, or literal, correspondence and can only be metaphoric translations of each other. Each medium reaches hopelessly towards what only the other has. The edge between them, like the pressurized contact of opposites in the word “bittersweet”, is pungently defined. The act of subsuming both upon the same picture plane creates a space of incongruence and paradox. Across this space, as Carson puts it, “a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight”. The electrified dance of allusion and sensation is an erotic one. In this light, what Clement Greenberg proposed in his 1940 Towards a Newer Laocoön, that painting should uphold its two-dimensional purity against contamination of other disciplines, reads like a call to chastity, evading the possibility that painting could be strengthened by interaction with another medium.

Strikingly, Twombly achieved the feat of using poetry to elevating painterly expressivity at a time when images were rendered secondary or diagrammatic by the stipulations of textual concepts (minimal art and pop art). This underlines the difficulty faced by Twombly’s innovative enterprise, and thus the importance of recognizing some seemingly instinctive or literary decisions as contemplated formal strategies. His choice of quotation is often painterly in nature, drawing from favored poets like Keats, Rilke, Sappho, Catullus and the haikuist Taigi. When citing these writers he often modifies or omits words. On the canvas or page, the territorial sovereignty of text is, furthermore, frequently violated by painterly marks—and undermined by his inimitable, barely legible handwriting. The Twombly scrawl is something he deliberately cultivated at the outset of his career when, during national service in the early 1950s, he took to drawing in the dark. Line probes with libidinal tremor realms of rhythm, psyche and temporality.

In abundant examples, Gagosian’s drawing exhibition demonstrates the ways in which Twombly’s very particular quality of line undergoes constant metamorphosis. The first career-spanning presentation of its kind, this show covers ground from 1951 to 2008. It is a journey that begins in the early 1950s with angst-ridden gestural line drawings heavily influenced by German Expressionism and bristling with primal forms. The 1960s witness both the somber, incessant, compulsive loops of the blackboard paintings and the first stirrings of mythopoeic imagery rich with quotations sourced from world literature. In the 1970s the sublimated landscapes, with their pastoral reminiscences and flower-lined splendor, an idiom that would come to dominate Twombly’s later years, make their first appearance.

In an untitled drawing from 1969, a swarm of looping white lines surge and plunge atop a uniformly dark-gray ground. The gentle upper-rightward drift of this cluster is typical of Twombly. In the center background, a tangle of translucent pentimenti insinuates itself into atmospheric distance. Gentle, slanting lines traverse the page, not with the calligraphic modulation of a brushstroke, but with the nervous energy of a drypoint needle: mobile rather than corporeal. Indeed, the jolts and swells evoke a disembodied psychic rhythm, one in which a smooth curve never travels far without being disrupted by an obstinate shudder. Somewhere between Surrealist automatism and Abstract Expressionist gesture, this quality of line manages to reconcile Joan Miró’s slick, smooth arabesques and Franz Kline’s muscular thrusts. An uneasy volatility recalls projectiles hitting friction that is distinct at each local point. It is intensely felt, “the sensation of its own realization” as Twombly declared in his 1957 manifesto, yet it’s a particular kind of cathexis realized through sensitized rhythm rather than carnal gesture. At moments when the frail loops close upon themselves, we catch ghostly glimpses of legibility: letters flash, “R,” “O,” “M,” “S”, illuminating a fugitive tunnel between word and drawing. Perhaps there’s another, implicit kind of literariness in Twombly’s art: poetry is about rhythm, a matter of stress and timing, just like the artist’s particular use of line.

White for Twombly is densely impregnated with symbolic meaning. He has a penchant for moments of white on off-white, or for laying white paint on evenly tinted paper. To quote his 1957 manifesto again: “Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance – or […] the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé”. And as Mary Jacobus has observed, white also evokes the sun-lit Mediterranean for Twombly,. It also embodies memory through the act of erasure, constitutes intervals and space for painterly marks, and annuls directionality by creating a decentered narrative. In the seven-part panel Untitled, 1981, a frail crayoned arc springs into a flower before a leaping, cresting wave takes over, which then proceeds to narrow out. The center panel with the wave exhibits at its full range Twombly’s masterful use of white. It is achieved by maneuvering the complementary red and green, the main colors of the forceful crayoned undertow. The peak of the wave is a creamy commingling of thick white impasto applied in staccato daubs and red pigment rubbed out from the crayon lines, in which a pink pudgy opacity results. In the middle right, we see the same situation with green, but the emerald twines break through the white paste, creating a partial palimpsest. At the bottom of the wave, the layer of white paint, spottily grayed by the mingling of red and green, clarifies in glassy sedimentation. A stylus then scores back into this diaphanous zone, exposing the crayon beneath in flashes of lucidity. Nietzsche’s statement about dreaming comes to mind: “Even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance”.

The Gagosian show is extensive enough to make clear that the apparent orgiastic chaos of Twombly’s work is buttressed by visual sophistication. In Untitled, 2001, in the culminating room of the exhibition, a furor of yellow and gold hurtles across the image. Large, blazing flowers, in lemon, sap green, purple and crimson—the paint slathered on and fingered to a velvety luster—bloom at the top of the composition. Paint dribbles down in vertical streaks forming a balustrade. Articulated local areas (the blossoms) with their vestiges of naturalism and strong geometric structures (the yellow diagonal passage and the dripping veil) rein in an otherwise sweeping anarchy.

Living for most of his life in different parts of Italy and immersing himself, furthermore, in various forms of classicism, one wonders how Twombly managed to remain conversant with American artistic culture in the second half of the 20th Century? His move to Europe and incorporation of literature into painting at a time when people were rejecting Abstract Expressionism in favor of Minimalism and Pop Art reads like an effort to revive the subjectivity and romanticism of the earlier movement while also extracting moral and emotional nuances from the literature from which he quoted. Untitled (To Sappho), 1976 shows this at play. The center of the picture is the purple stain. It lies above the last stanza of Sappho’s brief epithalathum (marriage song) Lament for a Maidenhead. The stain has itself a scent-like gauziness, and is partly obscured by a white flurry. The text is a pyramidal shape lapsing rightward like a sigh, each line written with larger and more spaced out letters. In Sappho’s poem, loss of virginity is compared to the violent crushing of a flower. Besides Sappho herself, this picture evokes another personage associated with queerness: Hyacinth, Apollo’s young lover and one of Twombly’s literary alter egos. Produced during Twombly’s pastoral period, the picture recalls Adorno’s remark that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism”. The first Gay Liberation March was held in New York City in 1970, but how engaged was Twombly, whose sexuality few now question, in 1970s’ sexual politics? The connection is a mere hint, but the eroticism of his allusions is more than a literary ploy.

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May 5 to September 1 (extended), 2017
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com

Within the high walls of a cloistered garden, a young man falls in love with a rose, but seeking every possible avenue through which to attain his affection, it becomes increasingly clear he can never have it without destroying that aspect of it which he loves. With the general plot line of the original “Romance of the Rose” (1230 CE) in our minds, and its universal ramifications for all human relationships, we can follow the path that Anselm Kiefer weaves in his newest exhibition, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” rich with themes of sexuality, eroticism, femininity and longing. Though bookended with several massive paintings, the heart of the exhibition comprises watercolors and books. The exhibition has also been, to extend the metaphor, bookmarked by two events: an interview with Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library and an intimate demonstration of the plaster-soaked-cardboard books taken out of their vitrines at the gallery. These extra-curricular activities allowed the viewer into Kiefer’s thorny garden, and explicated a profound transition of the artist/author from his pulpit of philosopher and historian to a much more earthy place, looking up at the stars with the rest of us.

The exhibition has been laid out along the plan of a basilica, with a pair of rooms as aisles on either side of a main nave. The inner sanctum of the gallery contains a presentation of Kiefer’s newest one-off art books—hybrid objects that ensnare a dizzying number of references: to Wagner and Nordic mythology, Abrahamic traditions, Rodin, Picasso and the modern conception of data storage and presentation. On the evening of June 22nd, several of the books were removed from their vitrines and presented up-close. Vitrines have always served Kiefer well, and the chunky archaic tomes were accessible to the viewer as splayed hydra-like assemblages within their glass cases. Out of the cases though, and with their heavy encrusted leaves turned by two preparators, the static objects became storytellers. When reading, flipping a page is usually not such a big deal, though the term “page-turner” does still resonate; but when presented with Kiefer’s oversize monolithic works, the viewer is forced to digest the imagery of the page; a marbleized background overlaid with a languorous female figure traced in fragile graphite lines and then fluidly enlivened with watercolor in pink, beige, ochre, or any iteration of a flesh tone imaginable. With each turn the manuscript groans and the balance of weight shifts as one image recedes into shadow and another goddess or nymph appears. The majority of the books cover the subject of “Klingsor’s Garden,” 33 volumes in all, referencing the garden of women/flowers who attempt to seduce the hero in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. In contrast to the mythological is the historical “Jules Michelet: les Reines de France” (2013). Particularly edifying was the presentation of Keifer’s original sketchbook, “Erotik im Fernen Osten oder Transition from Cool to Warm” from the mid-1970’s. This fragile and deeply personal narrative placed the artist’s newest pieces in context. The female imagery has existed in Kiefer’s cosmology as a hot, diaphanous and perhaps uncomfortable balance to the epic literature and historical landscapes that have comprised his main corpus.

The day before the opening of the exhibition Kiefer was interviewed at the New York Public Library. Kiefer’s interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber, was able to expertly unpack much of the symbolism that forms a sturdy foundation for the current work. The discussion focused on the immediacy of the work in the life of the artist: Kiefer was brought up in a house in ruins, as it was bombed on the night his mother rushed to the hospital to give birth to him (or so the story goes), so the destructive propensities of history and the devastation in his work is from direct observation and experience. This was heightened in the discussion by Holdengräber’s bold decision to frankly address Kiefer’s “Occupations” series, the artist’s powerful and equivocal assessment of the war. On the humorous side, a slide of the artist dressed as a Cardinal underlined the fact that as a youth he longed to enter the Catholic Church and rise up the ranks of sacred hierarchy but was thwarted by the blunt assertion that no German could be pope. These revelations of juicy subtexts aid immeasurably in the understanding of the work, and even hint at the angle at which Kiefer approaches the erotic.

Unlike Picasso, the sexual imagery of whose late work emerges from his own lascivious fantasies, Kiefer’s vision is predicated on the works of his poet friend Jean-Noël Vuarnet, whose “Extases Féminines” (Paris, 1980) described the experiences of such personages as Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena. (Kiefer’s series of watercolors inspired by Vuarnet is on view.) Kiefer immediately builds a religious and numinous subtext into his eroticism, much as Wagner does with his field of seductive flower girls crossed with Christian iconography in Parsifal, and this accounts for the flowers as well as the Christian symbolism mixed together in the watercolors. The paintings which serve as something of a preface and epilogue to the main, bookish, body of the exhibition also engage the darker side of Kiefer’s Catholicism: Ohne title (untitled) 2017 and Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love) (2017) prominently feature lead torturously peeling off the surface of the canvas, an aesthetic choice that the artist in his Public Library discussion paralleled to the flaying of St. Bartholomew, while Schlange (snake) (2017) is a large vertical canvas crowned with a re-bar grate, a recreation of a grill on which to roast any number of saintly individuals. While that is decidedly hot, the oscillation between cool and warm is very perceptible in the artist’s handling of intense human emotions such as faith, lust, love and loss. Rather than cast himself into the flames, he prefers to ponder such issues within the walled garden he has built out of plaster volumes.

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Mark Grotjahn: Untitled (Captain America) at Gagosian
January 19 to February 20, 2016
980 Madison Avenue (between 76th and 77th streets)
New York, 212 744 2313

The title of Mark Grotjahn’s show at Gagosian is “Captain America,” after the comic book character created in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s involvement in World War II. In the comic, Captain America fought against the Axis powers, knocking out Nazis and Japanese soldiers in storylines that promoted extreme patriotic fervor. It’s a strange thing that this suite of 10 drawings is noted in the gallery’s press materials as “first shown in the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo,” as if embedded within Grotjahn’s works is a parallel heroic narrative.

For this series (it is only necessary here to describe one, as the other nine are essentially the same with slight variation) Grotjahn used the red, white and blue Captain America color scheme. The drawings distill motifs from his two major bodies of work: the “Butterfly” and “Face” paintings, seen in his oeuvre since the early 2000s. Each piece presents a “Butterfly”-like radial of alternating red and blue bands against a chalky white surface. The bands radiate from, or recede into, a central vanishing point. Over the image, hastily painted yellow eye shapes cover the surface at random. These “eyes” (a recurrent motif in Grotjahn’s “Face” paintings), though omnipresent across the series, are faint and barely register against the bold design of the main image. The vitality and ecstasy that are so primal in those earlier works has given way to bland seriality in the new series. While the title evokes a spirit of play, it also feels a bit sinister as it flags the artist as a hyper-masculine, self-proclaimed hero.

On Great Jones Street Grotjahn’s “Sign Exchange” project was presented at Karma, a gallery that often shows decidedly un-auspicious projects and DIY projects by artists of stature, including Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, Rudolf Stingel, Stanley Whitney, Chris Martin. Between 1993 and 1998, Grotjahn, just out of UC Berkeley, began replicating liquor store and bodega signs from his neighborhood. He would then trade the shop owners his copies for their originals, which are on view. The result is an archive of signs and hand-painted advertisements resplendent in their low-budget glory. The tightly curated sampling of these signs (as well as several pastel painted flower stands) feels precious in a way that the then-25-year-old Grotjahn likely never intended. At the right of the entrance, a long line of multicolored index card-sized ads were hung end-to end in a kind of continuous banner of liquor brands, prices and keyed-up color; I was reminded of the nearly 10-foot-long line of paint chips that horizontally bisects Rauschenberg’s 1955 opus Rebus.

The “Sign Exchange” project is a relational aesthetics experiment wrapped in a post-Duchampian gesture: the signs register as Art because the artist dubs them as such. Ten years ago, as Grotjahn was hitting his stride, achieving critical and market success, the “Signs” project might have thrown institutions and collectors off of his scent. Grotjahn’s success is as a formalist painter; now, with his work firmly in the canon of aughts-abstraction, galleries and curators have more freedom to exhibit examples of his less conventional (i.e. less collectible) output. In 2014, Grotjahn’s painted bronze “Head” sculptures (originally conceived as studio experiments made with discarded beer boxes and toilet paper roles) were shown at the Nasher Museum in Dallas, concurrent with a survey of his “Butterfly” paintings at Blum + Poe’s Upper East Side outpost.

Grotjahn is the ideal artist for our time. He presents an image of authenticity: his work seems approachable enough — it’s AbEx without the heartache — and is systematic with the just the right inflection of happy accident to present an air of humanity. It was prescient that Grotjahn had, in the early to mid 1990s, become so interested in advertising and signage (their main function is to broadcast prices and sell goods). The work in the Gagosian show does the same thing, though its messaging is subtler. Advertising has long been free game for artists to use in their work but Grotjahn actually presents original ads in “Sign Exchange,” a gesture that seems all the more potent given his rapidly rising star. But the shadow side of Grotjahn’s success is seen in the redundant, conceptually thin uptown show at Gagosian (not to mention his self-consciously scrappy “Head” sculptures at Anton Kern on view just three months ago). For the last three years, Grotjhan has shown his work non-stop in museums and galleries (often with ambitious, concurrent exhibitions) and this frenzied exhibitionism seems to have culminated in his fatigue.

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John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

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Richard Phillips (born 1962) is, depending on your point of view, one of the most important hyper-realist painters alive today or a gifted wastrel, squandering his talent painting monuments to meaninglessness. His work solicits a wide range of reactions: admiration of his technique, disinterest with the superficial celebrities he depicts, or disgust with his objectification (or re-objectification) of women. Love him  or hate him, his entire career is laid bare in Rizzoli’s monograph of his work, Negation of the Universe. Nearly everything is on view, from his 1996 breakout show at Edward Thorp Gallery to his exhibitions from last year. The works included range from his most famous and widely-publicized paintings such as Scout (1999) to his recent experiments with sculpture and film. There are a few of Phillips’s paintings that are missing from this book as individual plates, but their number can be counted on one hand.  In fact, by my calculation, this monograph is just a few plates shy of a catalogue raisonné.

The trajectory of Phillips’s career has seen his content mutate and shift while his form has stayed more or less the same: large-scale hyper-realistic oil paintings are the trademark of his practice. His particular manner of painting is not far removed from his photographic or cinematic source material, as his models are represented on canvas without much painterly flourish. He doesn’t render the shadow of every pore in the manner of Gottfried Helnwein, instead presenting his models after the camera and the airbrush have flattened and “perfected” their portraits for public consumption. That’s not to say that he does nothing but copy photographs: he tends to render hair in identical spaghetti-like tendrils and depicts skin in “Flesh Tint,” seemingly straight from the tube with chalky white highlights. The ragdoll yarn hair and silicone skin tones transform his figures into fakes of fakes. His paintings present a manufactured and artificial world, any reality having been filtered out by the media and through the artist’s own hand.

When looking at paintings in a book or on the internet, one of several major attributes lost in translation is a painting’s scale. A painting could be six inches tall or six feet tall, but in print or online it is forced into the frame of the page or the screen. Negation solves this problem in an elegant manner by presenting each painting in the context of its  first exposure with gallery and museum shots next to the individual plates Vote Mitt Romney (2012), for example, looks very different installed salon-style at the Rauschenberg Foundation than displayed alone on a page and takes on a different (and possibly more transgressive) meaning in that setting, calling out the right-wing sympathies of some of the moneyed elements of the art world (including his dealer, Larry Gagosian, who has donated money to Republican candidates).

By presenting Phillips’s oeuvre as it would have been seen by someone following his work in galleries and museums, Negation draws attention to the ways in which his subject matter has changed with time. Phillips started out painting chiefly from fashion photographs before branching out into pornographic imagery around 2000, and more recently has shifted towards images of contemporary celebrities. His most recent work has seen him zero in on two particular models: Lindsay Lohan and former porn star Sasha Grey. These are also depicted in films, presented here as several pages of screenshots, but due to the obvious limitations of the book format cannot be as neatly displayed as the paintings. His brief foray into sculpture/installation, the apparently illegal Playboy Marfa (2013), is also included. A monograph just of his paintings would have been perfectly acceptable, but the inclusion of his experiments in other media gives the impression of an artist not content with just being “that guy who paints big celebrity paintings.” While the success of his more diverse ventures is up for debate, their inclusion in this monograph is a welcome, if brief, diversion from his traditionalist output.

Several pieces included in Negation show Phillips’s engagement with not only the worlds of celebrities, fashion and porn, but with the art world itself. Ann Lee (2002) quotes the transmedia project No Ghost Just a Shell by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, in which the duo purchased the rights to a Japanese manga character named Annlee and invited other artists to produce collaborative works with her image. An earlier painting, Jacko (After Jeff Koons) (1998), reproduces the head of Koons’s famous sculpture of Michael Jackson (minus Bubbles in this case). Pre-Banality (2007), a monochromatic painting showing a naked woman riding a pig, references another sculpture by Koons, Ushering in Banality (1988). Phillips’s past quotations of Koons seem serendipitous, since Koons’s retrospective has dominated artistic discourse around the time of this book’s release. Such quotations also seem appropriate: both artists have been accused of producing big shiny meaningless objects for billionaires.

The book includes an interview with the artist by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum, Amseterdam, and an essay by German philosopher Marcus Steinweg, for whom “Richard Phillips’s images portray the theater of desire and the dialectic of fulfillment and disappointment that correlates to it.” For those who, in contrast to Professor Steinweg, are offended or bored by Phillips’s subject matter and content (or lack thereof, some would say), this monograph will not likely change any minds. Some may find his paintings offensive and complicit in the objectification of women. I personally see his work in the tradition of classical history painting, elevating and immortalizing the individuals and narratives our culture has, rightly or wrongly, imbued with value. Being able to see the vastness of his oeuvre may serve to dispel at least one myth: that Phillips only paints pretty women.

Richard Phillips: Negation of the Universe. Essay by Marcus Steinweg, Interview with the artist by Beatrix Ruf.  New York: Rizzoli, 2014. 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-8478-4390-9. $85.00

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Richard Prince uses Instagram, but not in the way most people do. While you or I might dip into that infinite stream of pixels for idle diversion or cheap thrills, what we see or say is usually inconsequential and ephemeral. Prince goes on Instagram, and somehow the result is important and enduring art. With an alchemist’s touch, what was worthless becomes precious. It couldn’t be easier: Prince trawls the app for selfies of young female hotties (famous or merely Internet-famous or totally amateur), posts a comment on the photo, captures the screen, and has an assistant inkjet-print it onto canvas at 65 x 48 inches. He calls these 40 images “paintings”; you might object, but collector dollars speak louder than you do.

Is there a reason to interpret the endeavor as anything other than some simple economic activity devoid of other meaning, like, for example, printing money? This easy explanation is tempting, in exactly the way a late-afternoon nap on the couch is tempting. Are we obligated to try to avoid “following the money,” even if that requires a true-believer devotion to art as a realm beyond politics?

Since his emergence in the late ‘70s as part of the Pictures Generation, Prince has always been the naughtiest of appropriators. Unlike Cindy Sherman, he has little respect for history; unlike Louise Lawler, he takes little interest in the art world; unlike Jeff Koons, he doesn’t fetishize craft or expensive raw materials (two of the most universally accepted indications of artistic value). With Prince, it’s just take, take, take.

In 2011, a US District court judge ruled that Prince’s appropriation of Patrick Cariou’s photographs for his 2008 “Canal Zone” exhibition constituted copyright infringement. His New Portraits can be read as Prince’s response to this defeat, by implying that his transgressions are no worse that the common and familiar act of re-posting images on the Internet. He just happens to re-post on the walls of Gagosian, that’s all.

It’s not news that digital data can be reproduced perfectly with little effort, and that many of us take and share it freely. If a press release asserted, “Prince’s appropriation holds a mirror to our contemporary moment,” we’d probably agree without much thought. Prince is merely commenting on the way images circulate in 2014, someone might argue.

It’s advisable to think harder. What Prince and Gagosian are up to isn’t a game; massive amounts of capital are being created and accumulated here. Artnet reports that between January 2011 and August 2014, $106,995,896 worth of Prince’s art was sold on the secondary market (placing him at #7 among living artists for this period, ahead of Damien Hirst and Peter Doig). Thus Prince’s modus operandi is not analogous to the common man’s copyright-blind illegal downloads and shares, which serve to disperse valuation instead of concentrating it. What it really resembles is Facebook’s profiteering strategies, which convert what is freely given into a valuable commodity.

It’s become evident that the Internet is a tool more for consolidating power than dispersing it. It has made our economy more “efficient,” meaning that it concentrates more wealth in the hands of fewer individuals and corporations, faster and with less effort. This, precisely, is what Prince mirrors — though the work itself gives little space for reflection.

The readymade recently had its centennial, so the gesture of re-photographing is hardly transgressive. And yet Prince may occupy a sort of radical position, in that his work is so morally untenable. When an artist like Santiago Sierra performs unethical acts in creating his work (such as hiring 30 day laborers and arranging them in a gallery according to their skin color), the work intentionally brings the evil within the art into dialogue with evil in the world. Instead, Prince’s cynical but collector-friendly exploitation exists within a vacuum. It presents the viewer with a challenge: do we carry on with the business of art-consumption as usual when to do so means a tacit affirmation of the ethos of “greed is good”? What if the zombie ghost of the avant-garde walked among us as nothing other than Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of ethics and our complicity with it?

Should art be more than expensive clickbait? Though Prince did not take any of the Instagram photos, his selection of them and his appended comments act as a signature for these portraits. Like the best comments on the Internet, they are funny, rude, and passive-aggressive. On a shot of a spread-legged Kate Moss in the forest, he writes, “I remember this so well, glad we had the tent.” Under an image of a black woman with rainbow dreads, Prince writes “DJ Trippy Headrin” (a pun surely lost on her demographic). It’s an occasion for a 64-year-old man to demonstrate his impressive mastery of a specific Internet argot: troll-speak, those booby-trapped non sequiturs which first parse as a “like,” but on second glance are revealed to be a total diss.

Perhaps Prince was always a king-size troll avant la lettre. His snarkiness couldn’t really blossom until its true medium, the Internet, was invented. And, the Internet attains its quintessence in the heteronormative blue-chip mind-fuckery of this most accomplished of trolls.

Instagram’s Community Standards FAQ helpfully explains:

Instagram is a place where people can share beautiful moments from their lives, and when you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.

Would most people have a problem if their Instagram selfie popped up for sale in Gagosian? If yes, then the consummate post-Modernist Prince has accomplished a feat any Modernist would be proud of. His New Portraits make the thinking viewer feel sad inside.

The post Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art: Richard Prince’s New Portraits at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

David Carrier, 2014
Saul Ostrow, 2014
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Gagosian Gallery

Full index entry for “Koons” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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September 26 to December 21, 2013
976 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, (212) 744-2313

In its first effort to represent the estate of Balthus, the Gagosian Gallery is presenting an exhibition of 35 photographic works and an unfinished painting, the whole of which carries a whiff of brimstone and in my opinion suggests a scandalous disregard for an artist’s wishes.

Who exactly is the author of these 35 works: Balthus or whoever arranged them as groupings? In close collaboration with the artist’s family, it appears that Nicolas Pages and Benoit Peverelli, the “editors” of the two volume book of 2,000 Polaroid images, published by Steidl, have actually manufactured the combinations of 155 Polaroid images on view to simulate the up-to-date “look” of serial images by Duane Michaels or multiple image panels by Nan Goldin. It is a very clever way to hawk a wide range of images that vary greatly in subject, intent and quality, and have them range from $20,000 to $240,000 in price. And they have done a very fine job of obfuscation: one has to look closely before the smell of sulfur begins to emerge.

Balthus was known to be very reluctant to allow people into his studio while he worked, or to see work in progress, as Pierre Matisse once complained. Thus the exhibition of this unfinished work is nothing less than a betrayal by the family. Looking at the tiny Polaroid images of weak stages of paintings in progress made me wince. As a painter, in these last years, Balthus was “not the man he once was”, as he said himself in Damian Pettigrew’s film. And I write this as one who would champion the best of the late paintings as great.

After his eyesight and hand co-ordination had seriously deteriorated, Balthus took up the Polaroid camera as a substitute for drawing with three kinds of results: studies, accidents, and independent photographic works.  There is much on view that represents genuine searching to find the telling image for a painting and explore the crucial particulars needed to adjust the “single-eyed” perspective of the camera to reveal the spatial relationships wanted by the artist.  One might become familiar with this sort of search by viewing the sketchbook drawings of Edouard Vuillard. Yet, Balthus is known to have destroyed many of his drawings done to this end. The useful images are clear and as normative as many photographs that appear in magazines. Then there are the accidental images created by a shaky hand, works never meant to be seen.

From these accidents, Balthus seems to have pursued an idea both appropriate to photography and subversive of what I would call the medium’s innate materialism. The idea was to use the subtle movement of the camera, and the movement of the model to suppress detail through blur and create a sensation of fading consciousness, that plays ambiguously between the viewer and the subject. With moving intimacy and poetic affect Balthus evokes, in these images, both a sense of Anna’s drift from lassitude into dream and his/our fatality. In these works, a “young” photographer has melded the tenebrism of Titian to the futurism of Duchamp in works that are truly “deskilled” by a master.

By blending all three kinds of images into “super-sized” products, the estate has sanctioned a diminishment of his real achievement as a photographer. And by displaying a feeble and effaced canvas they have given comfort to those who would deny Balthus his due. Such work belongs in study collections like the unfinished drafts of poems, not in public exhibitions.

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May 3 to June 30, 2012
555 West 24 Street
New York City, 212-741-1111

You enter a labyrinth, white walls and floors, ceilings not too high and shrouded in a material that softens the overhead gallery lights. Smiles or averted eyes exchanged with the people in front and behind you, a playful gravitas, shared with others. What is striking about Lucio Fontana’s last Ambiente Spaziale (Spatial Environment) made in 1968, is the intimacy of its scale, and the sensation of being both inside and outside a work of art. Inside the innermost corridor is a cut-out opening in the wall, outlined in black. Like the televised vision of the Madonna from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita its appearance comes as a revelation for believers and non-believers alike, image and event rolled into one.

Fontana has the questionable fortune of being instantly recognized by and reduced to his signature gesture—a careful and quick incision, either a slice or a hole, into a canvas. This mark, or rather the absence of the mark, has absorbed extraneous social and political content with each new wave of criticism. A New York Times critic writing in the late 1980s labeled the distinctive cuts “misogynist” and noted the “intermittent violence” of the gesture. Today it is perhaps clearer that there can be no reconciliation of the sacred and profane in Fontana’s art, only an appreciation for how he fitted one inside the other. Gagosian’s sweeping retrospective, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali, allows us to see each phase of his practice as part of a greater cosmology that extends beyond the frame of art’s edge, in order to reaffirm the limits and immanent presence of painting.

An Italian by birth, Fontana lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Paris and Milan, and like many European and South American artists of the mid-20th century, such as Jesús Rafael Soto and Yves Klein, sought to socialize a new public to abstract art through phenomenological means. Beginning in the 1930s he was a key player in many trans-European avant-gardes, such as Abstraction-Création, a collective of artists who upheld the values of abstraction in the face of Surrealism’s turn toward figuration. In 1946 Fontana contributed to the Manifiesto blanco (White Manifesto) and developed his concept of Spazialismo (Spatialism), the desire to access a fourth-dimension in art through systematically transgressing traditional painting boundaries.

The exhibition opens with a selection of the first paintings made in accordance with the theory of Spazialismo, the Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), from between 1949 and the late 1950s. Fontana’s previous training as a ceramicist and sculptor comes through in his insistence on painting’s materiality. Already there is a discernible order to the Buchi (Holes) series—a technique clearly derived not from passion, but from a force of mind. The punctures in the surface are delicate, like traces in sand, and are never expressionistic. The colors slip between natural and industrial: indigo, silver/cement grey, cadmium yellow, bright blue and pea green. In the Pietre (Stones) series, bright pieces of Murano glass are stuck on the surface like jewels to create a three-dimensional pileup. The paintings exist at the very edge of the pictorial, suggesting planets, stars and animal bodies. The radical conceit of a painting made from collaged surface elements has one of its precedents in Joan Miró’s late 1920s paintings on unprimed canvases; Painting (Cloud and Birds) and 48 (both 1927) contain scriptural numbers, real feathers, and brushy areas of pure painted color. Fontana’s paintings take flight from where Miró’s leave off, banishing any trace of language or pictographic organization.

Four of the artist’s rarely exhibited walk-in environments serve as a kind of black box annex to the main attraction of the paintings. In Ambienti spaziali a luce nero (Spatial Environment in Black Light) (1949) the only light source in the room comes from a black light reflecting off Day-Glo-painted, papier maché objects suspended from the ceiling. Florescent paint had only recently been invented in 1934, and its previous uses included amateur magic shows and color-coding allied bomber planes during World War II. Despite their theatrical, fun quality, the Ambienti spaziali do not capitulate to entertainment value. Instead, they ask for a sustained engagement that is almost educational, resembling not so much an art installation, but an old-fashioned planetarium display. Pat Steir moved into similar territory with her installation, The Nearly Endless Line (2010) at Sue Scott Gallery, a darkened room with a blue light illuminating a white line painted directly on the gallery wall. But while Steir in effect made a walk-in painting out of the gallery space, Fontana’s environments convey a sensation of space that exists wholly apart from painting as a medium.

The Attese (Waiting) series, begun in 1958, radiate action and stillness. The paintings are hung in color-coordinated groups: bright red next to charcoal grey; purple, light grey and canary yellow; forest green next to black.  The white expanse of the gallery setting and the complimentary hanging strategy suggests a strangely domesticated object, a painting that could easily adorn the walls of a high modernist waiting room or office. The surface is pure appearance, all traces of traditional paint application are gone, and the only visible gesture is a collection of surgical slices in the canvas’s center.  Fontana’s movement towards a more clearly defined object-hood in painting, and more outrageous choices in terms of color and puncture-type, reaches a climax in the series La fine di dio (End of God) (1963-64). The painting’s oval shape and sharp colors (neon lime, bubblegum pink) read as high-end kitsch, a kind of Madison Avenue window display that speaks to the rising decadence of culture in the 1960s. The irresistible, smooth surface is riddled with holes, almost as if the historical body of “painting” itself was under siege. If, as Willem de Kooning put it, “flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented,” then the gold-framed mirrors that are Fontana’s La fine di dio paintings reflect the unspeakable thing that we have become. The buried content of the work gives evidence to Theodor Adorno’s observation that true art is a form of “weeping without tears.”

In Trinità (Trinity) (1966), an installation of three paintings, placed for the first time here following Fontana’s original plan, the connection to the sacred is again made explicit by the work’s title. Three white monochrome Buchi paintings set inside cream-colored, lacquered wood frames are placed next to and above three half spheres made of brilliant, cobalt blue plastic. There is a softness to the elements not found in Fontana’s previous work, in the two qualities of white, and one blue as unchanging as the ocean and the sky, for instance.  A grid of delicate holes in the side canvases and a spiral in the center are the only traces of the artist’s hand. A majestic presence is achieved by the paintings being installed slightly higher off the floor than usual, so one’s gaze has to travel upwards. The work suggests an ideal of the infinite with the most minimal means possible, and has a similar commitment to joy through sustained looking as an Agnes Martin painting from the same era.

The last paintings Fontana made are the Teatrini (Little Theatres) (1965-66), miniature worlds-unto-themselves that, like the Trinità group, are monochrome canvases punctured with a series of small holes, set inside colorful, lacquered, wood frames. The cut edge of each frame loosely suggests natural forms (like a Jean Arp wood relief) and creates a delicate shadow-play effect against the canvas. In dialogue with the Bucchi paintings from the 1940s, the Teatrini flirt with the pictorial, the relationship between the frame and the surface yielding a number of dualities: trees/buildings, night/day, man/woman, clouds/earth. At the end of his life, Fontana had achieved a kind of painting that was infused with myth, but remained as simple and straightforward as its material properties. Abstract painting’s primal relationship to the theatrical is laid bare in this work, as the silhouette of the edge meets the mute code of the perforated surface.

For copyright reasons we are presently unable to post images of the environments reconstructed at Gagosian Gallery discussed in this article.  For Ambiente Spaziale (Spatial Environment) (1968) and Ambienti spaziali a luce nero (Spatial Environment in Black Light) (1949) please visit http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/lucio-fontana–may-03-2012/exhibition-images images 36 to 37 and 38 to 40 respectively. 

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