January 7 to April 3, 2021
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, davidzwirner.com

Albers and Morandi, an exceedingly handsome, thought provoking show, probes the surprising affinities between two very different mid-20th-century artists. Walking through its large rooms of small, widely spaced works, one senses a distillation of distillations, so to speak, as well as a gathering argument about the surprisingly fragile division between the abstract and the observed. If we ever needed persuasion on this point, this exhibition will convince, even if some paintings make a more compelling case than others.

The works of Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) fall on opposite sides of the abstraction/representation divide, of course, but that’s just the beginning of their differences. Their entire relationship to paint could seem hardly more divergent. Morandi’s fleet brushstrokes delight in the viscosity of paint; Albers’ smooth surfaces downplay any evidence of human application. Morandi’s shapes melt into rich, atmospheric depths; Albers’s never stray from hard-edged precision. But similarities abound, too. Both artists worked most comfortably on a small scale, and preferred reductive palettes and compact, centered compositions. Moreover, they shared a certain temperament, evident in the patient determination and quiet vigor that equally animate their work.

Born into a family of craftspeople in Bottrop, Germany, Albers was hired in 1922 to teach at the Bauhaus as a stained-glass artist. With the rise of Nazism he moved to the U.S., teaching first at the fabled Black Mountain College, and then settling in for a long stint at Yale, where he wrote what was to become a standard text for art and design classes, “Interactions of Color.” His early stain-glass experience may have influenced his approach to color; his classes endlessly explored, with scraps of colored paper, the internal, abstracted light of juxtaposed hues. He was particularly intrigued by the illusion of transparency created by placing a sheet of just the right color over another one.

All but one of his nearly two dozen paintings in the exhibition belong to the “Homage to the Square” series, the nested-squares compositions that engaged him after 1948. In person, their color proves surprisingly emotive, and describable only – despite the artist’s penchant for the abstract – in real-life terms. The outer, surrounding square of a painting from 1973, for instance, acts like a dense, rust-colored frame, holding sturdily in space before giving way to delicate, central cloud-like grays. The centers of two other, side-by-side paintings suggest a pale cardboard box in shadow; behind them spreads a depthless, James Turrell-like aqua-blue. (Surely, even if abstract, the blue is behind?) At first, the two paintings look identical, but a second glance shows the blue-green to be slightly warmer, the tan barely darker, in one; labels indicate they were painted fully eight years apart. Albers’s drawing, too, hints at spatial depth: his compression of the squares towards the lower edge of every painting evokes a kind of proscenium, viewed from a point one third of the way up the painting’s height.

Morandi‘s life suggests a similar mix of modesty and rigor. Sharing an apartment with his three sisters, he hardly ever left his hometown Bologna except for summer stays in the neighboring hills. After a few early flirtations with Cubism and Metaphysical painting, he turned to more realistic landscapes and, especially, the luminous still life paintings celebrated today for the maximal light they extract from minimally modeled objects. To facilitate his muted color harmonies, Morandi famously pre-painted many of these bottles, boxes, and pitchers; a certain pre-planning is also evident in their carefully aligned tops and vertical intervals. Like Albers a devoted teacher, he taught etching for many years. The exhibition includes nine of his still life etchings, which preserve, in a busier crosshatching technique, much of his painting’s atmospheric depth.

Morandi’s dozen paintings include his “Still life with white bottle and small blue bottle” (1955), which deftly captures the conversation between two utterly different verticals: a stoutly fluted vase, barely but tangibly differentiated in its creamy lightness from the background, and a petite, spindly, dark blue vial. Colors tell us how they occupy space. Pressures of hue ebb and swell, on objects and spaces alike, so that every square inch urges a single impression: buoyant vase and its small, jewel-like descendant. In another robust painting, from 1957, repeating verticals spell out the rapport between three slender bottles and a pitcher. Overlapping in subtly shifting colors, the bottles lead the eye incrementally to a final splash of blue – a pitcher, familiar from other paintings, but reduced now to a crucial foil to the volumes in front. One moves palpably among the bottles, as through a copse of trees.

Albers’s compact rhythms serve as an effective, if unsubtle, framework for color investigations. For Morandi they feel more like elegant tethers for his continuous massaging of space. But their purposes overlap. Linger with the paintings in “Albers and Morandi,” and a peculiar realization sets in: one need only zoom in on one of Albers’s “proscenia,” adopt a slightly higher point of view – and, yes, add the cadences of observed light – and one comes intriguingly close to the intimate, contained energy of a Morandi. The greatest revelation of “Albers and Morandi,” in fact, may be its affirmation of the paradox of painting: every brushstroke is both pigment and a sensation in a parallel reality.

Arguably, the installation over-produces this revelation. At two points a single painting by each artist is centered, alone, on a vast wall. The effect is striking – the ultimate tribute to an artwork, befitting a tiny Raphael predella panel or van Eyck painting, either of which could hold up to hundreds of square feet of white. But can a painting by Albers or Morandi? Even though both fully pursued a vision of painting, neither probed its full potential; their inspirations were drawn out, elaborated, and put back, so to speak, in the same reliable box of centered and repeating horizontals and verticals. When Albers ventures “outside the box” with his non-square “Untitled (Variant/Adobe)” (1958), the asymmetric rhythms open the door to new contradictions across the surface: large vs small, expansive vs condensed, here vs there, and we may think wistfully of Mondrian’s more daring rhythms. Similarly, while Morandi’s most enthralling works make ordinary objects appear startlingly new and real, he just as often settles for the look of the impactful — those insightfully aligned bottles! — rather than its realization in a momentum of forms. Bonnard, for all his technical meanderings, more vitally located his still life objects.

But then, isn’t painting necessarily an unending quest? The exhibition’s subtitle, “Never Finished,” implies as much – and leaves one wondering what the “finish line”’ might be. My own vote would be for a painting that equally embraced the dynamics of abstraction and the complex veracity of representation, using each to inform and propel the other, to come up with something as potent, lucid, and essential as – well, a painting by Chardin, the eighteenth-century still life painter so admired by Matisse and Picasso. Dare we hope for a contemporary equivalent? That would be a painting holding up to any wall.

The post Distillations: Albers and Morandi at David Zwirner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

November 10, 2016 to January 7, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th Street
yoshiigallery.com

Christened Derek Rowen, Guggi, a former member of the band, Virgin Prunes, is an Irish cult-figure. Usually we expect self-taught artists to deal in unabashed self-expression. Certainly that is what we anticipate in art made by onetime punk musicians. But Guggi’s art, which is as strange as his chosen name, is marked by restraint, delicacy and elusiveness.

The medium-sized oil paintings (the largest is 46 by 57 inches) in his current exhibition depict rows of empty bowls on fields of color. Sometimes he draws additional bowls on the background. Working within this basic fixed format, he creates pictures that are surprisingly varied. Conjoined I (2016) depicts three copper-colored bowls on a shelf; Crimson (2016) shows nine bowls, each on an individual panel, with the panels set three-by-three on a grid; and Turquoise Drawing (2016), which despite its title is a painting, shows a bottle, and drawings of bottles on a gray field..

The title of this exhibition, which may seem excessively elusive, actually is a statement by the artist’s father, Robbie Rowen, made in response to an earlier display of Guggi’s art in a Dublin hotel. An exhibition of his son’s art, whose subjects are domestic utensils, he presumably means to say, transforms the public hotel space into that private place where you usually find bowls in a home, the kitchen.

Guggi may not be technically skilled, but aesthetically speaking, he is very sophisticated. Friendly commentators, quoted at his web site, have compared him with Chardin and, inevitably, Morandi, but in truth he’s a very different painter from these exemplars, very much a law unto himself. If we need an Irish reference, who better than Samuel Beckett, who also got much artistic mileage out of repetition? But ultimately, all of these associations are aesthetically irrelevant. When on a busy morning, I walked into Yoshii Gallery, which is a tiny space, knowing nothing about Guggi, I was immediately spell-bound by these oddly winning paintings. I loved the way the display cunningly forces the viewer to get close up. What attracted me to these modernist compositions, which make singularly potent use of grids and repetition of simple, banal forms, was their modesty. And I was fascinated with their variety, which Guggi achieves with a limited format.

Often an artist’s chosen still life subject has apparent emotional significance. Some painters represent natural artifacts. Think of Cézanne’s apples, the humble foodstuffs of Chardin, or the posh spreads of seafood in Dutch Golden Age art. When, however, Andy Warhol presents rows of banal manufactured artifacts, soup cans, coke bottles, or photographs, he reveals a very different visual culture. Guggi’s simple unornamented bowls are also manufactured, and often they too are in rows, but unlike Warhol’s still life objects they have great individual character.

What attitude does he take towards his bowls—what do they mean to him or, indeed, to you and me? And why display them in rows?. These obvious questions are oddly difficult to answer. A bowl contains whatever you choose to put in it—almost anything at all. But that these depicted bowls are mere containers does not make them aesthetically indifferent. The longer I look at Guggi’s enchanting pictures, the more puzzles I find.

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On the occasion of Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 16 to December 14, 2008, we post abstract painter Sean Scully’s 2005 essay on his Italian forebear. This essay was first published in Sean ScullyResistance and Persistence: Selected Writings Edited by Florence Ingleby, (Merrell, London/New York, 2006) and is reproduced here, for the first time in an art magazine and on the internet, with kind permission of the publishers

Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna in 1890.  He studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti from 1907-15.

He lived all his life with his three sisters, Anna, Dina and Maria Teresa.  From the age of 20 until his death he lived in a flat at Via Fordazza 36, and in the family country house in Grizzana in the mountains 35 km from Bologna.  He traveled to Venice where he saw Monet and Cézanne, but largely throughout his life he moved very little, being content to live and work in his simple rooms in Bologna, and his home in Grizzana.  And it was only in 1956, at the age of 66, that Morandi made his one and only trip abroad, which was to attend an opening of an exhibition he had in Winterthur. Morandi died in Bologna in 1964.

Crucially, Morandi never visited Paris, the center of Art in the first half of the 20th century, which is like not visiting New York or London now.  When I was a student passing through the halls of the Tate Gallery in London, looking for role models, I would consistently pass a typically small painting by Morandi.  It seemed to upset and disturb everything else that was going on. It was as if it was participating in the Modernist dialogue, since its spirit was 20th century, and clearly painted after the discovery of abstraction, but then again, stubbornly refusing to participate with appropriate enthusiasm.  It seemed to be permanently hung on a short wall.  So you saw it between seeing other paintings that were of course always bigger. Everything, it seemed, was bigger than the Morandi.  Nothing else was as self-effacing.  And nothing else was so awkwardly sealed. So you’d see Morandi after you’d looked at one painting and you turned your body and your head to look at the next, and as you were leaving one room to go into another room you’d see the Morandi again.  Not fitting in.  NOT playing the game.  Being a part of it and not being a part of it, so therefore in the margin of the communal conversation, the common consensus built by the surrounding works.   Imagine one sees, for example, a short wall, between big walls that occupy major spaces, as the margin of the architecture, or the transition between one major event and the next; this is where Morandi lived in the museum.  Not exactly an event but a tap on the back of the head.  An appeal to the conscience one might say.  A worrying doubt.  Made by a doubter: who raises the disturbing possibility that the modernist juggernaut that we were so happy about, might one day crash and burn.

And then there would be this small painting that says, yes.  This kind of thing can happen.  And it has happened before.  Rome was for 4000 years the center of the universe known to man.  And it is therefore very Italian to know that the favors of history can wash in and then wash out leaving empty buildings and unfortunately located agendas.

One day I’d see it and I’d think, this is great.  It’s really weird.  And then another day I’d see it and I’d think to myself that he was an idiot.   And so was the Tate for putting it up all the time.  And then another day I’d see it and I just didn’t know what to think.  It wasn’t exciting yet it was exciting.  Exciting in its resistance, in its subversiveness.  Someone asked me once if abstraction was subversive.  I did not think so.  And I don’t think so now.  It’s subversive in the sense that it makes or helps people to think free.  But it’s not trying to bring some other structure down to be seen.  It makes it’s own space or has invented its own space.  A space, that didn’t previously exist.  This, coincidentally, Morandi did.  This small painting used a space that was not used before, or could not usefully be used by anything else.  The architecture of the idea, was to say yes. Correct.  But what about this?  That was big, this is small.  That was a statement, this is a state.  That Morandi was making an art of figuration during an epoch characterized by a wholesale march towards abstraction was, in itself, an act of defiance.  However in his case the defiance was wrapped in a cloak made of humble subversion.  His paintings were not merely opposite in subject.  His “opposite” subject was painted apparently meekly in colors that were pale and seemingly tired, as if defeated at the outset of their contest with international abstraction.  Like a boxer who fights each round without getting up from his seat in the corner of the ring.  As if in a sense to make a demonstration of rising for the contest, would be far too conformist and compromising.  Morandi paints in pale, nearly dead color, which itself cannot or will not rise to full spectrum. It will not reach across space to communicate visualpower, but makes you reach across space toward it. We do the walking.  The painting does the waiting.  It lets you, in fact invites you to walk past it and ignore it: It is only after you have seen many other paintings that you return to it, with your doubt.  Morandi embodies the patience and the diffidence of history.

The undersized painting that is pallid at birth, doesn’t need to be defeated by time and by its offspring history.  Morandi, who is full of history, understands it can begin in life that way.  As if it has already been weakened by time as it is being made.

Morandi, the priest of subversion and reverence, sits in his small room stroking his humble surfaces with a vibrating acceptance of the impossibilities and necessity of resistance.  Resistance to the majority and resistance to progress.  When Fascism was rising in Europe like a galloping fire, Giorgio Morandi was a young man at art school, and trying to articulate his place in the contemporary world.

He began his public life as an artist with an active dialogue with the visual ideas of his day, the most dominant of which was Cubism.  His landscape and still life paintings from around 1913 and 1914 demonstrate a willingness to do what all young artists must do: which is to learn the lessons of recent Art.  However in Morandi’s case this dialogue is short lived, and his rejection of Internationalism is born of a deeply felt negative reaction to war and its consequences.  Thus Morandi began his unique journey by traveling in the opposite direction to his contemporaries.

THE ACT OF LOOKING with Cézanne

To see and to work.  To paint in a way that was predetermined and to paint a subject that was always virtually the same.  Thus to simultaneously liberate the painting style which represented the subject without prejudice: as I would call it, and the freedom to read that subject as space, light, color and form.  Morandi paints things that exist, though they are stripped of all burdensome references to social function and history or political contexts.  His discreetly expressive painting style is in concertwith a subject that is also discreet, in the sense that they are vessels and containers who’s meaning is open and exists outside clearpolitical or functional reference.  We are free to enjoy them and feel them as we might an abstract painting, yet they are faithful and mysterious representations of objects that were there.  Huddled together in familial dependencies.  So that their edges touch, and the bodily groupings and their contact enables them to stand humble yet noble on their simple shelf.  They stand for themselves, but they don’t articulate exactly what that is.

The sameness of his subject amplifies the imaginative response.  He has learned the lessons of abstraction.  He has understood how powerfully repetition, and visiting the same or similar motif again and again can open up emotional depth and interpretive range.  Abstraction abstracted reality to reach the non-objective shore of new experience.  Morandi reverses this journey and returns this possibility to simple observed reality.  In this he is very different from Cézanne, his great example.  Cézanne never knew abstraction until he was an old man, even though he pioneered it by making painting systematic.  Yet, in his way, he overcame appearance with structure.  This, Morandi did not have to do, since the appearances of things in the world had already been conquered by abstraction.

I once watched a film of Cézanne painting.  He moved as a bird moves, and his head was rapidly inclined toward the subject, the canvas, the subject and the canvas.  Back and forth in a  triangular relationship between the painter, the subject and the painting.  This, Morandi did also, since he was painting his jars or the view out of his window in Grizzana.  Always in a triangle.  When I paint I look at the canvas on the wall, and I paint it.  I move back and forth, between my seat and the painting, in a straight line, between me and the work.  The painting being the subject and the object, all in one.  There is no triangle.  Everything I need to make the painting is in me when I start.  And this difference is crucial.  There are similarities, but the difference is profound.

Robert Irwin has described Morandi as making a unique kind of Abstract Expressionism.  While being able to identify with this generous view, and being equally in favor of Morandi’s work as Irwin, I would describe Morandi oppositely.  The Abstract Expressionists worked in an atmosphere that benefited from group support, and furthermore their position in world culture was advanced from being in the right place at the right time.  The various group photographs that were taken of De Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Motherwell, Newman et al testify to the cultural momentum of which they were the positive recipients.  The Abstract Expressionists were working harmoniously with contemporary cultural history and their careers were enlarged accordingly.  They were working on the back of European Art, as exemplified by Surrealism and geometric abstraction, whilst rejecting and improving it in favor of a new “heroic” American Art.  They had the writers such as Greenberg, Sandler and Hess, and the monied patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim, as well as the construction of new Art palaces in America to contextualize critically, to buy and exhibit, these powerful new works.

The simple fact that Morandi, even today, still represents a “cause” that other artists feel obliged to assist, shows how resistable the work of Morandi was.  Morandi’s paintings were not really collected, because they simply didn’t fit.  Because when the great collections of America and Europe were being assembled in the fifties and sixties what largely “fitted” was major abstraction.

Many painters like to argue that the “subject” of Morandi is not important, and that one can ignore the figuration on his work, in order to enjoy the abstraction.  However Morandi’s work was ignored by the major institutions for good reason.  And simply put, it is not abstract.  And it therefore cannot even legitimately be seen as a form of Abstract Expressionism.  It should be read as figuratively based.

As a counterweight to the dominance of American painting of the fifties, Morandi holds a position that cannot be challenged, and today seems to yield an array of possible influences and examples for young painters.  Morandi’s work doesn’t negotiate with Abstract Expressionism as does, say, the work of the important French artist, Yves Klein, who competes with America for scale and conceptual directness, or like other Europeans such as Soulages, Schumacher and Tapies who worked on a similarly large scale.  Morandi’s extreme originality is achieved as a counter-point to all this.  He is the authentic opposite.  He doesn’t attempt to compete with American Art: he does the contrary, which is what American Art cannot do since no culture can effectively represent the opposite of itself.

I was talking to a friend once on the ‘phone about a painting I had just finished.  The painting is called “Wall of Light Sky”.  She was asking me to describe it.  After a few minutes I said, “look, I can describe it to you, by describing something that can’t really exist.”  I told her, since it was made of many greys that were mixed in with pink and red and blue, that it was maybe like a Morandi on a giant scale that was drawn on a broken grid.  So I was talking of the way a simple subject could be given a compressed complex history, by being overpainted in uncertain colors.  This made everything clear to her even though I had described the impossible: since a giant Morandi is the opposite of what a Morandi is.  What its sense of being is, and what it registers itself as in the world of Art.

Morandi is the opposite of heroic scale Abstraction in every way.  That Morandi worked in isolation is part of the central meaning of his work.  He chose to resist modernism in a way that Jackson Pollock did not and did not have to. Pollock, for example, was working in a rising culture that had just won a world war, and played a major role in defeating fascism.  The United States had been flooded with grateful, eager to be patriotic immigrants after World War II, and it was glowing with self-belief.  New York represented openness and freedom and importantly: wealth.  There was no reason why its artists should resist its direction.  They were, after all, the equivalent of Masaccio working in Florence in the 14th century.  New York was the new Florence, and was a golden gate to a future of freedom and wealth.

Morandi’s world was very different.  His world was not big, in the sense that it was expanding into light. It was small, in the sense that in the midst of personal crisis, fascism and impending darkness, Morandi had to paint in a corner out of “what was left”.  What he could salvage.  Not what was possible, in terms of invention, growth and freedom: but what he could hold onto, as a human being, in a context of failed hope and danger.

In 1915, when Italy entered World War I, Morandi was conscripted into the Italian army. This event caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown.

It is also the case that politically speaking, Modernism, as exemplified by Futurism in Italy, had been on occasions loosely connected with Fascism.  After his breakdown Morandi withdrew into a quiet life of teaching.  There he could create a distance from the polarized world of political extremes, war, and the Italian avante garde.  This is when, I believe, Morandi began to actively separate himself from the International community of artists, to create his own private space populated by his mute, hand sized, familiar figures.  The subject, of his intimate scale vases and boxes and jars, gave him stability and the peace vital for his mental well-being.  With this extremely unique subject he was able to rebuild himself emotionally, and begin the gradual formulation of a great understated body of work that was a return to small scale painting in the tradition of Chardin and Manet.

His personal crisis in the face of the non-negotiable image of progress, as widely understood in 1915 Italy, is what forced him to turn away from Modernism.  His escape and his solution is what have made him into a great artist for us today.  We still revere the modernist masters of the 2oth century, though now they seem as if they are from another age.  However Morandi sits more comfortably and truthfully for us, on our highway of doubt.  His alternative to modernism corresponds with the temperature of our own time, precisely because it is anti-heroic and therefore the opposite of Abstract Expressionism.

During the years immediately after his breakdown, Morandi was still engaged in a modernism of sorts: though now it was Pittura Metafisica.  In reality this meant he was gradually moving away from Internationalism and the influence of Cubism towards a National style.  It is symbolically important that in his Pittura Metafisica period Morandi painted a form of construction or still life that was contained within its own box.  Cubism broke up the solidity of the object, fractured it and spread it out over the picture plane.  Pittura Metafisica, as exemplified by Morandi’s painting, Still Life 1918 (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma), established a dream world where objects sit silently and in a protected context.  They are secure and framed inside the picture and therefore, metaphorically and symbolically, not in direct contact with the outside world.  By 1920 Morandi had positioned himself in his own box, which was his modest studio, where began to paint his “still life” paintings in solitude.  This represents a journey away from international engagement, through a National engagement, and ultimately into a private world where he stayed for the rest of his working life.

Modernism represented by the Futurists Boccioni,  Severini and Balla stood for progress in the painting world of Italy in 1913.  The interaction with the machine and its dynamic movement was reflected powerfully in their paintings.  Their engagement with the machine world was responsible for their force since they fed off the juggernaut of progress.  However like the Suprematists and Constructivists before them in Russia, the paintings of the Futurists lacked sensibility.  One only has to look at the paintings of Rosanova and Malevich to see that they are painted with a kind of generic neutrality. To find a profoundly personal painting style for the Suprematists or the Futurists was not the point of their work or of their mission, which was to represent in paint an International idea.  The representation of movement in for example,Dog on a Leash1912 by Giacomo Balla, is dynamic, but it is also mechanical in style.  This undoubtedly was the point, since an overly subjective or personal worldview would have appeared anti-progressive and bourgeois.

It is against this backdrop of Fascism, modernism and its opposition to a personal and private sense of poetry that Morandi made his small revolution. This radical resistance, a stand for the individual as a spiritual being, made with humble work in a small room in Bologna should not be underestimated.  By slowly withdrawing into his own private box, Morandi constructed a reality that gave him time to think and work against the way large masses of Europe were moving.  Morandi worked in the shadows of his studio, for the existential position, to feel as an individual.  This is fundamental to the gradual formulation of a masterful sensibility.

Morandi paints like no other, before or since. His brushstroke is in complete philosophical agreement with the subject, the scale and the color of his paintings.  It is expressive, though it is modest, and not so expressionistic as to disturb the sense of meditative silence that inhabits all his paintings.

Still Life c.1957 (The University of Iowa Museum of Art) carries a signature in the left lower corner that is huge in relation to the size of the painting.  The signature stands for the individual as author.  And for the uniqueness of touch that runs through the painting.  As is typical of Morandi the color is pale and profoundly gentle.  Two jars, two boxes and one vertical bashful shape, probably standing for a jar, huddles protected in the middle of the group, partially hidden by the bodies of its familial neighborly objects.  All the figures close the space between them, and all the figures contain space within their bodies.  The absence of earth color gives the two front figures weight and absence of weight simultaneously, so they appear lit-up.  The two boxes behind them make a backdrop that has sculptural force.  The central figure is compressed, pushed into the position of protected and captive.  This quiet drama takes place on a grey, bent interior horizon which gives the centralized composition its place, and its insecurity.  Morandi’s hand is everywhere, dominating the weak color, yet allowing the whole composition to pulsate evenly.  Even the shadows running around the figures as a dark grey collar locks them into place, and the light from the back of the surface is allowed to leak out through the laconic brushstrokes of the painter.  He is timeless yet vital, timorous and seemingly threatened by something outside, yet determined and stoic in his will to be. To be human.  To stand noble, modest and resistant to the violence of the world.

The post Giorgio Morandi: Resistence and Persistence appeared first on artcritical.

October 9 – November 13, 2004

Giorgio Morandi: Paintings, 1950-1964” at
Lucas Schoormans Gallery
508 West 26th Street, Suite 11B
212 243 3159

December 4, 2004

A version of these reviews was first published in The New York Sun, October 14, 2004.

By MAUREEN MULLARKEY

The ghost of Bartleby the Scrivener hovers over Albert York, contemporary painting’s best known recluse. On view at Davis & Langdale are 25 paintings, all created before 1992, the last year the gallery received a canvas from him. This exhibition also includes 9 recent drawings abruptly submitted by the artist earlier this year.

Born in 1928, the painter came of age with Abstract Expressionism. He staked his place vis-a-vis the modern movement with passive resistance to its defining imperatives, much as Melville’s Bartleby countered demands with “I would prefer not to.”

While Ab Ex heralded its own significance on over-sized canvases, Mr. York preferred panels under a foot square. Pressure to make noise-pump it up, abandon representation-was quietly met by Mr. York’s bias for the visual world: small-scale landscapes, a pot of flowers, sometimes a cow or a memento mori. His subject matter is so ordinary as to be almost inadmissible. But it is ordinary in extraordinary ways.

Skill with the fabric of paint plus a refined palette combine to shift his renunciatory simplicity away from the margins inhabited by Sunday painters and eccentrics. The quality of his color marks him as a sophisticate whose modernity knows its own roots.

His greens, derived from French landscape tradition, are delectable. Spare compositions divide into light and dark zones, the drama of contrast made more intricate by subtle blending of foreground and background color into the motif. While values remain distinct, admixtures of pigment harmonize the counterpoint.

“Two Pink Carnations in Glass Goblet” is a luscious example of his deceptive realism and the improvisational confidence that binds him to the moderns. A goblet of blooms is set, deadpan, in a meadow as if it had grown there. The foreground green is worked into the carnations, reducing the tone almost-not quite-to a middle gray. The optical effect is of a warm, dark pink with anything saccharine denied.

Entries for Albert York are scarce in the annals of modern art; yet every serious painter in New York knows his work (so do collectors). For good reason. He raises simple sights to the dignity of painting with an imaginative el n that strikes the viewer as something deeply felt. In a 1974 essay, Fairfield Porter wrote that it is his empathy that attracts. That, and modesty. Legions of artists pummel us with the weight of their ideas. Albert York would prefer two trees against the sky.

A more illustrious celebrant of a private world is Giorgio Morandi, lodestar for other painters and a poet of the familiar and unexceptional. Now on view at Lucas Schoormans are 6 stunning paintings plus two works on paper in a loan exhibition that was several years in the making. It concentrates on work from the last fifteen years of Morandi’s life, his most mature and exquisitely nuanced.

Volumes have already been written about the formal structure and spatial organization of Morandi’s painting: the distilled architecture of homely items compressed on a tabletop, each adjustment finely calibrated to break the monastic silence of the whole. The same household objects repeat like mantras throughout his work.

No middle ground exists for the audience. One is either captivated (as I am) or bored by his seemingly narrow range: penetrating distinctions so unassuming that you have to work at observing them. Too see the world in a grain of sand or an arrangement of bottles and boxes is an acquired taste. A decision. Everything depends on one’s attraction-or none-to Morandi’s subtlety, a dynamic attentiveness that, were it not for the physicality of paint, comes close to an act of prayer.

The word “contemplative” is overused in relation to art in general and to Morandi in particular. Contemplation of what? and for what end? Your tolerance for these two questions shapes the nature of your response to the work. It helps to know what motivated Morandi’s mastery; it was more than paint.

Morandi was an ardent reader of Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, physicist and passionately religious man. The painter took heart and direction from a man (credited with originating the theory of probability) who lived what he proclaimed: “Let a mite be given to him [the reader]. Let him see therein an infinity of universes.” Morandi had no need to leave Bologna. Infinity was there on the Via Fondazza.

It is commonplace to label Morandi a precursor to Minimalism because of the severity of his methods and materials. But art-historical pigeonholing misses the animating core of his originality. Morandi’s painting embodied his convictions. For these, look to Pascal, not academic categories. The spatial ambiguities and linear evasions of these still lifes emulate Pascal’s refusal to fix the finite: “Let us not look for certainty and stability.” There is nothing minimal in Morandi’s affirmations of material uncertainty.

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through December 4, 2004

There are six paintings, one pencil drawing and one watercolor and pencil drawing in this exhibition of works from the last fifteen years of Giorgio Morandi’s life. In Natura Morta, ( most are titled this) 1955 [V944, refer to this # for reproduction] one notices a slight crookedness on the right side of the stretcher. The canvas is stretched over some old, uneven wood with a slight chasm in between it and the edge of the frame of the painting. This might not mean so much in another painter’s work, but one’s observing consciousness always heightens when looking at Morandi.

The surface of the painting is made up of a continuous brushy energy of modulated oil paint. It takes equal possession of the solidity of the objects depicted as it does of the air surrounding the objects and of the waveringly tentative light and shadow. This same work has a sensually bumpy bottle at the center of the composition, with the bottles neck at the horizon line. On either side of the central object are boxes, a horizontal one in a peach color with a dove gray box above it and then on the other side a vertical box in a creamy pale yellow.

All of the objects seem to blend and calmly pulsate in this closed, timeless world. But as one walks around the room, the paintings slowly seem to become reachable and very human. The colors, amid the measured warmth or coolness of the grays, possess a curious audacity. This combines with the odd elegance of the arrangements of objects, how they tuck in around one another, behind their proscenium in their shallow spaces and shadows.

Morandi is continually rich in metaphor. From still life, his works travel backwards toward some ancient architecture, then move to the present, where they display a sense of stagecraft. They are equally personal and monumental, surreal and bluntly candid. In fact, we gain most from seeing these infinitely quiet little dramas as still contemporary, anticipating the kind of genre-busting that contemporary art displays regularly. To cite one influence, the late Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect, arranged his buildings with Morandi’s bottles in mind.

Near the office of the gallery is one of his last paintings, three white objects on a gray ground. A dark red shape, the color of dried blood, hovers behind them. The foreground objects are white, blending from the color of chalk to that of bone. Natura Morta, indeed.

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