When Eugene Thaw first tried to give a drawing to the Pierpont Morgan Library he was told, ‘We don’t take gifts from dealers’. Although understandably crestfallen, his regard for the highmindedness of this great New York institution only intensified. Founded by the legendary collector and ‘robber baron’ J.P.Morgan, the library is a stupendous treasure-trove of rare books, manuscripts and works on paper from across the centuries. Thaw persevered in his attempt at generosity, eventually managing to donate an entire collection of over 250 drawings, as well as the cash, some years ago, for the purchase of an adjacent building. He is now a trustee, one of very few dealers on the board of a major collecting institution. ‘I have steered things their way and saved them on occasion from the foibles of the art market’. There is no conflict of interest, because when he collects it is with the Morgan in mind.

Eugene Thaw, who will be seventy next year, was until his retirement one of the leading dealers in old master pictures. His clients included many of the major North American collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to which he has also bequeathed works), the Frick, the Art Institute of Chicago, and such mega-collectors as Norton Simon and Andrew Mellon. But as wealth and opportunity have allowed, he also amassed his own stunning collection of drawings.

He has no trouble admitting to the fact that he prefers drawings that are complete aesthetic experiences in themselves, very full and involved compositions. He even jests that he is a ‘paintings collector manqué’. ‘There are two kinds of drawing: the sketch for something, and the drawing for its own sake. Lots of connoisseurs are much more concerned with the art of idenfification, with ‘who dunnit’, doing detective work and making the right connections. That doesn’t interest me so much as the aesthetic impact of the sheet.’ With characteristic modesty, though, he adds that, ‘Being human, I react more strongly if I know who the artist is. I can’t claim to be so brilliant an eye that I respond just as strongly as if I knew the work were but by Durer.’

Thaw muses on how attitudes towards dealers have changed so demonstrably during his time in the trade. ‘You were one step above a push-cart peddler. Now every young debutante that comes out of college wants to work in a gallery. In my youth the professions for a polite and venturesome young man were Wall Street and advertising – both rather demoted these days. Art dealing has come a long way. Most art dealers who are any good are real scholars and know their field thoroughly.’ Thaw himself is the epitome of the dealer-scholar. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and numerous publications including the Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonne, of which he is co-author. ‘With some dealers, their eye is equivalent to the best academic scholars, or better, because they actually learn from the objects.’

How does he feel about the infamous Mr Morgan with whose legacy his own is now entwined? ‘Of course I have mixed feelings about him as a human being, and don’t know that he would have accepted me as a friend. He was a tyrant, but he was a great collector. But you know, the robber barons like Morgan actually gave their fortunes back to society in the collections they bequeathed. Today’s billionaires are only worried about their ratings with Forbes. With all our moral superiority, Morgan belonged to a better episode in the history of wealth.’ Mr Thaw and his wife Clare have done their bit for philanthropy this end of the century, however. Besides their gift to the Morgan, they have donated a major collection of Native American art as a museum at Cooperstown, in upstate New York, and in Santa Fe, where they now live, they sponsor the restoration of historic adobe churches.

Since parting with his drawings bequest, keeping just a few around him ‘to decorate the apartment’, Eugene Thaw has started collecting in new areas, such as nineteenth-century plein-air oil sketches. With the mixture of bemusement and pride of a true collector, he notes how, thanks to a current exhibition of Corot’s followers at the Brooklyn Museum, many of these forgotten figures are fashionable again.

Mantegna

‘I’m especially proud of this Mantegna because of the difficulty for any collector to get a capital sheet of this early period’, says Eugene Thaw. There is little representation of Italian renaissance or even baroque drawing in his collection because he would have been hard-put to match the superlative holdings of the Morgan in this area. But when this presented itself, he couldn’t resist, and ‘luckily happened to have the funds at the time’. Like many Mantegna drawings, this had previously been attributed to Bellini, but relatively recently the matching of a related work to a Mantegna print led to reattribution of a whole group of drawings. ‘But anyway, I wouldn’t have minded if it was by Bellini’, he remarks with good humour. ‘I don’t collect for the value of drawings. I never resell – that was my whole career as a dealer, which gave me the money to collect these things. I’ve had the thrill of my eye being vindicated by selling again’.

Rembrandt

‘This is one of my earliest Rembrandts. It has such a sense of colour, he is able to use the medium to bring out such liveliness and light. It comes from a set of four sketches he made watching a parade; it’s a band of black musicians. It just says everything about his graphic powers, that he is able to put down so much in such a small sheet.’ ‘Rembrandt is an artist who is being rethought and torn apart by attribution these days. Seymour Slive has said that if there is one more conference, Rembrandt will cease to exist as an artist. Some of my pieces have not survived the various rounds of reattribution’, he concedes, although the four selected for the Academy exhibition are still reckoned to be by the master himself. ‘Actually, if they are great drawings by the best pupil, it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, if they are good enough to be in the Morgan Library, the next generation may put them back [in the oeuvre]!’

Goya

‘This is the peasant who loses everything. She is a universal, even an archetypal figure of suffering’. Thaw sees the grace and fortitude of the peasant who can say ‘Leave it all to Providence’ reflected in the tenderness yet monumentality with which Goya has drawn her, ‘the wonderful silhoutte of the figure against the page, the fullness of emotional content. It could be lifesize, and yet it is only ten inches high’. He doesn’t accept that there is any irony in the title. ‘Goya sympathized with these people. He was a figure of the enlightenment, a humane man like Goethe or Beethoven, but he also has a dark side. This really comes out in some of my other Goyas, in his sharp satire of the Majas, or in the cutting depiction of a monk being fleeced by card-sharks, but here the sentiment is different. He really sympathised with members of the lower orders. This woman is the victim of wars and revolutions.’

Cézanne

Eugene Thaw bought back this late watercolour, one of the set of around a dozen of this unusual size, from his client, Norton Simon. Simon was a collector who believed in hanging everything he owned, Thaw explains, but was worried that such a fresh and delicate watercolour on such a large, clean white sheet would suffered exposed to the California sun. ‘I managed to trade it out of him’. For many years this still-life took pride of place over the Thaw mantlepiece in their Park Avenue apartment. ‘This is one of the miracles of an artist’s hand. Cézanne who started as such an inept performer with a brush and pencil became the subtlest and most magical artist, almost oriental in brilliance of touch. It is so refined, its what the mind’s eye would see. Trying to refine a motif, he draws out of it a kind of abstraction; its a picture created by a mind rather than just a recording eye. This watercolour is just a miracle.’

The post Eugene Thaw in his Own Words: The late collector and philanthropist interviewed in 1996 appeared first on artcritical.

September 9 to November 6, 2016
396 Johnson Avenue (at Morgan Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 456 0396

There is, of course, something exciting about corpses. The fascination is often puerile in the contemporary world, centering on death’s foreignness, emphasizing gore and horror, rather than, like, the ontology of permanent lifelessness. Probably a lot of people in developed nations encounter (human) death most in mediated depictions, as in violent video games, movies, TV, and the arts, such as, famously, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20), John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), or the Chapman brothers’ Hell (1999). Calvin Marcus’s exhibition of new paintings at Clearing Gallery, “Were Good Men,” his third solo show there, employs similar imagery, with nonchalance.

Marcus is 28 years old, working in Los Angeles, and the show suffers from some of the problems that appear common to young painters hailing from that city: here are 39 repetitious paintings; each 101 1/2 by 79 inches and called either Dead Soldier or Grass (all 2016); blandly and proudly derivative, especially of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist imagery; and hung way too close. On uniformly ochre backgrounds, smears of green grass blades loll in flat clusters and fields. On some lay the mangled carcasses of decorated soldiers, each in a casually rendered uniform. Their tongues fall from gaping mouths. Their skin is mottled and discolored; blood seeps from bullet wounds, crushed skulls, peeling flesh.

Marcus has something of Michael Krebber’s wan touch and Sue Williams’s garish caricature. The dead’s rendering is nearly goofy: their decrepit stillness, open eyes, approach something like black comedy. Under the show’s somber title, honoring the dignity of fallen men who’ve worked to kill, their grimaces can be spooky.

Curiously, the paintings suggest, but subordinate, the realities of war and violence. The wounds are cartoonish. The caricatures are called men, but boys typically form the bulk of military personnel, and, increasingly, drones. The paintings represent conflict generally, without particular political or social ideas. Even if Marcus grimly needles platitudes about soldiers and sacrifice, the imagery nonetheless upholds the mythology of grown men dressed brilliantly, fighting bravely, and dying valiantly in combat — a display of masculinity rather than a dead kid whose body is ornamented by 60–100 pounds of gadgetry. One might wonder why most of the canvases are abstract gashes of green oil stick, or why multiple panels are not combined into a few mural-sized artworks. They’re very quiet images, both visually and ethically.

In February 2015, the death squad ISIS released a video that mimics and exceeds images of war that we encounter in all kinds of media (both fiction and non-). It shows the execution of a 26-year-old Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, whose plane crashed in Syria. The video employs sophisticated production and a high-concept narrative structure, asserting that Jordan is a US-puppeted religious apostate, and therefore the pilot must be righteously murdered. Al-Kaseasbeh gives a coerced statement and is taken to buildings allegedly bombed by Jordanian pilots like himself. Intercut footage shows local first responders pulling civilians from a similarly demolished building. At the ruins, al-Kaseasbeh is put in a cage and burned to death, extinguished by a backhoe dumping the building’s rubble on his char. The video closes with a computer-animated dossier of further targets comprising a hit list of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilots.

Apart from its artfully staged and layered signifiers, the ISIS video shows actual war, in extremis. Unlike a lot of famous Western depictions, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), The Things They Carried (1990), which portray battle as a dignified, contemplative and tragic space, with men dying for causes that are both noble and questionable, the ISIS video shows, abysmally, what war is, aside from rules of conduct and myths of heroism. It is blood and death in search of political and economic advantage. Although some are very gruesome, few of Marcus’s cartoonish figures ever have the horror of a figure being perceptible as an actual dead person.

It’s worth noting, however, that there may be some benefit to depicting war distantly and mythologically. During the current election, Americans have been bombarded with messages that our military must be “stronger” against enemies, including vows to murder families, to use torture for the purpose of causing horror, to indiscriminately bomb civilians, to expand authoritarian controls on travel and constitutional rights, celebrations of extrajudicial executions, and other incitements to cruelty. More than assuming America in the role of global policeman, they show America claiming the executioner’s mantle. It may be hypocritical or unrealistic, but declaring an interest in fantasies like restraint and justice in war, or, in this case, who wages war and how, provides us with an ethical line against which we can judge — probably condemn — the implementation of power, can hold it accountable. Paintings of dead men might raise the question: Why then are wars fought by indigent kids and robots on behalf of elders? Why are good men dead men? Why are soldiers’ sacrifices repaid with banalities and substandard medical care?

It is vital, though, that such a fantasy be held against the truth, for comparison, to retain the hypocritical gap in order to maintain the taboo against violence. The multivalent clusterfuck called the War on Terror was heralded with a spectacle so viscerally grim that it has become a presiding trope for American viewers. The image has not been supplanted, in part, because of the refusal (and sometimes inability) on the part of the government and media to show exactly what the war consists of: through the practice of embedding journalists; the Pentagon’s ban on photographs of military coffins; few outlets show what it looks like in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan; a recent statute in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual gives latitude to the military to treat journalists as “unprivileged belligerents,” a class similar to spies; and various media having legitimate concerns about showing snuff videos, like that of al-Kaseasbeh’s murder. The contrast between the fantasy of war’s glory and the reality of its indignity is, perhaps, necessary, but their gulf is filled with a river of gore.

The post Spilled Blood: Calvin Marcus at Clearing appeared first on artcritical.

May 5 to June 18, 2016
547 W. 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 242 7727

Spanish painter Juan Uslé’s recent work, now on view at Cheim & Read, bears an inseparable connection with environmental conditions experienced out of doors, and out of an urban scape, perhaps. That low, raking illumination at dusk, the change physically in our receptiveness to color and tonal contrasts when surrounded by fading light in the transition from day to night, are all more intense, slower, and more subtle away from the noise and artificial illumination of the city. I say “perhaps” because in the city there is that incredible moment when fading natural light combines with electric light. All of this, it seems, both informs and is contained in, these new canvases.

There are only three sizes of canvas present, SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLORADO) (2016) is an example of a series of paintings begun in 1997 and is rendered in the largest size. The other paintings are considerably smaller, at 24 by 18 inches and 18 by 12 inches, respectively, and also belong to longstanding series in their own right. The earlier paintings often comprised vertical as well as horizontal brush marks that moved and stopped, moved and stopped, sequentially, to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat. These paintings, when made in New York are frequently made at night when the city is somewhat quieter, and the heartbeat can be felt in the silence, varying as it does, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, over time. At 120 by 89 inches, the field of this painting visibly absorbs light and reflects it at different intervals. The light reflected is modified by the paint that covers a prepped gessoed surface in uneven — fluid, abrupt or staggered — rhythms. The gradations recall the restless, wrist-driven, backgrounds of Goya’s Los caprichos (1797–1798) or the apparently black surroundings of Velázquez’s Cristo Crucificado (1632). The Velázquez is 98 by 67 inches, a large painting that presents an image of Christ on the cross in an isolated and classical contrapposto posture The apparently black surroundings, or ground, of the figure are not actually black but a kind of unfathomable green black consisting of a multitude of brush strokes that accumulate and with their different directions pulse and variegate the light that falls onto the painted surface. It is a surface alive with the repetitions of Velázquez’s hand in motion in a way like the stepped movement of Uslé’s hand as it tracks across a painting.

In Kayak (Aral 11) (2015), like the other small paintings here, demands its share of wall space. In regarding the space afforded between paintings in the installation, it comes as no surprise that the smaller works require as much wall space as large works. In Kayak shares the horizontal repetitions, each one above the next, of SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLARADO). However, the change in scale takes us closer to the painting in a different way, the view now close, like a person is close to the water in an actual kayak, something Uslé experiences regularly. Between each band of black horizontal translucent brush strokes that deposit the pigment loaded into a medium of vinyl at intervals, like silt, are lines of opaque paint of various colors. The final, bottom passage, though, is not, as might be expected, more translucent paint, but instead another band, this time of opaque black. One’s eyes have to adjust as if to perceive a shadow or afterimage. This increases the complexity of this painting in denying expectation, both in beauty and structure, exponentially.

In part three of George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), titled “The Propagation of Things,” Kubler writes:

The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitude to the process of invention, repetition, and discard. Without invention there would be only stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any man-made thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.

He goes on to state that a condition of the present is the acceptance of continual change. It is this that Uslé’s paintings embody, even celebrate, successfully, neither avoiding repetition nor denying difference. All the paintings in this exhibition are part of larger series, and each painting is assertively particular despite, or one could say because of sharing a continuity of formal elements.

The post Heartbeats: The Spanish Rhythms of Juan Uslé appeared first on artcritical.

Jake & Dinos Chapman: ‘The Realm of the Unmentionable’ at the Jerwood Gallery

October 25, 2014 to January 7, 2015
Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings, East Sussex
www.jerwoodgallery.org

Just a few months after taking over London’s Serpentine Gallery, Jake and Dinos Chapman have another large-scale outing. The brothers spent their teenage years in Hastings, on the south coast, and most of The Realm of the Unmentionable is an enjoyably mischievous reprisal of the greatest hits you’d expect from the local boys made bad. That’s ideal for anaudience who may not have seen much of their work before. For those more familiar with it, the obvious focus is on the show’s relationship to place, and on the newer streams of work, which push forward the Chapmans’ interest in value, originality and fame in art.

It’s relevant that Hastings, which has important historical associations and was a fashionable tourist destination in the 19th Century, had become one of the least salubrious towns in the south of England by the 1980s: the Chapman view of existence, brutal to the point of satire, had to come from somewhere.  Of less relevance is the fact that this author went to Hastings Grammar School, which became William Parker Comprehensive by the time the Chapmans attended. Appropriately there’s an Archive Cloud of 79 drawings, gathered in 2012 but dating back to school and college days and demonstrating that the Chapmans were just as juvenile when they were juveniles. The Sum of All Evil, 2012-13, is a version of the original Hell, destroyed in the MOMART art warehouse fire in 2004. It features not just thousands of individual figures at 35:1 scale, but also one god-like pair of feet at full human size, dressed in locally sourced rainbow socks. There are a couple of the brain machine sculptures, one expanded by the addition of three spectating mannequins from Hastings junk shops. Each member of this nuclear family holds a pair of eyeballs, as if to emphasise their failed striving for true vision, and the head of each contains a radio blaring out. The competing channels yield a cacophonous clash of cultures which infects the whole show. There’s also a new set of repurposed Victorian / Edwardian portrait paintings from the series One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved, 2014.  Not significantly different for some of the originating canvases, these are again sourced locally.  The show’s site specificity, then, is weak: we have work made in Hastings, and material sourced in Hastings. What we don’t have is any work about Hastings or explicitly derived from experiences in Hastings.

There are new works of known types. Sturm und Drang, 2014, a grotesque bronze version of an old Chapman favourite, Goya’s Great Deeds – Against the Dead; a naughty boy defacement of Los Caprichos, all phallically elongated noses and tongues; and hand-coloured etchings (Human Rainbow II, 2014) which exploit the imaginative use of rainbows in dark settings.  There re also new examples of Living with Dead Art, 2014: small views of designer interiors featuring classic masterpieces alongside the Chapmans’ own work; Twombly and sex dolls; Rothko and mutants; Guston and Ronald McDonald; and so on.

Two new work types, however, advance the bothers’ interest in originality and fame in art as a way of challenging the value ascribed to it and hence – by implication – value systems as a whole.

First, they have remade Tracey Emin’s tent of everyone she slept with, which their fellow White Cube artist has steadfastly refused to recreate following its destruction in the said MOMART fire. Resisting the temptation to stick themselves in, the only apparent differences from the original are blank panels where no photo documentation was available. The title makes the risibly false claim that this is The Same Only Better, 2012. It hasn’t gone down well with Emin, but I guess the Chapmans would be disappointed if it had. Here it reads as a run-down seaside parallel – her Margate, their Hastings – as well as a way of questioning the primacy of the original and the fetishizing of the lost.

Second, they reboot their serial use of Hitler, the artist. There’s no doubting how notoriety affects the attention paid to his dull paintings.  A muddy still life attributed to him is installed – unmarked, for a change – in its own reverential space, but with the ceiling lowered to less than five feet. That undercuts the reverence, but also forces the adult viewer to bend down in front of the Führer’s art. Then again, the ceiling is also a child friendly nod to the ‘join the dots’ drawings installed nearby – under an ironically full height ceiling – which evidently plays on the reactions Jake recently provoked by saying that it was a waste of time to take children to art galleries.

So Goya, Hitler, Twombly, Emin, children’s book illustrators and their own past and present are all reduced / elevated to the same level. What, then, is the Chapman “realm of the unmentionable”? Perhaps the point is that the realm is unpopulated: nothing is too tasteless, immoral or cheap to be included. The world is so wicked, in their vision, that cynical laughter is the only response.

The post Just As Juvenile When They Were Juvenile: Jake & Dinos Chapman in their hometown of Hastings appeared first on artcritical.

A cursory glance at Michael Berryhill’s paintings could lead to a mistake on the order of confusing fiberglass insulation with cotton candy. So beware of complacency induced by pastel colors, sensuous surfaces and snarky titles. Something disturbing may be lurking behind the cheerful ambiguities in the nine new paintings and vitrine of drawings in his new show at Kansas Gallery.

Saturn n Son (all 2014), a play on words of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son, is the title of two initially puzzling paintings in Kansas’s rear room. Layered in mostly blues and rusty browns, they seem to represent an indistinct, non-descript figure, which could be a piece of disintegrated statuary, bent over in some kind of activity. Without knowing the title, the activity could range from manual labor to microscopic examination.

However anyone who has a passing acquaintance with art history will immediately recognize the Saturn in the title as the one Goya depicts devouring his son. Which of course makes the figure in Berryhill’s painting discernable as Goya’s wild-eyed, child-eating demon, and Berryhill’s resonances with Goya more obvious. The TV show reference emphasizes a bit of campy goofiness in the Goya seen from the present, despite the horrific subject matter, and conveys a spirit of ambivalence that permeates this work.

Berryhill is not ambivalent about his ambition however. Though modest in scale, the paintings use expensive, thick-weave linen, a high culture archival maneuver that serves to offset some of the low culture references, and telegraphs his seriousness. Berryhill nods to not only Goya, but Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as his contemporaries, such as Dana Schutz. He places himself in an early modernist painting tradition that, despite an apparently abstract affect, is always representational in its ultimate methods.

The major ambivalences in this show concern the perception of the imagery and how important it is to decipher it. Berryhill presents his subjects theatrically with proscenium-like verticals as quotation marks and a shallow horizontal strip at the bottom that stages each event. The grain of the linen, and small, dry brushstrokes allow Berryhill to use a halftone-like layering process, producing a surface of fuzzy colors and figure-ground inversions. The results are images seeming indefinite, corroded, or out of focus.

Like the wordplay of his titles, each of Berryhill’s paintings involves some kind of visual misreading or multiplicity of meaning. Indeed the very title of the exhibition, Beggars Blanket, is an obvious reference to the 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggar’s Banquet, replacing a humble repast with an inadequate fuzzy fabric (the canvases themselves?).

How we respond then is always dependent on how easily one psychologically negotiates the frustration of not being able to resolve the paintings into coherent images.

Some viewers will simply accept the work as abstract and just appreciate the sensuous, warm and fuzzy mood it projects, which can lead to overlooking a reference to parental cannibalism. But the sustained attention required of viewers to parse partial bits of imagery in hopes of a deeper comprehension carries a risk for the artist. Too much unresolved ambiguity, coupled with a flippant title, like Axis of Easel, might interfere with the painting attaining memorability, and the futility of finding resolution could overwhelm the artist-viewer bond.

Long Long, Gone Gone, a painting with fairly straightforward imagery, is a great ploy to engage one in the work’s hermeneutics as well as a direct statement of Berryhill’s themes. This painting depicts the back of a longhaired person, left hand to brow in a peering-off-into-the-distance gesture, and with a parrot on the right shoulder.

The formal ambiguities are easy to parse, but their metaphorical implications give the painting gravitas. The airy blue background, grading from ultramarine to cerulean, can be either sky or sea, or both, and the blue reappears at the bottom to frame the bust of a figure, who, given the layered hairdo and delicate wrist is probably meant to be seen as female. Or the bottom strip might indicate that the figure is submerged to her chest in water. To her chest that is, if the patterned rectangular shape spanning the canvas is her back, and not in fact the back of a couch. The parrot, as signifier of both imitation and piracy, is depicted as a degraded representation. The searching gesture, which echoes our own concentration of looking, seems futile because nothing can be deciphered from the scumbled brushstrokes that represent the distance.

The title, Long Long, Gone Gone, can represent not only our own fruitless attempts to find meaning in Berryhill’s paintings, but perhaps an elegy for the past itself — a recognition that painting has departed as the major vehicle for conveying cultural meaning. Despite the rigor and purpose that Berryhill brings to his paintings, there is also a sophisticated understanding of that ship having already sailed, and we peer desperately at its surface, trying to understand why it exists, trusting only our own perceptions, Flaubert’s stuffed parrot squawking useless artspeak at our shoulder.

The post Fuzzy Reception: Michael Berryhill at Kansas appeared first on artcritical.

November 17, 2006 to March 28, 2007

What to think of yet another in the procession of general surveys the Guggenheim has served up?  In 2000, the late, great Robert Rosenblum presented the 1900 show as an expansive index that mirrored our own pluralistic, institutionalized, post avant-garde era.   The current exhibition, of Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso, includes a magnificent array of  paintings and again puts the onus on us, by questioning how historical painting is currently viewed.  Can we truly accept a portrait of the artist as a ravenous, time-traveling marauder who steals and cannibalizes the immediate and distant past in an attempt to break new ground?  In 2004 the Guggenheim answered affirmatively in the smaller-scaled, less ambitious exhibition, Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, which charted Mapplethorpe’s course as he pillaged classical sources depicting the sexually objectified male nude.

This time, Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez unfurls Time, Truth and History –  El Greco to Picasso, a theme-based show positing that the historical avant-garde, as exemplified by Picasso and Gris, was fueled by Spanish painting and cultural memory from as far back as the 16th century. And that cubism is, as Gertrude Stein quipped, Spanish.  The same claim is made for surrealism here.

While Gimenez’ thematic strategy does project continuity of subject matter, such as still-life or women, throughout centuries of Spanish painting, it doesn’t support the idea of an inherent Spanishness in Modernism.  And although the nationalist agenda is a stretch, the exhibition is a refreshing and bracing challenge to the notion that the contemporary epoch of the last 100 or so years sprung from Picasso’s head in an immaculately conceived rupture with the past. The usual suspects and heirs exemplar from Barr’s and Berenson’s cannons are trotted out and extolled, but this time they not only kiss and make up but have a roll in the hay.  We are treated to a celebratory mix of painting that reveals 350 years of swirling influences, and the sheer enormity of the presentation allows for other conversations, about foreign influence and formal innovation, to happen between the paintings.

The advertisements in the subway for the show offer an introduction.  The copy reads “El Greco to Picasso,” beneath which are two portraits, presumably one by each artist.  The Picasso looks like a Picasso –  a man’s bespectacled head, sporting a ruff collar, twists in a cubo-surreal tug-of-war.  Juxtaposed is an exquisitely observed portrait of a man in a sumptuous ruff collar.  But contrary to the headline, the image is not in fact by El Greco, but by Velazquez.  This thwarted expectation underscores the curator’s unfortunate preference for thematic rather than formal comparison.  Happily, El Greco painted a ruff collar too, albeit a less flamboyant – and less photogenic – one, in his Portrait of a Man (1600), which is installed in the exhibition with the other two portraits. And the conversation here is clearly between El Greco and Picasso — decidedly two-way and thoroughly modern, although the traditionally buttery Velazquez can listen in.

Establishing an unadulterated Spanish line of painterly influence is ultimately compromised by the looming presence of the Italians.  By Caravaggio’s death in 1618, Velazquez had fully embraced the Lombard’s use of dramatic snapshot naturalism and concentrated detail set in a dark vacuum of space. Velazquez’s superb Peasants at the Table (1619) exhibits all these qualities.  Caravaggio’s influence was so pervasive that as late as (1660) even Murillo, who was known for his fondness for Raphael’s classical idealism, was employing the new naturalism in Four Figures On A Step.

Ribera, perhaps Caravaggio’s greatest admirer, had a particularly ravenous appetite for cannibalizing Italian sources.   In Apollo and Marsyas (1637), Ribera directly borrows from Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in the treatment of Marsyas in the lower half of the painting.  And Marsyas’ facial expression is influenced by the Bamboccianti school in Rome of the 1620’s. Yet in the upper half of the painting, the rich color and loose paint handling of the sky, background figures and flowing drapery of Apollo, is an homage to late Titian.  It is a breathtaking combination of opposing influences. Yet somehow Ribera makes it all work beautifully.

Despite the overwhelming Italian influence on the major Spanish masters, some lesser known painters expressed a more distinctly Spanish aesthetic.  It is here that this remarkably expansive exhibition taps the intrinsic power of Spanish painting, the power to evoke with deafening silence a heightened psychological state of existential quietude and foreboding.   Spain’s long-term political and cultural isolation spawned a reflective, insulated environment that drove Spanish still-life painters to develop their own darkened stage-set.  Amazingly, the stark, reductive space and dramatically lit volumes associated with Caravaggio were concurrently used by the marvelous Spanish still-life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan as early as 1602.  It was Cotan, with his hard-boiled observation and simplified compositions, who deflected the influence of Dutch still life’s over-abundance.  Cotan’s paintings, along with those of his brilliant follower Juan Van Der Hamen, are installed here with Gris and Picasso. But the hyper-real bent of 17th century Spanish still life was part of a different trajectory from that of Cubism’s inter-planar agitation. Eschewing the use of overlap, Cotan often staged his objects like overdetermined ducks in a row, and to great effect.  Most of the museum goers prefer to hover around Cotan’s and Hamen’s glistening gems rather than the more demanding examples by Picasso or Gris.  The Spanish preference for spare, evocative still life finds expression in Salvator Dali’s precisely defined bread-basket table settings and blood-and-sand landscapes, the final and decidedly uncubist destination of Cotan’s trajectory.

The unnerving yet magical stage-set of 17th century Spanish still life may have affected Francisco de Zubaran as well. The small atrium off the Guggenheims lower ramp is filled with Zubaran’s haunting paintings and has never looked quite this good.  Interestingly, Zubaran, the master of the aura-drenched lone figure, could not breathe a sense of interpersonal dynamics into his figural groups.  Instead they remain isolated, and psychologically dissociated from each other as if they are objects inhabiting the strictly compartmentalized, separately ordered world of Spanish still life. (Zubaran’s own still lifes were entirely indebted to Cotan.) One example where this tendency toward alienation works to great advantage is in the sense of foreboding between Jesus and Mary in his House of Nazareth (1644), of which there is an equally splendid second version in Cleveland.

The bold expressions of individual Spanish genius from Las Meninas to Guernica are astonishing.  And Zubaran, with his unique vision, reductive impulse and expressive power, is still greatly underrated.  Zubaran’s remarkable use of white hadn’t been approached until Robert Ryman’s assessment in the late twentieth century.  And in the midst of continued national isolation, Goya emerges, presaging symbolism, expressionism, and late Guston , and surpasses every European painter in  penetrating  the human condition.  Manet certainly thought so when he modeled The Execution of Maximillian (1869) on Goya’s  The Third of May (1814).  And it is Manet who perfectly exemplifies the roving art-historical eye.  By single-handedly resurrecting El Greco and touting him along with Velazquez and Goya as a magnificent triumvirate, Manet changed the way we look at art history.  When Manet brazenly stole the figural group from Raimondi’s TheJudgment of Paris (1520), and inverted the identities of the flagrantly sexualized male nude and modestly poised female, for his seminal modern work Luncheon on the Grass some 350 years later, he showed how a modern artist could re-evaluate painting tradition, charting the way for Picasso and Matisse.  In the wake of Manet’s and Picasso’s connections with historicism it should not be startling how much Lucian Freud’s Leigh Bowery and Fernando Botero’s figures owe to Juan Carreno’s excellent full length portraits of “La Monstrua” (1680) in the Freaks section of the exhibition.  Carreno’s monumental sense of proportion, framing and scale are remarkably contemporary.

In spite of the specific themes and domestic schools of Spanish painting emphasized by the curators, international cross pollination of style within historical movements has a messy life of its own.  Ribera, though born in Spain, lived all his adult life in Naples and adopted Caravaggio’s practice of using live models.  And what of El Greco, born in Greece and active in both Spain and Italy?  His greatest influence is undoubtedly Tintoretto, whose compression of figure and ground, use of elongation and diaphanously sketchy painting technique can at times appear agitated to the point of seeming unfinished.  Of course this is something Tintoretto, El Greco, Cezanne and Picasso all have in common.  Does that make Cubism Italian?  Aren’t El Greco’s figures in Vision of St. John , on loan here from the Met, and Lacoon, at the National Gallery, the template for Matisse’sDance and Cezanne’s bathers?  Surely many of Cezanne’s paintings satisfy the defined criteria of analytical cubism.  Does the fact that Picasso spent the vast majority of his life and all his innovative years outside of Spain determine his artistic nationality? If not, El Greco is Greek.

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