Brian O’Doherty is justly renowned for his short book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976). In any case, as a much-acclaimed artist and a veteran critic, he deserves this presentation of his writings. Collected Essays brings together substantial personal reminiscences of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, who were his friends; accounts of travels to Las Vegas and Miami; discussions of medicine that are informed by his early experience as an MD; descriptions of the work Orson Wells and other filmmakers; and selections from his art criticism of the 1960s and ‘70s, dealing with Richard Chamberlain, George Segal, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. There’s a marvelous account of how he took Marcel Duchamp’s heartbeat to compose a portrait of that artist and the story of how, as a political gesture, he took the name Patrick Ireland (1972-2008). “As a young man in Dublin,” he writes in a brilliant introductory essay on masquerade, “I felt the need to assume a persona that stretched the borders of a culture where literature always flourished and the attitudes to visual art were warily provincial” (pp. 8-9). O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture.

As examples of his luminously lucid, jargon free analysis, I especially admired his highly instructive account of the role of windows in Hopper’s paintings, the problems with the dark paintings in Rothko’s Houston Chapel, discussion of neon signs in Las Vegas, and an analysis of Stella’s early reception. But because he doesn’t provide an overview on the very diverse themes of these essays, it’s left to the reader to tease out the unifying concerns. And it’s not clear who will read this book through – except a very patient reviewer. Perhaps Inside the White Cube provides the unifying perspective much needed in the present volume, with its appeal to the role of the spectator’s space. When O’Doherty describes the ways that Hopper’s “aim was to keep the spectator right there, looking” (p. 21), using his windows in his “mysterious realism” which “invites you in to test the logic of his space with reference to your everyday experience” (p. 39), his account is revelatory. And his claim that Rothko’s dark late paintings show “an urge to experiment in ways he had not previously allowed himself” (p. 83), extends that analysis in a surprising way. I regret, then, that O’Doherty doesn’t go out of his way to make this overriding concept, which points to surprising parallels between Hopper’s realism and Rothko’s abstractions, entirely accessible, nor indicate how it might bring together the concerns of the other essays in this volume.

What is the right format for republication of a famous critic’s writings? When Clement Greenberg collected his criticism in Art and Culture (1961) he provided a carefully edited selection of his essays; he was famous enough that no elaborate editorial discussion was needed. When Michael Fried collected his criticism in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), he offered an elaborate introduction describing the genesis and development of these writings. But although O’Doherty’s Collected Essays opens with respectful brief essays by Liam Kelly and Anne-Marie Bonnet, they don’t really tell enough to provide a full perspective on his career, much of which now is historically distant. I sought out this volume, I confess, because I wanted to know if how he had rethought his history of the commercial art gallery, in light of its recent development. But I was frustrated by the very condensed five-page account, whose title, I admit, is suggestive: “Boxes, cubes, installations, whiteness and money.” “Art and its reception,” he rightly says, “always intersected finance. Art is made to be coopted” (p. 331). What then follows? “The white cube I described over thirty years ago is no longer the same place. The stresses on it from within have increased” (p. 330). True enough – but surely there is much more to be said. Right now I can think of no more interesting challenge for anyone interested in contemporary art and its market than spelling out the implications of these claims.

Brian O’Doherty, Collected Essays. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.) Edited by Liam Kelly. Introduction by Anne-Maria Bonnet. ISBN 9780520286542, 342 pp. $85 hardback, $34.95 paperback

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Barry Schwabsky’s new anthology, The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), collects his columns for The Nation between 2006 and 2014, providing a clear record of a surprising variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. We get his response to shows of old masters and modernist heroes — Diego Velázquez, Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse — and his often-critical views of famous senior contemporaries, such as Alighiero Boetti, Dan Graham and Ai Weiwei. We also get his sympathetic take on a number of lesser-known and emerging artists, including Laurel Nakadate, Zoe Strauss, Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. And in the introduction, as well as in many of the reviews, readers get brief, instructive statements about the present-day role of art criticism, the contemporary art market, and about the role of art schools — three of the art world’s perpetual quandaries.

As art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky may be reasonably compared with the most famous holder of that post, Clement Greenberg. When Greenberg championed the Abstract Expressionists, calling them the only legitimate heirs to early French Modernist tradition, he appeared a prophet. By contrast, Schwabsky, modestly recognizing in his introduction that contemporary art critics have only a marginal practical role, aspires “to open up […] perspectives without, I hope, belaboring them.” While Greenberg provides a skeleton history of Modernism from Edouard Manet to Jackson Pollock, it’s abundantly clear that no such master narrative can conceivably extend into the present. But now, Schwabsky suggests, thanks to “an inner transformation in the nature of art itself,” it solicits “participants, collaborators, communities.” For this reason, the role of politics has also changed. Greenberg’s art writing, guided by Marxism, sententiously contrasts high art and kitsch. For Schwabsky, however, the goal is to “let the critical distance between art and politics — between my writing and its context — display itself.”

Schwabsky’s presentation of these important arguments is very elliptical, so I hope that elsewhere he will spell them out. Here is how I would place them: after art history became an academic subject, in the 1960s Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss (and her followers at the journal October) attempted also to turn art criticism into a discipline housed in the university. In pursuit of that goal, they introduced a methodology and technical vocabulary into writing about contemporary art. But this project failed. And so nowadays our best critics are poets (like Schwabsky), journalists, or perhaps moonlighting academics such as Schwabsky’s immediate predecessor at The Nation, Arthur Danto. And this means that Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire and even Adrian Stokes (the maverick 20th-century English writer who is repeatedly cited by Schwabsky) remain the most relevant role models for critics.

Schwabsky is an eloquent, compulsively quotable writer. His essays, he says, “aim to keep art unfinished.” Without ever seeming to try too hard, he is very effective at summarizing artists’ achievements in tightly coiled felicitous phrases. Kara Walker’s “instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist,” he nicely observes, is “the aesthetic equivalent of what the marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition.” Gauguin’s Polynesian women, he suggests, are “almost indecipherable. […] Something in them remained as mysterious to him as he was to himself.” I love it when he calls Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) an “immersive and synecdochical painting.” And I admire him when, in a surprising review linking the abstract paintings of Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries, he suggests that they both “aspire to grandeur — with a pictorial vocabulary that to some may seem painfully narrow.”

Critics, whose raison d’être is to scrutinize particular works, need to have a sensibility — which is to say that they are unavoidably more personal in their enthusiasms than art historians. But art historians deploy a method, and so generalize. Suppose, then, that an art historian devoted to contemporary art were to read The Perpetual Guest (as many no doubt will). What general view of the subtitle’s “art in the unfinished present” would she come away with? Schwabsky’s account of how Nancy Spero’s “effort to unmoor painting from the Western tradition finally did converge with Matisse’s earlier one” would show how our best critics link contemporary art with its antecedents. Reading in his discussion of Christopher Wool that “The price of things is crowding out the value of things” would reveal how skeptical our critics are about our overheated art market. And studying his account of Gordon Matta-Clark — “artist of fragments (who) left an oeuvre that feels whole” — could inspire the art historian to resist conventional critical clichés. Above all, I would hope that the contemporary art historian responded to his very dry sense of humor. His analysis linking the prospects of abstraction with Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?,” for example, is worth more than a lot of formalist or sociological analysis. “A dominant aesthetic,” says Schwabsky in his account of the 2009 Venice Biennale, “always undermines itself.” At this time — when older formalist and Marxist theorizing is no longer applicable, but has not, as yet, yielded to new approaches to art writing — he offers a reliable, necessarily unfinished guide to the dilemmas of the present.

Schwabsky, Barry. The Perpetual Guest. Art in the Unfinished Present (London & New York: Verso, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2. 304 pages. $24.95

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The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

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Epic Abstraction: Friedel Dzubas in the 1970s at Loretta Howard Gallery
April 9 to May 9, 2015
525-531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 695 0164

For most artists, a “late style” comes as the final fillip. With Friedel Dzubas, it represents the third stage of an evolution that may be viewed in terms of Hegelian dialectics.

The first stage, or thesis, is the Dzubas style of the 1950s, marked by the energy and dynamism common to so many gestural abstractionists of that period. The antithesis comes along in the 1960s, when — in the words of Barbara Rose — Dzubas “cleaned up and emptied out his canvases.” Instead of many active small shapes, the artist focused on a just a few, large and superbly calm ones. The final stage, or synthesis, occurred in the 1970s, and lasted right through to Dzubas’s death in 1994. The dynamism of the 1950s combined with the detachment of the 1960s in Olympian canvases of increasing scale distinguished by the artist’s unique stylistic device, a feathery spectrum of color.

Since Dzubas began to exhibit in the 1950s, one might think that he was born in the 1920s. In fact, he was born in 1915, only three years after Pollock — and in Berlin, which was still fighting World War I. As a boy, he knew that he wanted to become an artist, but his father, a textile factory manager, only allowed him to apprentice with a business firm of decorative painters.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Friedel was Catholic, not Jewish, but his politics were leftist and he didn’t want to serve in Hitler’s army. Leaving Berlin in 1939, he wound up in Chicago, designing magazines for Ziff-Davis Publishing. There he also read articles by Clement Greenberg in Partisan Review, which impressed but mystified him. He moved to New York after the war, determined to become a fine artist, but only able to support himself freelancing in commercial design. In 1948, he became friends with Greenberg and through him met many of the first-generation abstract expressionists, and, in 1951, Helen Frankenthaler, Greenberg’s new companion.

She and Dzubas were sharing a studio in Manhattan when in 1952 she painted Mountains and Sea, a stain painting that was to inspire many artists, among them Dzubas himself. His work continued to resemble Frankenthaler’s throughout the 1950s, with brightly colored, vigorously wrought stains and splats.

Although there are no paintings by Dzubas from this period in the two shows under review, The Elkon Gallery has Eden (1964), a typical example of his bright and lively stain painting. Perhaps it was intended as a homage to Frankenthaler, as one of her best-known canvases is also titled Eden (1956). The other five paintings at Elkon give a good idea of Dzubas’s progress in the 1960s. Most distinctive are the three larger ones, all about seven feet by six feet. Here the artist has abandoned the stain technique. By applying a gesso primer, he kept his colors on the surface of the canvas and independent of each other.

The result is just a few large, often oval and subtly colored shapes on each canvas. The simplicity of Azure (1962) makes it particularly memorable. It is dominated by a large, jaunty area of pale aqua, set in the upper center of a big white field, and a dashing small peach horizontal comma of color at the bottom.

Still, it wasn’t until around 1972 that Dzubas achieved his truly original look, his device. This consists of bold rectangular slabs of color that feather off into increasingly paler shades, finally disappearing into the surrounding field. These feathered bands combine the vitality of the stain paintings of the ‘50s with the more emphatic shapes of the ‘60s. They dramatize the contrasts between colors while retaining the majesty of the resulting forms — particularly as the canvases themselves get larger.

Four huge canvases dominate the show at Loretta Howard Gallery. The smallest, Chenango (1973), which hangs in the front gallery and measures about four by 14 feet, is a symphony of churning reds and greens. Facing the entry in the back gallery is the largest painting here, Procession, (1975), which measures about 10 by 25 feet. To its left and right hang Nebel (1971) and Foen (1974). Nebel (“fog” or “mist” in German) is dominated by a misty field, with only a relatively small number of pats of deeper color. Foen, named for a treacherous warm spring Alpine wind, features ominously dark cloud-like shapes on top, with quivering paler earthlike colors below.

On the fourth wall in this back gallery hang eleven of the small colored acrylic sketches or modelli that preceded larger paintings, and were used by Dzubas to work out his ideas before he translated them into major scale. These range from 5 1/2 inches square to 13 1/2 by 31 inches, and they are a delight. Especially joyous are those that served as modelli for Inca (1975), Heath Cote (1978), and Westerly (1973). Even more illuminating is the modello for Procession since the resulting painting hangs on the opposite wall, providing an opportunity to compare what stayed and what changed in the larger finished work. On the right-hand side of both large and small paintings are a double row of vertical bands, feathered at one end or the other. They seem to have made the transition more or less intact, but the horizontals on the left-hand side of the larger canvas appear to have been more precisely worked out.

In a vitrine there is documentation for the creation of an even larger mural for a Boston bank in 1975, with an accompanying text by art historian Patricia Lewy Gidwitz, who is working on a book about the artist. Gidwitz quotes Wes Frantz, onetime studio assistant to Dzubas. “With Friedel’s painting the devil was in the details. If you compare closely a small sketch to a large painting, the large painting will have all the details that the small ones don’t. And it’s in those details that Friedel sought his identity.”

The post Friedel Dzubas: Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis appeared first on artcritical.

March 18 to April 18, 2015
530 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

The majority of what I know about art is owed to two things. The first is making a lot of paintings and drawings. The second is conversations with Walter Darby Bannard.

Bannard is a third-generation Abstract Expressionist who came to prominence in the mid-1960s along with his friends Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. Clement Greenberg was close with all of them. Though Stella’s reputation held, Bannard’s fell along with Greenberg’s over the course of the 1980s, which concluded with Darby leaving New York and taking over as chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Whatever this meant for Darby’s career, it was immensely good fortune for me, as I was able to work with him as a graduate student.

Darby possesses a rare combination of taste, intellect, and verbal acumen. His writings, an archive of which I have edited, contain some of the most astute observations about art I’ve run across outside of Greenberg’s. Indeed, Darby could and would argue with Greenberg to their mutual pleasure.

Having quietly nurtured talent at UM since then, the silence around his legacy broke on the evening of March 19 of this year, when an exhibition of his reductive paintings from the late 1950s and early ‘60s opened at Berry Campbell. At one point, hardly another body could have fit in the gallery. Darby stood at the front desk, greeting well-wishers (and a few ill-wishers, too) with his customary jocularity. I spoke with him the following morning.

Franklin Einspruch: Did you have an initial “aha” moment about abstraction? How did you know that it was something that you wanted to be involved in?

Walter Darby Bannard: It just seemed more exciting, that’s all. It’s kind of like food, you discover that something tastes good and you want more. At Princeton in the mid-’50s I had an instructor who was an abstract painter, Bill Seitz, who later became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He did the “Responsive Eye” exhibition, which was an Op Art show. The people I was friends with liked abstract painting. Then Frank [Stella] came along, a couple of classes behind me, and he was an abstract painter. Mike Fried was there, and a guy named Dave Comey, who loved autos and killed himself in a car crash unfortunately. We all just loved abstract painting and went to New York and looked at abstract painting.

Abstraction bewilders a lot of people when they first see it. It did me. You didn’t experience that.

I was brought up in an atmosphere with a lot of music in it, which is an analogous interest. When I was seven years old we lived in the country, at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a black church. I was a kid in the country and I would wander around. One Sunday I was next to this black church. I heard this music coming out of it. I was – what’s the cliche? – riveted. I’d never heard anything like it. I actually went during the week and broke into the church to look at the pump organ and stuff they had there and pushed it and wondered at it. I thought these machines were making the music. I was only seven years old.

That’s how it is with abstract painting, it just takes you over. I remember looking at one of these little intellectual magazines when I was sixteen and I saw a de Kooning painting, and thought, wow, that’s really cool.

When I was eleven I saw a picture in the rotogravure, the color section of the Sunday paper. This magazine had a page that said, “which kind of art do you like?” On one side there was a picture of a painting of a clown, and on the other side was a painting by Ben Nicholson. I said to myself, well, I sure know what I like. In fact I’m going to cut it out and put it in my wallet. I loved this Ben Nicholson so much and before I had no idea that there was any such thing as that. It’s like falling in love. I had no idea that there were any social consequences to this. The magazine only did it to get people upset, presuming that everyone is going to like the clown, and I didn’t even know that, I just thought the Nicholson was a beautiful painting. It was in a rotogravure that had all the quality of comic strips, but I just loved it.

Do you remember the frame of mind that you brought to this work in the Berry Campbell exhibition, the impulse to make a painting as simple as possible?

My professor at Princeton told Frank, David, and me that we should go look at Rothko. So we went to look at Rothko, and we thought it was idiotic. It was just a lot of yellow – this show happened to be a bunch of yellow squares. But it affected me mightily and pretty soon I was painting Rothkos in our little studio. I was interested in all kinds of painting. I was very interested in Pop Art, for instance. Rauschenberg in particular turned me on. And I did lots and lots of Pop Art things. I did “event”-type art. We were all anti-de Kooning, who for us represented sensitivity, and we had decided that we were not going to be sensitive. I got the idea that it would be really cool to get a big balloon and shape it as a de Kooning woman, fill it with hydrogen, let it up in the sky right before dawn, and when the sun came up, to fire tracer bullets at it so that the whole thing would explode like the Hindenberg.

The Beat poets, Corso and Kerouac and Ginsberg and a few others, came down to Princeton to give a reading. So I had decided that I was going to make a big hit with these guys by telling them my Blow Up de Kooning idea. They were nice, quiet, polite people. They weren’t wild at all. I told the whole room, which turned utterly silent. LeRoi Jones, who later became Amiri Baraka, turned to me and said, “Man, you really are crazy.” I was so hurt and abashed. They just thought I was nuts.

Before I was making Pop Art stuff and doing drawings of figures floating in the sky. I had an obsession with that for some reason. Then I saw a Clyfford Still in Art News in 1958, and I was fascinated. It was a full-page red painting, a really good one. So I went right to my studio and did Clyfford Stills for a while. I was also interested in centrality and simplicity and this idea of presentation. I had this painting with a red circle and some Clyfford Still-y stuff on top and some Clifford Still-y stuff on the bottom. Frank said, you don’t need the thing on the top, and Mike Fried said, you don’t need the thing on the bottom, so I had a circle. I said, holy shit, that’s really all I need to make a total, in-your-face presentation. I thought that was just wonderful.

Then I went to see the Barnett Newman show at French & Co. I saw that there was another person doing the same thing, only with a line instead of a circle. That told me that I had permission to do what I was doing. Back then if you did a painting like that people wouldn’t even take it as a painting. The closest they could come was to call it Bauhaus, which was not only out of fashion but didn’t interest us at all. That was an absolutely different motivation altogether.

So you made these paintings before you saw Ad Reinhardt.

I did see Reinhardt, but I didn’t like it. I saw one of the black paintings in the Modern, and all the black paintings have this faint, slightly different value and design on them. But this one had wrinkles, and the light from the window was making the wrinkles the strongest component on the painting. All you saw was light wrinkles and blackness. I said, “That sucks, that’s a cop-out, I hate that.” In my journal I wrote, “NO REINHARDT!!!” But Reinhardt was one of the people doing this presentational work.

And by presentation you’re talking about..?

Simplicity that’s not Cubist-derived. Mondrian is Cubist-derived, and Bauhaus is Cubist-derived, and Malevich and all the Russian constructivists all came out of Cubism. It was taking cubism to an extreme. Me and Frank and Frank’s buddies, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, didn’t have any interest in Cubist-derived simplicity. Ellsworth Kelly was doing it and Rauschenberg was doing it in a way with his early, simple stuff. Gottlieb was doing it. There was this impulse to put a simple thing right in the middle of the picture and it wasn’t Cubist simplicity, it was presentational simplicity. Something was staring right back at you like it was another person. That idea just fascinated me. I thought, this is the best way to present color – make it into a painting, but just barely.

Did anyone push back on the idea that that was painting? Did you encounter resistance?

I didn’t encounter resistance because nobody had any idea what I was doing. I was painting in my basement and didn’t have any interest or exposure until ‘64, which is about five years after I started doing it. My first exposure was at Tibor de Nagy in 1965. Of course, there were people who looked at the paintings and said, “This is awful, this is stupid, this is not even painting,” but not the art world, because the art world didn’t know who the hell I was. When I got started with this it was just a matter of developing color combinations so I was happy as a clam for four or five years, painting these things. But nobody really cared except for people like Frank and Mike.

Why did you stop making them?

Boredom. It was laborious to make these paintings. They required layer after layer after layer of paint. Otherwise you wouldn’t get the simplicity and the lack of brushstrokes. It was like Chinese lacquer, you needed the layers to make it work. And then I saw Olitski’s paintings, and I was knocked out. I had a crisis in the mid-Sixties, and I decided I had to do something new. The problem with abstraction is that when you have a crisis in painting you have to start from scratch. Everybody thinks it’s easy but when you begin something new you have to get yourself a whole new set of conventions and methods.

I’ve been telling students for years that being an artist and feeling bored with your work is like being a doctor and killing your patient. You’ve gone into a fundamentally incorrect place with regard to your work.

It’s an element of seriousness about your art. If you’re getting bored with your art and you recognize it, I think you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise you’re just churning out stuff forever. That would make me go nuts.

Clem came out to my house where I had all my circles and squares, and he pulled out some older paintings that were more painterly and said, “This is what you’re going to be doing in ten years, this other stuff is temporary.” I thought, this guy’s full of shit. Those circles and squares, he liked them all right, but he didn’t think there were long-lasting. And he was right.

When did you first meet Greenberg?

At the Gauss lectures at Princeton in 1958. Mike Fried was very interested in these lectures so Frank and I went with him. I didn’t understand a thing that he was saying, which wasn’t his fault, but I got to talk to him later at the after party.

I was working in a gallery that was also a frame shop and a print shop, and my boss was a huge admirer of Clem. My boss was already getting impatient with me because I would paint and I would work as little as I could. This guy was in the front of the gallery, I was in the back, and Clem walked in and this guy was absolutely beside himself with pleasure. And Clem said, “Where’s Darby?” He came in the back because he was interested in talking to me. He liked what I said about Gottlieb at that initial meeting, I remember. He said, “You understand Gottlieb better than anybody I know. That’s great.” He sought me out at the store and that was a huge ego boost for me and the opposite for the guy who owned the gallery. I thought that was really cool. So I kept up that relationship. We used to sit and argue and talk all the time. It was wonderful to have that kind of brain to work with.

We disagreed about a lot but not the fundamentals. He underrated American artists, oddly enough. Winslow Homer, Milton Avery, Edward Hopper he didn’t think much of, and I thought and still think they’re wonderful. I thought he had a little too much appreciation for the newness of the mechanical operations behind Pollock’s drip paintings. A lot of his admiration for Olitski was the same kind of thing. There were a lot of artists he liked that I thought were second-rate. He underrated [Giorgio] Morandi and he overrated [Georges] Matthieu. Horacio Torres was an interesting artist but that whole business of cutting off the head and the legs is such a corny thing. Torres was okay but Clem just went wild about him.

Clem liked the old masters better than the abstract artists. If we were at a museum he’d say, “Let’s go see the old masters.” I’d say, “Oh, come on, Clem, I don’t want to see the old masters, I’m tired of them. They’re all brown. Let’s go see if there’s anything modern.” I always liked modern artists better than the old masters unless we’re talking about someone like Rembrandt, who’s a goddamn jumping genius. Most of them really are just brown and dark and gloomy.

Something I’ve come to appreciate in Clement Greenberg’s writings is that after a while he not only knew that he was going to be misunderstood, he knew the manner in which he was going to be misunderstood. So he started to try to preempt the misunderstanding, then finally gave up on the prospect of ever being correctly read.

Yes, he said several times in his writing something like, “Of course what I’m saying won’t be understood.” Even last night at the opening there were people who wanted to make big points to me about Greenberg. They absolutely detest him and completely misunderstand him. This thing is still going on, even now, with people claiming that he found artists who were cooperative and told them what moves to make, and that they became his little clique. I said to one of these people last night that I used ask Clem all the time what I should do in my studio. I’d say, “Tell me what to do!” And he’d say, “No! I’m not going to do that. All I’m going to tell you is that I like this and don’t like that.” And that’s all he ever did. He never had any suggestions like, “There’s too much red over there.” But nobody wants to believe that.

Why do you think that is?

That’s a very interesting question. What Greenberg did infuriated the art world. It had something to do with the authority and the quality of his writing. I can’t say forcefulness of his writing because it wasn’t forceful writing.

He admitted to its being declarative, as he put it.

It was declarative but that derived from his eye, and his certainty about the rightness of his eye, his ability to see what was good and not so good. He wrote so clearly and so transparently that it just got people enraged.

If you don’t have commitment to good art as such, and you don’t believe the idea that there’s very little good art, you’re on the defense against anyone who does believe it. And if that person has power and influence he becomes the villain. If you’re in the art world, and you’re on the side of crappy art, which 99% of the art world is, it’s an automatically inimical thing to have a voice like that around. Anybody who embodies this is an enemy. That attitude is killing the messenger because that’s basically what Greenberg was. This is the guy who said that Jackson Pollock was one of the strongest painters of our generation back in the 1940s. And lo and behold, it turned out to be true. This pisses people off. I had a friend who went around saying that Jackson Pollock couldn’t be a good painter because he didn’t use a brush. So if Jackson Pollock becomes a million-dollar painter and everyone says he’s great, you were wrong, you’re a jerk. People don’t like that.

Your motives for making art have stayed constant from almost the beginning, it seems.

Following my eye and impulses, that’s all. Everybody’s gone off on other tangents, but to me that’s the most interesting thing. Painting survives because of its restrictions. I like to compare it to games. If you go out and play a football game and people get a bat and say, “let’s use this instead,” you’re going to have an audience that says, “I don’t like this.” They want something that has conventions and supports those conventions.

The first panel I was ever on was “Painting Is Dead” in 1966 at New York University. I was sitting next to Robert Rauschenberg, and the moderator, Barbara Rose, was in between us and Donald Judd and Larry Poons on the other side of the table. Of course, I was all for painting, Poons was all for painting, Judd said that painting was completely abolished, and Rauschenberg didn’t give a damn. We went through the whole thing, the question of whether painting was dead, and of course we didn’t decide anything, but we had a good time.

Everybody was very sincere back then. They asked for questions after the panel discussion and people would get up and make speeches. This one guy got up and began making a statement. Rauschenberg yawned and he started sinking down in his seat. So I started sinking down in my seat too. We were both looking at each other and sinking in our seats until our faces were at the level of the table. The audience was looking at us and howling with laughter, and this guy thought that he was being funny, so he got into it and thought he was a comedian, that everybody was laughing at what he said. It just turned into chaos. The point is that 1966 is fifty years ago and painting isn’t dead. So there you go.

The third-generation abstractionists were not hostile to Pop Art. You yourself were making Pop-inspired paintings for a time. The stereotype is that the circle of Greenberg recoiled at the very sight of Pop, but it wasn’t that way at all.

Even Clem, he thought Robert Indiana was okay, and Jim Dine a little bit. He thought that Lichtenstein was a good designer. He would always give everybody their due. He just didn’t think that Pop Art amounted to very much. Clem was much more generous in his taste than people give him credit for. He used to tell a story about himself that when he juried an exhibition – and he was asked to jury a lot back then – he was always susceptible to giving out too many prizes and being too inclusive, to the point of putting the little old lady flower paintings in the show. He wasn’t black and white about things at all. There was more of that spirit back then, that Pop was just another development, and the same for minimalism when it came along. There were all these happenings, like the ones with [Claes] Oldenberg and Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainier. I thought they were really very interesting.

It hardens up when somebody gets successful. When Pop Art got successful it seemed to be overvalued. Nobody liked that very much. The idea gets around that a few people are getting too much of the pie. It’s human nature. We need a social scientist to write about this dispassionately and give us a real cultural history, somebody who looks at us as specimens, the way Margaret Mead looked at the South Sea Islanders.

These things don’t get worked out in the short term, and the short term is fifty years. Look at Andy Warhol. People are paying millions of dollars for his work. I keep wondering, When are people going to get tired of this guy’s paintings? They’ve turned into the ultra-tchotchke. If you have a Warhol you’re a hotshot collector. The quality of the thing, whether it’s good art or not, is absolutely beside the point. So there’s no selection being made on that basis. Things actually change very slowly now in the art world. People think that it’s very fast, and it is fast in the sense that it’s so big and there’s churning on the edges, but meanwhile most of it stays the way it is.

But things are beginning to separate. There’s a whole underground of abstract painting that doesn’t get any publicity. With everyone going in so many different directions, it’s getting to the point that you can choose your own genre, and the genres will be able to split off into their own tribes. The enlargement of the art world means, I think, that the pie is getting bigger for everyone. The abstract painters ought to recognize that they have their own art world, and should have their own magazines and have their own critics and all that so they don’t have to reconcile what they’re doing with everyone else. If that could come about you could get a Renaissance of abstract painters competing against each other, not giving a damn about the other stuff, and you could start getting abstraction to take advantage of all the things that got cut off back in the early sixties when Pop Art and Minimalism took over the market. There are a lot of people not in the market who understand good painting and can recognize it. They’re all over the place and they just need their own family.

If that tribe of abstractionists comes together, what are the possibilities that were cut off that they could work on?

Well, color is one. Nobody really gets into the mechanics of color. Even very good painters never got into the mechanics of color. Abstract painters shunted it aside because they considered it unimportant. As a consequence they used colors out of the jar. And they used color for area identification rather than coloristic effect.

Even someone like Kenneth Noland?

Oh, Noland would be a supreme example of someone to follow. He was influenced by Paul Klee, another one who did very interesting things with color. Noland was able to do just magical stuff putting colors together. I envy him endlessly. It’s like Matisse, you can’t point at what’s good about it, it just hits you, bam, right in the eye. Why his colors worked, how he used shapes and symmetricality to make his colors effective, all that could be explored further.

There’s also the idea of using open space to make paintings, like in [Mark] Rothko and [Morris] Louis. There are a lot of things that [Hans] Hofmann did that nobody was able to follow up on. It seems like there’s no end to the possibilities of hard edge combinations. Another thing would be the sophisticated use of new mediums, materials that weren’t even around in the Sixties. There are so many things you can do that haven’t been done because it doesn’t have the support.

Innovation has collapsed into weirdness that doesn’t have any lasting quality to it. Innovation in abstraction used to be recognized. That’s what happened in the Forties. Everyone knew how good de Kooning was. We have to build our own art world in which people recognize when something is good and new. The example I always use is Rex Stewart. According to a friend of mine, when Stewart heard Louis Armstrong he said he was never going to play his horn again. He just sat there at the table and cried. It took three seconds for him to recognize how good Louis Armstrong was because of the cultural structure around the conventions. That’s what does it. Without that you have nothing. You need a tribe and a big family and art teachers and writers. Get smart people together who can create something worthwhile.

The post Presentational: Walter Darby Bannard on his early reductive paintings appeared first on artcritical.

Some of our best art critics (Clement Greenberg, Peter Schjeldahl) are short winded– they publish only essays. Barry Schwabsky belongs in their company. This book republishes his accounts of very diverse subjects: the Octobrist manifesto Art since 1900; the collected writings of Meyer Schapiro and E. H. Gombrich; and such well known commentators as Thierry de Duve, Boris Groys and Linda Nochlin. Generous even when highly critical, critical even when he is praising, Schwabsky is a master of concision. Schjeldahl, he writes, “dreams of the artist ‘as story-teller, as bard’,” failing to recognize that film directors “fill that bill . . . . If Schjeldahl really wanted to dwell on that kind of art he could have become a film critic” (p. 154). As for Michael Fried, “a willingness to strain credibility has always been part of (his) critical method. . . . He has always been aware that any truly productive interpretation must go beyond verifiable fact—that it is, in fact, a wager” (p. 136). Schwabsky certainly knows the theorizing, which, until recently, often dominated art world discourse, especially at Artforum where he has long been coeditor of international reviews. But whether because he is not an academic, or because he is a practicing poet, or just because he is too smart to allow himself to be caught in a system, he himself has mostly not theorized. The exception, the odd man out in this collection, is his immensely suggestive “A Benjaminian view of color,” which in just thirteen pages links Matisse, Frank Stella, Gary Hume and the marvelous Italian painter Maria Morganti. It is a virtuoso performance.

Because he’s not an art historian, Schwabsky is unafraid of making surprising ahistorical comparisons, as when he links Adolph Menzel’s “makeshift constructions” (Fried’s phrase) with the installations of Jessica Stockholder, “whose work is always based on careful observation of what, even arbitrarily, happens to be there in a particular situation” (p. 134). In a marvelous imaginative flight, he compares Giulio Romano’s frescoed scenes of collapsing rooms in Mantua to Chris Burden’s Sensation 1985),

an installation contrived so that each visitor, entering the gallery through a turnstile, places added pressure on its walls so that, if enough people had come to see it, the work would have destroyed its setting (p. 87)

I wish that I had said that—well, perhaps I will! And although Schwabsky’s not a philosopher, he is unafraid to tackle de Duve’s Kant after Duchamp, which, he nicely says, “uses philosophy brilliantly but often awkwardly” (p. 168).  Jacques Derrida’s commentary on Meyer Schapiro’s account of Heidegger’s discussion van Gogh has often been discussed in comically solemn terms. Schwabsky cuts to the chase: “For all the philosopher’s concern to explicate the distinction between objects of use and the work of fine art in which truth is disclosed, he has in fact reduced the work to a merely useful prop for his text . . . ” (p. 64).

Is it perverse to praise a senior critic for his modesty? Perhaps not, not when Schwabsky’s exemplary modesty masks his interpretative will-to-power. “Scholarly attempts to form coherent methodologies,” he is describing Art Since 1900, “are fundamentally something else altogether: expressions of taste” (p. 15) And taste, he adds, “is always the fundamental thing.” This is the lesson I carry away from this book. At a time where attempts to generalize about contemporary art are foredoomed, art writers need to trust their taste, for ultimately that is all we have to go on. How, Schwabsky asks

Do conflicting views on the value of different kinds of artworks gel into a rough and shifting consensus about the boundaries of what will be considered art in the first place? (p. 211).

Words for Art assembles the materials, which any adequate answer to that crucial question will need to employ.  Schjeldahl, it says, “can do things with words on which other critics can only look with wonder . . . ” (p. 147). That’s how I feel, often enough, about Schwabsky’s book, which for me inspires unenvious wonder.

Barry Schwabsky, Words for Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013. ISBN 978-3-95679-002-7. 232 pages, €19.00

The post Too Smart To Be Caught In A System: Barry Schwabsky’s Words for Art appeared first on artcritical.

September 13 t0 October 26, 2013
523 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 243 0200

This exhibition presents – in a finely tuned installation – sculptures, paintings, and drawings from the 1970s, many of which haven’t been exhibited since that decade. Early in her career, Washington-based Anne Truitt’s work was positioned in opposition to Donald Judd’s and Carl Andre’s Minimalism by Clement Greenberg, who had been introduced to her by Kenneth Noland. Washington was also home to Morris Louis, another painter exploring color in abstraction, and it was with the potential of color and painting rather than the principles of sculpture that Truitt was determined to find her expressive medium. The result, painted rectangular wooden objects, neither followed the cubistic vocabulary of David Smith, (a friend and supporter of Truitt’s), the found object/vernacular pop of Warhol, or the machined constructions of Judd. It was this independence from both Greenberg’s desire to see her work remain within the sculptural tradition of assemblage, and a rejection of the anti-handmade alternative that makes fitting Truitt into one category or the other impossible.

The pastoral sense of existing within a landscape (think Milton Avery) was very strong in the gallery’s three rooms, not only because of the orientation of the vertical column-like objects and horizontal floor pieces, but also because of the soft and shifting temperatures of Truitt’s color. As sightlines changed in passing through the exhibition, relationships were reconfigured between the individual works. Not only are the individual pieces an externalization of interior experience, their isolation in a shifting context – one that as a group they provide – allows an identification with our own situation in the world to be comprehensible only as flux and change.

The first work encountered on entering the gallery is the painting Februare, 1978. It recalls both Agnes Martin’s and Barnett Newman’s use of line to establish a compelling illusion of space through simple placement and color. Openly handmade, rather than hard edged, it already suggests a three dimensional equivalent that eschews neutral facture. It was on seeing Newman’s and Ad Reinhardt’s paintings in 1961 that Truitt turned to geometric form from figuration. Februare embraces in its chromatic range of cream, lime green and white, a pastoral rather than primary pallet. The green horizontal line is taken around the edge of the frontal surface stressing the objectness of the painting. It was a bold step from this acknowledgement of the edge of the support to the work that Truitt developed, exploring painted surfaces as part of free-standing colored objects that can be experienced actively, no longer images in themselves but now relating to their surroundings dynamically. The vertical columns make the floor, as it meets a wall behind them, an active changing horizon dependent on where the viewer is located.

The titles reaffirm an idea of movement or journey in the second room, three of the four works are called: Jaunt, 1977, Landfall, 1970 and Echo, 1973. Schubert’s song. Der Wanderer, composed in 1816, describes restlessness and estrangement within the context of a search for positive identification with nature, seems apposite in relation to Truitt’s externalization of emotion through colored isolated objects around which we move in order to behold.

In the final room Second Requiem 1977/1980, only reveals its color sequence of vertical slices of green and dark red bordered pink when the viewer circles the piece.  It floats, as do all the column-like works, to effectively free the color from the floor, like a suspended painting, whereas if it were not raised, it would interact as one plane of color meeting another.

Within the exhibition, each group of works establishes a strong and particular sense of place. Take, for instance, the room containing the four white paintings from the Arundel series, all 1975, one on each wall surrounding the black/blue floor-based  Remembered Sea, 1974. The white rectangles of the paintings with their subtle graphite lines are like snow or ice banks around a sliver of deep water, bleak but beautiful, like the sublime moments of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings created from multiple views that were assembled in a single work. Truitt talked of an artist’s work as being a distillation of a life, of the work out-living the artist. In this exhibition her experience of life seems generously well articulated and alive.

The post Finding a Place: Anne Truitt from the 1970s at Matthew Marks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
February 5 to March 23, 2013

The exhibition was shown in two parts at:
Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410 6120

Asya Geisberg Gallery
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, 212-675-7525
April 24 to May 24, 2013

We may one day recall 2013 as The Year That Abstract Painting Came Back. Historical exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925) and the Guggenheim (Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960), as well as Loretta Howard Gallery (DNA: Strands of Abstraction) and Cheim & Read (Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s). The year has also been a notable one for contemporary shows: Paul Behnke at Kathryn Markel, Jennifer Riley at Allegra La Viola, Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, to name a few, with Sharon Louden coming to Morgan Lehman in October. And that’s just considering New York.

Add to this list POUR, an exhibition that showed simultaneously at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace after originating at Florida Atlantic University. Curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, POUR established that the desire for good abstract form, achievable by way of liquid paint, is a perennial concern. In Chaim Potok’s 1972 book My Name is Asher Lev, abstract painter Jacob Kahn says to Asher, “I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.” We’re well on our way. Moreover, we seem to be doing so having settled a debt to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg goes largely unmentioned in the catalogues, criticism, and conversations surrounding the aforementioned exhibitions. Helen Frankenthaler’s name comes up in the POUR catalogue (this is a show about pouring paint after all), but so does Rubens and Chinese scroll painting. Finally, we can have a show of abstract painting in New York without it turning into a referendum on Greenberg. When someone turns it into one anyway, as John Yau did on behalf of Thomas Nozkowski in his March 2013 review in Hyperallergic, it sounds dated and beside the point. Greenberg has taken his rightful place in the cosmos and we can choose to navigate by his light, or not.

It now seems possible to draw a line from Carrie Moyer’s lesbian activism to her formidable shape-making, and think it only natural. Moyer, who was made a Guggenheim fellow this year, co-founded Dyke Action Machine! in the early ’90s and designed the group’s  agitprop. Her painted images have long combined elements from political posters, Tantra drawings, and a vocabulary of abstraction derived from Morris Louis. The last of these influences has come to predominate her work in recent years, as she keeps experimenting with painting techniques. While plenty of splatters remain on her canvases in the state in which they landed there, Moyer seems to have enlarged certain incidents of gravity and viscosity until they form flat, opaque arcs with the graphic fortitude of industrial signage. For added visual heft, she paints in subtle shadows around the edges of some of these shapes. The total effect is both delicate and arresting.

The “pour,” as presented by Condon and Prusa, takes one of two forms. The first is the revealing pour, the one with which we’re familiar from Jackson Pollock – paint as the manifestation of itself, the literal trail of evidence made by the action of colored liquid on a support. There is a distinctive grid, irregular and rounded, that appears when you tilt a canvas with a dripping swath of paint on it along one axis and then across it. This drip-grid appears in work by both Jackie Saccocio and Carolanna Parlato. Saccoccio, working handsomely in a vein first opened by Jules Olitski, is emptying out otherwise busy abstractions with a high-value, neutral color poured generously into the center.  She uses the drip-grid to integrate the figure and the ground, by breaking up this central shape at the edge and allowing the more saturated colors there to show through. Parlato, in contrast, uses  the drip-grid as a design element. In Drizzle (2009), areas of viridian, fuschia, and scarlet have been given the same treatment, one layer after the next, and she tops them off with a lemon-over-green coat that is itself allowed to drip, locking in a diagonal that composes the canvas. Angelina Gualdoni used an analogous technique to create Opening the Gates (2011), but the paint was tilted every which way, and she dosed the broad, black pathways thus formed with chalky violet while they were still wet. The interpenetration of the two colors results in luminosity.

The other form taken is the hiding pour, in which the force of the falling paint removes evidence of the human hand from the application, leaving the viewer to wonder how the shapes got there. David Reed’s No. 611(2010) is painted in oil and alkyd on polyester, using dripping, squeegeeing, and masking of translucent paint on the slick surface, producing an abstract calligraphy of blue across an elongated six-foot rectangle. Carrie Yamaoka’s works on reflective mylar, coated with colored gloss that has been allowed to pool across the supports’ bending surface, are so limpid and so devoid of evidence of their manufacture that they may as well have come from outer space. Roland Flexner’s moody, diminutive landscapes of liquid graphite form from controlled accidents of surface tension on paper. Their appearance is a wondrous collision of an abstract contact print with a Sung Dynasty forest scene. Ingrid Calame’s Pop-bright whirls and scrapes of enamel on aluminum may look improvised, but in fact are the product of meticulous tracing in the urban environment.

Later in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher and Jacob conclude a satisfying day of painting with a walk on the beach. Gazing at the sea, Jacob remarks, “Sometimes I think all water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” No more about it is said. Among painters, no more would need to be said. But I might elaborate this way: liquidity is vitality. The artists of POUR have made this beautifully clear.

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July 21 to October 27, 2013
279 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY, 631-283-2118

(Reviewed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 9 to May 12, 2013)

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1902-1985) were friends of the privileged collector Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). Heir to a Philippines sugar fortune, Ossorio lived and worked during his creative life in East Hampton, New York. A gay practicing Catholic, he aspired to synthesize Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut. This exhibition, presenting the three men as peers, aims to reveal the elective affinities of two famous painters, who themselves never met, and, also, to demonstrate what Ossario, who was friends with both men learned from each of them. It includes one large Pollock masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist); some important smaller paintings and art on paper; and a number of works such as Collage and Oil (1951) that reveal him struggling. And, in a marvelous demonstration showing how consistent Jean Dubuffet was in the period 1946 to 1958, it presents both his little drawing Corps de dame (Body of a Lady) (1950) and the majestically large Paysage métapsychique (Metaphysical landscape) (1952). Very different, they both are first-rate pictures.

That Pollock and Dubuffet can happily cohabit as near equals is, of course no surprise. What here is up for grabs is Ossorio’s artistic relationship with these two modernist masters. He tends to place figurative elements or shapes not unlike Dubuffet’s in a Pollockesque all over field. So, for example, Perpetual Sacrifice (1949) floats faces in a field of white lines; Crucifix: Seek & Ye Shall Find (1951) deploys a heavily painted field of lines on a shaped canvas, with a crucifix shape giving form to that field; and Martyrs and Spectators (1951) sets the outlines of a crucifixion scene in a framework of black and white. Advent (1951), the best of Ossorio’s paintings on display runs lines of green, red and yellow around a vertical standing figure. He lacks the single-mindedness of Pollock at his best and, also, the very high level of excellence of Dubuffet in this period. You have the sense, rather, that driven by his awareness of the greatness of his friends’ art, Ossorio was experimenting restlessly without ever achieving real resolution. So, for example, Red Family (1951) uses a figure like some Dubuffets; and Head (1951) employs a drawn field akin to some of Pollock’s weaker pictures. But where Pollock mastered a language of personal abstraction, evidenced in his great little painting on paper Number 22A, 1948; and Dubuffet immersed figures in flatted fields, Ossario, a gifted eclectic always remains uncomfortably suspended between abstraction and the figure.

This Eurasian Catholic must have been a fascinating personality. And it must have been tricky for him to befriend and collect two such different and apparently overwhelming figures. But he isn’t a great artist. In the catalog essay Alicia Longwell says that Clement Greenberg, who admired both Pollock and Dubuffet believed that “an artist had to suppress any hint of representation to achieve a level of distinction in art making.” This statement, which is emphatically not correct, misrepresents Greenberg in an unfortunate, very misleading way. What is the case is that a great artist must be single minded. Connoisseurship is out of fashion—it is commonly said to be politically incorrect. Ossario was a well connected artist; an interesting artist; a skilled artist: but what this misguided exhibition inadvertently shows is that he was minor. Successful curators need to be connoisseurs.

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April 25 to June 8, 2013
53 East 58th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, (212) 832-0208

James Walsh is an artist in mid-career who is still not as widely known as he deserves to be, despite the fact that he has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions since 1974 (when he was still an undergraduate at Rutgers) and has been the subject of five solo shows since his 1985 debut at Galeria Joan Prats, New York.

His latest show comprises just seven small paintings (24 by 18 to 36 by 26 inches) judiciously selected and installed in Spanierman Gallery’s project space, Spanierman Modern Library.  I find the paintings very handsome, with a clear, vivid palette and sophisticated color combinations.

These paintings also differ from almost any other abstract paintings in town by virtue of the fact that their paint rises above the canvas surface in swoops, blobs and swirls. Practically every other abstract painter who has attracted critical attention this season is painting with thin, flat layers of paint, but Walsh’s paint is mixed with molding paste so that it has to be scooped out of a bucket and spread onto the canvas by hand. Then it is manipulated with blades of wood, steel, or cardboard, and sometimes with a large commercial brush designed for smoothing wall paper. The final effect falls somewhere between thick cake frosting and the foaming waters in the wake of a giant cruise ship.

Clement Greenberg is supposed to have said that flatness should be a characteristic of modernist abstraction. Walsh’s painting challenges this apparent dictum (possibly because he concurs in my belief that Greenberg was merely describing what had been done in the past, not advocating what should be done in the future).  Here is yet another mass of evidence that painting is better done by instinct than by theory.

I have not always been enthusiastic about Walsh’s exhibitions:  the last time I wrote about his work at length, I felt that he was exhibiting too many paintings that combined too much paste with too many colors, but in the current show, in each painting he either limits his color schemes or the amount of paste he uses, achieving much more satisfying results.

Jolts (2012) is an example of holding back on colors and lavishing on the paste, with the left hand yellow side scraped clean down to the canvas surface, but a giant blob of on the right edge of brown, green and white, and both sides held together by a central, medium-thick area of brown and yellow.  Black Bottom (2012) goes the opposite route, with a fairly thin sea of blacks and blues on the lower side of the canvas, a sky of pink and yellow above, and a cruising inward form on the upper right that could be either a comet or a fish in the Hungarian national colors of red, white and green.

Occasionally, in Colorbook: Paularry (2012) for instance, Walsh seems to depart from his newfound restraint, to ladle on both a hefty quotient of paste and what appears at first a full range of hue (though it isn’t).) The image is built around three fat vertical sweeps of predominantly blue paste on a flatter blue field. The two side sweeps swoop downward. Both have white tops, and the right hand one also has a pink underbelly. The central sweep swoops upward, with blue feet, brown head, and a daub of white in its middle.  This painting forced me to accommodate myself to it. At first, I felt it excessive, but in the end, I found myself thinking that it might be the best painting in the show.

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