John Yau is a poet as well as a supremely prolific art and literary critic. A new collection of his prose, The Wild Children of William Blake (from Autonomedia, 2017), centers on oft-forgotten artists and under read writers, with the occult as the leitmotif that threads many of his connections. Leave it to a poet to consider the unseen, the enigmatic — and even the mystical — in critical writing today.

Yau’s apparent sense of constant genuine interest is what first attracted me to his art writing. He works tirelessly in efforts to tell his readers what they don’t already know — as opposed to constantly reminding of theoretical conventions, canonical standards, etc. As the painter Philip Guston said to Bill Berkson, quoted in these pages, “I got sick and tired of all that purity. I wanted to tell stories” (91). His manner of clear analysis is in the service of engaging the senses first and foremost, evident in prose that emerges from curiosity. The writing is sharp, never pedantic but exploratory, off-the-cuff. Like other poets who know how to write about art (from Apollinaire to a litany of modern successors who knew that someone could, and needed to, improve upon those efforts), he looks intently and thinks imaginatively on his subjects and their occasions, coming up with parallels and historical insights that are often strange, memorable. But unlike some poets whose art criticism focuses almost exclusively on formal qualities, Yau’s writing is invariably dedicated to telling stories.

Yau has been engaged with art criticism for the better part of three decades. Reading The Wild Children, one doesn’t get the sense that he sits at his desk, armed with art history textbooks to get it “right” in an anticipated scholarly way — despite the fact of his prolificness (96 articles at Hyperallergic, for instance, where he is a member of the editorial collective that produces the Weekend section, in 2017 alone) and the kind of frame of reference it might require. It really seems like Yau just takes simple notice of what tugs on his coat tails. He makes it a point to put aside time every day to look and ponder at art, and further, to remain in the daily practice of writing.

The chosen organizing theme in this book, the occult, gives way to novel approaches (as opposed to otherwise narrower views) to artists, their works and lives, and what to notice in art. As I understand it, the occult relates to and communes with the things in this world that we can maybe perceive but not necessarily see or define, and to consider it is to invoke new experiences that might perhaps bring surprise and new understandings. Its consideration involves, in short, “looking for what was hidden in plain sight, for the invisible within the visible” (35)—which in turn recalls, perhaps, Odilon Redon’s notion of “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” In his essay on the poet Robert Kelly, Yau observes that “whatever place we consciously or unconsciously inhabit — call it a house or reality — is in a state of flux” (49), that we are constantly dealing in uncertainty. This essay is strange, brilliantly peripatetic, and reveals a lot about Yau’s one-thing-follows-another mode of investigation, and many of his affinities. “Between its root and its obsolescence, the word (the author) wanders, meaning only one thing to him at a time,” (53) he writes.

Yau often turns his attention to painters, refuting the idea that painting is dead — seeing its value, its continual power to transport. In his essay on British artist William Tillyer, Yau asks important questions relative to anachronisms in painting that one might dismiss too quickly. In his analysis, he sides with sincerity, asking “how do you make an image laden with history fresh?” considering what it takes to re-frame an idyllic subject — in this case, a bucolic stone bridge as in the Bridge Paintings series (1982-83) — to bring it up to date, and make it “part of the present rather than an artifact of the past.” I get the sense that loaded subjects like this, tropes from Romanticism that carry over to today, are sometimes frowned upon in more rigorous circles, and yet Yau takes note of Tillyer’s being “critical of those who would approach this subject solely thought mechanical means or solely through an ironic use of paint” (108). The poet’s attention to what’s dialectically possible, worthy of another point of view, proves utterly worthwhile today.

Innate curiosity explains, I think, why Yau pays so much attention to biographical information in these reviews and essays. It’s not his one chosen methodological “lens” per se, and he’s not just paying due-diligence — it’s clear that Yau wants to know, to dig, and for the reader to find out. He’s not an evangelist, either, and his takes bear little air of sentimentality, nostalgia, or hyperbole — it’s more ‘take it or leave it’, and it’s all very user-friendly. The book is broken up into six chapters, with an interrelated parade of fascinating figures that goes from painter Hilma af Klint, in the book’s beginning, to figures like the sole “American Surrealist” poet Philip Lamantia, and the painter Katherine Bradford. Two very striking illustrations made it into print here. Jay Defeo’s The Eyes (1958) takes up an entire spread (befitting of its massive aspect) early on, and Brian Lucas’s rather psychedelic Afternoon’s Embryo (2016) helps to close the book’s eponymous essay. The Wild Children share 264 pages; not one of them is super famous, but all of them are congenial.

John Yau. The Wild Children of William Blake. (Brooklyn, 2017: Autonomedia) ISBN 1570273243. $15

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At times, abstract painting can seem like a received package, with little space left to think outside of the box. In Virva Hinnemo, to overplay the postal metaphor, we have an artist “pushing the envelope” — in her case, literally so. A form vocabulary and a gestural lexicon familiar from mid-century American masters Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston meet the swift completion of their appointed rounds on flattened cartons as their repurposed, eccentric support. This strategy could have smacked of Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces or currently fashionable “provisional” abstraction, but somehow in the hands of this Springs, NY-based Finnish artist the work manages to come across as visually sophisticated but stylistically innocent. Their charming, unforced modernism fits right into the refreshingly old-fashioned surroundings of this plush new venue, sharing quarters with another of proprietor Anita Rogers’ enterprises and thus itself an eccentric support.

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May 19 to June 25, 2016
532 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 367 9663

The sudden embrace of Nicole Eisenman as culture hero should come as no surprise. She’s a prolific painter whose unleashed imagination and hungry heart have produced memorable and disturbing works of art. She also happens to hit the diversity buttons of underappreciated woman, queer, and gender fluidity that animate current cultural discourse. And of course the trifecta of MacArthur Fellowship grant, survey exhibition at the New Museum, and concurrent first solo show at Anton Kern gallery, has obviously made her the focus of attention. But what makes Eisenman important, rather than merely au courant, is her approach to ambiguity.

Something significant has happened to Eisenman’s paintings since the work shown in “Al-ugh-gories” at the New Museum. Much of “Al-ugh-gories,” though compelling, is fairly easily parsed, and critical interpretations seem remarkably consistent.

At Anton Kern, the truly subversive nature of Eisenman’s vision flowers when she focuses on “normal” everyday life. Her new focus recalls a passage from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange; that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it; that no one set of practices or relations has a monopoly on the so-called radical or the so called normative. 

The more one gazes into the mechanisms of these paintings, the more it is apparent that ambiguity has become the medium with which she now paints. In so many different ways, ambiguity animates every new Eisenman painting. If it isn’t the uncertain gender of her figures, it’s a subway train’s direction of travel in a station, the era in which a party occurs, whether a shooter is gangster or cop, or the nature of the figure/ground relationship.

The tour de force Grand Guignol here is Another Green World (2015), which is also the title of the Brian Eno album the central character is examining. A huge 128-by-106-inch party scene that is inhabited by 28 figures (by my count, if you don’t include Grace Jones on an album cover) of indeterminate gender and sexuality who are making out, doing drugs, listening to music, eating, drinking, dancing, conversing, smoking, moon-gazing, or passed out under the coats on the bed. Oh yeah, and despite the ‘70s disco ball, vintage turntable with vinyl LPs, and lines of coke, there is a figure raptly gazing at a cell phone, which throws the whole era of the party into question. The binaries of male/female and gay/straight and past/present quickly break down, as we try to assign gender to all but a few obviously female figures. It is interesting how reflexively we desire to do this in order to navigate our social world. But here it doesn’t matter; it’s a party, everyone’s welcome.

In Another Green World Eisenman also successfully confronts the figure/ground problem that has increasingly challenged her as a painter. Eisenman has great skill as a draughtsman, but her talent lies in expressively depicting people. Against the blank paper, there is no problem, but in her paintings she has to invent the environment in which they occur. The details of background have evidently always been less compelling to her, and might have seemed like tiresome labor. With scaled up canvases, the figure/ground dilemma has become more urgent: how to animate every inch of the canvas while preserving the hierarchies of attention needed to construct emotional legibility. It has been interesting to watch Eisenman tackle this as an idea she seems to have realized that she needed to address.

Part of her solution has been to increase the number of figures so that sometimes much of the background is now other figures. But more interestingly is the way she now considers paintings as a jigsaw puzzle of shapes. And whether they are the positive shapes of feet, hands, faces, clothing, and objects, or instances of negative space revealing surfaces of carpet, furniture, table, or landscape, Eisenman treats each shape as an arena of painterly invention of differing facture, not letting big expanses of emptiness dominate. What keeps it together is her masterful drawing, creating space through exaggerated changes in scale, juxtaposing oblique surfaces coexisting in impossible perspective, and establishing different points of focus using her sharp tonal color sense.

Despite the cacophony of Another Green World, Eisenman gets the whole drama to revolve around the brightly lit woman at the center raptly studying the eponymous album, and rubbing her nose in reaction to the bump of coke she has probably just snorted. Our attention rotates to the lower left to the kissing couple, a topless woman sprawled upside down on the couch in the embrace of an impossibly blue figure of indeterminate gender, though perhaps the stubble on her legs indicates female–but that’s how closely you have to look.

There are many compelling paintings in this show, which also invite rigorous analysis particularly Weeks on the Train (2015). Despite focusing on a central young person slouched in a window seat working a laptop, whose cat in carrier occupies the aisle seat, Eisenman pulls off the neat trick of rotating the windows 90º to fit parallel with the side of the vertical canvas. This pushes the viewer’s perspective high above the painting. From this point of view, our focus is pulled to the cartoonish Guston-like head ensconced by big red headphones, with a single, large bulging eye in the bottom foreground staring out the window. At the level of this eye, the view out of the window becomes thick with impastoed booger-like flowers.

Though more emotionally subtle, another focal point of this show is the tenderly haunting Morning Studio (2016). Here Eisenman eschews the butch/femme brazenness of her two pre- or post-coital chapeau’d women in Night Studio (2009) at the New Museum and replaced them with two embracing figures whose erotics are more maternally consoling than flatly conversational. In Morning Studio, the faces are painted with different levels of specificity but it is the boyish person with ochre skin who fixes the viewer with a wary stare, and who is comforted by a more generically represented topless woman who is also simultaneously reaching a hand beneath her jeans. Eisenman then explodes this intensely personal moment with references to the world out a window and the universe via a large spiraling galaxy computer screen, which watches impassively over the scene. This is where we see Eisenman striving for an emotional complexity that she achieves specifically in her recent paintings.

The measured construction of her paintings provides a pointed contrast with the still wonderful drawings in the second, back room of the show. They demonstrate how Eisenman’s work has previously been driven by her drawings, which are fairly direct depictions of any idea that crosses her mind, no matter how silly, heretical, or gross. Her drawings are pure id, she doesn’t seem to judge or censor, and they have a spontaneity and freshness that has always been thrilling and noteworthy.

But this show seems to indicate that Eisenman’s present ambition, her desire for significance, now lies in her paintings. Earlier paintings seemed often like large elaborations of various ideas originating in drawings and fleshed out with details in paint. Now the paintings seem to develop on their own terms, with the ambiguities and complexities that the act of painting promulgates seizing control over the content. Drawings are direct and fast and in the present, while paintings are slower, much more calculated, and connected to a history that is mostly white and male. In her new paintings, we see Eisenman sublimating the immediacy of her drawing talent and examining historically established protocols that she either honors, flouts, or fucks with. It is now in these mature paintings, that Nicole Eisenman is finally confronting her artistic superego.

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Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

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The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

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September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

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The Space Between at the New York Studio School
February 13 to March 22, 2015
8 West 8th Street (between Macdougal and 5th Avenue)
New York, 212 673 6466

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition. And the juxtaposition of a little two-sided painting Woodland Stream, Martha’s Vineyard/Chilmark Landscape (1922) by Thomas Hart Benton with a glorious drawing from his pupil, Jackson Pollock Untitled (folded greeting card) (1946-47) is a marvelous demonstration of how varied art whose making is part of its meaning can be. So too are the 23 drawings by Kit White, as illustrated in his book 101 Things to Learn in Art School (MIT Press, 2011), which present details from works by such varied painters as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol.

The press announcement for “The Space Between” identifies a key theme in Studio School teaching. Between-ness, this text suggests, may allude to the space between forms in the picture plane, between abstraction and representation, and, also, between pictorial symbols and the three-dimensional space they symbolize. Here, then, we find a variation on FreedmanArt’s theme, for speaking in these varied ways about betweenness is to allude to awareness of the process of art making. No wonder, then, that Bill Jensen and Graham Nickson are in both shows, for Jensen’s abstractions and Nickson’s figurative images provide pleasure thanks to both their subjects and our awareness of the painting process used to present those subjects. The same is true, comparing two other works on display at the Studio School: contrast, I would suggest, Margrit Lewczuk’s magnificent large Untitled (2009) with Stanley Lewis’ View from Studio Window (2003-4). Sometimes the most revealing survey displays are found not in our museums but in the galleries — here in small galleries. You could teach a whole history of Modernism using just the art on display in these two richly suggestive shows. That is a great, generous achievement.

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The Islanders at Galerie Mikael Andersen
January 9 to February 21, 2015
Bredgade 63, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the renowned institution 25 miles north of Copenhagen, has recently mounted a string of ambitious shows of figurative painters with an often psychologically pointed, symbolist bent: Philip Guston (the late work) and Emil Nolde were on view there this past summer, and a retrospective of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker continues there through April 6th.

A related expressive spirit infuses Galerie Mikael Andersen’s “The Islanders,” where four English painters of different generations explore the continued possibilities of figurative painting done from imagination and invention. Rose Wylie (b. 1934), 2014 winner of the John Moores Painting Prize, is the unlikely elder statesman of the group, which also includes Billy Childish (b. 1959), Ryan Mosley (b. 1980), and Tom Anholt (b. 1987).

These artists share an interest in intuitive image making, ostensibly rejecting preconceived plans or directly observed models — with the exception of Childish, whose The Great Banks After Wilkinson is a fairly direct copy after a 1936 work by English painter Norman Wilkinson. The show’s title seems to refer not only to the artists’ shared birthplace, but also to the exoticized subject matter of Peter Doig, an art school peer of Childish and likely influence on Mosley and Anholt. The best works here veer away from such calculated idiosyncrasy, offering a more immediate sense of weight and humor.

The whimsically enigmatic quality in Rose Wylie’s work seems to emerge from her asking very literal questions, rather than grasping deliberately for the odd. As she wrote in Frieze Magazine in 2014, “Another route to particularity is to make a written description of a person (or tree), and then to illustrate that list in the painting.” Her fragmented use of text, at first suggesting elusive phrases such as “With Go Imps,” pivots upon closer study to reveal more mundane descriptive purposes, as in the monumentally frumpy, “With Gold Lump.” (In another version of this show’s Gold Lump (single), Wylie attached an image of the Queen of Sheba, resulting in Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump.)

In a large work on paper, Wylie makes a written reference to a straightforward piece of advice from Ingres: “Never in drawing a face omit the ear.” Obligingly, a large yellow ear appears above on a very simplified profile. The humorous implication is that Wylie’s selection of detail has a matter-of-fact logic to it, even while she seems at times like a rogue camera, accidentally zooming in on an odd prop or the back of a head. Her use of scale to humorous effect recalls for me the cartoons collected in Roger Price’s 1953 Droodles, in which not-quite-readable, minimal images are explained by caption, and often revealed as extreme closeups or distance shots; for example, a vertical line and two triangles is described as a man with bow tie stuck between elevator doors. I could imagine Ack-Ack paired with a caption involving eggs or soccer, but it eludes easy reading even after its title has been deciphered as an off-translation of the German “acht-acht,” a common name for an anti-aircraft gun used in World War II. Wylie’s images resist tidy punch lines, reveling instead in the strangeness of figuration itself, and the possibility that something ambiguous or even illegible can, by explanation, become an authoritative representation.

While Wylie’s work also occasionally brings late Guston clearly to mind, as in The Man from London (film notes) (Thanks to Bella Tarr), her work feels forcefully individual. Her simple color choices take on an emblematic punch at a large scale, as she covers expanses of canvas without equivocation.

Satisfyingly direct paint handling takes on a different inflection in Tom Anholt’s paintings, another highlight of the show. His smaller works’ concentrated physicality and variety of mark-making bring to mind Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bradford, as figures emerge out of layers of misty underpainting. A crust of paint built up on the panels’ edges provides a matter-of-fact record of working as well as a purposeful decorative element. At its best, as in Irish Family, this peripheral appearance of paint- as-itself has a tangible impact on the painted space within the image.

All four of these painters have been prolific producers, and their energy comes through in the work. While the works representing Mosley and Childish feel more forced in their kitschy oddity, Wylie and Anholt make a strong case for the pleasures and freedoms of working indirectly, beginning with what Wylie calls a “sideways jump” into the paintings.

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February 12 to May 15, 2011
1600 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
202-387-2151

Philip Guston: Roma features a selection of paintings the artist made during his residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1970-71. The residency was presented as a respite from critical reception of the breakthrough 1970 exhibition with its return to figuration.  The imagery is derived from both his American and Italian experiences, burrowing into an obtuse iconographic language of fragmented objects such as detached eyes, hands, shoes, paintbrushes and light bulbs. This exhibition provides a wealth of historical context but tends towards overly literal explanations of specific Italian influences.

We see Guston developing his visual vocabulary and palette, while intermingling bits of his Roman surroundings. He was also distilling lessons in overlapping form and space from his trips to Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca’s otherworldly frescos, which he perceived as structurally organized like comic strips. What is most fascinating about this body of work is how worlds of antiquity and the contemporary meld through Guston’s touch and organization of objects in space. Often, these ambiguous images feel at once like landscapes and still lives.

In Italy, Guston’s palette remained mostly monochromatic, faithful to his penchant for pinkish coral reds. Even gardens with Farnesian umbrella trees – curiously resembling his Klansman hoods in shape – such as Untitled (Wall) (1971) were depicted in this rosé palette. When asked why these colors, back in 1966, the artist had replied that “it took a couple of years to get the feeling of red, and particularly cad red medium, which I happen to love. I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why. I like cad red medium. It has a certain resonance to it.”

Guston often explained contradictory impulses in his work with such stream of consciousness associations. Was he saying that the color was inspired by pastrami, which happened to be a similar hue? Not exactly, but pastrami came to his mind when explaining the color choice. He might or might not have made similar connections between the peach color in a painting such as Ancient Rock, Osatia (1970) and the influence of Italian light.

When Klansman-like hoods show up in the Italian paintings, curator Peter Miller Benson traces these forms, in his catalog essay, directly to Giorgio de Chirico, G.B. Tiepolo, and Gaudenzio Ferrari, artists whom Guston admired and studied while in Italy. Benson’s scouring for Italian influences can go to idiosyncratic extremes: that the open cloak in Piero della Francesca’s Mother of Mercy inspired Guston’s hoods, the wood plank in Untitled (Wood and Wall) 1971 mimics the wood cross in Piero’s The Legend of the True Cross cycle, that Guston’s pared-down palette echoes the tones in Piero’s frescoes.

These are far-flung comparisons that represent a revisionist attempt to enforce a literal set of assumptions in disregard of the artist’s complex, layered intent. They also pose the question: Was Guston more interested in the hood’s form or what it signified? Considering the rich ambiguity of these shapes, which morph across this body of work from hoods into triangular trees into stone fragments of antiquity, Guston was primarily interested in these motifs because they could not effortlessly be decoded. Furthermore, Guston was more concerned with making deeply considered, sensuous paintings.

Benson briefly discusses Guston’s visit to the Scialoja collection in Rome where he was said to have seen Morandi and proceeds to connect a Morandi painting’s pink palette to Guston’s use of the same color, which he had long used prior to Rome. This is a stretch. The exhibition’s wall text is absent of any more detailed discussion of Morandi other than his name listed in the introductory text as visual stimuli Guston saw, perhaps because there is little evidence of Guston discussing his work. David McKee, who represents Guston’s estate, told me in an e-mail exchange, “I hesitate to elaborate on a point which others have always brought up but to which I cannot fully or reliably respond.  In all my conversations with Philip I don’t recall him ever praising or being interested in Morandi… his sole interest in going to Bologna was to EAT.  I can’t help but feel that at some time he must have visited Morandi’s studio, but there is no record.” Although in a more general sense, Guston shared a similar touch and scale to Morandi’s still life-landscape hybrids, there is little evidence that Guston looked beyond the Italian masters, at one time declaring “I am not interested in looking at Modern art.” In Pantheon (1973), after all, in which Guston lists his influences, only de Chirico is outside of a classical cannon.

What is compelling, however, is a 1960 photograph of Guston in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome standing near a colossal pointing marble finger the size of a man. That Untitled (Foot) (1971) resembles a smoothed, pyramidal-shaped Roman marble foot is hard to ignore. It is cases like this, requiring no back-up argument, of the obvious influence of Roman antiquity on Guston’s symbolic vocabulary that make this show an enlightening delight.

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