Video (c) New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture

The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century by Timothy Hyman. (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2016) ISBN 9780500239452. Hardcover, 256pp, 142 color illustrations, $50

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In Self-Portrait Picking Up the Pieces, his baggage is more cultural than natural. Visible through the interstices of a loosely meshed net are giant sculpted Buddha heads sporting hairstyles that could be mistaken for bunches of grapes, ripped untimely from the ceiling of a late renaissance palazzo. These are interspersed with oversized shell motifs and other quasi-architectural ornaments. Stranger still, many of the “objects”, upon close inspection, turn out to be vignettes from lost paintings that we almost recognize. Upon a distorted grid of metal pipes are mounted giant medallions displaying bizarre images of destruction that might have been purloined from the background of a Bosch painting. Some incongruously contain words, like “oops” or “hard place,” the latter humorously positioned next to a large rock

It would be arduous to itemize the dizzying range of appropriated objects and images that are packed into Heffernan’s paintings, which read as a Borgesian collection of which they form the animated inventory or catalogue, a kind of cultural and biological stocktaking. It is as if the artist is on a Messianic mission to collect examples of every period, culture and species prior to what one must only assume to be an impending apocalypse. This notion gains credence from “Self-Portrait as Burial Mound” where pairs of crazed animals are released from a pagoda-like structure. Noah is nowhere to be seen, but a sign says “OHNOAH” and others say “Almost done” and “Roar”.

But what to make of the abundant, almost ubiquitous, explosions of fertility that might suggest some hope that can be gleaned from the future, concretized in the Christmas ornament clutched by the “budding boy” Jack? His languid demeanor in many of these canvases evokes hints of the Pre-Raphaelites and their attempts to build a culture around medieval romance, so despite the cool and limpid light of spring, the frequent blossoming forth of flower, fruit and foliage, the youthful promise of the “budding boy”, for me, there is something disturbingly fin de siècle about these paintings. It is as if the plants and trees have been over-fertilized or genetically engineered, as if Julie Heffernan is inter-splicing the genes, not only of the flora and fauna that she depicts so lovingly but of the different cultural influences, whether they be derived from Jan Breughel, Remedios Varo, Sandro Botticelli, DG Rossetti or a wealth of other effortlessly evoked artists. Surely this might be the source for my unease in the presence of these superficially Arcadian scenes, which flatter to deceive. Nature and culture have been grafted together in ways that suggest the manhood of the main protagonist will be dogged by the hollow promises of a genetically engineered paradise. Societal consumption, the superabundance of artifacts and the ability through technology to remake the world according to man’s unfulfillable appetites are subtly satirized in Heffernan’s consumption and manipulation of other art and other artists’ styles. This might be seen, particularly with her recent incorporation of text labels, as a gentle but pointed critique of postmodernism.

The pervading mood is one of hope soured, but it is also more than this.  Heffernan has treated her canvases to a virtuosic painterly technique culled from the collected resources of European art, while focusing on the flamboyant trompe-d’oeil effects of Dutch and Spanish still lives. She has packed them with countless, carefully selected quotations and appropriations, from Adam Elsheimer to Arnold Böcklin to Max Ernst.  The entire edifice groans under the weight of these accumulated riches, however, which now read as so many obsolete jujus. It is as if she is pulling the rug out from underneath her own feet, and we find ourselves gasping, hoping upon hope that the human spirit can continue to shine through, despite the fact that all our aspirations seem to rest on Jack, the ‘budding boy’ who embodies the next generation. We have to hope that no more branches will be severed from his tree whose naked stumps are prettified by colors painted over their growth rings. We have to hope that we can build a culture from the over-taxed resources of the earth, from the late mannerist phase of postmodernism and the accumulated relics of the past. Whether this can be achieved through a savagely accelerated form of hybridization, à la Monsanto, seems in doubt. Thus the tragic but honest pessimism at the core of Heffernan’s endeavor.

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This image was featured in the June 2010 listings

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Nancy Princenthal, Gregory Volk, and John Zinsser joined David Cohen to review Rudolf Stingel at the Whitney, Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner, Julie Heffernan at PPOW, Georgina Starr at Tracy Williams, and Ingrid Calame at James Cohan.

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“Julie Heffernan: New Paintings” at P.P.O.W until November 8 (555 W. 25th Street, second Floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-647-1044).

“Laura Harrison: Building Portraits: Surface and Space in Landmark Structures” at PSCA until November 1 (86 Walker Street, Sixth Floor, between Broadway and Lafayette Streets, 646-613-1252).

There is a noble tradition of Bad painting with a capital “B.” It is a modern spin on mannerism: Instead of merely accenting their work with distortions of perspective, color, composition, and so forth, some artists attempt to will themselves into a state of ineptitude. A noble tradition, and Julian Schnabel does not belong to it.

There are basically two branches of Bad: the anal and the incontinent. Artists of the first variety ape the hackneyed horrors of Sunday painters and thrift-store finds, and are essentially conceptual in their iconoclastic intent; Francis Picabia and John Currin are Bad painters of this stripe. Those of the second are more ambitious, expressive, and risky. (Sloppy-joe messiness is more ambitious because, beyond kindergarten, excesses with paint tend only to occur in a fine-art context. Mind-boggling meticulousness, by contrast, is a defining characteristic of Outsider art.)

The masters of fast-and-loose Badness are artists who have entered their “old-age style”: Painters such as Picasso and Philip Guston were proven masters before electing to become desperados. Like clowning, the appearance of goofiness requires a special kind of control.

However much Julian Schnabel seems to aspires to the beastly sublime, it is painfully apparent with his latest show of lethargic, gratuitously outsized doodles that he is merely bad with a forlorn, bedraggled, lower-case “b.” In his handling of the genre, neo-expressionism has ceased to have any vitality or purpose. It has become, like cigarette smoking, a pathetic and outdated habit.

PaceWildenstein, at its Chelsea premises, are showing five of Mr. Schnabel’s recent “Indian” paintings -based on turn-of-the-20th-century portraits of native chiefs – and half a dozen gargantuan sculptures of the 1980s. Though the latter take up more space, and are greviously unoriginal in the faux-dionysian bravura, they are somehow less offensive. Totemic turds crudely pierced with found-object heads and limbs have been done already, and far more convincingly, in the sumptuously primitive sculptures of Cy Twombly and Joan Miró. But any 13-foot tall patinated bronze of vaguely archetypal shape and rough surface will make an impression. Not so smeared paint.

On every inch of his canvases, some of which stretch up to 9-feet high, Mr. Schnabel indulges in a hubris he wouldn’t tolerate from himself or his minions in a single frame of his finely crafted movies. (“Basquiat,” 1996, and “Before Night Falls,” 2000, are the pictures this artist should want to be remembered by). His new paintings revisit territory more than amply explored by Mr. Schnabel’s superiors in the neo-expressionist camp, namely Malcolm Morley and Georg Baselitz.

To explain what’s wrong with Mr. Schnabel’s paintings, it is not enough to say, for instance, that the drawing is limp and illustrative: Those are precisely the kind of dubious intentions and calculated strategies that, when purposive and thought through, can be interesting. Genuine mannerism is about testing endurances, twisting language, pushing against medium, and then suddenly capitulating to it. It’s about really good painting that goes bad, or vice versa.

Mr. Schnabel gives himself nothing to resist (not even some smashed up crockery, as in his trademark early paintings). He splurges blobs of paint over an underlying sketch that is itself nothing but a splurge. There is no push-pull between quality and mediocrity because with him it’s all the latter. He is like a B-movie karate-fighter kicking at an open door.

***

There is welcome relief just across the street at P.P.O.W. Julie Heffernan is a “natural mannerist” – an oxymoron, of course, because mannerism is per se unnatural. Forced, stylized, strategic, and effect-driven, it exploits the received rather than the discovered. Yet within Ms. Heffernan’s camp idiom, she achieves genuine intensity and richness of expression.

In this show, her third at the gallery, her technique is dazzling in a modern-academic kind of way. “Self-Portrait as Agnostic II” (2003), for instance, is a tour de force in its handling of reflections in a polished floor and a warped antique mirror. This may be John Koch rather than Velázquez, but Koch is a good place to start.

Technique is inconsequential if not harnessed to vision; Ms. Heffernan’s most marvelously is. In golden, glowing aristocratic interiors that date anywhere from the High Renaissance to the Rococo, mysterious dramas are played out: Gorgeously attired ladies spontaneously combust, birds descend in flocks, alchemical landscapes sprout from bedsheets.

All Ms. Heffernan’s paintings announce themselves as self-portraits. They are also allegories of sorts, engendering dialogue between touch and self, consciousness and imagination, style and expressivity. Best of all, Ms. Heffernan has the quirkiness of magical realism without the sordid silliness of so much latter-day surrealism. With her, mannerism is definitely a price worth paying.

***

Laura Harrison’s debut show at the offbeat Tribeca loft gallery of Paul Sharpe is a must-see. She, too, is a mannerist of sorts, eking out poignancy and nostalgia in the very act of painting. In thrall to vintage photographs, especially those of destroyed buildings (such as the old Penn Station) or Venetian palazzos, she plays the painterly alienation card like an old violin. Her images, sparsely painted with a dry brush, bear a strong resemblance to those of the British painter, Merlin James, while a sense of the precarious and the ephemeral ties her to Belgian Luc Tuymans. She also looks to respective forebears of these two artists, Sickert and Hammershøi.

But Ms. Harrison already has a voice of her own. Although some unresolved experiments in larger scale and crudely shaped canvases mar this selection, a group of six medium-sized canvases in the gallery’s inner sanctum is profoundly moving. These have the delicate, knowing slightness of Elizabeth Peyton’s portraiture. Not despite but because of their fragility and seeming inconsequence, they are real tear-jerkers.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 23, 2003

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