January 29 to February 28, 2015
958 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street)
New York, 212 628 4000

New York veteran Lisa Bradley’s abstract paintings communicate feeling above all else. Often looking like cloudscapes, and usually occurring in a dark, midnight blue, Bradley’s pictures summon visions of endlessness on a cosmic spiritual level. Her work is open to contemplation and deeply felt experience; the paintings are mystical in nature and suggest the sky, the ocean — places where one finds and retrieves the self in heightened circumstances. Because the paintings are so resolutely abstract, it is hard to pin them down to a particular place; Bradley’s audience must imagine both the emotion and its provenance in processing the inchoate intensity of her art. Championed early in her career by the famous dealer Betty Parsons, Bradley can claim kinship with major New York School artists such as Rothko and Pollock; however, her independence as a painter is notable, in large part because she is so determined to present an undertow of feeling and force through abstraction alone. Interestingly, though, the radical self-containment of Bradley’s paintings often opens up to sweeping vistas that relate to the infinite. So the works have the tendency to switch back and forth between closed and open states. Thus, Bradley’s broad horizons issue forth from a relatively narrow spectrum of expression; the paintings are closely related, and their cumulative effect on the viewer is striking.

How does Bradley’s art compare now, when seen in the light of rising artists? The start of her career belongs to a different time in New York, when painting was of primary importance in the hierarchy of contemporary art. Things have changed — there are many kinds of art vying for our attention — but abstraction has never died out here, where the romance and legacy of major New York nonobjective artists continues to make a pronounced impact. Bradley consequently looks like a painter who has continued in her own fashion as she follows her creativity in subtle ways. Her style, large and voluminous, is found in sequences of related imagery. One moves from work to work and gains appreciation of the dense color and mysterious patches of light, which heighten the sense that something is about to happen. The feeling one has on seeing the paintings is that of silent imminence; it proves hard to explain them with words.

Indeed, intellectual readings fail to explain the meaning of Bradley’s art. In the fine painting Passing (2011), we look at a dark-blue background, against which passages and spots of white contrast in luminous fashion. Although it is not a large painting, Passing presents a spectacle indicative of imminent change — we can ask what it is we are passing through, or if the changing sky or currents of the sea are about to engage in another transformation. The title of the painting, a single word, hints at the occurrence of something reshaping; it is an idea supported by the abrupt contrast between light and dark in the painting itself. As Bradley’s viewers, we are struck by the intense flux of elements caught in a particular moment, just before everything alters. Another painting, Through This (2012), feels like a study of the deep sea. Like Passing, it is painted a dark blue with bits of white color rising from underneath the surface. The title suggests a meaning, but it is hard to say exactly what it is; the image is an intuitive experience.

The oceanic feeling of Bradley’s pictures, both in a literal and figurative context, never goes away. Indeed, the grandness of the pictures is what sustains them. Larger than life, they display a ready familiarity with sublime feeling. Nothing Lost (2012) could nearly be the background sky in one of El Greco’s more melancholic paintings; instead of blue, Bradley’s work brings forth a few blurs of light in a nearly black setting. The implications of the picture’s title are as mystical and incipient as the art we see. At times Bradley’s enterprise can become unclear by her refusal to explain or define her motives. But Bradley is a painter who believes in large philosophies. Because she is working with nearly a boundless sense of form, particulars give way to large insights. So Bradley’s art reminds us of the formless attractions of color alone, and the pleasures of meditating on the infinite. She leaves us room for thought.

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Joining moderator David Cohen, the panel discussed Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, T.J. Wilcox: In the Air at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bruce Pearson: Getaways at Ronald Feldman Gallery, and Arcadia: Paintings by Bill  Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries.

To view Slideshows: While we sort out a minor technical issue, please click the “video mov” icon to view slideshows; the options underlined in blue are not currently working

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March 8th – April 2nd, 2011
958 Madison Avenue, between 75th and 76th streets,
New York City, 212 570 5786

One advantage to having a downturn in the art market is that critics, gallerists, curators, and collectors have an opportunity to reflect and, perhaps, rediscover what they have missed during the infestation of mediocrity we have endured over the past few years. It takes a hefty dose of mediocrity to jump start an art market barnacled in the doldrums of selling bear rugs and blowjobs as the recent SCOPE Art Fair has made abundantly clear.  Yet once we get a tingling – ever so slight – that quality is somewhere on another horizon, this will appear a hopeful omen (for some) that things are beginning to change. In such a period, the tendency to resurrect works of art that would have scarcely, if ever, made it through the portholes of acceptance in more lucrative times is reassuring.

Ironically, Marjorie Strider’s hybrid paintings, fraught with protruding buds, butts, breasts, and luscious red lips, are being seen collectively at a gallery for the first time since their exhibition at Pace in 1965.  These are being shown along with a more recent group of bathers and facial close-ups of women that bridge the old with the new. For those counting, it’s been  45 years since most of the early formative works have been shown or seen. Of the recent work, the alluring large-scale close-ups seem closer to the present than the full-figured bathers.  In the sixties, Strider was a formal artist – akin to Roy Lichtenstein – who employed Pop imagery in her paintings.  She considered the gargantuan carved petals in Red Roses (1962), the alluring bikini breasts in Come Hither (1963), and the fertile asparagus stalks bound with pink rubbers in Green Vertical (1964), as all basically coming from the same family.  In that the paintings are employ carved reliefs, they are heavy.  Painted with bright colors on laminated Masonite, the  “built-out” elements are either in pine,resin-covered foam or, later, polyurethane.  They are wonderfully conceived and executed. Another major work from this period, Green Triptych (1963), reveals a standing bathing beauty adorned in a green standing bikini. Strider has never concealed the fact that these came from Playboy or other girlie magazines. What makes these images ironic, even subversively Pop, is that the artist’s formal and art historical knowledge did not ignore, for example, the influence of Venetian altarpieces.  In such works, including Girl with a Rose (1963), the passage between Renaissance-style figuration and portraiture is transformed into a full-fledged secular Decameron, reminiscent of the tales of Boccaccio.

A great deal has been made of Strider being a woman in a male-dominated art movement of the 1960s. Issues of gender and feminism surround the question of why has this artist and her work been so intensively ignored.  While attitudes in marketing contemporary art have historically favored men to the exclusion of women, this has most directly manifested itself in former connections between art media and the market. There are obvious ploys in making contemporary art easy to grasp, and therefore saleable.  One such ploy is the association of select artists to one another, in the way, for example, that putting together Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldernberg and Rosenquist into one powerful gallery in the 1960s relegated Rosalyn Drexler, Robert Indiana, Mel Ramos, and Marjorie Strider, among others (such, for instance, as those seen in the important exhibition, “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968” at the Brooklyn Museum last Fall) to the sidelines of attention. The problem here is also a critical and curatorial one, where critics fail to bring these artists into the dialogue and where curators fail to make aesthetic connections that are not entirely within the scope of the famous five.

However, the marketing issue is not only a gender issue, and the gender issue is not necessarily an isolated content issue.  Thus, it becomes problematic in trying to argue the case internally that Strider was a feminist whose work throughout her career was severely focused on this one idea (or ideology).  Having known the artist, and admired her work since the mid-1970s, I have always found her attention focused on her work, which I believe to be original in its subject matter and experimental in its application of materials.  Intriguing in its demeanor, her energetic and insightful work is never without a certain paradoxical force and humility, intellectually gratifying in opening new thresholds of understanding about the post-human condition and about the role of women in a highly mediated era. She has always believed in herself as an artist, which is one reason I am gratified that finally a glimmer of recognition has found its way in her direction. Marjorie Strider is an example to any artist, younger or older, regardless of gender or race, that to believe in your work is ultimately what counts, and never to give up doing or believing in what you feel your art requires.

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Gretna Campbell (1922 – 1987) at Tibor de Nagy (724 Fifth Aveune, 212.262.5050) June 3 to July 3

Bill Scott: Process and Continuity at Hollis Taggart Galleries (48 East 73 Street, 212.628.4000) May 18 to July 9, 2004

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, 10 June 2004

An Odd Nerdrum exhibition is like a pastiche of old B-movies. Remember Louis L’Amour’s “Heller in Pink Tights:” A rag-tag theatrical troupe wanders the frontier struggling to survive. So too, the cast of Mr. Nerdrum’s costume epics. His generic post-catastrophe landscape conjures up “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.” Every day is The Day After Tomorrow in Nerdrumland.

Oscar Wilde said it took a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. It takes lights lowered to catacomb wattage to discourage merriment in front of Mr. Nerdrum’s special effects: that histrionic nosebleed, wolf-skin wardrobes from George Caitlin’s Indian gallery, the ghosts of Paintings Past and omens of artistic anguish.

His stock role of The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer takes its cue this year from Mel Gibson. “Second Birth” (2004) presents the Second Coming of himself as Christ. Antonello da Messina’s haunting bust-length image of Christ crowned with thorns, a 15th century panel, is stamped with Mr. Nerdrum’s features and set to resurrect from a lunar tundra.

Seabiscuit drew crowds recently, so expect a horse. “Horse Bath” (2004) gives us a white one, homage to Rembrandt’s “Polish Rider.” Head held at an unnatural angle, the goofy rider looks to be mimicking Balthus’ portrait of Baroness Rothschild. “Flock” (2004) has five naked men and a boy in a simian crouch, like chimps posing for Jane Goodall. The crown of thorns on each head is a portentous absurdity that lends credence to Mr. Nerdrum’s claim to have studied with Joseph Beuys.

“Five Singing Women” (2004) arranges five females on their backs, suggesting notes on a staff that ends with a half-note: another naked boy. All mouths are open, in song or rigor mortis? The women’s coverings-part sleeping bag, part shroud-slip off at just the right places. Breasts and beaver shots carry the day. “On The Boat” (2004) teases us with a threadbare couple, straight from some sagebrush saga, watching the distant approach of a phantom boat. The ark of salvation? The lifeboat from a lost starship seeking The Big Trail? Analogies are mixed but that happens with Odd.

His repertory of New Old Master showmanship camps in full feather past the footlights. Nothing here supports its own publicity as a Rembrandtian critique of modernity. Mr. Nerdrum is a parodist. That his parodies are mistaken for prophecies is a testament to P.T. Barnum’s grasp of public credulity and appetite for spectacle. In the end, failed prophecy is a form of nostalgia. It is dispiriting to see fine technique lavished on an art running on empty.

Gretna Campbell’s plein-air paintings are a gracious antidote to sham solemnities around town. They are on display in New York for the first time in eight years. It is a welcome event. Concentrating on work from the 1970s and ’80s, the exhibition features landscapes of the Maine coast, rural New Jersey and the south of France.

Ms. Campbell came of age among a generation of painters respectful of the achievements of Abstract Expressionism but confident that depictions of the natural world remained timely and significant. She was a realist in the best sense, faithful to the physical pulse of what she observed yet not subservient to appearances.

The apparent spontaneity of the work belies the rigorous studio preparation that preceded outdoor painting. Ms. Campbell drew on site, mapping details of the locale: the juncture of planes, the nodal points of her composition. Transferred to canvas, this initial linear schema was painted over in the studio with broad expanses of color chosen for chromatic interaction with the final paint layers improvised on the spot.

The pleasure of her work is in the variety and complexity of its color and the lush, textural weave of brushstrokes. Details of the local scene-a rocky shoreline, the slope of a field or angle of a trellis- are the raw material for a pictorial architecture built on the reciprocal effects of one color upon another. She worked boldly with brush and palette knife but the result is fastidious and transparent. The gestural energy of action painting enlivens an intimate sympathy for natural settings.

Specific shapes are loosely rendered while the sense of light and air is vividly realized. A snow bank resonates with touches of blue, delicate pinks and ochres. That distant haze, where sky and hill tops meet, reveals gentle modulations of viridian, cerulean, violet and yellow. “Along the Banks of Cranberry Cove” (1984) is a riveting dance of variegated greens interknit with supporting mauves, tender browns and golds.

The eye has work to do in these subtle, sophisticated paintings.

Bill Scott has no garden; so he invents his own. And what a high time he has in it.

Mr. Scott is an abstract painter working withing the Philadelphia colorist tradition that follows the lead of Arthur B. Carles, one of the most spirited of the early American modsernists. This is hs first exhibiton with Hollis Taggart.

With vivacity and a crazy quilt inventiveness, he evokes the retinal sensation of flower fields in a rambunctious patchwork of color segments. Depositing paint in abstract, lozenge-like shapes, Mr. Scott makes deft use of the see-through capacities and textures of oil paint. Pale tones are glazed over with darker ones; contrasting colors appear beneath the surface of each seemingly nonchalant swatch. Desultory dark lines traipse over the canvas, unifying disparate patches, much like the overstitching on traditional quilts.

Emotional range is keyed to the coloristic one. With the exception of “Night Garden,” Mr. Scott’s chromatic scale emphasizes smiling colors. Candied pinks pushing toward fuschia, ingratiating yellows and spring greens predominate. The work is unapologetically decorative, delightfully so. It would be cranky to wish for more metal amid the charm. Seduction is enough.

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