February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener and Christopher Stackhouse

Joining Moderator David Cohen February 13, 2015, at the National Academy Museum, the panelists reviewed exhibitions of Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Heidi Howard at Nancy Margolis Gallery.

We regret to inform listeners that due to equipment failure the last segment of the event was not recorded; Heidi Howard’s review ends part way through and the audience response to the second half of the program (Kaphar and Howard) was lost. Special thanks to recording engineer Isaac Derfel for defying the odds and saving the bulk of this month’s recording.

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The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
April 20 to May 7, 2012

Bookended by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s glorious Arts and Crafts Glasgow School of Art on the hill, (like Edinburgh Castle, protective and aloof) and the urban fabric of the once blighted and still slowly recovering industrial city beneath is a small, well-knit network of galleries and public spaces that help make Glasgow the second most vibrant art scene in the UK.  Some of the more polished venues aspire to London-style blue chip glitziness, but other, more thoughtful, independent spaces, retain a gritty, vernacular quality, inhabiting empty warehouses and commercial quarters true to the heart of the city’s Victorian architecture.

Several exhibits in the Glasgow International seemed geared to impress an international art crowd.  The Glasgow School of Art commissioned series of sculptures by Folkert De Jong, while local hero Karla Black filled the Gallery of Modern Art with an overwhelming installation, also a commission.  The most heavily promoted attraction of the festival, however, was  “Sacrilege” by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. An inflatable “bouncy castle” life-size version of Stonehenge, the piece questioned both the British reverence of the neolithic stone circle on Salisbury plain and it’s importance in contemporary culture as a lightning-rod for kitschy celebrations of the vernal equinox and summer solstice, and low-budget sci-fi flicks about witches and druids. For all the seductive and viscerally engaging quality of this doppelganger in rubber, a lingering feeling that the British have already transformed Stonehenge into a conceptual bouncy castle made this elastic piece of satire a bit redundant. And sadly, rain made actual bouncing on the castle impossible; harsher critics than I, aged four to ten, deemed the piece completely useless.

The debut exhibition at the gallery at 42 Carlton Place, “Ever Since I put Your Picture in a Frame,” is a refreshingly thoughtful and diverse selection of painting both contemporary and from the early 20th Century.  The gallery is a project of the painters Carol Rhodes and Merlin James; curated by James, “Ever Since…” clearly shows the touch of a painter.  Initially a bit bewildering in its breadth, it corrals portraits by artists such as Alex Katz, André Derain and Walter Richard Sickert alongside landscapes by the self-taught artists Alfred Wallis and James Castle.  Despite all the recognizable faces, places and sundry animals, including Richard Walker’s mesmerizing “Moth” and Stephen McKenna’s delightful “Lesser Antilles Bullfinches,” this is an exhibition of paint and materiality.  Both framed and unframed, all the works in this show are consciously vehicles of their own creation.  Clive Hodgson’s “Untitled,” a meditation on decoration and it’s often uneasy allegiance with deep symbolism, revels in it’s painterliness, while Joel Tomlin’s “Elk,” and Julie Roberts “Young Apprentice (Study)” investigate the lugubrious  propensities of oil paint to define a painter’s style.

It is the trifecta of Derain, Sickert and Wallis at the heart of this show, however, that lend sturdy historicity to James’ curatorial endeavor.  Sickert’s delicate 1930s oil sketch of “Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies as Elizabeth Barrett Browning” on a brutal, textured canvas, conveys a spontaneity of creation that perhaps bespeaks his obsession with the pretty young actress, while Wallis’ blunt but warm sketch of “Fishermen’s Cottages” done in a fresh and unassuming hand captures the pure beauty and rustic simplicity of a working seaside village.  With such a variety of subject and so many different viewpoints—including abstractions by James Hyde, Tony Swain and Joe Fyfe—the show insists upon the old adage, “the devil is in the details.”

Karla Black’s installation at GoMA was a more sincere rejoinder to Deller’s “Sacrilege,” located in the precious classical library that almost claustrophobically fills Royal Exchange Square, Black’s sawdust and face makeup rectangular mound, “Empty Now,” similarly dominated the interior of the gallery.   The sheer magnitude of this layered, almost geologic concretion of earth tones, resembling a giant bar of halvah, oscillated between grabbing the viewer with its delicious consistency and coloring, and repulsing them through fear of its seemingly immanent collapse.  Hanging over the piece was “Will Attach,” a filigree of clear packing tape daubed with more face makeup in iridescent pinks and gold.  Too junk-like to be visually pleasing (as is Black’s aesthetic) it hung low enough to threaten the spectator’s shoulders and hair.

The two galleries at 6 Dixon Street, Mary Mary and Kendall Koppe managed, despite being under the same roof, to locate their exhibitions about as far apart on the art spectrum as possible.  Lorna Macintyre’s “Midnight Scenes & Other Works” at Mary Mary featured two quiet and subtle totemic sculptural installations that played with themes derived from Brancusi, also pensively questioning the idea of perimeter and containment in sculpture. The raw outrage of the work of Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for The Black Panther Party, was very tastefully framed and commodified at Kendall Koppe:  an attempt was made to revive some of the anger in the work by having a wall painting featuring violent protesters and dead pigs created by the artist himself around the doorway to the gallery.  The Modern Institute presented a very personal series of notebooks and related artworks by  Paul Thek (1933-88),“If you don’t like this book you don’t like me,”  and “Dresden,” a Beuys-referential/reverential show by  Michael Wilkinson at their new space on Aird’s Lane.

This quick survey of the officially sanctioned GI would not be complete without mention of the alternative, “satellite” shows organized by emerging artists and students. The gritty, earnest assemblages in “Stay Vector, Stay!” organized by a group of graduate students at the Glasgow School of Art in an empty storefront on Albion Street had a willful, kinetic energy.  Justin Stephens’ punctured canvases resonated with the colorful drapery of G. Küng’s ceiling hanging, while Dunja Herzog’s rickety sculptures lurched threateningly over Scott Rogers floor pieces that resembled a awesomely cracked out Smurf village, while Sarah Rose’s thoughtful video installation flickered on the chipped paint walls of this suitably grungy venue.

The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art manages to keep a healthy distance from outright bald-faced capitalism with a predominance of commissioned works and archival museum-quality exhibitions:  it still is a festival, not an art fair.

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October 30 to December 23, 2011
47 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand
New York City, (212) 274-0064

There is something deliciously grubby about the paintings and sculptures of Bianca Beck.  She favors distressed, punctured, encrusted surfaces, an earthy, at times visceral palette and painterly gestures that border on violence.  Lacerations, smudges and sgraffito incisions attack the paint as if in a last-ditch attempt to extract imagery from recalcitrant materials.

This debut solo commercial gallery show is titled “Body” and follows a spot earlier this year in the project room at White Columns. In but a couple of instances, the paintings are untitled, date from 2011, and are less than 2-1/2 by 2 feet.  The three oil painted sculptures – also 2011 and untitled – are roughly carved or perhaps found shapes of wood, arranged on pedestals, each not much more than a foot high.

Dance Painting is an exuberant aggregation of curlicues forming a web against what could register equally as a flower or an orifice, a red depression with a black and blue center.  A swirl of lines, seemingly dragged wet in wet through thin paint, sometimes sharp, sometimes smudged, is accented here by dabs and there by scratches.  Darker browns against the light tan of the panel support invite an association of pubic hair against flesh but without enforcing such a reading.  The painting has a compelling gestalt, an almost tantric center, and yet there is a sense of elements coming into being as we look at them, of wet, wayward squiggles coalescing into form.

The artist, who is in her early thirties, has been seen in a number of group exhibitions recently, including Le Tableau at Cheim & Read in 2010, a show that proffered affinities between contemporary artists from various centers and postwar French painting.  Beck’s work would make a convincing bridge in a three-person show with two otherwise formally dissimilar co-exhibitors in that show, namely Joe Fyfe (its curator) and the British painter Merlin James.  Readers aware of this reviewer’s ongoing attention to Fyfe and James will recognize this as a statement of praise.

Beck’s scruffy supports and mucky surfaces share with these artists an oxymoronic luxuriance in unprepossessing ingredients.  What is less immediately apparent in the younger woman than in the supremely history-conscious older painters is a way of reconciling studious awareness of precedence with a determinedly improvisatory expressiveness: knowingly making space for innocence.  Beck adopts a striking variety of approaches from piece to piece without a loss of personal style, managing simultaneously to bolster and destabilize authorial integrity.

Her primitivism is both “primitivism” in quotes, with a strong nod in the direction of postwar apocalyptical art informel and art brut, and at the same time an authentic-seeming venting of feeling, a connection to deep urges.  The allusions or affinities are with artists like Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier or Jean Dubuffet (in his brown phase), or with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.  They are not with the Viennese actionists, Antoni Tàpies, or Julian Schnabel, with each of whom they bear some occasional formal resemblances.  This comes down to a matter of scale, not just size—or even for that matter bombast or speed.  The key is that Beck’s visual statements are contained.  Thus the sense of their being pictures rather than paintings; images rather than fields of experience.  Thus, too, perhaps, the title of the show: Body. The show almost feels like a vindication of Fyfe’s inclusion of the artist in his curatorial argument for a kind of abstract picture making that is a paradigm apart from Abstract Expressionism.

Art historical erudition is not the same thing as pictorial intelligence, of course, but these enticing objects – at once spontaneous and heavily worked, orgiastic in their immediacy and thought through in their local, formal implications – achieve a delectable balance of seemingly opposite impulses in painting.

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December 1, 2006 – March 4, 2007

[at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC to June 24, 2007]

Merlin James: Painting to Painting
New York Studio School
8 West 8 Street
New York City
212 673 6466

February 8 – March 24, 2007

Saul Steinberg (1914-99) loved to draw. He depicts architecture; cowboys; fashion; furniture; Manhattan social and street life; opera sets for Rossini and Stravinsky; portraits of artists, such asDelacroix (after Nadar) (1994) and Giacometti’s Face (1983); and still lives like Breakfast Still Life(1974). He combines drawing and photographs as in Woman in Tub (1950) into which he sketches a nude, and Excavation (1951-52) with little houses added. He does calligraphy and over-the-top seventeenth-century allegories, and draws small American towns and big cities in this country and Europe. And he also uses other media on paper: cut brown paper bags for his Six Masks (1959-65); leaking ballpoint pens for Road, Samarkand, USSR (1956); rubber stamps for the all-over composition, Indians, Cyclists, Artists (1968); rubber stamps and postcards for Nine Postcards(1969); and thumbprints in Passport (1951). Everyone knows his often reproduced View of the World from 9th Avenue (1976), showing the world as seen looking westward from Manhattan. But equally deserving of attention is The West Side (1973), which reverses the viewing direction; or another map, The Flat Earth (1991) which, as the title says, evens out the planet.

Steinberg is consistently and amazingly inventive. Consider Untitled (Paris/Sardinia) (1963), in which two talking women reveal how different their vacations in central Paris and the island of Sardinia were. Or look at The Line (1954), a 29-section, folded 33-foot-long Chinese scroll-like drawing too long to be fully displayed, a virtuoso illustration of the many uses of one horizontal line. Across the hall at the Morgan’s display of drawings, “Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings,” Sinibaldo Scorza’s early baroque Orpheus and the Animals (1620-21) also reveals a rich imagination. But while Steinberg displays the skill of an old master draftsman, almost all of his subjects are modern. Like newspaper illustrator Constantin Guys, the subject of Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Steinberg is “always, spiritually, in the condition of (…) convalescence.” Such a return to childhood, so Baudelaire adds, which is so typical of modernism, comes only when an artist “is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things,” even if they seem merely trivial. Displayed in one not-noteworthy gallery, subdivided with partitions, the 117 works of art in this exhibition tell the history of the twentieth century. In his adopted country, Steinberg was marginalized as a mere illustrator, Ernst Gombrich’s favorite modernist. What a strange fate for the creator of the anamorphic Five false paintings (ca. 1971) of standing figures, Marcel Duchamp, and a painting by Mondrian; the dazzling November 26, 1965 (1965) that uses ink and watercolors to tell what happened to the artist on that day; and considerable art devoted to explicitly political subjects, such as Ex Voto: Execution of King (1951) and Street War (Cadavre Exquis) (1972/74).

Merlin James (b.1960), an art writer who paints, does small pictures, rarely more than two feet tall or wide, after details from the old masters or old photographs. Sower (2001) is from Jean-François Millet; Castaways (1984) from boating scenes by Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet; and Ruin (Ruisdael) (1995) from Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape with the Ruins of Egmond Castle (ca. 1650-55), which, itself a ruin, has a hole cut through the canvas. Sometimes his details are almost unidentifiable. Without the comparison images, I would certainly not have connected Cat and Fête (2000) to Titian’s Concert Champêtre (ca. 1510) or linked Jude Farm (2004) with Sir William Nicholson’s Judd’s Farm (1912). Often James’s sources are visually obvious, as when Bathroom Mirror (2006) re-does Pierre Bonnard’s Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror (1943-460, or Parapet and Sky (2005) reworks a picture of a Naples rooftop by Thomas Jones. But some are frankly esoteric, like paintings by Jean Hélion or photographs from the Alinari Brothers. And his most complicated picture, Étretat (2004-05), is based on paintings showing that beach by Courbet, Monet, and Matisse. Judging just from this description, James’s procedure might seem a form of art historical appropriation. But not at all — in fact he uses the resources of European art history to make paintings in his own style, with a muted palette. Harvest (1995-97) redoes a detail from the background of Nicolas Poussin’s Summer, or, Ruth and Boaz(1660-64), brightening the tonality; and After Poussin (1995) reworks Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens (1648) into a very dark image indeed.

Because Poussin is mostly written about in terminally academic ways, it is enlightening to see a painter’s response to the visual qualities of his art. Just as Cézanne was said to re-do Poussin after nature, so James in effect re-does painting after the old masters, as if for him the painters’ subjects traditionally found in the real world could effectively be replaced by materials all assembled from within art museums. The history of painting is rich enough, he shows, to give a sufficiently gifted painter all the subjects he can reasonably require.

I am in awe of Merlin James and Saul Steinberg, for in their very different styles they show everything that we can reasonably expect visual art to present; James in his painterly manner with the aid of the old masters, and Steinberg, a great linear artist, directly drawing from life. And they share a certain dry sense of humor not found in much contemporary art. In-between going back to these exhibitions, I made my Chelsea rounds, seeing the usual image appropriations, installations, large-scale photographs, and videos used to stage debates about politics. But after seeing Merlin’s and Steinberg’s shows, the concerns of the rest of the American art world look pretty parochial–and their historical allusions, much of them too obviously ambitious, a little strained.

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Merlin James’s painting, “Flower Piece” (2001), is almost a manifesto of a will to evade categorization.  It hangs in a show spanning twenty years of his work at Sikkema Jenkins, his fourth with these dealers.  At first it looks like a dashed-off, intimate still-life of a few flowers in a vase, a subject that epitomizes slightness, ephemerality, and thanks to Manet, poignancy.  But framing the composition are cautiously irregular rectangular strips of red, yellow, blue that—albeit obstinately not in their primary states—personify purist abstraction.  The flowers flutter between epochs.  It is a painting that simultaneously says yes and no to modernism.

Mr. James is an oxymoronist: Everything he touches bristles with meaningful contradiction.  You could say, for instance, that his work has dashed-off deliberation.  That’s pretty much the hallmark of a show that, typically of this artist, looks like a one-man group exhibition.  Not that he lacks for consistent touch and attitude, but his images are provocatively all over the place in terms of reference, period, genre: There are erotic nudes, turbulent seascapes, ruins, interiors.  Erudite nods to tradition and the old-masters abound, but he doesn’t look in the least traditionalist: The paint is dry, pasty, sometimes even murky acrylic, the palette tortuously muted, the canvas punched through with holes, the surfaces textured with alien materials like hair and sticks.

Anything but safe and loveable, his is a difficult, high-minded art about art.  And yet, the work has a quirky, whimsical personality.   The paintings are “anxious objects” in the sense (coined by Harold Rosenberg) of being self-conscious about the problematics of where they belong, critically and historically.  But free of existentialist expressionism, their angst is affable. Despite a certain nonchalence, he is invested in the process of making.

This could sound like Jasper Johns, but with Mr. James there is never the sense of an official, “important” statement about art; instead, the images almost deliberately consign themselves to critical margins.  The punctured and distressed pictures come “ready damaged,” with the oddball charm of thrift store finds. In this sense, they share something of the anti-painting rhetoric of many contemporaries who paint “despite” painting— the Belgian, Luc Tuymans, for instance, with his washed-out, one sitting paintings after photographs.

Mr. James taps a similar ennui to Mr. Tuymans in “Room” (1990), a near-grisaille painted in sepia on white.  The spare period interior depicts just a mirror, stepladder and lightbulb, and a sense of corridor spied through the open door.  But the slighly naïve handling with the hint of mystery of the open door give the work a poetry you rarely get in the heavy handed nihilism of Mr. Tuymans, with his more deliberate drama.  Instead, the image looks like Van Gogh’s room, only painted by Sickert in a drab, poignant tonalism and matter of fact touch.

Sickert is one of a number of historic figures about whom Mr. James has written criticism.  Others include Morandi, Derain, William Nicholson, Gwen John, Soutine, Jean Hélion, and—a rare contemporary—Alex Katz.  What these disparate artists have in common is maverick status: At some crucial point in their careers they bucked the trend of avantgarde orthodoxy to reassert a sense of tradition, but in ways that retained the probing inventiveness of modernism.   Mr. James’s polemics identify a quasi-masonic fraternity of painter’s painters. On the basis of the exquisitely quirky paintings in this show, he is himself worthy of their ranks.

“Painting Per Se”, a lecture he gave as the first Alex Katz Chair in Painting at Cooper Union published by that institution in 2002, is a polemical plea for the  specificness of painting and against a fashionable blurring of boundaries which leaves painting stranded as just another option within the bigger category of visual art, at the expense of nuance. The muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory) and each art form had its own muse, notes Mr. James, which means “there were already varieties – categories – at the very source of creativity”. The job of art, to the ancients, was to commemorate, and to block the forgetting of eternal truths. “But also,” he continues, “I like to think that memory is the mother of the Muses because any form of creativity- any art form- requires a continual internalization of its own tradition, an ever-present consciousness of its past… Each painting contains the memory of painting.”

The survey at Sikkema Jenkins allows some overview of Mr. James’s development, but in a way it also doesn’t precisely because throughout the work there seems to be so much memory of other paintings, both his own and those within the broad history of easel painting.  The selection is more a meeting of early and recent canvases than an overview, and includes canvases on which he has worked, ostensibly, for the whole period, like “Brown Girl” (1988-2003).  The luminous figure against a lugubrious ground (which gives the picture its color name) has a doll-like quality that recalls the late portraits of another of Mr. James’s hero-mavericks, L.S.Lowry, the popular, anti-academic painter most famous for industrial landscapes.

Still, there is a change in tempo in his work, a loosening up.  He sticks by acrylic, which perversely he prefers to oil because it is less generous, elastic, inherently lush. When it occurs in his work, Mr. James makes painterliness seem like a guilty pleasure.  But he has found in a recent erotic painting, “Sex” (2004) a way to convey the orgiastic qualities even of acrylic.

“Waves and Rocks,” (2004-05) which doffs its cap to Courbet and Constable, manages to show Mr. James both at his most diffident and invested.  It has the kind of intense blandness of de Chirico and “pittura metafisica” (apart from the hint of a vessel in the middle distance, it is depopulated) but at the same time the scumbling and impasto are atmospherically convincing and empathetic.    At one and the same time, Mr. James seems to be making a dry, fusty painting of a painting of the sea, and to shiver as he paints it.

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