If numbers alone indicate success, Robert Miller is probably one of the greatest art dealers who ever lived. But there’s another assay of greatness among art dealers, and it has more to do with having an eye for the outlier, a talent for selecting the unlikely but strangely right work, the ability to simply recognize vision, but above all, to be a Connector. If you happened to monetize these factors, all the better, your gallery’s doors stayed open.

But art history, and art gallery history, is more than a matter of who cashed in. There are those who truly mediate culture — in today’s scene Matthew Higgs and Lia Gangitano come to mind as prime examples — who cudgel creativity and platform things we’ve not seen before. These figures are Connectors, and theirs is a subtle and alchemical art. Swirl together an essence of Barnum, an ounce of Ezra Pound (for this job description a degree of insanity is not a liability), a soupçon of David Ogilvy, and the visionary who-says-we-can’t? style of a Sergey Brin, and you begin to see the skill-set required. One of the hallmarks of these wizards is that they’re almost always impecunious, and seeking backers.

Their gift is having an eye, and an ear, that sees and hears what others don’t. Their contribution rests in being there at key cultural moments, and having whatever combination of spark and grit that is required to reveal something truly new.

Meet Richard “Dick” Bellamy. Director and founder of the Green Gallery, who, in 1960, landed in the eye in a hurricane: the seismic upheavals called Pop and Minimalism. The odds were against Bellamy because unlike most founders of New York art galleries, he had little if any family backing, little if any formal art education, and pretty much zero business acumen. Growing up in the Midwest, he briefly studied at the University of Cincinnati, and later Columbia, but spent more time in Manhattan’s cheap bars than in classroom lectures. Desultory wandering in a Beat fashion, by the late ‘50s he decamped to Mexico and Provincetown, places where a lack of ambition and a talent for bohemian blather were perfectly OK.

Exactly what made him stop spinning his wheels is not exactly known, and it is just one of a long list of undiscoverables that stand out in Judith Stein’s new biography of Bellamy, Eye Of The Sixties, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One thing is clear: Bellamy took pains to cover his tracks, stay a shadowy figure, operate on the margins of society. Showing what he accomplished, and the lives he helped, and hurt, is wonderfully documented here. But as a portrait of a man, the book falls short. It is likely that the real Richard Bellamy is and will remain unknowable.

Stein’s biography stunningly fills in several yawning gaps of art history circa the early 1960s. We meet, up close and personal, artists such as Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Yayoi Kusama — artists who would certainly have found an audience eventually, though Mr. Bellamy brought them out into the light. More thrilling still are smell-the-smoke-and-sweat reports of Lee Lozano, James Lee Byars, Jo Baer, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Ronald Bladen. They may lack the epoch-making stature of Bellamy’s big guns, but there is still a lot to be discovered about each. Stein’s research reveals many avenues for further scholarship, and future writers will follow the trails she blazes here.

Each page contains nuggets of original research that are pure gold. The problem is that there are great artist-biographies, and this book, despite its absolutely fascinating and voluminous cavalcade of facts, is not in that company. Stein allows herself here and there to speculate, which leaves the reader slightly distrusting of the whole. What is to be made of an observation like “Dick must have read Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese, poems Lydia (his Chinese mother) would have praised for their delicacy and economy”? What is such a string of assertions based on? in other places, sweeping generalizations needed further edits.

Bellamy’s business practices were a slow motion cliff-dive, and on this subject Stein is at her best. Though he managed to find an angel investor to support the gallery, taxi-magnate Robert Scull, it became apparent in short order that the business aspects of running a gallery bored him — which led to a fast-approaching expiration date. He could often be found rubber-legged drunk in the early afternoon, hiding away in the back office but still open for business. We see him stoned or buzzed, lying full-length on the gallery floor; what affluent Midtown gallery visitors made of this leave little to the imagination. Sometimes he would simply abandon the premises, and head to a bar, leaving the gallery doors wide open.

Bellamy blithely made his own rules and followed his own code of ethics; his record keeping was spotty, he sometimes paid artists haphazardly, and he was known to enrage them, even retitling works as he saw fit. Is it any wonder that Oldenburg jumped over to Sidney Janis after a year?

Simultaneously, Dick Bellamy’s son Miles has put together a personal selection of his father’s letters, which document the dissolution of a life — “bludgeoned by alcoholism” is how he self-describes — while inviting us into a world more exciting than most of us will ever know. And it’s a beautiful, strange, sad and arcane little book. Now in his mid-50s, Miles was his father’s gallery assistant for the final five years of Dick’s life. As a boy, Miles lived mostly with his mother, and knew his father on a weekends and vacations basis. The letters from father to son are some of the most revealing; one winces at a letter written to the eight-year-old Miles, which includes this lovely line, “I love you sweet baby Miles no good louse scum.” Dick should have known that irony and sarcasm as humor are lost on a child. Doubtless he was off on his own chemical planet when he composed that cringe-worthy missive. That Miles struggled with (and overcame) his own substance-abuse issues comes as no surprise; the fallout from drugs and alcohol is a theme that permeates both Bellamys’ life stories.

Like the letters of Jack Kerouac (another victim of the hard-drinking artist’s lifestyle) these documents both shed light on and cast enigmatic shadows over their author. While Miles has provided helpful endnotes, these letters would have benefitted from close annotation. For example, in a letter to a Peter Young, dated 1970, Dick refers to “Dan painting well.” Later in the letter he says “I thought Mike’s show at Marlborough in May-June good. […] Saw Rolf a few weeks ago […] he was visiting Mickey Ruskin.” I happen to know that Mickey Ruskin was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, New York’s iconic artists’ bar in 1960s and ‘70s; who the hell these other folks are I haven’t a clue. This book is keyed to art-world insiders only, those with access to the inside of the inside.

It is, however, worth the price of admission for a 1996 letter to Barbara Rose, the seminal historian of modern art, who was, apparently, a close friend of Dick. It begins “Dear Barbara, Long time no see or hear. I hope you are still fucking. I am unable to. I wish I had been able to do it better when I could.”

Stein, Judith E. Eye Of The Sixties: Richard Bellamy And The Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0374151324. 384 pages, $28

Bellamy, Richard. Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy. Miles Bellamy (ed.) (Brooklyn, NY: Near Fine Press; Printed by Small Editions, Red Hook, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0-692-51867-0. 72 pages, $40

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December 13, 2014 through January 24, 2015
534 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 744 7400

This three-woman exhibition consists of very different, though interestingly related, approaches to the use of recognizable subject matter. The subject matter is variously displaced, distorted or fragmented. As a consequence, the paintings and sculptures present combinations of recognizable parts that function abstractly, at once both generalizing, through reconfiguration, and particularizing, through new formal relationships absent in the original context. The new frameworks created represent likenesses, now estranged and somewhat alienated.

Formal echoes and conceptual conversations are found repeatedly between paintings and sculptures throughout the exhibition, for example Diane Simpson’s 2011 sculpture Neckline (extended). Its vertical, rectangular fiberboard planes surround an empty triangular section at center, lined with gray and reminiscent of a revealing dress or blouse. There are arm-like extensions at either side, made of curved, linear aluminum. The sculpture could be a distant relative of the geometric figures found on a Dessau Bauhaus theatre set of the 1920s. Anna Neukamp’s Insert (2014) hangs behind this sculpture and to its right side. Insert features just that: the appearance of an insert central in the painting’s composition, together with a depicted, angled metal armature held by a large red schematic hand. The two works, so different in most aspects, still share compositional and associative characteristics. Elsewhere, Baer’s triptych contains grey vertical shapes against an ocher ground that are repeated — inexactly, of course — in the end view of Simpson’s Underskirt (1986), placed nearby. Even Neukamp’s 2014 sculpture Latz (“bib,” in English), with its vertical, leaning, threaded-through segments, reverberates with the same shapes as Baer’s triptych. Remarkably dissimilar, the works nevertheless display connections despite such obvious diversity.

For Baer, a key issue is how to release ideas through painting. The triptych Facing, Turning (Intro/About), Cleaving (Apart/Together), from 1978-79, evinces an interest in antiquity and prehistoric times seen in Baer’s earlier drawings, but not paintings her from this period. The elemental shapes in Baer’s paintings function like signs, and subtly rendered images of animal or human parts recall cave paintings while remaining mysteriously cryptic. Her mostly earth-toned palette used enhances this association. In moving through the sequence of canvases, a possibly ritualistic narrative is implied. After the Minimalist works Baer became known for, the turn to what she called “Radical Figuration” seems completely apposite in the context of this exhibition’s constituent aggregations of abstract and representational divides.

Simpson’s exquisitely invented objects present both an acute sensitivity to aspects of construction and specificity of materials. The titles orient the viewer to one source of the form, now reinvented as an object independent of function. The potential readings, given the hybrid quality of her sculptures, include historical, sociological, psychological or architectural. Take Mesh Bonnet (1992), which is a basket- or bonnet-like object made of pinewood, cotton mesh and waxed linen thread: suspended from above by the thread, the bonnet is now transformed and suggests anthropomorphic, historical and architectural referents. What would have been a chinstrap appears to be held by two downward-reaching arms. The body of the sculpture forms an enclosure on the shelf upon which it sits, like a shelter or canopy. Formalist and Duchampian, Simpson’s appropriation and nuancing of familiar forms enrich an understanding of inherent complexity in objects of common (or once common) use. The finely crafted construction retains an essence of the sourced object, which is simultaneously heightened, refined and expanded.

Neukamp’s boldly graphic and compellingly illusionistic paintings scallop and contort pictorial space. In Crook (2014) a rhythmically doubled image is seen as situated on an abraded surface. What is represented in the paintings and what the origins are is not revealed. The typically scoured surfaces that intrude upon obscurely familiar shapes — like brand logos or instructional symbols — leave us to meditate on the fictive spatial events at which painting can prove so proficient. Unsettled figure/ground relationships are further complicated by the roughened surface, which not only contrasts with the sharp graphic delineation of the two repeated black-and-white, highly illusionistic elements, but also crosses over onto them, contradicting the established illusion. Another Berlin painter, Frank Nitsche, sometimes comes to mind in looking at Neukamp’s paintings as another artist who creates paradoxical spatial structures with abstracted representational components.

There is integrated reality and paradoxical purpose inherent in the works by all three artists. The simple play between perception and physical surface in two and three dimensions is amplified through a deferred knowledge of origination. The thinking required to translate the various substitutions and transformations engages many strands of thought — there are no simple answers. Pleasure, in tactile surface, elusively fragmented shape or coexistent facture and form make the process of viewing this exhibition as much about being embodied as being able to project or embrace ideas. Here, sensuality is of equal consequence to the intellectual conundrums posed, and separating these two aspects is simultaneously impossible and pointless. They are active and compounding; they define each other.

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Exhibition curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed

National Academy Museum until April 22
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212 369 4880

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 15, 2007 under the title “Painting when Painting was Dead”

Maybe it is because the word “times” occurs twice in its title that  “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75” achieves such a feeling for period.  Even for someone who was a toddler when the experimental abstract painting in this lively, intelligent, informative survey got going—in another continent, to boot—dejà vu seems to waft from the National Academy’s fabric walls.  What must this show feel like for people who lived through those years?

This was the era of spray guns and masking tape.  So many of these dishevelled yet sparky paintings and paint-based objects have the trippy, hippy look of the years of the flower power movement, civil rights, ecology, and emerging feminism and gay liberation.  Even brightly colored works have a limp, tie-dye, impoverished quality.  Everything is rough at the edges, made from cheap or recycled materials, informal or provisional in arrangement, sometimes ethnic-looking, other times futuristic, and always at once earnest and nonchalent—in harmony with what one knows (or projects) of the look and feel of bohemia, the city, and youth culture at that time.

The show looks at painting in a truly transitional moment.  The medium was under sustained assault from an avant garde that, empowered by the ascendancy of sculpture, installation, performance and film/video, insisted that painting was dead.  Of course, hundreds of painters worked experimentally and optimistically through such rhetoric, but there were some determined to be part of the revolution who nonetheless wanted to paint.  For them, according to Katy Siegel, the exhibition’s curator (advised by painter David Reed, with whom the idea for this show originated) the radical critique of painting was liberating, “an opportunity, not a pink slip.”

Indeed, the heavy duty insistence on painting’s demise is now seen by defenders of the painters in this show as itself macho, authoritarian, and locked into an earlier aesthetic, which by the late 1960s was an institutionalized revolution.  These artists found a space for themselves between the dogmatics of minimal and conceptual art on the one hand and the formalist abstraction championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, on the other. Having their cake and eating it, they wanted to enjoy playing with shape, form, color, and material and feel that they were structurally questioning the language of art in the process.

In terms of inclusiveness and free flow this new painting was obviously a backlash against the prim, austere negations of minimal art, but it would be simplistic to see it as a pendulum swing back towards the defiant gestures of Abstract Expressionism.  If there is one artist in the show of whom this might be the case it is Joan Synder, whose painting, “The Storm” (1974) has a rich, romantic mythic sensibility.  Generally, however open and loose looking their forms, the artists were interested in upfrontness and process, not in mystery and nebulousness.

The first galleries have the most pictorially conventional canvases of the show.  “Pavo” (1968), a large Dan Christensen of nine-by-eleven feet, has overlapping fuzzy circles spray painted in bright colors, while Kenneth Showell’s “Besped” (1967) is a warped grid of spray-painted little squares bent into trapezoids and parallelepipeds.  The spray in both paintings is at once illusionist and a literal, fact of process. Jo Baer’s “Speculum” (1970) is a precisionist geometric abstraction.  On its front the picture is mostly monochrome, with most of the composition taking place along the deep edges.  Ms. Baer had taken on the anti-painting rhetoric of Artforum magazine, which moved to New York from California in 1967, in an influential letter to its editor.

Once the visitor moves to the large second floor gallery, however, order and precision give way to scatter and flop.  But still, however limp they have become, grids still predominate. “Put a Name on It Please” (1972), by Alan Shields, a diagonal grid looking at first like a badminton net caught in a gale, is made of cotton belting embellished by strings of bead. Its mix of a structural element from high modernism and almost louche use of cheap and unlikely materials sets the tone for a kind of hippy abstraction.  Howardena Pindell’s “Untitled” (1968-70), an open grid of sausage-like rolls of canvas joined by metal grommets, and Louise Fishman’s “Untitled” (1971) of string sewn into strips of canvas, are limpid grids that tease this signifier of order and regularity.  For many feminist artists, a use of craft elements like sewing was a self-consciously political gesture, a critique of masculine authority.

And women dominate this show in terms of the most striking and original forms: There is Lynda Benglis with “Blatt” (1969), a floor piece formed of poured pigment and latex that curdled into a free-standing puddle free of any canvas or support.  Mary Heilmann’s “The Book of Night” (1970) is a deep-stained black canvas, free of stretcher, that also lies horizontally, in this case with a kink in it on a chest-high pedestal.  Dorothea Rockburne’s “Intersection” (1971), a kind of oil sandwich in which thick, viscous black oil is contained within transparent plastic sheeting laid out of the floor.  Imprinted on the plastic is, once again, a grid.  Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of performance and feminist art, is represented by a video of her 1967 piece, “Body Collage” (1967) in which she dabbed her naked body in glue and rolled around over bits of paper and fabric.  Her inclusion is a provocative statement in a show of painting, an insistence that process, gesture and intention trump product or effect.  It is taken as significant that she described herself, in early group shows, as a painter.

Many of the artists in this show have fallen from attention, while others—like Ms. Heilmann and Ms. Rockburne—returned to conventional formats in their mature careers.  What also happened is that shortly after the time frame of this exhibition New York witnessed a resurgence of abstract painting.  Figures who now dominate that genre such as Bill Jensen, Thomas Nozkowski, Melissa Meyer, Sean Scully,  and Mr. Reed himself, all found their feet in the wake of these years of “way out” experiment.  There is a clear trade off between radicality and quality in such artists who are more conservative in format but nuanced in painterly achievement.  But for sheer permission to play there is a debt to those who scaled the high, hard times.

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Richard Serra’s initial reaction upon seeing Jo Baer’s orchid-inspired “Wraparound” paintings, Baer has recalled, was to ask, “How does it feel to do revolutionary work?” [quoted in Stein, see below]. Moreover, the first important art-world article on Baer’s work — a cover article by Carter Ratcliff in Art Forum (May, 1972) — focused on her wraparound paintings, two vertical and three horizontal, from her Orchid series. So why did the predominant critical reaction to her recent DIA exhibition strongly favor Baer’s earlier black band paintings over the wraparounds? Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, and Carol Diehl, in Art in America, both strongly praised the black band paintings while disparaging the wraparound paintings. (A notable exception was Jim Long’s review in the Brooklyn Rail, (Winter 2002) which strongly preferred the wraparound paintings exhibited in the third room at DIA.)

To fully appreciate these disparate claims, one needs to consider a range of historical, psychological, and conceptual issues. First, from a psychological point of view, there is likely to be a primacy effect-the black band paintings came first and were well received. The likelihood of a primacy effect is heightened by the fact that the wraparound Orchid paintings were so different from the black bands that Diehl describes them as looking as if they were done by a different artist. There are also art historical reasons why a favorable reaction to the band paintings might have occurred. The black band paintings appear to be a direct reaction to the claims of the prophets of Minimalism — Judd and Morris — that painting was dead. In effect, they are attempts to produce minimal works that are clean, cool and direct and yet retain a certain singularity peculiar to painting. It is as if the blinders were removed from Greenberg’s eyes and he could see that such paintings were nearer to specifying the unique properties of painting than had ever been achieved in the 1960’s by his favorite color field painters, Noland and Olitski.

Clearly then the black band paintings are historically important, but from another point of view they are more limited and less original than the wraparound Orchid paintings. Indeed, their optical glow appears somewhat reminiscent of certain of Flavin’s neon rectangles. On the other hand, if one assumes that an important antecedent of Baer’s paintings comes from her training in the psychology of perception, we can view her wraparound paintings as an attempt to explore more complex modalities of perception than she attempted in the black band paintings. In the words of James J. Gibson’s (1966) seminal work, Baer was in effect exploring “the senses considered as a perceptual system.” Viewed from this perspective, the wraparound works are a considerable advance over the black band paintings. Specifically, the black band paintings are disembodied-all the action is in the eye, giving in Carter Ratcliff’s (1972) prescient words, “a reduced version of seeing.”

Elaborating on Ratcliff’s observation, it may be claimed in contra-distinction to the black band paintings, the wraparound Orchid paintings entrain the body in terms of requiring various postural adjustments to solve the manifold perceptual puzzles posed by Baer. Such explorations supply kinesthetic feedback so that what the eye sees is augmented by information from other sensory modalities. Thus, it may be argued that these paintings draw upon an embodied view of perceiving-they compel us to repeatedly shift our bodily orientations if we want to detect Baer’s edgy messages which are never fully in view from a single point of observation. Such perceiving by doing fits J.J. Gibson’s (1966) concern with perceiving-acting cycles whereby what we do affects what we perceive and what we perceive affects what we do.

These paintings are embodied in a second sense-they make claims on architectural space. They teach us about how perception works in the real, cluttered architectural environment. Here, angles of vision are constantly cut off and/or obscured. Ordinary seeing involves sightings in between, over or under environmental structures. Viewed thusly, the wraparound paintings go beyond creating a visual pop based on retinal responses. Rather they bring us closer to how in Gins and Arakawa’s (2002) terms, we partition the world in the process of landing in it. Like the real world, they open us up to the inexhaustible information provided by the perceptual system when it is allowed to operate naturalistically. These paintings make perceiving a sited process involving our responses to line, color and space.

In these terms, Baer’s wraparound Orchid paintings prepare us for navigating the real world in its inexhaustible complexity rather than eyeballing a cool, beautiful object in a virtual world that is in the end an optical tease. Such navigations provide a multi-modal aesthetic experience that is deeper and longer lasting than “the cheap thrills” of the black band paintings.

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