Fellow artists often speak of collectors in hushed tones as if referring to some exotic species, one that is difficult to understand let alone  attract. The press might in part be responsible for spreading myths about collectors delighting in stories describing herd behavior at art fairs and, as described in an article in The New York Observer, “The Rise of the Insta-collector.”

But some collectors I know are of another breed.  Or more to the point, they are actually individuals: thoughtful people, confident in their ability to learn and make up their own minds about anything, including art.   These are people who want to live with art they love, and are committed to learning by looking as widely and deeply as necessary to allow them to live with serious art made in their moment.  They’re curating — often for their kids — a space of honest cultural values, rather than investing in commodities.

I want to argue that one way this can happen is when collectors develop their “eye” often with the help of someone in the art world who will take time to show them lots of art intelligently, respectfully and without undue self-interest.   More people would buy art in this way, I would like to suggest, if they could learn about art in non-manipulative settings: the opposite of the “art as investment” teaching model.

Collectors who buy work that is critically esteemed but not necessarily a good investment are essential to the real life of art, yet they are generally “under the radar.”  These are not people who want something for “over the couch.”  They often use an advisor or consultant to start out, but their goal is to learn to trust their own responses.

This may seem so natural that it doesn’t bear saying, but while the art fairs are multiplying, this “normal” collecting, though less prevalent, might be on the rise.  There are many intelligent adults of middle age who loved and even bought art when they were young.  They left off in the 1980s when it all got complicated: trend followed trend while gallerists learned “attitude’ and price manipulation at auction.  When these art lovers return to the gallery scene now, usually with a friend or some kinds of guide, they’re amazed by how much work speaks to them.  And they are equally amazed that there is good work that is affordable, having read in the newspapers the astronomical prices art goes for at auction.  I’d like to describe two of the collectors I know who buy for love.

Joel and Ulrika bought a painting of mine in 2002 when I was showing at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.  At that time, they had a respectable collection that included abstract painters from Sweden where they were born and three great modernist drawings.  Early on, Joel was shown around by David Neuman, who went on to found Magasin 3 Konsthall in Stokholm.   Once together, Ulrika and Joel bought a number of abstract expressionist works: a Robert de Niro, Sr., an Esteban Vicente, some beautiful Hans Hofmann drawings, a small Louise Nevelson, a Louise Fishman, a Robert Therrien sculpture, set next to work by total unknowns.  The question of current prices came up, to which Joel said, ”I don’t know and I don’t care”.  The collection, which is a sort of family, goes off in various directions, and they now have a Michal Rovner video piece that lives very well with the rest.   Joel speaks disparagingly of collectors who match their art with the period of their décor or who ”buy the brand names, the Warhol or whatever”.

A few years ago, Mayann Butler, a long-time dealer and friend, introduced them to Lori Bookstein and the paintings of John Dubrow, specifically his portraits.  They had never been interested in the idea of portraits before (Ulrika said she found them “weird” when she sees them in homes) but they loved Dubrow’s work and began to think: first one, then a second teenager would soon fly the coop for college.  So they commissioned Dubrow to paint their family of five.  Dubrow doesn’t use photographs so the family sat for three months, once a week.  The teenagers had to be out of their rooms with their family, the apples had to be the same in the bowl and clothing and light had to be consistent.  The result is a masterwork. The painting’s structure, so formal yet utterly relaxed, realizes the uniqueness of the moment for the family and for each sitter.

I can’t think of another family who would have commissioned such a painting or gone through the demanding process of being painted. Process and product both reflect the couple’s total confidence in their judgment and in the painter’s work, as well as their experience of living with works of art  that have held up over decades.

Marcy and Bennett  were busy with life and three kids too.  They didn’t buy any art until the kid were teens. They first bought a painting from me because we knew one another and they liked it.  They asked me to show them around and I did.  We went to many shows; ones I would have wanted to see anyway and ones I might have skipped. I just exposed them to work.  It wasn’t long before they were able to compare the works they saw to one another and make distinctions.  Looking at reviews, they saw that their own responses were often corroborated. They found they were learning about themselves through the process; there was a lot they liked but what they chose to live with reflected what they each cared about.  They began to trust themselves, but they thought hard about each painting and continued looking broadly.  They responded to a Leon Berkowitz at Gary Snyder, an Atta Kwami at Howard Scott, a Melissa Meyer in a show at the New York Studio School.  They bought works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly, Serra and Marden  through a consultant; but also a David Poppy from Pavel Zoubek, another small Nathanson from Messineo/Wyman and an Elizabeth Huey from Thorpe.  Over about eight years, they have put together a unique contemporary collection of works that touched them personally; this has a value quite distinct from buying “brand names” for investment.  The collection has a distinct personality; a group of works full of surprising decisions that seem to be built of both paradox and light.

Some collectors, while not buying as an investment, would nonetheless like their art to retain its value at auction, should they ever need to recoup the expense.  But others  realize that since many contemporary artists don’t have a record of sales at auction, this concern will radically narrow the field.

When people begin to collect they have a lot to learn and there are seemingly endless options.  There’s risk involved:  you might buy something you later dislike. It’s easy to confuse this concern with fear of financial risk.  The art world moves fast, making judgment a challenge.  Artists, curators, writers and patient gallerists can communicate what we know to collectors who are excited about looking at and discussing art, balancing the influence of the art-as-speculation environment

The post “Curating for the Kids”: Artist Jill Nathanson makes the case for real collectors appeared first on artcritical.

Dubrow: January 8 to February 7, 2009
37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 750 0949

One suspects that few young, ambitious artists these days would try to base a career on faithfully painted landscapes. But two mid-career painters – Stuart Shils and John Dubrow (who paints the figure as well) – have spent many years doing just that, and with a good measure of success, as underscored by recent shows at their respective galleries, Tibor de Nagy and Lori Bookstein.

Landscape (and its close relative, cityscape), of course, has quite a tradition. Masters ranging from Pietro Lorenzetti to Claude Lorrain and from the Limbourg brothers to Diebenkorn have explored its special qualities of sunlight, atmosphere, and panoramic depths. From our vantage point, we can see that technical proficiency and stylistical charm count for less than a landscape painter’s temperament; we value Corot more than Daubigny, and Seurat more than the pointillist Ker Xavier Roussel. The traditional requisites, few but daunting, begin and end with avid observation and finding vital equivalents in a language of paint. The landscapes by both Stuart Shils and John Dubrow show a refreshing awareness of this, and both approach their motifs with considerable focus and little posturing or fuss.

Stuart Shils’ exhibition of nearly 20 paintings reflects his familiar technique of layering and blending colors to produce rich atmospheric effects, usually on small canvases and panels barely a foot across. Close inspection revealed extensive, careful reworking, with colors scraped or wiped down and reapplied to create quietly throbbing depths. Lines, drawn in with a pencil or scratched with a pointed object, serve as a kind of framework defining the edges of buildings and ground planes. With their soft edges and inner incandescence of color, they come close to ethereal, almost nostalgic visions of urban and country life.

Shils’ subtle feel for the effects of light was much in evidence at Tibor, in, say, the difference between a building’s sun-drenched walls and the absorbent depths of its shadowed portions. Some of the paintings also revealed other qualities of particular interest. For instance, in the painting Umbria Farmhouse on the Road up to Corciano (2008), the simple rhythms of the blocks of color describing a house – a blazingly bright warm white for the first floor, a slightly more retiring ochre for the recessed second floor – culminate in an awkwardly angled eave that holds vividly before the deepest of medium-blue skies. One senses forms commanding the dimensions of the canvas – like they might in a Courbet — rather than being mere receptacles for atmosphere.

Similarly luminous tensions animate From Ray’s Kitchen Window, Near Union Square(2008), a very horizontal composition in which the boxy intervals of high-rises deftly pace the 42 inch width. Traveling its length, the eye circulates among myriad reddish and yellowish facades that convey not only a particular weather but also the full breadth of the scene, which is measured out by sudden, small glimpses of the sky at the horizon.

Elsewhere, such intervals are often eclipsed by the atmospherics. The indefinite divisions between ground plane and buildings in A Field Toward the Edge of Georgetown, Late Afternoon (2008) drain the impact of a small and especially pinkish building within an indefinite zone of burnt sienna facades. At such points the scratched and penciled lines seem like decorative means of maintaining identities rather than concentrators of impulses. However, Shils is on top of things – artistically and topographically – with Looking Down from Montecastello, A Garage with an Open Door (2007), which imparts a jewel-like precision to the sun-drenched structure, tiny in its poignant distance. And yet, and yet — that evocative haze of ochre-greens and blue-greens in the foreground leaves one longing, just a bit, for the quirky rigor of Bonnard’s trees, which manage to claim their pictorial real estate no matter how fuzzy they appear.

At Lori Bookstein, John Dubrow’s nearly 30 landscapes are tiny by his usual standards.  Even at eight inches in width, though, they evince the efficient brushwork and decisive, reductive descriptions of his larger work.

Dubrow has always been a capable and strategic colorist, one who tangibly weights the location of forms with subtle pressures of hue. Near the left edge of Weaver’s Farm 1(2008), for example, the fringe of leaves around the top of a tree gleams improbably next to the cavern-like deeper greens at the tree’s core. This, however, perfectly conveys the actual, galvanizing effect of strong sunlight. Up close one can see how the artist has dragged a duller beige over the field at center – a move that, again, settles it palpably among the nuanced surrounding greens. Such local light effects, moreover, add up to complete descriptions of atmosphere, giving a warmer, slightly misted impression to the panoramas of Italian scenes (installed on two opposite walls) and a cooler, closer ambiance to wooded scenes of upstate New York, hanging in-between.

These small paintings all have the aspect of studies, in that they seemed intended for the artist’s own education. They evince no egotism or hunger to be anything greater, and also a faith that nature will supply any necessary drama: whatever moments of expansiveness, contraction, resolution or relenting that might engage the eye. This reticence turns to downright passivity of perception in Umbria 1 (2008), which registers differences of hue but not of weights of colors, leaving it rather inert. But Umbria 3 (2008), shows more active observations of color; here mauve and green and yellow ochre shapes stir about the painting’s center, setting the distant and foreground fields centripetally into the corners. Why does Umbria 19 (2008) remind me, ambivalently, of Brice Marden? Perhaps because it records a hillside as an undulating, fishnet-like patchwork of forms – as elements in constant movement, but towards no abiding direction – and one realizes that it is a truthful, if not particularly urgent, experience of a hillside rising evenly before one’s eyes. Such paintings show considerable merit, but the subject matter reminds one of how actively inventive Corot’s Italian sketches are. (The French master was known to move a tree as needed, even when he worked on-site.)

But when nature provides the occasion, Dubrow rises to the challenge. Umbria 13 (2008) uses generous shifts of scale to measure out a journey of events: the exceptionally dark tone of a foreground tree, leading to a scramble of spreading fields dotted by the singularly bright note of a road or house, and settling, at the diagonally opposite corner, in the compact note of a cloud above distant hills. Here – as in work of the masters – adventure seems not just consistent with faithful observation, but its indispensable partner.

The exhibitions of Shils and Dubrow overlapped by only a couple days, just enough to allow fresh comparisons between the two. Their differences intrigue: could it be that Shils seeks evocative means of representing, while Dubrow peruses the workings of representation itself? In any event, both painters in their latest exhibitions seem at times to proceed by rote, as if fulfilling public rather than personal expectations. Their best work, however, confirms that the genre of landscape remains a vehicle for original observations, and for their realization in paint.

The post Stuart Shils: Recent Paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and John Dubrow: Small Landscapes at Lori Bookstein Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

April 29 – May 31, 2003

Against the backdrop of war, gallery hopping seems a indolent sport. Does the world need another painting? With scalding images everywhere-in newspapers, on television and the internet-Van Gogh’s comment that “there is more to life than making pictures” comes back to me with the poignancy of a rebuke. But every so often work presents itself that addresses the dignity of life and the way it stands revealed in art. Art says it slant, but that is no bar to truth. John Dubrow’s exhibition, his fifth at Salander-O’Reilly, testifies that some pictures are, indeed, necessary.

Salander-O’Reilly has become indispensable to figurative painters who care about what Kenyon Cox termed “the classic spirit.” This is the point of view that, as Cox wrote, “. . .desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.” That was written in 1911. The chain is longer now and Dubrow is establishing his place in it.

He brings a distinctive intelligence to his motifs. At his finest, Dubrow invests subjects-places, no less than people-with a moral dimension that is as rare as it is humane. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he uncovers this dimension where he finds it: in the architecture of cities and of the human form; in the design inherent in man and his world

His cityscapes, lovely in coloration and rigorous in construction, deserve the recognition they have achieved. My favorite in this show is West Side Highway, one of three luminous urban views. Gone is the vigorous diagonal so helpful for leading the eye into the scene. Instead, the eye is greeted by a series of verticals that lend definition to the seeming chaos of the view. The midmost stake, marking the center of the canvas, is not an object at all but a buttery slice of sunlight glancing off the side of a building. This crucial vertical, in middle distance, is anticipated by another in the foreground, a tall flue of similar color but lower intensity. Both uprights are echoed by a prominent pair of chimneys in the distance.

This use of a center plumb line as an ordering device was put to fine effect by the British painter Euan Uglow, with whom Dubrow shares both passion for craft and a singular refinement. West Side Highway is a deft performance. It brings to mind the essence of the painter’s vocation: the call to master all that one’s art brings into play.

Dubrow’s possession of his art is fully evident in his portraits. The agitation of his paint surface belies the tenderness of these paintings. His portrait of Frederick Wiseman, in solitude amidst his film cans, is deeply appealing. So, too, is the face of Dubrow’s model, Josie. His self-portrait is a dynamic confrontation with his own powers of concentration. Each of these paintings is touched with a beauty that does not come from paint alone. Likeness itself is of no particular interest. Only when it becomes a vehicle for some indwelling truth behind the features does it gain value. In short, when it becomes more than a picture. Dubrow has that quality of empathy that marks the divide between facile verisimilitude and great art.

When the pressures of picture-making supersede that empathy the result disappoints. Interior , a snapshot of riders in a subway car, is a dull painting, unrelieved even by the burst of pure yellow at its center. Prince and Broadway is laudable for its obvious competence and is certainly imposing. But it impresses in the way that heavy machinery does: by its sheer weight. Yet it seems a mechanical exercise. No mattress of paint can subdue the photo underneath. In both paintings, the initial snapshot rises to the surface as an irritant-like a pea beneath layers of featherbed in the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea. This is the danger of facility: it can distract an artist from his real gifts, leaving him a mechanic of his own style.

But these considerations pale beside the achievement on view in this exhibition.

There are two showstoppers here. One is a stunning panorama of Jerusalem, all yellows and greens in an infinite multiplicity of tones. The other-thematically adventurous and a challenge to art world pieties-is a biblical scene, Rephidim. Both are breathtaking. They cry for discussion, not as two disparate paintings but as works that exist in antiphonal relation to each other. Unaccountably, they are hung in separate rooms. Jerusalem is displayed as one cityscape among others. Rephidim is treated as an anomalous “religious painting.” Yet it is neither eccentric nor narrowly religious. It is, in essence, a history painting intimately bound to Dubrow’s paintings of Israel.

The title derives from Exodus which describes the battle between the tribes of Israel and the followers of Amalek. Grandson of Esau, who hated his brother Jacob and all his progeny, Amalek allied with other nations to attack the Israelites. A terrorist, he struck from the rear in surprise attack, assaulting the weakest trailing behind. (The battle site, Rephidim, is thought to be Wadi Refayed, some miles west of Mt. Sinai.)

According to the story, Moses watches the battle from a hill, with the rod-of-God in his hand . If he keeps his arms raised heavenward, Israel will prevail. If he lowers them, Amalek will rise. But Moses is aged and tired. Aaron and Hur bring him a rock to sit on and keep his hands steady until sunset. Joshua leads the Israelites to victory.

Dubrow’s imagining of the scene is incandescent in its loveliness. The canvas shimmers, quivering with the tension of the scene, the heat of the desert sun and the vitality-fury-of Dubrow’s painting methods. Light is as much the subject here as the biblical anecdote. Individual forms on which it falls are less important than the light itself. Details are more felt than seen. Outlines tremble. Small forms are subsumed into the impasto, intensifying the effect of radiant energy.

Dubrow adjusts his color chords with great delicacy. Sobriety of form is rendered in a riot of tonal subtlety. Meticulous adjustment of color to value, combined with the harmony of half-tones, lends poetry to an image that, in lesser hands, could sink into costume epic. Dubrow risked real peril with this painting. The hazard of historical narrative is only one of them.

Specific religious dimension is muted by omitting the rod from Moses’ grasp. But the attitude of supplication remains. To refer to the painting, as the catalogue does, in terms of Titian or Poussin is to muffle the impact, silence its meaning. This is not an occupational homage in the spirit of Uglow’s tributes to Poussin. Moses’ intercessory posture, an unmistakable prayer for victory, beckons to us from our own particular moment in history. As epilogue to Dubrow’s Israeli suite, Rephidim reverberates with assertions of Israel’s legitimacy and its people’s claim on Jerusalem. It also stands as a coded reminder of the comment, eloquent in the wake of 9/11: “We are all Israelis now.”

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