Black Mountain College and Its Legacy at Loretta Howard Gallery

September 15 to October 29, 2011
525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 695-0164

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

There are some sore omissions and unnecessary inclusions in this exhibition.  It’s hard to justify the absence of Jerry Van de Wiele, for instance, especially when Helen Frankenthaler, who was at Black Mountain for just a week visiting Clement Greenberg and hardly a part of the community, is represented.  Enticed by a letter from his friend the painter Jorge Fick (represented in the show by a selection of late works), Van de Wiele enrolled as a student in September 1954. When classes were suspended during the winter of 1955 he returned to The Art Institute in Chicago where he convinced two friends, Richard Bogart and John Chamberlain (the latter represented by later sculptures) to follow him back in the spring.

There are, however, amazing moments in this show that allow you to look across rooms and down hallways to draw associations, such as when Jack Tworkov’s hefty gestural painting Day Break (1953) is seen through the undulating stainless steel beams and cords of Snelson’s large Easter Monday (1977). Tworkov is also represented by two ink studies for House of the Sun, an important series of paintings the artist began at Black Mountain during the summer of 1952.

Upstairs hang three abstract paintings by Emerson Woelffer, invited to Black Mountain in 1949 at the request of Buckminster Fuller (represented by a large sculpture and two posthumous prints). A group of five collages by Ray Johnson hang next. Johnson was on campus from mid to late 1940s and studied with the likes of Albers, Bolotowski, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold, Motherwell, and Charles Olson. His collages, all done later, incorporate and at the same time upend the learning of these historic teachers.

While the College did offer classes in language, anthropology, and science, the arts remained the focus of the curriculum. An impressive selection of rare books by the Black Mountain Poets is assembled in a large vitrine on the second floor on loan from the collection of James Jaffe. The show provides first edition printings of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Jonathan Williams to name a few. Among the various publications sits the prospectus for the 1951 Summer Institute, which includes a terrific image of one of Black Mountain’s most remarkable dancers, Katherine Litz.

Photography was officially added to the curriculum in the fall of 1949. Hazel Larsen Archer was something of the resident photographer. Her images of a spiky-haired John Cage, a contemplative Willem de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham dancing in an open field (reprints of a few are included in the exhibition) are some of the most historic images of the school. She is credited, among other things, with giving Rauschenberg enough instruction with the camera to let him do with the instrument as he pleased. Archer, along with students in her class, decided to produce the magazine 5 Photographers, showcased here.  Aaron Siskind, a photographer particularly admired among the Abstract Expressionists, arrived in 1951 as faculty. Works from his North Carolina Series (1951) are on view, accompanied by works by Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan.

A highlight of the exhibition comes with the projection of footage of three early dances by Merce Cunningham:: Septet (1953), Antic Meet (1958) and Story (1963). It is captivating watching Cunningham dance his own choreography and while the footage has been available to Merce Cunningham Dance Company, enabling the company to recreate these historic pieces in detail, this is the first time the footage has been publicly shown. Septet was created during the summer of 1953, the year of the company’s official debut, and is one of the very few dances Cunningham set to music.

Story (1963) features sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, assembled using anything the artist could find outside the door of the theater. This work speaks to the great collaborations that took place at the College, including Cage’s Theater Piece #1 (1952). Created over lunch and performed later the same day, the piece features Cage, Charles Olson, and M.C. Richard reading from ladders while Rauschenberg plays records and Cunningham dances.

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy is an impressive show and a remarkable undertaking considering the many facets of this historic school.  Continuing a streak of themed shows at Loretta Howard that include last year’s Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974, the exhibition strives to make connections within the period, although sometimes lacking the tight editing necessary to make such associations more visible. The mystic Ruth Asawa is represented with a single work: an untitled looped wire sculpture from early 1950s hanging overhead. It would have been insightful to see one of Asawa’s later drawings as well in this context.  The exhibition, spread out over two floors, makes for a great treasure hunt, but it’s difficult to experience the true impact of the show in its totality. The catalogue is a bit of a disappointment with some annoying historical errors. Pat Passlof’s name is misspelled. for example, and she followed de Kooning to Black Mountain with the intent of studying with him not Mark Tobey, as recounted here. Chamberlain was never on faculty and was not  present during the summer of 1955.  Bios are included only for the most prominent artists, and poets are left out completely. Even Charles Olson, whose reputation at Black Mountain outstripped his 6’8” frame, isn’t featured. These problems need not detract from the abundance of historic materials, however, that make this a show not to be missed.

RELATED EVENTS / PROGRAMS:

A Black Mountain Poetry Reading
featuring Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and others. Wednesday October 19, 6-8PM

An afternoon with independent curator Jason Andrew, as he discusses his recent exhibition and publication: JACK TWORKOV: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. Mr. Andrew will discuss Tworkov, his arrival at Black Moutain College and his relationship with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, during one of the most historic summers in the history of the Black Mountain College. Saturday, October 22, 4:00PM

JASON ANDREW is the manager, curator and archivist for the Estate of Jack Tworkov whose recent projects include the publication Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, his independent collaborative projects with artists and dancers and others are presented through the Norte Maar company. He is also the co-owner of Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick featuring young talent and revisiting the work of established artists. He can be followed on twitter: jandrewARTS

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New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced that it now exclusively represents the estate of American Color Field painter Kenneth Noland.

Noland, who died in January 2010 of kidney cancer in his home in Port Clyde, Maine, was one of the best-known Color Field painters to emerge in the 1960s. Art critic Clement Greenberg championed Noland’s signature stripes and chevrons on unprimed canvas for their clarity and the energy of color.

Noland studied under Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was part of the generation of American artists that succeeded the Abstract Expressionists, which included Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.  Later in life, he developed great friendships with Anthony Caro, Paul Freeley and Jules Olitski, all of whom taught at Bennington College, VT.

The artist was honored in 1977 by a major retrospective which was shown first at the Guggenheim museum in New York and then traveled to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington DC, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash plan to mount its first solo exhibition of the artists work in 2011.  The gallery is located at 1018 Madison Avenue between East 78th and 79th Street and 534 West 26th Street in Chelsea.

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May 8 – Jun 27, 2008

By PIRI HALASZ

It was exhilarating and depressing to visit “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today,” at the Museum of Modern art this past spring. Exhilarating to see how crowded the galleries were, especially with younger people, all apparently eager to see a show about color. Depressing because the show itself was so limited. How many of these art-lovers, I asked myself, are going to come away thinking that this is all that color can do? How many of them are going to get to Leslie Feely Fine Art, where they can see how far beyond the paint pot it is possible for a real master to go?

MoMA’s show was predicated on the Duchampian assumption that mass-produced objects (whether bicycle wheels or commercially fabricated paints) are as good as, or better than, the work of a human hand. In the ‘60s, this outlook was voiced by Andy Warhol saying “I want to be a machine,” and Frank Stella’s “straight out of a can; it can’t get better than that.” I asked Kenneth Noland, who belongs to the same artistic generation as Warhol and Stella, whether the paintings in his show at Leslie Feely were made with paint straight out of the can. “Oh God no!” he exclaimed, going on to explain that not only did he have to mix paints to get the colors he wanted, but also depending on the way that the paint’s applied, different degrees of liquidity are needed as well.

None of the paintings at Leslie Feely scream color. They are part of the series of horizontal stripe paintings that Noland executed in the mid- to late-‘60s, but that series began with brilliant colors and modulated into paler ones. The paintings in this show are mostly later, paler ones. My initial impression was of exquisite elegance and delicacy, but after I stayed a while, the paintings began to get to me on a gut level, too, particularly because I studied them carefully, and tried to jot down the colors used.

“Shade” (1969), a very narrow picture, has some of the brighter colors in the show: chartreuse, yellow, apple green, deep red, rust, magenta, and bark. “Via Shimmer” (1968), one of the palest, is built around seven or eight shades of ecru, beige, pale mauve and palest blue. “Via Light” (1968), the most variegated, is a symphony of eleven different pale blues, aquas, yellows and creams.

Adding to complexity, the stripes are of varying widths, and the painted stripes are usually interspersed with narrow bands of raw canvas. The bands of raw canvas endow the surfaces with textural variety that softens and further humanizes them, gives them a chance to breathe. At the same time, Noland’s rigidly straight bands of color, created with the aid of masking tape and rollers, are very much of a piece with the post-painterly esthetics of the ‘60s. His work was included in MoMA’s big show of op art in 1965, “The Responsive Eye.”

The forms in Noland’s paintings are usually dismissed as mere devices to enable him to explore color, but the lines and shapes of these paintings have a basis in the natural world as well. As even a computer geek knows, a horizontal format suggests landscape (as opposed to portrait). Horizontal stripes add to the feelings of harmony and serenity that these paintings project, while titles like “Via Light” and “Via Shimmer” suggest Roman roads and air mail stickers, thus ideas of travel and motion and speed.

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“Markus Linnenbrink: The Beauty You Are”
Margaret Thatcher Projects until November 29
511 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-675-0222

“The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting”
Elsbeth Deser, Iva Gueorguieva, Frederick Hayes, Mark Takamichi Miller, Jennifer Riley
Triple Candie until November 23
461 W. 126th Street, between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues, 212-865-0783

Although, as Cézanne observed, there are no straight lines in nature, art and design more than make up for it. Still, it is surprising how late and inauspicious an entry stripes made into Western consciousness. As the French scholar Michel Pastoureau noted in “The Devil’s Cloth” (2001), when the Carmelites brought the pattern back from the Holy Land, stripes bewildered and infuriated people: The medieval eye was conditioned perceptually by figure-ground relationships. Stripes came to be viewed as diabolical.

In our own times, however, the stripe appeals to artists of a reductive bent precisely because of its ubiquity and standardization, the unostentatious way it sits upon the eye. (No room for the devil if there aren’t any details.) Three painters currently showing revisit stripes: Two – the German Markus Linnenbrink and the Bostonian Jennifer Riley – are relative youngsters, but Kenneth Noland is a grand master of the motif.

As ever with Mr. Noland, his exhibition at Ameringer Yohe of nine new canvases is in equal measure elegant and enigmatic. In his last show at the gallery, the artist revisited his trademark “target” format, first seen in the late 1950s. Now it is the turn of stripes, which became his idiom ten years later: emphatically horizontal bands of solid color, posited in radical chromatic relationships with one another.

Mr. Noland’s own rhetoric, and that of his formalist champions, speaks about optical hedonism. His style and achievement were pitted, historically, against the hard, cold, logic of the minimalists. But while this new show deploys sumptuous colors, ranging from the pumped-up synthetic to the shamelessly pretty and pastel, it is hard to get these paintings to work in the way one assumes they are supposed to. How is one to resist the banal conclusion that they are delightful graphic designs?

Scale helps. In their bid to envelop the gaze, these canvases are heroically horizontal. At least double-square, they sometimes stretch in width to more than three times their height. But getting the eye horizontal doesn’t mean these paintings have their wicked way with it. Bands of color are hardly more prone to blend on the retina than Seurat’s dots; they insist on their autonomy. At best, if stared at long enough, there’s a bit of optical buzz, but – to pursue the bedroom analogy – it is hardly as if the earth moves.

Mr. Noland’s paintings are “about” color relationships rather than actually embodying them: They are beautifully printed scores, not symphonies. This artist, who has suffered for his formalism, is actually not formalist enough. Revisiting his own high-modernist halcyon days at a time when *de rigeur* ironists are doing the same, Mr. Noland has become an inadvertent postmodernist.

***

I first became aware of Markus Linnenbrink at the Hammer in Los Angeles last spring, where a floor-to-ceiling mural filled the UCLA museum’s entrance. This stunningly audacious décor, “Myself Outside,” fused the yin and yang of painterly abstraction: the stripe and the drip. It was droll, canny, and felicitous in its balance of semiotics and sweetness.

Mr. Linnenbrink’s third solo show at Margaret Thatcher Projects, however, disappointed me. If only he could heed the classic modernist dictum that less is more; instead, the artist seems to be hedging his bets with a variety of strategies and confections. It is not that there aren’t winners on hand. In “Ladylove” (2003) strips of bright, colored, epoxy resin form a beaded surface, each strip artfully seeming to drip its way to a point. In “Zimmer in the Dead Sea” (2003), horizontal lines of epoxy, tentatively zigzagging and densely clustered (at places almost sandwiching), shimmer or dribble over faintly legible collage materials to intriguing effect.

It is the array of that ideas is unbecoming. Whether the artist means to show off, is unsure where to go, or is placing his disparate efforts in clever-clever (Richterian) quote marks is unclear. This market-stall act is decidedly gauche from an artist of such proven poise.

***

Jennifer Riley’s contribution to the stripe renaissance is to be found in an eclectic and bizarrely titled group exhibition at Triple Candie. “The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting,” is like the Harlem industrial space that hosts it: sprawling, rough at the edges, and quite a trip.

Ms. Riley, who is represented by three large canvases in this five person show, appears to be the only artist who can plausibly be described as abstract. It is also difficult to believe that abstraction is, or ever has been, “the” sentimental favorite. But so what? The true selection principle is that these are emerging artists with some reputation in their hometowns: New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, and, in Ms. Riley’s case, Boston.

It’s worth the detour, incidentally, for another painter in the show, the emphatically figural Mark Takamichi Miller, whose fast, thick, gooey action paintings read like family snapshots caught in atomic meltdown. In contrast to these gushing fountains of virtuosity, Ms. Riley’s sparse, introverted compositions reveal their quirky individualism as if by micro-irrigation. They pay a kind of warped homage to the earnest mystical abstraction of Agnes Martin, the Zen nun of stripes. Ms. Riley, however, is devoted to what are more like heraldic bars.

She is often symmetrical, but more in the breach than the observance. In “Multiflex” (2003), color schemes seem suspended between the random and the sensical. Typically of the artist, the eye is beckoned towards an ever-elusive logic. Ms. Riley’s subtle touch creates fluid, almost sinewy lines. Strangely flesh-toned, these can almost misread as stretched stockings (connecting with the funky Mr Takamichi Miller after all). It is as if by stealth this gentle subversive is claiming back – for nature, for the body – the hardest edge of abstraction.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 13, 2003.

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