Kimberly Venardos (1014 Madison Avenue at 78 Street, 212.879.5858)
April 22 to May 29, 2004

A version of this article appeared in the New York Sun, May 20, 2004

Lee Bontecou is back! Launched by Leo Castelli in the 1960s, she catapulted to international attention within a decade. The only woman in Castelli’s stable, she shared the fast track with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Limoucades lined up for Bontecou’s exhibitions until her last, in 1971. Then, abruptly, she turned and walked away. Her work has hardly been seen since.

Rumors flew around the motive for her legendary about-face: discontent with critical reception of her ’71 show; desire to avoid competition with her husband Bill Giles, a less known artist; unease with the gallery scene and its packaging machinery. However complex the reasons, she withdrew with husband and daughter to a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. But she kept on working. Throughout these 30 years, Bontecou maintained her studio routine and taught sculpture and ceramics at Brooklyn College two days a week.

The harvest of Bontecou’s chosen obscurity is on view now at Knoedler. Thirty-seven untitled drawings, spanning three decades, inaugurate her return to visibility. And what a stunning return it is. Her medium is different (predominantly pencil instead of canvas over welded metal armatures) and the imagery more varied; but her preoccupations are identical. So is her radial organizing structure. Almost every drawing spirals around a central darksome aperture, as ominous and enigmatic as the mark of Cain.

The anger of her early sculpture, forged in the era of the Cuban missile crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall, is gone. But the crucial sense of menace persists. While the circumstances of ’60s rage have passed, our own era brings new dreads. Bontecou’s imagery is as fresh today as it was forty years ago.

In the gallery, the first things that seize you are the intelligence and rigor of her invented iconography, counterpoised with the luminous refinement of her touch. Looking into these delicate, intricate forms, it is hard to believe they come from the same hand that wields an acetylene torch with such ferocious intent. Number 4, a graphite drawing from 1962, is quintessential Bontecou: a closeup of her characteristic chasm with its surrounding membranes, an intimation of obscure engulfing forces.

Number 5 explores the same central concavity. Blackened and velvety with soot, it first suggests a piece of architecture, a rotunda, perhaps, or an observatory. But the delineated structure turns in on itself and becomes simultaneously a gaping vortex. Between the sensitivity of the rendering and the oscillating spatial illusion, the image is hypnotic.

Bewitchment is everywhere. A number of casein, pastel or pencil drawings from the 1980s nestle centripetal force in wave-like shapes that arch and flow with the expressive precision of Hokusai. Yet at the center of each spins the ineluctable helix that pulls everything into itself, swallowing energy and generating it at the same time.

Forbidding cavities are constants in her work. Only the allusions shift, from the zoömorphic and botanical to the astronomical and visionary. Science fiction types will swear they have met these interstellar bodies before: on Ursula le Guin’s 4th planet of Altair or in the somber interstices of Philip Dick’s mind. Gentler imaginations can find flowers, eclipses, insects eyes, cloud or landscape forms. Art history buffs will spot Surrealist forebears.

What holds this suggestive fecundity together, making it recognizably and immutably hers, is the ethereal grace of her pencil and the particularity of her inventions. These are precise, dimensional and rational images in service of a logic that defies all categorization. Bontecou’s genius outwits nomenclature and taxonomic pigeonholes.

Throughout the ’60’s, ideologues of the Women’s Art movement joined vulgar Freudians in trying to claim her imagery for themselves. References to “vagina dentata” abounded. Sophisticates quoted French essayist George Bataille’s “solar anus.” Early on, Dore Ashton tried to bring sanity to the classification game by rejecting all sexual analogies. In a ’62 essay, she insisted that Bontecou’s signature cavities were most plausible as signs of destruction, like the barrel of a gun. Elizabeth A.T. Smith, curator at MOCA, Los Angeles, and original organizer of this exhibition, quotes poet John Ashberry’s dismissal of critical fixations on sexuality: “It is hard to feel very erotic about something that looks like the inside of a very old and broken-down-air-conditioning unit.”

The sex-death-and-degradation crowd that claims descent from Bontecou’s work will have to revise their bios after this exhibition. It swats them like flies on the verandah.

In its entirety, the work bears witness to that disinterested commitment to a chosen course, without regard to market trends, that is an artist’s decisive evidence (as an artist [ITALICS]) of moral conviction. Bontecou has set her own standards and stayed faithful to them. Her reemergence brings with it an unintended rebuke to the circus of contemporary image mongering.

This exhibition is adjunct to a full-scale retrospective of her work that opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and is on its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Queens this summer. I am counting the weeks. The last time I saw one of Bontecou’s wall reliefs, it was tucked along a corridor in the acoustic-tiled basement of Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate. Any day now, a member of the clan should be moving it upstairs to a more prominent position.

Secluded treasure of another kind is on the walls at Kimberly Venardos. Sarah Austin is a name few people outside the museum world have heard of. Her father was Chuck Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944 and one of the twentieth centuries most progressive museum administrators. Young Sarah inhabited the whirl of her father’s enthusiasms: from Italian baroque painting to Cubism, Surrealism and Modernism in all its manifestations, including music, movies, photography and dance.

Austin inherited her father’s passions and his flair for presentation. She spent a life creating sophisticated, witty, frequently motorized Cornellian shadow boxes, each one a retable for the patron saints of twentieth century art. Artists, composers, writers and auteurs appear in contexts intuitively evocative of their own creations: Picasso, Ersnt, Mondrian, James Joyce, Ingmar Bergman, Braque, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollack, others. Duchamp, for example, is glimpsed through a tiny version of his own miniature French window of 1920, “Fresh Window.” Within, a sequential, staccato image of him descends a staircase, miming his celebrated nude in the 1913 Armory Show.

Duchamp, for example, is glimpsed through a tiny version of his own miniature French window of 1920, “Fresh Window.” Within, a sequential, staccato image of him descends a staircase, miming his celebrated nude in the 1913 Armory Show. In another construction, a photograph of Duchamp at a chess board appears behind actual chess pieces. The image is splintered, distorted by the glass bricks through which it is viewed. Another “explosion in a shingle factory.”

Austin had the resources and connections to make the boxes public but refused. She neither spoke nor wrote about her constructions, a secret museum expanding with the years. An exceedingly private woman, she cloistered her work, not permitting it to be exhibited until three years before her death in 1994. If only this gifted woman had been less modest. It is a wonder we have this exhibition at all. The work is a virtuoso’s delight that has waited too long for an audience. It deserves to be seen.

The post Lee Bontecou: Drawings from 1958 to 1999 and Sarah G. Austin: Assemblages appeared first on artcritical.

Lovers: The Drawings of Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika, 1968-69
Lori Bookstein Frine Art

Andrea Morganstern: Nature’s Pulse
Kimberly Venardos & Co.
1014 Madison Avenue at 78 Street, New York. Tel: 212.879.5858

A version of this review appeared in The New York Sun, February 26, 2004

Wendy Mark, an accomplished print maker, finesses several themes. But it is her near-miniature landscape variations, dominating this exhibition, that best fulfill her stated ambition to express a body of inherited forms in contemporary terms. With contemporaneity a swollen currency, Mark’s conversation with past masters broadens her emotional range and achieves a certain eloquence.

Mark bypasses the disorder of nature to seek motifs in the formal vocabulary of the great names in landscape painting. With a cheerful kleptomania, she excerpts motifs from the history of landscape-a veil of atmosphere, the color and movement of clouds, the weight of skies or volume of a tree-making imaginative reconstructions from the models provided by the masters. She also nods to Wayne Thiebaud, who holds a patent on the candy-puff clouds that Mark adopts on occasion.

Out of Mark’s paraphrases from tradition emerges a beau ideal of the natural world presented with a modern directness and simplicity. Self-conscious titles (e.g. A Place to Take Off From, Where He Was in August) signal that these are products of the studio, not natural vistas. In their seeming specificity, they achieve in litho ink what poet Marianne Moore sought with words: the creation of “imaginary gardens with real frogs in them.”

Look carefully at Halfway Over, 2000. In a print under 6 inches square, Mark suggests a convincing bank of considerable expanse, all its varied vegetation and the sky above. An animated, improvised surface, stippled and wiped, yields an optical charm that is all the more appealing for its informality. Reminiscent of the textures and tonalities of Degas’ late monoprints, this is Mark’s technique at its loveliest. All else on view can be judged against this singular gem. And with one solitary exception, every thing succeeds in holding its own.

That exception is the display of 3 sets of cubes, similar to children’s box puzzles. Each side is covered with an image clipped from discarded prints and set under Plexiglas. These are playful but slight, substituting cuteness for pictorial interest. Mark serves herself best with work that makes no apology for a refined sensibility.

In 1968, Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika drew from the figure together, sharing models in a Washington Square studio. Thirty five years later, the result of those sessions is on the wall in an instructive pairing.

In Resika we see an ebullient, sensuous colorist contending with the austerities of line and the discipline of anatomy. His sketches leave an impression of things glimpsed over the artist’s shoulder, rehearsals that at the time of their making were not intended for an audience.

Beck’s drawings, the anchor of this ensemble, are beautiful. Bearing the stamp of Cezanne in their hatchings and broken contours, their communicative value is wholly personal. They convey the volumes and expressive rhythm of the human body with distinctive grace and tenderness.

Beck was a deft draughtsman, unintimidated by the heightened challenge of figures in pairs. She made effective use of shadows to unify separate masses and create spatial veracity. With a gift for abstracting from bodily facts, she handled the demands of male musculature with the same transforming ease she brought to the arabesques of the female body. In an era of dreary eroticism, her drawings make creditable John Donne’s sweet cry: “Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee.”

Andrea Morganstern is a painter in search of a subject. She creates delicate surfaces that appear to exist for their own sake regardless of the motif. Love of surface drives the picture, instead of the other way around. Her images are distilled from nature-bamboo shoots, birds or, most recently, a tracery of jagged, lightening-like forms-but with little of the natural left in them.

Tender oil glazes, applied one over the other, appear to have been breathed onto the canvas. The mark of a brush is barely visible. Desert Pulse, 2003, is indicative of her approach. Here, an undulating rhythm of pale cadmium and yellow ochres combine to suggest the heat and movement of sand on a desert floor. It is evocative, not realistic. Any illusion of reality is shattered by the web of pale viridian cracklings that migrate across the picture plane unlike anything in nature. These are patterns decorating a surface still waiting for a purpose to support.

Artic Cascade, 2003, is the most successful of the series. Red-black veining is perfectly pitched in width, extra-fine so that the drawing of it does not call attention to itself as something applied on top. It appears, instead, as if the dappled canvas had been splintered by some inner force. The illusion of fissure lends needed strength to the gentle play of blues and violets of the ground.

Morganstern possesses a sensibility more at home in a monastic scriptorum than on the modernist battlefield. Like several artists in Kimberly Vernardos’ stable, she seems a manuscript illuminator deprived of a text. Artists with a sense of humor can turn that deprivation on its head and pull whimsy from it. But Morganstern turns inward to make a sacred text out of some vague spirituality culled from Eastern philosophy.

Less concentration on Vedantic practices and a deeper love for the visual world-and its great interpreters-would give this artist the focus on which all possibility of emotional depth depends.

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