Nov. 3, 2011 to January 14, 2012 (now by appointment only)
19 East 70 Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 794-0550

The elusive Little People who notionally build the tiny dwellings and inhabit the miniature landscapes made by Charles Simonds have had to endure everything from heedless vehicles to curious children demolishing their abodes in broken curbs and abandoned buildings in the forty-some years since the artist began to “follow” their migration through SoHo and the Lower East Side. Recently they faced a new challenge uptown, in the sudden collapse of the 165-year-old Knoedler & Company, where Simonds’s most recent work was shown, just a month after the show opened.

The exhibition was organized mainly in two galleries. In the smaller one were two porcelain sculptures, technical tours de force made nearly twenty years apart at the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, that are striking departures for Simonds. Tumbleweed (1993) is a realistic, impossibly intricate rendering of the plant that detaches itself from its root when it is mature and dry, rendered ghostlike here in the porcelain’s pure white unreflective finish. Unlike Tumbleweed, stubbornly turned in on itself, ready at any moment to roll away to parts unknown, Life, with Thorns, completed in 2011, reaches outward threateningly with its spiked stems, commanding the space around it. The earlier work, emblematic of rootlessness and desolation, and the later one, recalling traditional depictions of the Crown of Thorns, are like a two-sided portrait of the artist as existential prophet: rootless, peripatetic, and yet in the end defiantly messianic and even darkly judgmental.

Despite the fantasy and miniature scale of Simonds’s work, the messages they convey are far from comforting or child-friendly, as shown by two new tabletop pieces in this gallery, which recall his earliest work. Ruined Blossoms (2011) displays three plantlike miniature brick structures, seemingly in successive stages of growth. The smaller “juvenile” brick plants seem to have been aborted in some way—dead of thirst perhaps or crushed by an outside force. A third “mature” brick plant apparently has survived: two tower-stalks remain erect, though the remaining ones wilt or are prone on the desert-like surface of the piece. Growing morphs into building—a basic paradigm of Simonds’s work—in Grown Walls (2011), which relates as well to the cycle of life in depicting an androgynous male-female form in the middle of a landscape that grows outward in successive rings, initially circular but becoming rectilinear as they approach the limits of their compact clay realm.

The larger rear gallery was devoted to flying, twisting landscapes, hanging from the ceiling or projecting from walls, that embody the twin themes of building and growing—male and female principles, respectively, that in some works can be teased apart, but in others are folded or collapsed onto each other. In addition there were a pair of wall-mounted “smears,” excretory swipes of hardened clay that speak to “body function issues,” as Simonds delicately put it. Each is a captured primal gesture in his primary medium, clay. More than a medium, clay has, as Arthur Danto points out in a thoughtful catalogue essay for this show, a “primordial nature,” and one has long noticed a Golem-like aspect to Simonds’s work, a conjuring of larger-than-life beings out of base clay. The question becomes, as Simonds put it in an email message that informed the venerable philosopher’s essay, “Where do ‘will’ and imagination meet material (material reality, meant physically and ‘philosophically’)?”

As if in response, an expressionistically rendered hanging sculpture, Mental Earth (2002), captures the collision of psychic experience and actuality at the core of the art and, one imagines, the psyche of this son of a couple who were Vienna-trained doctors and psychoanalysts. The ambitious, “post-analytic,” tortured figure, a “smear” more than ten feet across, looks to this viewer like an inside-out rendering of the self, flayed and monumentalized. A serpentlike “head” at one end (or so one imagines it) and a coiling tail with shit-brown coloring at its other end—and less extravagant extrusions also projecting from the core of twisty rock supporting the work—appear to represent a kind of roiling id, whose miniature brick structures twist and curl in sync with the spiraling, seething rock to which they cling.

Four works flanked Mental Earth like courtiers, providing the best viewpoints of the large piece. Moving around them, one felt like a visitor in a virtual helicopter, cruising past impossibly lofty and inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Two Streams (2011) is a wall-mounted piece mostly made from squared-up granitic forms on which are perched seemingly abandoned miniature dwellings, reminiscent of ancient ruins like those in the American Southwest. The streams of the title are tongue-like forms snaking across and beyond the site, implying an extensive unseen landscape.

Arabesque and Twist, both 2011, are more fantastic pieces, both projecting from the wall in alternating clays of gray and orange (roughly the color of burnt sienna pigment), which are Simonds’s basic palette. Arabesque terminates in a set of towers, torquing wildly, as if seen through a distorting lens. In Twist, the most overtly phallic of the wall-mounted pieces, an erect projection grows from a cracked, clifflike “parent,” smooth orange forms developing brick-textured “skin,” maturing into gray, and terminating in a wizened but still vital tip.

The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.

“Orphanness” is the term Simonds himself has used to describe his existential stance, while “finding his way home” is the impulse that drives him and, presumably, the restless, elusive Little People. A tale has survived of a Taoist at court in the ninth century who longed to go home but the Emperor would not allow it. In the palace there was a miniature landscape, representing the three mountains on the sea. “Unless one is immortal, one could never enter that region,” said the Emperor, pointing.

“The mountains are only a foot high,” laughed the Taoist. “I am weak but I will try to inspect it for Your Majesty.” * At that, he leaped into the air, became smaller and smaller, and disappeared into the little world, never to be seen again.

* Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 p. 85)

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September 15 to October 21, 2011
19 East 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 794-0550

On Cape Cod there is a bay that faces directly into the setting sun during the summer months. When the tide is low one can count up to seventeen sandbars before seeing the water’s edge more than half of a mile off shore. It’s a mind-bogglingly seductive scene. As the sun sets, the water trapped in between the long thin bars begin to shimmer, glow and turn hot orange, red and magenta, ringed with opalescent greens and blues. The sand bars go from reddish dirty blond to deep eggplant. The shore is lined with a cast of locals and tourists, many sitting on the dunes or posing for snapshots. When the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon, a din of clapping and whoo-hooing is heard followed shortly by the irregular hum of engines starting up to take the spectators home.

But for Graham Nickson, this is the time when the colors are the most intense. He knows to stay and look. He knows also the challenge of such a moment and of such a theme.

In the aptly titled exhibition, Paths of the Sun, Nickson demonstrates his capture of the transitory in a forty-year sampling of over 40 bedazzling paintings and watercolors of sunrise and sunset.

There are examples of the small paintings in hand painted frames from 1972-74 made during time spent in Rome, when he initially adopted this time-worn theme and aimed at making a fresh interpretation of it.  These small format works articulate a certain conception of light and a synthesis of abstraction and figuration that resulted in images that Nickson to this day continues to explore. The gemlike quality of these small-format works is emphasized by the wide, flat, profiled frames, which also underscore the individuality of each image. They link, in my mind, to the experience of finding small treasures in dimly lit churches.

A group of watercolors, installed in a grid, conveys Nickson’s idea of painting the same tree as a foil to sunrises and sunsets. These are characterized by large, interlocking areas of brightly colored wash with hatched lines that become, bush, tree, branch and so on. They represent some of Nickson’s most extra sensory visions of the forces of nature upon his subject.  Each is an animated world of its own, recalling the watercolors of Charles Burchfield and the newest large-scale paintings of Per Kirkeby, to be seen a few blocks away at Michael Werner Gallery. A second group of figureless watercolor landscapes of sunrise or sunset mesmerize with pulsating orbs and bands of rich color.

But three monumental paintings anchor and at the same time steal the show.  They make me want for more, not because they are deficient in any way, but becuase they are so full of so much that is absent in a great deal of painting today.  A deep pleasure in viewing Nickson’s work is being able to discern the direct, straightforward use of the medium. To see the hand at work, to feel the effect of the choice of the oversized canvas, to be brought along as a viewer as if participating in the spectacle of this work: these are seldom achieved by anyone in today’s climate of immersive, overwhelming spectacle.

The theatricality of sharp contrasting colors of red, orange, pink, deep blue, gray and violet in Traveler; Red Sky (2002), as well as in Red Lightening (2008-10) creates powerful epic images.  Although these paintings produced a lingering emotional reaction, the most recent of the three, Tree of Birds (2009-11), is the most challenging for its seemingly effortless combination and arrangement of both representational and abstract elements.

The scene, a tree of birds before a massive volcano within a mountain chain, is painted in shades of blue, grey, and violet, off-set by areas of light yellows and greens. A patchwork of interlocking clouds fill the sky, drop in front of mountains and cast shadow shapes upon fields below. There is a funky-chunkiness to these slightly comic, awkward forms as well as a remarkable compression between the foreground, middle ground and background. Shapes belonging to the background are pulled to the front of the picture plane and vice versa. Clusters of pale color are geometrically deployed in subtle triangulation that interestingly brings emphasis to the volcano peak. Here, we find a small, white shape, just like the pale lavender one to its right, which, surprisingly, is a bird in flight and not a cloud. One can imagine being in this scene and yet the painting conveys the immensity and mystery that we know of and experience but can never fully capture.

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One favored interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is that content in many of their paintings actually overrides form.  This suggests that the emotional, pent-up angst raging through the subterranean reaches of the American mindset following the Second World War was a primary motivation for the generation of painters associated with this movement.  Even so, the claims made for extreme content hold reservations depending of whether one subscribes to Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting” or to the aesthetic formalism advocated by Clement Greenberg.  A further distinction, heralded by Barbara Rose, clearly separated “action painting” from the reaches of “chromatic abstraction” – namely in the paintings of Rothko and Newman.  Clyfford Still belonged to neither group, according to Rose, but offered a synthesis between the action gesture and a built-up color field.  The youthful Michael Goldberg – considered by many as a “second generation” abstract expressionist along with his close colleagues, Norman Bluhm and Joan Mitchell – also tended to favor a hybrid approachbut with one critically important exception:  In Goldberg, the rejection of European taste and pictorial composition became the perquisite whereby extreme content could evolve, thus allowing his entry into an untamed territory that the  uptight Still would never dare to tread.

To observe – indeed to experience – Goldberg’s Red Paintings (1962-63) currently on view at Knoedler is scarcely a neutral affair.  Given their extraordinary force and paradoxical restraint, these paintings represent the kind of psychic change that distinguishes the fifties from the sixties. These interior signs made manifest reveal the staggering undercurrent of a heightened cultural transition in full throttle.  In the Red Paintings we sense the American geist entering a new threshold of consciousness from the depths of political denial and sexual repression in the decade of Eisenhower to a new form of exhilaration truly on the edge of life, exemplified by Kennedy.  To approach these paintings in terms of a hyper-formalist aura is almost beside the point, yet equally necessary to place these remarkable paintings into the history to which they belong. Clearly the black, brown, and white lines painted against fields of sanguine raw sienna in virtually all the 1962 paintings mark these spaces with an indelible primal accuracy. In Dear Wo, for example, a diagonal band emerges from the bottom edge ending below the space of a broken “L” that descends from the top.  Instead of a constructivist emblem, we are given an immediate tension, an intuitive leap that recharges the surface, thus transforming it into an energy field.  A similar effect is present in the logotypical Untitled ( a detail is shown on the catalog cover).  Here a linear flare of titanium pulsates across the upper reaches of a vast sanguine space, halting short of the right edge.  Roughly parallel to the white line, a trace of smudged umber runs below it. In a related painting, Sam Wells, this configuration is repeated, but in a vertical format. Here the umber is more defined in the shape of a menhir and is lightened with a touch of ochre and white where it resides to the left of a descending while line.

Having known Goldberg for more than twenty years, I became aware of his infinite love of jazz and poetry.  Poets from the earlier New York School, such as Frank O’Hara (who was also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art), the Beat itinerant Gregory Corso, and later, David Shapiro, were all close to Goldberg and inspired by his work. Goldberg was a man of his own choosing.  He liked who he liked and disliked the rest, regardless of their positions or their pedigree.  Mike had an elegant mind.  He was a true connoisseur, and often cursed a blue streak when he became impatient with art world banter that stood in the way of art. Many of his friends remember the fantastic dinners with Mike and his wife, the sculptor Lynn Umlauf, in the former studio of Rothko, and the excitement that filled the air whenever painting became the subject of conversation. I can hear the cursing with every stroke in the Red Paintings.  His life was embodied in his work.

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Milton Avery (1885-1965) is celebrated primarily for reductive landscapes of flattened, simplified space and elements, coming into his signature style in the late 1940s. Less attention has been given to his early career, which the recent exhibition at Knoedler and Company focused on Avery’s industrial scenes of the 1930s.

If nature was his springboard, as Avery once famously declared, then in this body of work nature is also the lens through which he experienced the city. His treatment of the machine age is paradoxical in many of these paintings. Architecture and bridges suggest organic structures and appendages for what is clearly humanmade and mechanically assembled. The Blue Bridge (ca. 1930), for example, twists and twitches in ways that, severally, recall a root system, insect limbs or bulbous stems; the bridge morphed into these suggestive forms from a more realistic gouache study.

Going against the Precisionist grain of Léger, Scheeler and Demuth who in various ways found mimetic equivalents of the technology they depicted, Avery wistfully and almost mournfully placed nature and the natural order as supreme, a theme that anticipates his later development. These pictures exude a foreboding, deeply gloomy atmosphere in a dismal reaction to industrialization. In the brooding Country Railyards (ca. 1930s) Avery ironically depicts these booming rail intersections under a veil of darkness and absent of people and trains. These depopulated scenes also recall Giorgio de Chirico’s mysterious desolation and solitude. The drab palette in New England Industry (ca. 1930s) suggests a consciousness of imminent environmental damage.

Although the work in this show is not as flat or minimal as his characteristic later work, such as his oceanscapes, the editing of detail and flattening of planes as well as the compressions and distortions of space are all there already. The wavering and overlapping buildings in works like Tugboats in Harbor (ca.1930) and City Harbor (ca. 1930) strikingly anticipate Philip Guston’s late paintings (especially in the muddled pink palette of City Harbor). Remarkable similarities between Avery and Guston are further evident in Drawbridge (1932) in which the tugboats have an anthropomorphic, cartoon-like quality. In this sense, one may also trace Avery’s animate urban landscapes through the individualistic animism of Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings.

“Industrial Revelations” presents not only Avery’s lesser known work but also a perspective on the city that stands in contrast to prevalent views such as the Precisionist’s celebration of the machine and Edward Hopper’s romantic elevation of the everyday. These cityscapes are intensely personal and historical records, yet they also ring true in relation to current New York urban planning. As warehouses are swallowed by residential development and the trucking industry has all but replaced the railroads, Avery’s scenes become meditations for the loss of industry on American soil.

Greg Lindquist is a painter and contributing editor at artcritical.com. He received the Sally and Milton Avery Foundation grant to attend Art Omi International Residency last summer.

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“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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“Frankenthaler at Eighty” is a richly rewarding experience. What I got from it was not raw feeling but what some call “the esthetic emotion;” and what Susanne Langer has equated to “exhilaration.” The artist who would evoke it can’t simply pour paint onto canvas. First, she must learn to combine discipline with devotion. Frankenthaler has.

In the early 1950s, when she was going around with Clement Greenberg, the two cased Manhattan galleries together, seeing everything from Pollock to Sir Alfred Munnings, the British horse painter. They’d get a catalogue of each show, and grade the paintings in it. One check meant they liked it, two meant they really liked it, three checks was “wow!” Then they’d try to analyze why some paintings “worked” better than others.

During this period, Frankenthaler painted “Mountains and Sea” (1952), the famous painting that bridged the gap between Pollock and the future. Many of her contemporaries were imitating the more traditional brushwork of de Kooning, but she took Pollock’s black “stain paintings” of 1951, thinned her paint still farther, and swabbed it onto a swathe of canvas, inspiring Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Frankenthaler’s own painting continued to develop into a highly personal but diverse idiom. Its range can be seen in the current show, curated by Karen Wilkin: included are just nine paintings from the artist’s personal collection.

Only one of the nine got no checkmarks from me: Rake’s Progress (1991) is a noble experiment that just doesn’t come off. Still, an artist has to take risks if she is to renew her art, and Frankenthaler deserves marks for daring to paint a postmodernist picture (alas, I‘m an incorrigible modernist). I also felt that Sphinx (1975) is not quite up to the standard set by other paintings here, though I liked it well enough to give it one check. Its large, soft, succulent central areas of peach and tan, garnished with touches of crimson, are very satisfying, but I felt vaguely let down by how one side was covered with greige and the other left bare. Aerie(1995), a painting of greater stature, suffers from its context. Its sprightly linear pattern of red arches and a blue wave across the bottom of the paper is delightful, and would dominate an exhibition all of work on paper. Here, every other painting is on canvas, and the way paint sinks more into canvas leaves Aerie looking by comparison a bit dry.

On the other hand, Western Dream (1957), Snow Basin (1990), and Warming Trend (2002) are all excellent, rating two, maybe two-and-a-half checks. Western Dream is incredibly complex, invigorating and ambitious, with many smaller shapes—in soft, romantic pinks or light reds, blues from light to darker, brownish olive, gray—natural but also cultural (suggesting flowers and plants but also fine synthetic fabrics). Maybe just a tiny bit too much is going on here (the artist was only twenty-eight when she made it). Snow Basin is a horizontal picture with bands of pale colors, partially blotted out by masses of white. Parts of the paint surface are raised, but more effectively than in Rake’s Progress (the paint is opaque, not shiny). If you look at this painting long enough, you’ll feel yourself dizzied by its dazzling whiteness. Warming Trend also becomes very moving upon long contemplation. Its nearly monochromatic dark blue with purple highlights reminds me of late Rothko.

The three greatest paintings in this show are A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981),Provincetown I (1961) and Pink Lady (1963). Not only are all three “wows” in themselves, but together they show Frankenthaler’s range.

A Green Thought is named after a passage in “The Garden” by the 17th-century Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell.  The painting’s sumptuous green field suggests a garden, especially as embellished with floating dabs and flecks of flower-like reds, mustard, white, blue, deeper green and pink—but its overall-ness endows it with a second, formal dimension, echoing but also embroidering upon Pollock’s classic “drip” paintings.

Provincetown is even better. I’d give it four checks instead of three, for its extraordinary dynamism and balance, with the vehemently but cleanly delineated pink-and-brown square surrounding a central blue-and-brown image set high upon the canvas. This height cows the viewer while she contemplates the savagely but gracefully pinioned bird-like or Crucifixion shape in the center. Like all true abstractions, Provincetown is ambiguous, reflecting many different sources in the external world but committing itself to none.

Still more alive with energy is Pink Lady, another four check painting, though it abandons mean, clean lines in favor of seething but still serene clouds of color. A “pink lady” is a cocktail made with gin, Grenadine, cream and egg white—the gin packs a punch masked by the more ladylike ingredients. The punch in this painting lies in how its image, suggesting (among much else) an orchid and a human heart, boils upward and outward, from its slate-blue core through the billowing peach and fuchsia of its sides to the splattering blast of blue and reds at the top.

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Catherine Murphy’s first show with Knoedler & Company finds the veteran realist at her most compelling, though — as ever — her work is compellingly odd rather than compellingly beautiful.

She is a tough painter to enjoy but her unflinching, emotionally neutral realism is extraordinary for the level of its attentiveness. She has a fascinated gaze whose focus is both micro- and macroscopic, dealing with both minute details and broad philosophical issues about perception and aesthetic value in ways that are inexhaustable.

A sense of compulsion trumping pleasure in the response to Ms. Murphy seems to correlate with what you sense must have been the experience of the making. She is an utterly fastidious, acute, and astute realist who never looses track of the essential artifice of her project in rendering complex visual data with deceptively simple pictorial verisimilitude.

The motifs of her seven paintings and four drawings are diverse to the point of perversity, suggesting the kind of mind drawn less to things than problems. What is consistent across these images is the sense of a fanatical empiricist picking quarrels with the perceived world.

Her subjects include a striped comforter with a sleeper, his or her head just glimpsed at the top of the composition and rumpling the fabric’s closeknit stripes; Christmas lights oozing their glow into a night sky; a squirrel keeping watch over winter branches; blankets hanging on the line to dry, with snippets of picnickers again barely spied between them; a mirror held up to a bird in a tree; corners of fashion plate illustrations pinned to a girl’s bedroom wall; a crucifix suspended within a woman’s ample cleavage; a pie in the oven; a split log; shelled pistachio nuts and their shells in separate piles on an unfolded napkin.

Each subject is a challenge to maker and viewer alike, to see how deeply into the perceived they are willing to go, to think of the implications of this texture, that perspective, this duration, that light.

Sometimes, Ms. Murphy seems intent on setting up conditions for abstraction precisely in order, however, not [end italic] to capitulate to it. “Comforter” (2007) and “Blankets” (2006) tease out schematic possibilities — the stripes of the first, the color field, or (literally) floating lozenges of saturated color in the second. There is a game being played here with art history, with nods to Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland in “Comforter” and Mark Rothko in “Blankets.” But to keep up her end of this stylistic duel of observation versus decoration, attention to the perceived world outweighs absorption in painterly activity. It is in these two images that the glimpses of human presence are discreetly intimated beneath or behind. The stripes are a mind-boggling feat of close reading as they acknowledge various creases and follow the sleeper’s curves. The dappled surfaces of the blankets have what seem at first like arbitrary patches of texture but then register as either the reflections of foliage, or foliage penetrating the blankets as they catch the sun.

The artist’s paint handling is possibly the weirdest aspect of her work because it belligerently steers a resolute course between painterly exuberance and mechanical observation. She is not a photorealist, imitating the exactitude of a camera or rendering the coldness of a photographic print. But equally, she is unconcerned with the life of paint, in creating tactile equivalencies for the sensations of sight.

The real enigma of her treatment of the perceived world, however, is that for all that she is neither hyperrealistic nor impressionistic, nor is she so remote from her own facture as to achieve — or seem to want to achieve — total verisimilitude. The Greeks had a concept of ekphrasis, of such extreme realism that, in a famous example, cherries were so perfectly rendered that birds were fooled into pecking at them. With Ms. Murphy, you always know that it is paint- you are not lured into a trompe l’oeil state of suspended belief. Her realism is deadpan but handmade.

“Pendant” (2005) could almost be read as a manifesto of this middle road — all the more so for being so provocatively symmetrical a composition, and for teasing out theological implications — the “word made flesh.” The wearer’s breasts are viewed head-on (so to speak) while the cruficix is balanced between them, its nave casting a shadow between those of the breasts themselves. The arms of the cross ever so gently dent the smooth, tanned flesh that hold it in place. Christ’s arms then cast a wishbone shadow that follows the contours of the cleavage behind. The crucifix floats abstractly, yet from a pictorial perspective, quite credibly, popping out to the viewer’s necessarily voyeuristic gaze. The gold of the Christ figure’s artifice contrasts with the fleshliness of the woman’s body, her veins intimating palpable volume. The white dress caught in the corners of the composition adds a third texture to this trinity of metal, flesh, fabric.

The drawings take Ms. Murphy and her viewers into an even deeper level of sheer depictive obsession. Her graphite has such minute yet specific marks (pin pricks of highly sharpened pencils) that it achieves an otherwordly surface in which you feel the material has been breathed onto the page rather than applied with any intentional force. There is something of the exalted monomania of an old banknote engraver about these images, also recalling the fastidious touch of Vija Celmins.

The drawings have an incredible totality of coverage combined with restraint of markmaking. They are intimidating tours de force. She chooses subjects for herself like a split tree trunk whose innards are exposed, while deep foliage is spied in the narrow gap between these two halves. The level of detail requiring attention in this choice of motif makes you fear for the artist’s sanity. In fact, they recall a level of detail rarely seen since the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, who ended his life in an asylum.

But this astoundingly skillful, perplexing exhibition raises enough questions about representation and perception to leave little doubt about the wisdom and togetherness of this remarkable artist.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 5, 2008 under the heading “Catherine Murphy, Sneaking Glimpses of the Perceived World”

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RICHARD POUSETTE-DART: DRAWING – FORM IS A VERB
Knoedler & Company until March 8
19 East 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212 794 0550

Alan Saret was an important figure in the post-minimal art movement of the late 1960s who subsequently dropped out of the art scene. He is best known for mesh sculptures in chicken wire and similar materials that create dense yet airy, amorphous forms, and are often suspended.

Mr. Saret has been coaxed back into view in recent years: James Cohan Gallery, for example, staged a show of privately held early works in 2004. Now the Drawing Center has organized a show of 31 drawings, dating from between 1967 and 2002, and a pair of sculptures.

These drawings, which comprise a majority of his graphic output, belong to a series the artist calls his “gang drawings,” so named because the marks are generated by a fistful of colored pencils wielded as a single drawing implement. The clusters of marks then ensue can bear an obvious formal relationship to his sculptures, but are not to be construed as preparatory for the sculptures, or even necessarily sculptural.

Working this way can give rise to an instructive tension between individual, signifying marks and generalized texture. There is, however, considerable variety on this score from one drawing to the next. “The Great Hair Lock Ensoulment” (1968) presents a sharp, crisp formation of lines in echelon that will bring to mind the postwar School of Paris painter Hans Hartung. “Ensoulment of the Kings of Eart of All Ages” (1970) on the other hand, while also presenting a concentrated mass of line at the center of a large (two by three foot) sheet, opts for various softer kinds of line, some mushy and impressionistic, others spindly and tenderly feeble.

The defining formal characteristic of Mr. Saret’s aesthetic, then, is a dualism of looseness and definition. This equally relates to his wire sculptures that have literal presence but at the same time defy their own physicality to generate trancendent, suggestive meanings.  Mr. Saret’s outlook reflects the influences of his formative years. As a counter-cultural artist of the 1960s he was attracted to process art and found, industrial materials as part of anti-aesthetic stance that relegated the hand of the artist. Increasingly, he was also attracted to mysticism, much affected by a period spent in India in the 1970s. This perhaps accounts for the liberating mix of the literal and the transcendental in his drawings.

The use of clusters, in this context, manages at once to deny the expressive agency of the hand and to generate suggestive chance effects. The result is a curious fusion of severity and opulence. These drawings have a rigor and clarity that recalls the process art of the 1970s, yet formally harks back to the lyrical innocence of abstract expressionism, as does their mystical inclinations. The feathery strokes and singing colors of “Prana Spectrum Trace” (1989) might bring Joan Mitchell to some people’s minds. The general sense of disembodied gesture that animates many of these at once lyrical and awkward drawings relates directly to Jackson Pollock with little acknowledgement of minimalist denial.

An exhibition of late drawings by first generation Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart at Knoedler includes works made at the same time as many of Mr. Saret’s, and despite generational differences between these two artists the drawings seem to touch on a similar duality of absence and presence. Physical gesture means the artist’s hand is present yet transcended: there is no question that the arcs or circles are handmade, but an unforced, lyrical all-overness creates a cosmic, suprapersonal sense of order and well-being.

“Light Gathers to the Question of No” (1979) is a page filled with quickly scribbled circles — those towards the edge begin to dissipate while a cluster in the middle are more heavily outlined to suggest a circle of circles. These forms can equally be read as receding in space or projecting forward. In several works, a loosely drawn, off-centered circular form provides a focal point causing other kinds of marks to shimmer or vibrate, pulling the eye into an enveloping, consuming field.

These late drawings look remarkably like much younger, contemporary abstract painters. Where “Sphere Credo” (1991) has a matter-of-fact robustness that brings Terry Winters to mind, the graceful deliberations of “The Sadness of a Circle” (1989) with its deconstructed arcs and loops is a dead-ringer for Brice Marden.

Pousette-Dart was possessed of a gorgeous touch, drawing with animated restraint. There is unfussed variety of line within a single piece, such as “Imprison Circle” (1980s), where smaller, thinner marks serve to convey spatial depth. “Sphere Credo” layers circles within a loose diagonal grid with asymmetrical additions of color, in this case green dabs of acrylic. The pencil pentimenti generates depth while the circles drawn with spirited gusto in black ink pop off the page.

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February 3 – March 19, 2005

British-born John Walker is an abstract painter of singular power, fully in possession of his craft. As an artist and much admired teacher, his career has been illustrious and influential. Yet no exhibition should be seen through the distorting lens of credentials. Viewed straight up, this sampling of mammoth abstract collages from 1974-78 at Knoedler, together with current work in the same medium, is disconcerting. The exhibition is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

First impressions are breathtaking. In the main gallery, your eye is pulled immediately to the two10 by 8 foot paintings-painted canvas collages-structured on a majestic ordering of blues and yellows : “Ostraca I” (1977) and its untitled pendant piece from the same year. The architecture of the work overwhelms with the coloristic rhythm of its recessions and advances, hard-edged pieces of painted and cut canvas shifting and jostling for position like tectonic plates. Ignoring Clement Greenberg’s gospel of flatness, Mr. Walker has been a gifted exponent of spatial depth. So difficult to achieve, this is what makes these arrangements particularly memorable.

The skewed facets of “Juggernaut with Plume for P.Neruda” (1975), with its moody rusts and earthen tones over an ashen ground, is punctuated by a small flash of brilliant color that appears like a sudden sharp recollection. While the title evokes a preferred political stance of the post-Vietnam era, the image itself reminded me of Joan Baez’ “Diamonds and Rust,” an inescapable hit in 1975. We both know what memories can bring; rarely is it politics.

In the 1970s, the decade of muscle cars, painting was another macho performance vehicle. Of these early collages, the artist himself said he wanted the impact “of a truck, not a mini.” Minis they are not but Chevie El Caminos or Pontiac GTOs are another matter. Hugh Davies, writing in 1979, referred to them as “a wall of machinery in flat-out operation.” It was an apt analogy for aggressive works built from component parts moving together like pistons. Besides, the artist’s hot-rodding paint application is of a piece with the era of Sting Rays and Firebirds.

Heavy moving machines impel you out of the way. These collages have a similar effect. You have to keep backing up to enjoy them. Seen from a distance, Walker’s transparencies are magical; but the closer you get, the more the means-gel in great swaths-asserts itself. Compare the transparencies of Matisse or Diebenkorn which rely on the properties of pigment, not plastic transparentizers.

Followers of art world Kremlinology will notice Dore Ashton’s swipe in her catalogue essay at “conservative critics” who “breathed a sigh of relief when Walker produced identifiable landscape elements.” She adds, ” But I think they missed the point.” It is a gratuitous reference to Hilton Kramer’s stated admiration, in 2001, for Mr. Walker’s landscapes of the Maine sea coast. Perhaps Ms. Ashton has missed the point. Mr. Kramer aligned Walker ‘s Maine motifs with those by Marsden Hartley and John Marin precisely because they avoided scenic cliches. But abstraction generates its own cliches, which overtake Walker’s collages from 2003-04 installed in the smaller gallery.

Recent works are art department pot boilers of throw-away gestures in raw red, white and blue. It is as if the artist has begun to mimic his own imitators. Gone are Walker’s previous tonal subtleties and near-musical subordination of detail to patterned relationships. One untitled collage refers to the Maine landscape with a smear of real local mud, a hokey literalism that mocks the mastery of analogy on which great art rests. His earlier loamy neutrals were wonderously suggestive; mud is just mud. (Try to imagine Haydn composing “The Creation” using real farmyard animals.)

Then there are those illegible scrawls of handwriting, gravely termed “signage” by Ms. Ashton. What Magritte wittily-and fastidiously-introduced in the 1920s and 30s has dissolved into inchoate decoration. No longer a germinal idea, it has become a platitude that a generation of artists have fallen for like nine-pins.

My favorites are two very small collages from the ’70s and a series of four spare., schematic drawings, white chalk on a black ground. No bombast, much tremolo. Here are testaments to what refinement of conception and execution John Walker is capable.

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Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves
Knoedler & Company until January 29 (19 E. 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-794-0550).

Just as representation alters the way we view reality, abstraction has the same effect on representation itself: it has never looked the same again. Cézanne has us seeing shimmering facets fluttering in the landscape; Alex Katz has us acknowledge our social circle as so many crisp, cartoonish cutouts. Similarly, abstract painters make us read the efforts of older masters on their own nonrepresentational terms.

Abstraction is the great disengager of mark and color and gesture, subjecting them to a kind of pit-stop in their race to represent the world, giving us a moment, in concentrating on them, to savor them as things in themselves. A couple of shows up right now, recent paintings by Robert Ryman and late seascapes by Milton Avery, have the potential to upset the apple cart of art history and make us rethink the relations of abstraction to depiction — or, rather, they offer a timely reminder that abstract painting belongs to a “bigger picture” in which depiction remains the paradigm.

Both shows are stunning, and it’s worth crossing town to see them on the same day.

Nowadays, any painterly accretion of white looks Rymanlike, even if it is engaged in the work of depiction. Mr. Ryman is the artist who always comes to mind, for instance, when I look at Edward Hopper’s “Lighthouse at Two Lights” (1929) at the Metropolitan Museum , with the white of its tower thrust into the bright Maine sky. “It is important that painting always be new for me,” the usually reticent artist writes in an expansive preface to his show at PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery. To aficionados, each new series of Rymans represents a significant departure, as the artist is ever setting himself fundamental issues to address. Even skeptics, though, will concede a new spirit animates his latest paintings: Expansive is again the word, as by his standards the paintings are atmospheric (almost impressionistic, even), prodigious in scale, compositionally busy, and colorful.

White, as we know, is not quite technically a color; in Mr. Ryman’s handling of it, though, it become more than one: It is motif, an aspiration even. Many of his trademark works consist entirely of white paint, whether pummeled or thinly applied, painterly or transparent. His last show of new paintings, in 2002, introduced quite startling colors in the grounds that peeked around his edges. Now the grounds are really starting to stand up for themselves, yet white continues to predominate.

Mr. Ryman draws a distinction between his previous use of white and his current one, however. “It may seem strange that I would now be making white paintings when I have seemingly been making ‘white’ paintings for some years. In the past I have used white a neutral paint, but in these new paintings I decided to actually paint white.” Everything Mr. Ryman does is at some level a philosophical tease: Is there, in fact, a difference between using a color and painting it?

The real tease here is that when he wasn’t actually concerned with white, he was literally “in” it, whereas now that he is thinking about it, he is removed from it. Proof of the pudding is the introduction of other colors (the rich, dark grounds). He turns upside-down Jackson Pollock’s romantic conviction that he wasn’t portraying or depicting nature, but that he *was* nature. This doesn’t stop these new Rymans from *looking* romantic. Some are almost Whistlerian or Monet-like in their foggy, shimmering effects. He may have forged his career on a set of conceptual and post-Minimal gambits, but these new paintings belie that history.

It is scale in particular that signals a shift. “Series #9 (White),” (2004) is a 53-inch square (a mural by Mr. Ryman’s standards.) The composition is book-ended by tapering dark blue lines, intimating a dark ground. Then there is an arrangement of what looks like a rectangular lozenge of white cloud against blue sky. Instead of Mr. Ryman’s heavily invested, intimate, precious, almost doodly impasto, there is an old-masterly scumbling, like one of Constable’s Weymouth skyscapes. The pulsating lozenge, with its fuzzy edges inevitably brings Rothko to mind.

Milton Avery was the most influential teacher and acknowledged mentor of Rothko, and the late seascapes at Knoedler are among the pioneer Modernist’s most abstract works. In some of them, like the wonderfully spare oil crayon on paper, “Breakers” (1958), where the turquoise sky and black, spume-punctuated sea, are autonomous rectangles floating on the sandy ground, he out-Rothkos Rothko. The son is father to the man.

Although the motif always remains perfectly legible within his pared-down, faux naïve idiom, the marine subject encourages generalized effect over detail or specificity. Like no other motif, sea and waves press gang brushed paint on canvas into service as their perfect metaphor.

If you think about a Ryman and an Avery, the differences in intention and generational attitude make it hard to relate the markmaking. One pushes self-consciousness to a deliberately contrived extreme; the other revels in expressive freedom. Yet the works in these two shows have us modifying our view of each artist.

Avery often plays conceptual games with the implications of brushstroke. There is a wonderful vertiginousness in his flattened-out compositions, for example, in the way surf or waves are carved out of a wall of sea, or the way the schematic beach defies a distinction between upfrontness and vanishing perspective.

An extraordinary expressionism is at play in these paintings, one as sophisticated as it is childlike. The artist’s touch, with its pronounced, knowing sense of rush, urgency, lack of deliberation, and agitation (yet perfect color always, and exquisite juxtaposition) is richly onomatopoeic. We can almost hear the the artist impishly going “wooosh” and “shooo” as he pounces the canvas with his dabs and smears.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 23, 2004

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