March 4 to April 2, 2011
23 East 73rd Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, (212) 288-5888

A Preface for Puritans

It will come as little surprise to anyone acquainted with the paintings of Raoul Middleman that earlier in his career he had writing aspirations, too — and not just aspirations, for they were acted upon in raucous short stories that often delved into the steamier side of Baltimore. This is the city where he grew up, taught for many years at the prestigious Maryland Institute College of Art, and continues to make his home. But it is also, in his writings and paintings alike, a city of the imagination, transported beyond its present bricks and mortar to the planet of Joyce’s Dublin and Durrell’s Alexandria, Atget’s Paris and Kirchner’s Berlin. These are cities mapped by longings not landmarks. For many years he has kept a studio of mythic magni- tude in the neighborhood of the famed Copycat building, amidst the raw, mean streets that serve as location for The Wire.

Middleman is at once a supremely painterly painter and a writerly painter. His illustrious, fecund career provides a service to aesthetics by dispelling the prissy formalist notion that somehow to tell a story in paint, to illustrate a type, to animate a com- position with scenario, is incompatible with whatever it is that provides visual art with its essence. Middleman’s vital, brimful- of-life riposte to such a reductive way of thinking reconnects narrative painting to centuries of endeavor in countless genres, many of which latter he himself has attacked in his greed for imagery. In virtually any Middleman painting, an event has just happened and there is more to come. Subjects are never passive. The universe is in flux.

There is something to remind us of Balzac in Middleman’s mammoth scope and prolific output. His monumental narrative paintings have taken on epoch-defining moments like Custer’s last stand or whimsical themes that marry music lore and Americana with titles like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia, or The Prodigal Son”. He retells classical myths (“The Calumny of Apelles”) in a raucous, vernacular present tense that fuses the once discrete categories of allegory and low life. Even when he paints a modestly observed domestic set up the elements in it are restless. Supposedly dead fish glisten and writhe, literalizing the name of the genre: still life.

And then there are the Baltimore Babes: Madge spilling out of her motorcycle jacket; Linda the Valkyrie; Stephanie, more naked within her negligee than she would be without; booted Colleen; defiant Tracey; demure Heather; eager Anthea. Boy, this is one seriously politically incorrect exhibition. Here is the work of a straight male of a certain age taking irony-free delight in the portrayal of alluring women. Libido is manifest in every brushstroke. Like Renoir, he doesn’t only paint with his brush. Like Rodin’s Balzac, there is more than a clenched fist in his dressing gown.

If only the artist were a few years younger and a few brushstrokes more intentionally “bad”, the doting objectification would be “transgressive” rather than merely a tad louche. The show title is playful with the sitters’ status, as are the forename-only names given to individual works. From a cold, one line description (on Twitter perhaps) they could be imagined, albeit rather luxuriously executed and extravagantly scaled, as calling cards for professional ladies of a kind to be found in a very large and highly cultured telephone kiosk, if there were still such things in the world.

But then again, maybe not, for any lasciviousness in these pictures is concentrated in the paint handling, not on poses. These are not people selling themselves or leading anyone on. The women in this group span generations, occupations, social sta- tions, ethnicities and sartorial preferences. They are clothed less for modesty’s sake than for added drama. Sure, they have in common a propensity to arouse. But not – once we begin to study what the painter has given us of their personalities – a vocation to do so.

Another association, suggested by the exoticism of some of the costumes, and recalling Middleman’s early, unpublished short story, “Richard the Doorman,” is the burlesque of Baltimore’s legendary maritime pleasure dome, the “block.” But even the term “artiste” defies the poise and introspection of these sitters. What is common between them is the libidinal reverence paid their presence by the artist, not a mutual attitude or agenda on the part of the women themselves.

And anyway, compelling though these personal presences are, and despite the names being of the actual women who sat for these works, who include the artist’s son’s fiancé, personal friends, professional models and fellow artists, these are not por- traits per se. At least, they are no more so than, say, Rembrandt’s paintings of Bathsheba or a young monk are portraits when we recognize Hendrickje Stoffels or Titus as their sitters. As in all Middlemans, the observed is swept up into the imagined.

Willem de Kooning’s maxim that flesh was the reason oil paint was invented is so delightful and suggestive an apercu that it seems churlish to question its validity. In fact, a whole exhibition was presented on its premise at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC a couple of years ago, “Paint as Flesh,” and Middleman, with his masterful evocations of flesh, could have settled nicely into the ranks of the realist mavericks, first generation AbEx’ers, denizens of the School of London and young “bad” painters gathered there. Middleman belongs, in fact, to a strain of American realism that ranks Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Paul Cadmus and Middleman’s friend and contemporary Paul Georges among its luminaries, and the late Carl Plansky as a younger peer. Middleman’s Gloria, for instance, feels squeezed out of her canvas in a way that re- calls Benton in turn recalling El Greco. But then, Middleman’s affinities with European expressive realism run deep. He clearly channels the work of Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka and Lovis Corinth.

De Kooning’s assertion needs to be challenged, however, not, literally, from a historical perspective, to probe the origins of this medium, so much as to say, is it really skin that so particularly requires the dexterity and malleability of oil paint? Put another way: it would be axiomatic to say that flesh is the reason clothing was invented, to keep flesh warm, out of the harmful rays of the sun, and of the vision of respectable citizens and impressionable youths. But the genius of fashion is to persuade us that clothes are the reason that flesh and bone were invented; that the second skins of fur and fabric and stretched materials layer limbs with greater allure as well as signifying all manner of meanings and values. Oil paint comes into its own in the depiction of all kinds of surfaces, and the gooey swish of mixed colors and tones to suggest, say, light on the stretch of spandex in May’s stockings (May, 1989) is a sexier amalgam of the properties of medium and message than exposed skin – although the play of light on May’s forehead and arms is equally masterful. There is as much relish in the painterly evocation of the contour and surface of May’s corset as there would be for the flesh it constrains. (From the tautness of skin over the sitter’s shoulder bone and across her brow it seems that a corset is a superfluous decoration anyway on so lithe a figure as May’s.) The point here is that Middleman lusts to describe not to possess. The “babes” send us back to the woods where we find that Middleman’s penetrations of the Delaware River, as indeed of the dead fish that might have come from it, have as much “lust for life” as the paintings of the beauties that visit his studio.

Middleman’s art is comprised of observation and imagination in equal measure. He is truly an heir of Rembrandt in that flight of fantasy takes off from earthy ground. True to his name, he opts for the middle way. Having said that his “babes” are narra- tives not portraits, therefore, is only half true. When a woman plays a role for Middleman she is still herself. Middleman is like a demonic director who sucks the souls from his performers to get a fully living picture, to flesh out the abstraction of a literary character with the actuality of its enactor. Even if Middleman’s intention was to evoke the epitome of a femme fatale, when painting Tracey with such harsh chiaroscuro that her hairline seems as carved as the fissures in her purple slip, Tracey remains Tracey in the way Medea remains (or better, retains) Maria Callas, or Vivian Sternwood does Lauren Bacall.

For all his addiction to drama, allegory and type, Middleman is incapable of stereotype because he relies on actual human presence to evoke humanity, and works with such empathy that humanity cannot be denied. And so it is with all the “babes”: they are as fully individuated as anyone who presumes to regard them. Linda is her own Valkyrie, not Wagner’s, or Middle- man’s, or yours, or (hopelessly as I want her to be) mine.

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exhibition travels to Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center
Auburn, NY in May-June 2004

Watercolor, once the Cinderella of mediums, has been having a ball recently. Pamela Auchincloss and Melissa Meyer curated a survey of 22 abstract painters who use watercolor in 2001 that has been on virtually continuous national tour since, while last fall the painters Graham Nickson and Susan Shatter were co-curators of a ground-breaking international survey at the New York Studio School of 40 current practicioners that cut across stylistic divisions. Of course, in bastions of traditionalism across the land – arts clubs, community centers, academies – there has never been a let-up in annual shows by enthusiasts, but these two exhibitions challenged stereotypes about the medium, showing great range of expressive possibilities.

A preview of another survey, again of 22 artists, destined for the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, N.Y. next summer, is now at the Kouros Gallery. It has been organized by members of Zeuxis, a group named for the Greek painter celebrated by the Ekphrastic poets for a depiction of grapes so realistic that birds were deceived into pecking them. The Zeuxis group is devoted to still-life, although this show, of members, late members, and an eclectic roster of guests, is divided equally between the genres of landscape and still life, with a couple of abstractionists thrown in for good measure.

Despite the conservatism of this pervasively polite show, there are some truly remarkable painters here whose work rewards optimism about the vitality of this most ancient and elusive of mediums. Several exhibitors paid homage to the patriarch of modern watercolor, Cézanne. Both Robert Jessel and Ruth Miller favor the French artist’s delicate overlap of diaphanous veils. Where Mr. Jessel, who also brings to mind the watercolors of Signac, carpets his composition with repetitive strokes in a way that ultimately belies watercolor’s transparency, Ms. Miller’s explorations yield miraculous depths, a numinous sense of inner space. It is too bad that she is separated from her late husband, Andrew Forge, whose single contribution is hung on another floor: There is an exquisite commonality of vision and touch uniting the perceptions of abstract husband and realist wife.

In his mature paintings, Mr. Forge developed a deeply felt yet hermetic system of notation from colored dots, with the occasional intervention of connecting sticks. His oil paintings have the shimmering mystery of Byzantine mosaic, but to the uninitiated the sense of depictive logic without the reward of pictorial meaning makes hard work of them. In watercolor, where the roles of dot and stick are reversed, his esoteric pointillism lets its hair down, so to speak, in what is, for Forge, an exuberant display of painterly sensualism.

In a typically felicitous phrase, Mr. Forge, who was a dazzling lecturer and critic, once told sculptor and fellow Brit Garth Evans that, when starting a watercolor, the white paper is “money in the bank.” On the evidence of three works in this exhibition, Mr. Evans seems to be keeping his investment intact: no white shows through at all. Indeed, his use of watercolor seems counter-intuitive, for the effect of pigment pushed against page is to bolster the physicality of the support rather than create the ethereal otherness which is the most familiar property of watercolor. But in his masterful handling, the medium reveals itself as the perfect means to reconcile volume to flat shapes.

In contrast to Mr. Evans’ parsimony, Robert De Niro, Sr. (father of the actor) was positively profligate with the whiteness of the paper in the undated work included here. This seemingly dashed-off still-life arrangement of pots and flowers is a wonderful orchestration of wet against dry, color against virgin page – dualisms that recall the famous “push-pull” dictum of De Niro’s teacher, Hans Hoffman.

Other artists of De Niro’s generation shown here include Louisa Matthiasdottir, who makes the medium behave in harmony with her smooth, fluent vision, and Nell Blaine, one of the only artists in this generally rather tame exhibition to let rip, painting wet in wet with the ferocity of a German expressionist.

In a set of small duck watercolors from 1990, Lois Dodd takes the power of the support to an extreme: But for the beaks, all of the birds’ bodies is negative space defined by surrounding grass, sky or their own shadow. (Underlying pencil drawing does add further articulation.) Like the cows from earlier in her career, ducks are a perfect vehicle for the kind of placid, understated animation this quiet modernist values in landscape. Ms. Dodd evidently has an admirer in Phyllis Floyd, a prime mover in Zeuxis. Her economical but keenly observed views of city parks deftly capture specific body types and gestures in a way that is neat and endearing, and she handles watercolor with business-like straightforwardness.

The same compliment cannot be extended to Arthur Kvanstrom, whose bewildering, illegible, and fiddly back-and-forth merely aggrevates the eye, or Joseph Byrne, whose anemic tree trunks aspire to the fey reductiveness of early Joseph Beuys but merely confound the attention their fussiness demands. Victor Pesce saves the day for feyness with a touching, Morandiesque lemon, which is anything but.

The show, it has to be said, is generally let down by lightweights padding out the ranks*. The artists really compromised by their company are those whose understated style or compositions initially seem academic but on closer inspection are quietly inventive. I’m thinking of John Goodrich, for instance: The delicate awkwardness in his handling of the open form of a lattice bowl then left to stand out against a bold diagonal expanse of crimson wall is deliciously subtle.

Someone, meanwhile, should save Carmen Lund from her framer: Her abrasive, cacophonous flower studies, aggressively cropped with almost a collage sensibility to form a dense if irregular grid, were all ready to be taken seriously until shiny, kitsch mouldings disasterously intervened.

* In the printed edition of this review, the sentence continues: “although these are probably core members of Zeuxis, whom the heavy-hitters were enlisted to bolster”. Further research has revealed the opposite: it is the artists singled out for praise in this review who are Zeuxis members, the unnamed “lightweights” who were guests. Apologies to anyone hurt by the misunderstanding. Readers will have an opportunity, incidentally, to judge Zeuxis’ membership in greater depth in an upcoming exhibition, Zeuxis- A Moveable Feast, at the Westbeth Gallery, 155 Bank Street, New York, September 6-28, 2003

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, August 14, 2003.

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August 6-22, 2003

End of season group shows are a little like summer movies. They have the advantage of setting out simply to please. In a category-loving art climate, the last exhibition usually relaxes the categories. Works tend to be smaller, allowing us to look at art scaled for actual rooms, not museum spaces. Galleries are more willing to chance work they are not committed to. The publicity machine gears down. After months of generating operatic press releases, galleries puts their feet up and let items on the wall summon their own audience.

Fine and surprising things surface in these closing medleys. While this exhibition spares us the artificial labors of a “theme show,” its focus on a single medium-watercolor- provides continuity among the disparate sensibilities and ranges of ambition that are part of its appeal.

Most of the work on show is by members of Zeuxis, a loose affiliation of artists devoted to still life painting. Many of them exhibit regularly in artist-owned and/or university galleries. The better known names-Garth Evans, Andrew Forge, Lois Dodd, Robert DeNiro, Sr.-are on loan from other galleries. Three come from Kouros’ own stable of artists.

Things begin with two paintings by George Constant, an early modernist best known in his lifetime as an etcher and engraver. Here is a rare look at his gifts as an abstract painter and a return to one fecund moment in the history of modern art. Petunias, a 1952 watercolor, offers a bouquet of forms that recall his contemporary, Baziotes. There is something of Sheila Delauney in these shapes as well. Field of Flowers, c. 1960, is a fluid, calligraphic dance of all-over color, dispersed with an energetic and graceful hand. Constant’s approach has its antecedent in Pollock’s Lavender Mist , which itself points back to Monet’s waterlilies. Contrast between figure and ground disappear. We look straight into the surface of a multi-colored field, its elements woven together with delicate strands of black ink.

Immediately opposite, counterposed to Constant, is the vertical Study for Venice with Bridge by watercolorist Jorge Eduardo. The rigor of the study gives a useful clue to the hyper-realism for which Eduardo is celebrated in his native Brazil. He brings the intensity of an archivist’s scrutiny to even the smallest detail. Eduardo has built a career recording Brazil’s loveliest locales and the architecture of its colonial past. Here, he turns his concentration on a typical view of Venice. For all his command of the medium, his affinity for local color and light, and his ease with architectural detail, the painting seems more a scene prepared for tourists than a personal response. Technique can sometimes become a bludgeon that intimidates the audience into confusing a sense of place with mere items in sight.

By contrast, Joseph Byrne’s four diminutive tree studies are lively and personal. They make no claim to be other than what they are: liquid caresses of a tree trunk. One especially delicious rendering recalls John Marin’s warning against reading things into paintings: “There’s the daisy-you don’t rave over or read messages into it. You just look at that bully little flower. That’s enough.” One bully little tree trunk is plenty.

John Goodrich’s high spirited contributions are a surprise. Gone is the broody quality I’ve come to associate with his oil painting. Both still lifes here, attentive to the effects of light and air, have summer written all over them. Other unexpected pleasures are the lush, ebullient landscapes by Carolyn Harris; the startling subtlety of Louise Matthiasdottir’s subdued consideration of the Hudson River, less showy than her usual chromatism but with greater depth; and David Dewey’s darkling portrayal of a Belfast street on the shadow side of sunlight. Ruth Miller is always a happy find.

Phyllis Floyd, founder of Zeuxis, offers lean, reduced figure compositions done on site in Madison and Bryant parks. Victor Pesce’s works, each focusing on a singe object afloat on a field of color, emphasize how much the appeal of his painting resides in his eye for placement, independent of the characteristic weight and texture of his oils. Robert DeNiro, Sr., who died in 1993, is represented by a pleasant, neo-Matissean trifle Teapot and Vase/Flowers. But name recognition lends heft to what is almost a studio throw-away, slight in structure and technique. (Its $16,000 thumb-in-your-eye sticker is an instructive moment in art world pricing.) Nell Blaine’s Darkening Sky, Gloucester, just as pricey, provides more to look at.

I have always enjoyed Andrew Forge’s writing more than his painting. Elegant and spare, his work has struck me as having an air of the podium about it-a distillation of style-conscious theories with little blood in them. Even so, I was drawn to the untitled watercolor submitted here. Discreet, luminous marks, arranged in repetitive, seemingly stenciled rows, drift across the paper. Shifting gossamer planes overlay and penetrate each other, massed in the upper left and sliding, in delicate glissando, toward invisibility at the lower right. It sends me away to rethink my responses to this most refined technician.

One of the true satisfactions here is the opportunity to see Garth Evans. Known most widely as a sculptor, his watercolors are small astonishments. Two of them hang near a window in the upstairs gallery, a turn of the head away from Forge. It is an inspired placement. The works of both men share a similar sense of sequence, of structure arising from spaced intervals-like notes of a musical scale (Forge) or interstices between overlapping geological structures (Evans). Both make the most of transparency while letting color drive their compositions.

Similarities end there but how does one describe the difference? Or the quiet pleasure of Evans’ inventiveness, his lyricism, contained in a geometry of his own devising? This is painting that has to be viewed up close. At a distance, color and outline assert themselves easily. But the magical subtleties of surface and errantry of lines dissolving into worked paper reveal themselves only on close embrace. It is hard not to lean just a little closer to one particularly enigmatic, darksome piece just to kiss it.

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