Bill King was the gentle giant of postwar American sculpture.  So gentle, indeed, that his name and achievement remain chronically under-acknowledged, considering the power, virtuosity and humanity of his work.  He was a self-effacing man whose work tapped a light, comic vein, but given the proper attention it deserves, his work could change the way sculpture is thought about and made.

William King was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1925, and grew up in Coconut Grove, Miami.  He was a near contemporary, at the Cooper Union, of Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, his first wife, and remained close in many ways to their common aesthetic grounding, shared also with younger sculptors such as Red Grooms and Marisol Escobar.

The hallmark of King’s early work was radical experiment keeping company with social connection and hedonism.  The mix of big, important, innovative ideas and immediate, sensory, in-the-moment experience was a kind of visual jazz.  For this was not just the time of Franz Kline’s big open defiant brushstrokes and Jackson Pollock’s all-over mists of intricately drooling line, but of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.  If we look at the works that King made in the early 1950s when he got back from his Fulbright to Italy we see free, experimental, open forms that take their cue from jazz as much as art in their fusion of virtuosity and cool.  King had a reputation from the get go for being able to make anything, a magical touch with materials.  This comes across in an exquisite ten inch high by seven by three and a half inch sculpture in metal and wood, Sonny Greer and Jimmy Archie, 1953.  It almost looks like one piece of flimsy, slightly rusty, found metal has been twisted and bent this way and that to describe – in a quick, effortless, yet somehow accurate sketch – one guy on drums, another crouched over his trumpet.  There is a naïve, childish quality to the piece until you look closely, and feel your way into the piece, and you realize how astoundingly astute every line and dent is to conveying the sense of movement and sound.

As befits a man whose handling of materials is so effortless and whose aesthetic is cool, casual, in the moment, King was disarmingly dismissive about his early efforts, especially when he moved on to something new.  He was, clearly, deeply appreciative of the work of Elie Nadelman with his highly stylized, folk-inspired, doll-like figures.  Seeing Nadelman’s memorial retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, the year King finished Cooper, was instrumental in shaping his outlook.  But when he called his own early works in wood “watered-down Nadelman” he was being overly self-deprecatory.  As Sanford Schwartz has written, King’s wooden sculptures are “relations of Nadelman’s people, but with innards.” But Nadelman was liberating for King because he showed that satire and streamlining could go together. King’s sculpture managed to really expose an individual’s flaws while also bringing us close to his or her humanity.  As Hilton Kramer wisely observed, King’s humor is essentially Chaplinesque: “a mockery that remains sweet to the taste, a satirical vision that does not exempt the artist himself from the reach of its criticism.”

His social portraits were at their most acute in the ceramic medium. Bob and Terry, 1954, is a tour de force of economy: it seems the more he leaves out the more he gets across.  In such simply shaped forms he captures the togetherness of the couple, the support relationship between them, their social aspirations.  You feel you know all about these people.

The ambition to test the limits of what can be left out while getting across real sensations of movement and feeling led King, in the 1960s, into radical new territory. Magic, 1970 is aptly named because it is a sculpture in which so little conveys so much.  It is simply two sheets of shaped aluminum that slot into each other with the planes at a 90 degree angle, in which one half denotes a leg, from thigh to foot, the other upper body, from torso via head to outstretched arm.  There is no color, no joinery, no facial feature or expressive excrescence of any sort.  But where you would expect this little information to at best be like a traffic sign or scarecrow of a figure, a mere schemata or signifier of a figure, this, on the contrary, is a portrait of a very knowable figure—one that certain lusty viewers, indeed, would want to know better!  Magic conveys the sensual, curvaceous form of a young woman absorbed in some activity of her own – yoga stretching, perhaps, or tending a flower.  The shape of the metal gets across lithe limbs without resorting to erotic stereotypes.  The simple angling of one plane to another creates enough shadow to give the figure voluptuous volume.

King’s genius has been to fuse formal innovation and humorous observation.  The outstanding American sculptor in both these camps, of course, was Alexander Calder, with his circus of wire figures and his joyous, purely abstract stabiles and mobiles.  But in his interlocking metal pieces King made a sculptural move as bold as Calder’s mobiles with an earthy wit comparable to Calder’s Circus: a marriage of modes.

In his work of the last decades, King found a synthesis of the satirical explorations of his early period and the formal freedoms of his interlocking pieces in often monumentally scaled stick figures in multi-figured narrative compositions.  As was his wont, these mature works have it both ways: they embody all the virtues of speed of execution and lack of preciousness – perfunctory, streamlined, economical, sketchy, unpretentious – while resolutely standing their ground as effective figurative sculpture, simultaneously conveying individuality and type.

One of King’s earliest champions, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, marveled in 1960 at the young sculptor’s ability to fashion single sculptures of multiple figures, to “create a three dimensional whole out of more than one figure in the round,” a feat he compared to playing three-dimensional chess.  In Power Tennis, 1990, he bonds players and their equipment, literally and metaphorically, as arms and rackets are rendered in much the same way in flat shapes of aluminum such that sportsmen and women become like machines as surely as their equipment becomes quasi organic extensions of the limbs to which they are attached. King’s use of reductive and technological language escapes the literalism of traditional figuration in order to enhance the humorous and universal aspects of people’s foibles rather than to convey any notion of standardization.

In a career that ran in tandem with the hegemony of formal abstraction in sculpture, Bill King inevitably struggled with the prejudice that sculpture full of humanity and humor can’t be quite as serious as sculpture devoid of them.  But the tide has clearly turned in ways that ought to work in King’s favor, with an increasing number of sculptors, fêted internationally, who are producing work that looks remarkably close in spirit, if not quite as regal in sheer mastery of form, as his own. When art historians of the future connect the dots of modern sculpture then artists like Franz West, Stephan Balkenhol, Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, Julian Opie and Rebecca Warren will force recognition of the achievement of King the way King in turn has had us rethink Nadelman and Calder.

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With Hilton Kramer’s passing last month, American high culture lost a fearless – and at times feared – dissenter.  He was also among the last of a remarkable generation of New York intellectuals.  A sometime idealistic anti-communist liberal turned neo-conservative, Kramer reshaped debates about politics and culture with unstinting passion and erudition.  His enduring legacy was The New Criterion, the journal he co-founded in 1982.

He had a long career in criticism that came to include almost two decades as the chief critic of the New York Times, his other posts – en route or subsequent to that defining appointment – including stewardship of Arts Magazine, critic’s chairs at The Nation and the New York Observer, influential teaching posts at Columbia, Berkeley, and Bennington, and the authorship of books and monographs.

While his politics shifted significantly to the right, his artistic tastes, it can be claimed, remained consistent: the art world changed around him and he stuck to his aesthetic guns.  He was what can be called a soft modernist: he admired the historic avant garde, but strictly for its advances to the language of plastic expression, rather than for its revolutionary or subversive aspirations.  He was an ardent student, for instance, of the Russian Constructivists, planning later in his life to write a monograph on the subject, while having no particular affection for its political or theosophical ideals.  Among contemporary artists, beauty was invariably his criterion.  His critical mentors were John Ruskin, Roger Fry, T.S. Eliot (from whom of course he borrowed his journal title) and Julius Meier-Graefe to whom he owed more, in his formalism, than he did Clement Greenberg albeit that relations and interests were close with the latter.  His entry to critical debate was tellingly reactive: a rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg’s existentialist reading of action painting.

He was a curmudgeon, but to say this made him a maverick would constitute a misreading of American art writing: a majority of critics at any given moment pretty much subscribe to the less than augustly phrased observation by Charlie Finch that “most art sucks”.  Considering that his predecessor on the Times was John Canaday and that the three most illustrious art writers he patronized at the New Criterion were Jed Perl, Mario Naves and Karen Wilkin, it is difficult to single out his tastes as unusually conservative.  His negative tastes were also largely commensurate with those of Robert Hughes, Donald Kuspit and Peter Fuller, though each critic would have different cut-off dates as to when modernism went off the rails,  selective enthusiasms and varying political slants.  A Venn diagram, in other words, would see more of the circles of all these people’s tastes overlapping than not.

Unsurprisingly for a retinal hedonist, Kramer favored Matisse over Picasso, and gravitated strongly towards Americans who extended Matisse’s chromatic sensibility.  He was a dutiful advocate of Color Field Painting in the 1960s, but his heart seemed really to lie with Milton Avery.  Some of his most lyrical and persuasive art writing was devoted to figurative and landscape artists who emerged in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, artists who satisfied his longing for an art that reconciled social acuity, humane wit and visual pleasure.  William King and Richard Lindner occasioned some of his best criticism, while the “inspired insouciance” of Alex Katz takes us “out of the Existentialist wood, basking in the clear, bright light of an easy sociability.”

But Kramer will always be remembered less for his avowals than for his put-downs, most infamously the one meted out on that now unassailable contemporary art saint Philip Guston, whose 1970 Marlborough Gallery show, signaling a turn from polite lyrical abstraction to the rambunctious personalism of his late style, earned him the epithet “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.” In a way, however, Kramer’s cutting phrase became a boomerang, for increasingly the reactionary Times critic became not merely out of step with a conceptual, post-modern art world, but a necessary fixture whose dismissals served as an avant garde validation.  A stumblebum, in other words, still wearing the mantle of a mandarin.  Kramer became a latter day Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who – in backfiring attempts to bury them – ended up christening Fauvism and Cubism.  As Alex Katz intimates below in his note of tribute to his sometime scourge and later champion, a bad review from Kramer could be worn by a self-respecting artist as a badge of honor.

What is likely lost in reading Kramer’s excoriations of the NEA or lambasts of academic political correctness and trendy sexual politics is that Kramer was actually a remarkably judicious man with enduringly liberal tastes.  He was a fastidious attendee of press previews and conferences, a diligent note taker, an old-school scholar-journalist.  He cared about details, an attitude that came across in his editorial work.  I remember proposing to write a review of a big Calder show in DC for him, after publishing a couple of short pieces at the Criterion; he had to go see the show himself before assigning it, and actually decided that serious flaws in the curatorial process didn’t make it worthy of attention in his pages after all.

I had first met Hilton as a wet-behind-the-ears graduate student visiting New York in the mid-1980s.  I went to interview him about Patrick Heron, the British abstract painter and staunchly anti-Greenberg but nonetheless formalist critic.  Kramer heard me out and methodically refuted all of my queries and contentions, defending Greenberg against all of Heron’s charges.

A couple of years later I had a call from Hilton’s secretary saying he would be in London and would like to meet for a drink.  I immediately assumed that they had me confused for someone else, that so important a figure couldn’t possibly mean to waste precious time on me, even calling to good-humoredly explain the mix up.  But I was wrong, he meant me, and in fact,  I would discover, Hilton thrived on the company of younger people.  Despite seeming set in his thinking he liked to hear what others had to say—although he certainly also enjoyed an audience for his own ideas and anecdotes. I recall the salacious delight of his recounting the tale of one of his erstwhile protégés (none of those cited above, incidentally) found tied-up on the roof of his apartment building after a romantic tryst.

I have fond memories also, on that London visit, of taking Hilton to dine at St John, the trendy eatery specializing in offal and innards, much frequented by the YBAs. He was totally in his element, unfazed.  In turn there would be the great pleasure, for me, of lunch as his guest at the Century Association where he was a bow-tied fixture.  I will never forget, when a demure lady nodded at him as she passed our table, his expression of ever-so wistful regret that a court order had obliged the club to accept women as members.

Hilton was an early guest of my series of dialogs with American art writers at the New York Studio School, the Craft of Criticism.  One great line I remember was his describing the effect on his spirits of a Soho afternoon of particularly desultory art.  He had to go to Dean & Deluca, he said, and look at some fruit and vegetables just to restore a sense of nature and color to his mind.

The post Feared and Fearless: Hilton Kramer, 1928-2012 appeared first on artcritical.

The paintings of Jack Bush were once described by Hilton Kramer as “a garden for the eye,” an apt analogy for images that balance chromatic vibrancy and earthiness.  Canada’s participant in Color Field Painting held an obstinate remove from either the geometric hard edges or the ethereal sprays and stains of his confreres south of the border.  His paintings impact the retina with a dull thud. Color is intense but somehow un-ingratiating, as if mixed with soot and chalk.  The oafishness of his shapes and strokes and the uneasy back and forth between painterliness and pictoriality – foreground gesture and background expanse – make him provincial for the period in which he worked and uncannily relevant for the present.  Sing Sing Sing (1974) arrays a fluttering string of rough-torn ribbons – an anti-spectrum of anonymous color samples – against an agitated, nauseatingly meat-like, marbled ground. Beauty and the Beast.

Jack Bush: New York Visit at FreedmanArt, 25 East 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues, (212) 249-2040, February 18 to April 28, 2012.

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