Everyone knows that the death this month of John Ashbery deprived us of a great poet. Fewer realize that we also lost an outstanding art critic. It’s understandable. Ashbery often made light of his violon d’Ingres, perhaps in order to ward off the cliché—true enough, as most clichés are—that the New York school into which he was (uncomfortably) pigeonholed consisted of poets involved with the art world. Or maybe he just recognized poetry as the higher calling. David Bergman, the editor of Ashbery’s 1989 volume of selected art writing, Reported Sightings, of course followed suit:

In 1960, when John Ashbery accepted a friend’s offer to replace her as art critic for the Paris Herald Tribune, he was merely seeking employment in a city where Americans found it both difficult and necessary to earn money in order to live. Little did he know that the job would lead “as one thing follows another” into a career in which for the next twenty-five years almost without interruption he worked as a “sort of art critic” for such different journals as ArtNews, Newsweek, and New York. (p.xi)

But Ashbery was well aware that such accidental happenings, one thing following another, as they always do, is as much as we have of what used to be called destiny. His art criticism was important in itself and for his poetry, however much he might have minimized it—“as though to protect what it advertises,” to quote his most famous poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The commonality between the two parts of Ashbery’s work is evident, first of all, in an inimitable tone, which one discerns as clearly in his critical prose as anywhere else in his oeuvre. This tone is the essence of his poetry, but also of his idea of art. Admittedly, it occurs more fitfully in the criticism than in the poetry, of which it is practically the whole substance. As a jobbing reviewer working to deadline, he could turn out considerable quantities of merely intelligent observations about whatever the subject of his assignment was, allowing (or forcing?) the poet to show his hand in just a stray sentence or two. But there are other pieces that clearly meant more to him, ones in which he was working out the aesthetic principles that would both carry through his poetry and inform his appreciation of painting, drawing, and sculpture.

It’s easy to see that Ashbery’s idea of art was indebted to Surrealism, and Bergman rightly began his selection (thematic rather than chronological) with a section on “Surrealism and Dada.” But Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism was his own, and not André Breton’s; maybe I’d better refer to it as small-s surrealism, not a proper name but a potential broadly distributed throughout the aesthetic field. For Ashbery, surrealism is basically the realization that art is at its best when it is “the product of the conscious and the unconscious working hand in hand.” (p.6) His writing accordingly cultivates a tone of unruffled common sense—and often the substance, rather than just the tone—as a way of staying open to the “irrational, oneiric basis” of it. (p.7)

It is this interpenetration of the banal and the enigmatic that accounts for Ashbery’s singular tone. An example: Of Joseph Cornell he writes, “But the galleries which showed him had a disconcerting way of closing or moving elsewhere, so that one could never be sure when there would be another Cornell show.” (p.14) The statement is ordinary and factual enough; and yet Ashbery sets off unexpected overtones. The simple fact that galleries are typically rather transient businesses somehow becomes an unexpected portal to the more significant mysteries of the ungraspable form that the representation of reality takes on when interpreted by way of an artist like Cornell (or a writer like Ashbery), so that “these eminently palpable bits of wood, cloth, glass and metal must vanish the next moment.” That vanishing points to the great metaphysical question: Does anything exist? Ashbery is sensitive to the way great art often seems to point to nonexistence as the hidden truth of existence.

But that idea, like all those that assert the most potent fascination over certain minds, loses its power when spelled out, as I’ve just so ham-fistedly done. Its force is in its intimation. Ashbery quotes de Chirico quoting Schopenhauer: “To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.” (p.126) Such isolation has nothing necessarily to do with social estrangement or any sort of definitive withdrawal from contact with others—though Ashbery does manifest sympathy with the lost and lonely ones of art (John F. Peto, Patrick Henry Bruce…)—but simply, as Schopenhauer says, a vital moment of distance from everyday life but within it.

This understanding of the essentially commonplace nature of the artistic effects that de Chirico called “metaphysical” allows Ashbery a rare vision of the essential unity of modern art—a unity that cuts across even the most heavily defended stylistic boundaries, including those between art and adjacent cultural fields: “Surrealism has become part of our daily lives,” he explains, and “its effects can be seen everywhere, in the work of artists and writers who have no connection with the movement, in movies, interior decoration and popular speech.” (p.4) No wonder that he finds it to be “the connecting link among any number of current styles thought to be mutually exclusive, such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and ‘color-field’ painting. The art world is so divided into factions that the irrational, oneiric basis shared by these arts is, though obvious, scarcely perceived…. It’s still what’s happening.” (pp.7-8)

Still today, blinkered art historians would enjoin us not to perceive this overlooked essence, depriving us of the “original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal” perceptions that seem to have come so easily to Ashbery. Sure, everyone acknowledges the roots of Abstract Expressionism in capital S-Surrealist ideas of automatic writing, and it only takes a little nudge to begin seeing the dreamlike qualities of the chromatic fluidity in the work of a color field painter such as Jules Olitski, but his assertion of a Surrealist basis for Minimalism is likely to raise some eyebrows. Surprisingly, Ashbery insists on an art history that is not cyclical or dialectical but linear—much more so than, say, Clement Greenberg’s. “The pendulum has not swung” from an ostensibly irrationalist Romanticism to a more objective and hard-headed art of the real, he insisted, and in fact “the history of art proceeds in orderly fashion, in a straight line.” (p.10) It’s a line that in Ashbery’s eyes passed through something as mundane (and as tangential to any mundane consensus about the mainstream of art history) as a still life by Jane Freilicher, yet Ashbery’s words also resonate with Donald Judd’s praise of Frank Stella’s paintings, in which “The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.” One thing following another is Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism and of history.

This sense of continuity is why Ashbery can discern a “metaphysical similarity” (p.17) between Joseph Cornell and Sol LeWitt. He could have quoted LeWitt’s statement that the conceptual artist is a mystic, not a rationalist, leaping to conclusions that logic can’t reach, but he didn’t need to, drawing instead on the experience of the art itself: “Cornell’s art assumes a romantic universe in which inexplicable events can and must occur. Minimal art, notwithstanding the cartesian disclaimers of some of the artists, draws its being from this charged, romantic atmosphere, which permits an anonymous slab or cube to force us to believe in it as something inevitable.” (pp.17-18)

It might be argued that—like Milton’s Satan who carried hell with him, saying, “myself am hell”—the charged atmosphere necessary to see Minimalism in this way is something that Ashbery brought with him, and that the inevitability of the Minimalist object was entirely historical and discursive. But I don’t think so. How could anything so flatly empirical have so quickly given rise, for instance, to Robert Smithson’s earthworks, “wherein the romantic artist’s traditional folie des grandeurs is carried to dizzying new heights.” (p.352) The folie is more affecting for the fact that it may indeed be nothing but folly. In praise of Carl Andre’s sculpture Ashbery cited “its implicit admission that all this may be a put-on, may not be worth your while. The poignancy of this situation heightens our response to a Newman, a Rothko, or an Andre.” (p.230)

Of course, Ashbery’s poetry was often suspected of being a put-on, or not worthwhile. It’s somehow telling that “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” first published in 1974, is a kind of experiment within his oeuvre, an attempt to write the sort of essaylike poem he would never otherwise write, and have it yet be entirely his own and not an imitation of someone else’s style. It succeeded in convincing some of the skeptics that Ashbery wasn’t a put-on. It’s interesting to realize that the poem had its origins in an assignment a decade earlier for the New York Herald Tribune (International Edition), a review of a show of Parmigianino’s and Correggio’s drawings at the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre. But an ear for words and phrases, rather than subjects, tells us that the poem’s roots are spread further out into his art criticism. Consider Parmigianino’s hand, “thrust at the viewer” in the poem’s second line, and then re-read the 1967 essay in which he rightly cites Robert Rauschenberg as among those whose art profitably derived from that of Joseph Cornell (and thereby, he says, passed the influence on to Judd, LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Ronald Bladen)—the lesson being “the same in each case: the object and its nimbus of sensations, wrapped in one package, thrust at the viewer, here, now, inescapable.” (p.17) That thrust—Ashbery’s, Parmigianino’s, Rauschenberg’s—remains inescapable. It’s still what’s happening.

The post “One Thing Follows Another”: John Ashbery, Art Critic appeared first on artcritical.

BRENDA ZLAMANY: At first it would seem that our work doesn’t have much in common, but then I read about your process, how you rely on layering and how you do the final layers very quickly. That’s similar to the way I work. I start with a very labor-intensive under-painting, which is more of an illustration and then obliterate it with various layers of tinted glazes until it becomes art. Toward the end it’s a risky business because I have to be willing to sacrifice the image. Do we have something in common in terms of process?

MARY JONES: The compelling difference is that you define your initial image as something that isn’t art. I don’t. It’s all art, it’s all of equal value to me. The painting may not be working at times but going through that process and experience is important to me. I work on a piece repeatedly until I find some semblance of form. I’m looking for something new, but something I recognize.

In Bridges for Hedda Sterne and Hover the scale is very specific to the roller that you’re using, and I see traces of symbols from earlier paintings. There’s a lot of stuff obliterated. Are there hidden images behind these roller marks?

When I use a roller it has a motion and a weight that’s specific to the tool, and an extension of my body. I want it to be physical. It’s a form of drawing, and it’s also working to cover plenty of process history. I’m consciously using my biography in this new work, I’ve been revisiting my past and these paintings reinterpret and recontextualize images from earlier pieces as a way to begin.

Looking at the painting, Hover, which is obviously painted with a roller, I’m thinking that anybody who’s started to paint a room is going to have that kind of gesture, especially if you’re not professional and you’re rolling every which way, but on the other hand it’s also a very complicated atmospheric moment. It’s like you’re painting light but you’re also just priming a wall, so there’s this tension between the atmospheric, romantic landscape and this utilitarian thing.

I hope so. I want it to have that edge, something ethereal rooted in the every day. I like that the roller signifies a kind of erasure, a fresh start, and also speaks to all the construction that goes into my work, while still functioning as a tool for gesture.

Also in Hover, I am reminded of Mark Rothko. Is this an accidental Rothko? But the light is very Frederic Edwin Church and there are so many other possible references, you could even see a Winslow Homer seascape in it. It’s the most representational of the paintings in the show. Maybe because there is a horizon, it seems to reference landscape. Bridges refer to landscape too. In these later paintings are you turning to landscape?

I’m not really interested in landscape. I don’t mean to shut you down with that comment, but if we went out to the beach to paint on an observational excursion, I’d be painting the people and not the waves. My work is much more about movement and consciousness, and although a sense of place may be a part of that, it’s not specific terrain. Hover is one of the last paintings made for the show, and began with colors from Giorgio Morandi, soft greys and pinks. But now the blues and whites could evoke the American West, and the skies of Georgia O’Keeffe. The title could bring Rothko to mind, it has a duality of forms in tension with one another that’s similar to his paintings.

How did you come up with the title for the painting, Bridges for Hedda Sterne?

The “Abstract Expressionist New York” show at MOMA in 2010 included Hedda Sterne, and she had this amazing painting, a spray painted Brooklyn Bridge that looked like it could have been painted yesterday. I liked the bold optimism of the work, and found it so embracing of industrial NYC and urban life at the time. As this painting progressed, it seemed structural to me, and I like the metaphor of a bridge as a connection, to a woman artist of a previous generation and to the bravado of American Post-war painting.

The stencils collaged onto the works on paper are literally from past work, so once you use them up, you won’t have them anymore. Because there are a limited number of these stencils, using them this way must be a big decision. In these pieces, the stencils are at the end of their lives. It’s like a eulogy. You’re putting your past work into your current work. Cleaning your attic in some weird way… Taking stock… How does that fit in with your life?

It’s like those dreams where you’re searching through a house and you unexpectedly find a spare room. One thing that’s hard about giving up the stencils is that they’re equally beautiful on both sides. I have some rules for using them, and one is not to paint or change them. I’m trying to keep them as unselfconscious as they were when they were tools. The stencil motifs are often derived from lotus forms, an image that speaks to a kind of evolution and transformation, but here it does become finite. I like that they look so old and worn, which of course, they are.

I see that spraying through stencils combined with pouring paint continues in these small collage paintings, but with added elements. How did you apply the feathers? It’s an interesting surface.

It’s feathered wallpaper, and they’re real feathers. I was doing some faux painting on a Peter Marino jobsite, and he was having a powder room wallpapered in this material. I’d never seen anything like it. I took all the scraps I could get that day, and then after having them lying around my studio for months I started putting them into paintings and now I’ve made a series around them. It’s an outlandishly expensive wallpaper and I won’t be getting any more. I find it beautiful but a little disturbing.

What I like about these pieces is that they have a kind of erotic vulnerability. And I see this throughout your work. There’s something particularly tentative and tender about the way these shapes are hitting there. It’s a very specific mood that’s distinctive to your work. Something that you’re saying. They’re intimate pieces that don’t overpower you, they subtly communicate with you.

They’re very much about imagination. I’ve been looking at a lot of Greek Cycladic sculpture and Miro paintings on sandpaper. They begin on the floor with splatters and pours and evolve slowing through something like a Rorschach experience. The painting titled Lion reminded me of how animal forms are found in constellations, which I think of as another kind of abstraction, points and fragments connected into form. The small scale is like the page of a book, maybe an ancient manuscript, and there’s gold and silver leaf applied.

[Jones and Zlamany then headed down to the Chelsea Arts Building, where Mary Jones’s studio has been located for 20 years. Paintings in every stage of completion line the walls and floor. Stencils and various other source materials cover the walls.]

These paintings are very different from the paintings in the show, are they finished? It looks like you’ve got X-rays of a body. Can we talk about what’s going on in them?

These are made from my late mother-in-law’s X-rays. When Ross, my husband, was cleaning out her apartment he brought these home for me to use.

Wait, is that her pelvis? Is that her ribcage? Is she still with us? Is she dead? This is really scary… And why did she have so many X-rays? Was she ill? Was she a hypochondriac?

We don’t know, and now she’s dead. I think every time she went to the doctor and complained she was given an X-ray. They’re all from the ’80s, and the films look so fluid, it’s a kind they don’t make anymore. Maybe she just did what she was told.

There’s a history of mother-in-law paintings. Larry River’s Double Portrait of Berdie (1955) comes to mind. What was your relationship with your mother-in-law? Does it mean anything to you that it’s her, or is it purely visual?

She was a beautiful woman well into her 80s. As she aged she reminded me of the way Paul Cadmus looked when he was old, she had very regal bone structure. She was like a character in a Dawn Powell novel, and late in life a terrible alcoholic. They’re clearly portraits, of her, of me, and of lots of stuff between. And like the work in the show, using them is a way to incorporate my biography.

One of the most interesting things that I’ve uncovered about you today is your relationship to the figure and these X-rays take it to a whole other level. These are portraits and they’re really aggressive, which is not what I was expecting. There’s a lot of anxiety in the heads. They’re not calm. They’re challenging and have a lot of pain in them… It’s a side of your work that I didn’t see in the exhibition. How did you make the faces? Do you paint on top of the X-rays?

That image was initially formed from pouring bleach and acetone on an X-ray, and this unsettling face came out of it. I photographed it with my phone and then put it under the sink to stop the process, and to my horror the image washed away, so now I use the photo, and paint on top of it.

Do you relate your work to the work of Sigmar Polke? It seems your work shares the alchemical properties: the way he used chemicals and chemical reactions. Also there’s the mixing of abstract and figurative imagery, layering and reaction, hallucinations and dream images…

He’s so important to me, because of his attitude as much as anything. He moves through so many materials and ideas, there’s a voraciousness in his work towards subject matter and experience. He’s kind of a beacon.

This one has a skull in profile in it. Earlier we were talking about Renaissance portraiture. Do you want to go into that further? They have a quiet dignity that reminds me of Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of Battista Sforza (ca. 1465–72) or Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1480–85).

The profile, and the scale of the profile to the composition is typical of Renaissance portraiture. In terms of a portrait, it’s interesting to show the inside of someone first.

This one has stencils in it too. It as though you’ve dressed the figure in one of your stencils from past works. Are you going to start dressing these X-ray corpses?

I might, but this stencil is special, it’s a laser cut stencil given to me by a student, it’s her design, and now she walks through the painting too. It functions as a skirt or lingerie, and makes it notably feminine. It’s like she’s in a mirror or dressing room.

I’ve never seen a head “appear” as a chemical reaction. In a way you’ve brought someone to life, which is what portraits do. Do you think of yourself as a portraitist? It would not be stretching it. Is this a direction that you plan to continue?

I think I’m responding to the materials first, and I don’t see myself as a portraitist. It might be finite with these X-rays, like my mother-in-law.

Brenda Zlamany is an artist working in Brooklyn, NY

The post X-Ray Vision: Mary Jones discusses her work with Brenda Zlamany appeared first on artcritical.

The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

The post Working Together: A New Book on Words and Art appeared first on artcritical.

Marlborough Chelsea
211 West 19 Street
212-463-8634

Through June 4, 2005

In 1937 Ivor Winters prefaced his analysis of free verse with an essay entitled “The Morality of Poetry.” He could apply the concept of morality to art without irony, confident of being understood by his audience. Winters was not referring to moralism but to what might be called the virtue of craft: the discovery of values which the poet-any serious artist- finds by grappling with the difficulties of his medium.

In the brief span of a single lifetime, public grasp of the communal function of trained, sharpened sensibilities has eroded nearly to oblivion. Navigating in the fine dust of disconnected particles, we can barely glimpse purpose in art beyond that of entertainment or self-expression. On view at both Marlborough galleries, uptown and down, are the mechanisms of that erosion at work for half a century in the art of Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

Rivers was born Yitzak Loiza Grossberg to Ukrainian immigrants in the Bronx. At seventeen, he began a career as a jazz saxophonist, changing his name after a nightclub emcee introduced his combo as “Larry Rivers and His Mudcats.” He played gigs around New York and studied musical theory briefly at Julliard until beginning to paint in 1945. On tour that year with a jazz band in Maine, he met Jane Freilicher, wife of the band’s pianist. Painting appeared a more opportune vehicle for creative ambition than jazz, dominated as it was by great black musicians. Back in New York, he and Freilicher drew from the model at the studio of Nell Blaine who encouraged them to study with Hans Hofmann. Rivers’ first show at the Jane Street cooperative in 1949 earned praise from Clement Greenberg and the artist was launched.

Through the1950s, into the early ’60s, he created some wonderful things but few are here. I miss “Double Portrait of Berdie” (1955), a resonant synthesis of figuration and modernist intentions and his sweeping hybrid structure “The History of the Russian Revolution” (1965). Also absent is “The Greatest Homosexual” (1964), a parody of Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon in His Study” but with a delectable surface that holds its own.

On view uptown are several sensitive portrait drawings and delicately painted heads from the ’50s, suggesting the emotional power Rivers soon relinquished to the artifice of Camp. Veils of pure color are whispered onto fine-grained linen, supporting and balancing passages of elegant drawing. Lovely and distinctive, paintings like “Head of a Woman” (1957) leave you lonely for what he could have produced if he had resisted the tongue-in-cheek detachment of Rauschenberg, Warhol and company. But Rivers never kicked the habit of burlesque.

He was a skilled performer, a great mimic and fine draughtsman who abandoned the problems of painting early, gravitating toward the random I-do-this-I-do-that of Beat sensibility. “Portrait of Frank O’Hara” (1953), keeps the flavor of his abstract expressionist origins. But by the mid-1950s, Pop Art had begun its advance against seriousness and qualitative distinctions. Jackson Pollock had already used Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace as a urinal; Rauschenberg was combining stuffed goats with his paintings and undrawing de Kooning (“Erased de Kooning” 1953). The moment belonged to bad boys. It wasn’t long before play hardened into pose and Rivers substituted waggish constructions and anecdotal interest, often with sexual overtones, for the language of painting.

The sculpted and painted foamboard relief “Modernist Times: Assembly Line” (1989-90), a cartoonish Charlie Chaplin amid the machine-like forms of Leger, is good fun; so is every foamboard piece here. But the shelf life of sight gags is brief. Looking at lampoons of Balthus, Matisse and Gericault you wonder: Where does the fun end and the damage begin? Rivers’ gibes are ultimately as transient as window decoration-a reminder that Warhol’s paintings debuted in Bonwit Teller’s windows in the early 1960s.

Cleverness is a thin reed in visual art; it looses currency fast. This show looks as dated as Teddy boy Edwardiana, Beatles-style chukka boots or Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Beat dreams of the free poetic life. By the time Mary Hopkins bumped “Hey Jude” down the music charts with “Those Were the Days”, Rivers was already copying himself. “Dutch Masters Silver” (1969) is the third rendition of a cigar box motif begun in 1963. How many times can Rivers bleed the same logo-Dutch Master, Camels, Webster-before life drains out?

Marlborough Chelsea displays his most recent work, a last hurrah for commercial glamor. Rivers ended where he began: in an ethos of fashion-obsession that celebrated style over substance. The downtown paintings recycle photos from high-end fashion mags, a brash ensemble strangely reminiscent of the 1960s. Twiggy resurrects in the the concave droop of the bony, cropped-haired model of “Fashion Seated” (2001). Mary Quant’s micro-mini skirt is back; only the tone of the models is different. Here is Carnaby Street on the skids with the gartered waif of “Thigh High Fishnets” (2000) or the black stockinged pickup of “In the Artist’s Car” (1995). In Mary Quant’s memorable phrasing: “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

Larry Rivers fastened on showmanship and attitude. Beyond the earlier works, few are more enduring than a low-budget Warhol movie or the Velvet Underground. He spent high talent on the carelessness of his era, one foreign to the ground of lasting achievement. Works of great communicative scale and meaning are not products of a cultural attitude epitomized by Rivers’ close friend, collaborator, and aesthetic apologist, the poet Frank O’Hara: “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to; if they don’t need poetry, bully for them.” And if they don’t need painting either, no big deal.

The post Larry Rivers: Paintings and Drawings, 1951-2001 appeared first on artcritical.

June 12-July 25, 2003

Everyone knows the story: after World War II, the newly dominant United States brought to the world’s attention a new kind of art. The new painting was one of wide spaces and practical purposes. It reflected a plain-speaking individualism and a belief in social mobility and self-reliance. It rejected the stagnating tastes and hierarchies of the old order, and it prevailed because of its originality and forcefulness.

Right?

Actually, extraordinary as the New York School was, one ought to be a little wary of any account so flattering to our sense of national destiny. A truer history would also examine the mechanisms by which modern artists move from obscurity into the public’s imagination (noting, for instance, Clement Greenberg’s influential arguments about painting’s necessary evolution). It would also include accounts of other vital, contemporaneous movements.

The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York’s First Artist Cooperative, at Tibor de Nagy through July 23, presents one such movement, and there’s enough compelling painting here to make one wish for more. All twenty of the paintings here were at one point exhibited in the Jane Street Gallery, a cooperative gallery whose membership varied slightly over the years but seems to have hovered at around eight to ten members, each of whom paid $5 monthly dues. (Ah, 1940s rents!) The gallery operated only from 1943 to 1949, the same years that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were finding their mature styles. Most of the Jane Street artists were then only in their twenties-a fact all the more startling when one considers how fully-formed their work seems to be. Overall the selection at Tibor is strikingly confident in its philosophy of attack. Instead of the cathartic, autobiographical approach of their elder colleagues-the demonstrative process, the explicit brushwork-the Jane Street artists looked for discoveries within existing idioms. Many had studied with Hans Hofmann, and they sought to extend rather than overthrow the School of Paris. Not surprisingly, more often than the Abstract Expressionists the Jane Street artists show the virtues of the French School-and these lay not just in style and charm, but in a discipline of internal rhythms that bespoke its own kind of energy and courage.

After its first couple of years, changes in the gallery membership led to the dominance by artists pursuing pure geometric abstraction. Leland Bell (1922-1991), Nell Blaine (1922-96), and Albert Kresch (b. 1922) were particularly enamored of Arp and Mondrian, and the influence is apparent in all their work at Tibor. In every case, however, the impulses of forms and colors have the energy of personal discovery. In Bell’s small gouache Abstraction (II), 1942-45, a core of angling forms throws up two masses of concentric loops whose curves kink and chase each other in terse play; inside, succinct patches of pure cobalt, pale yellow, and a mild sienna pin down locations in a kind of expectant disequilibrium. The jostling, overlapping planes of Blaine’s oil painting Abstraction, 1948, suggest a tilted landscape, or perhaps a river pushing along resistant boulders; their colors-sturdy whites, a charged orange, a reserved blue, a static raw sienna-pile and slip against the flow. Kresch, the only artist here represented by both abstract and overtly representational work, employs unnaturally intense hues of cadmium red, yellow, and deep bluish blacks to boldly describe the natural plunges in space in Rockport Sea Wall, (1948).

No less geometric in style, three abstract paintings by Judith Rothschild (1921-93) are somewhat less intractable in their tensions; along with its more rounding rhythms, the Cubistic planes of Mechanical Personnages, 1945, recall a better-behaved Picasso. Rough depictions of figures in interiors in two oil paintings by Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2001) suggest at first an innocence of attack, but the keenness of light-with intense colors somehow communicating exact degrees of shadow-and the vigorous spatial placement of forms reveal a forceful temperament, balanced calmly at the crux between abstraction and representation.

The four paintings here by Larry Rivers (1923-2002) will surprise gallery-goers familiar with only his proto-Pop works. All these skillful works have a fluency (if sometimes a glibness) of style; three suggest rusticated Bonnard, while the last, an interior with still life, has the looping arabesque that might remind one a little of Braque were its coloration a little less equivocal. Rounding out the exhibition are single, lyrical paintings by Hyde Solomon (1911-82) and Ida Fischer (1883-1956).

Installed in Tibor’s smaller exhibition space are ten paintings, watercolors and drawings of the painter Jean Hélion, a leader of Abstraction-Création whose work particularly influenced Bell, Blaine, and Kresch. These works dating from 1937 to 1951 record the French artist’s gradual move in the 40s from crisp abstraction to a robustly modeled realism. To my eye, Hélion’s early abstractions are among the very few to rival the sensuous rigor of interval of a Mondrian or Arp, and here, in an untitled oil painting from 1943, Hélion neatly applies this energy to a portrait; in this stylized world of calibrated color planes, a necktie struggles to emerge from overlapping gray and white garments with unstoppable plastic force, while the subtle weights of hues capture, palpably, the space under a projecting hat brim. (Trifling stuff, with much of Europe then in flames? Hélion found different venues for recording his personal experiences: his paintings express the life of everyday objects, his published memoir recounts his service in the French army and escape from a Nazi prison camp.)

Hélion’s work forms a fitting afterword for The Jane Street Gallery, because his example inspired the gradual but permanent shift of Bell, Blaine, and Kresch toward representational painting in the gallery’s last years. Like Hélion, all carried the formal vitality of their abstractions into their more realistic work, but the shift may well have made the new paintings less interesting to critics. Clement Greenberg had previously singled out Blaine’s abstract paintings in group shows elsewhere, and in 1947 he described the Jane Street artists as “ambitious and serious” and “uncompromisingly determined to prolong and widen the path marked out by Matisse, the cubists, Arp, and Mondrian.” But to my knowledge, his only mention of the figurative work of any the artists here was a rave review of River’s 1949 exhibition (quoted in the excellent exhibition catalogue essay by curator Jennifer Samet). Other Jane Street artists found themselves in an ironic position: having wholeheartedly embraced abstraction before many of the Abstract Expressionists, they had turned away from it just as it was gaining critical favor.

History records that the sole Jane Street artist to gain celebrity status was Rivers, an artist best remembered today, ironically enough, as a progenitor of Pop art-the very movement whose genericizing detachment was scorned by Greenberg (and welcomed by others as an antidote to Abstract-Expressionism’s autobiographical angst.) Pop art was to bring figuration back into the limelight, but in an entirely new guise. One need only compare Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, 1962, to Hélion’s untitled portrait at Tibor to appreciate how fully the tradition of formal composition had slipped from critical attention.

Most of the Jane Street artists remained lifelong friends. The catalogue records the words of the lone surviving member, Albert Kresch, who aptly sums up their youthful venture and their view of the Abstract Expressionists:

“They felt they had invented something new, that easel painting had changed with New York artists…And in a way, we felt that what we were doing was more difficult, because we were trying to interrogate reality, and what we saw, and the visual. They were in the first ecstasies of success and triumph and we just didn’t agree.”

Much credit is due to Ms. Samet and Tibor de Nagy for illuminating an intriguing and too-little known episode of our own history. It’s a vivid reminder that good painting, whatever its incarnation, is always a matter of independent perception and spirit.

The post The Jane Street Gallery: Celebrating New York’s First Artist Cooperative and Jean Hélion: Selected Works appeared first on artcritical.