“Nobu Fukui” at Stephen Haller Gallery through May 18 (542 W26 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 741 7777)

“Alexander Liberman: No Regrets” at Ameringer Yohe, through April 24 (20 W 57th Street, bewteen fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212 445 0051)

“Fred Sandback” through end May at Lawrence Markey Gallery 42 East 76th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212 517 9892, and at Zwirner and Wirth, through May 1, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-86

Minimalism was so strenously and self-consciously iconoclastic, with its prim reductions, its insistently banal primary structures, and its chromophobia, that there is an almost equally iconoclastic pleasure to be had in work that takes up some aspect of this movement but recklessly adds whimsy or gaiety.

Several shows up right now that fit this bill. None of the artists set out to debunk minimalism: one historically precedes it, others dutifully pay homage to the movement. But it doesn’t require a radical misreading of these artists to see an implicit critique of puritanism in their catholic displays of gesture or color.

The small painted boxes of Stuart Arends know how to behave in polite company: They have been collected assidiously by the Panza di Buomo Collection in Italy, which specializes in minimal and monochromatic art. But they are touched by a delicacy and personal, even poetic quality that belies any sense of severity.

The artist has insisted on their status as paintings rather than sculptures, suggesting in a statement that accompanies the show that he arrived at the box as his preferred support out of a desire to deal with a painting as an object “rather than just a format for illusions”. The box isn’t suggestive of a receptical; rather it is just a canvas whose wrap around edges happen to have equal weight to its frontage.

The painting is made up of neatly delineated, irregularly overlapping rectangles. There is a specificness to his touch, which is restrained but personal, sealed-in (with much use of wax) and at the same time differentiated, with a different kind of brushstroke for each rectangle. As if to emphasize the personality of these charmingly particular objects, Mr. Arends has called his show “Friends,” giving each piece a person’s name. His show is a party where you want to linger and meet everyone.

In 1965 Nobu Fukui elicited a cryptic description from Donald Judd, the high priest of minimalism, in a brief notice in Arts Magazine: “The paintings are well done; there isn’t anything wrong with them-they aren’t elegant, bland or affected-but they are like other paintings.” While Mr. Fukui’s work has changed radically in the intervening decades-his aesthetic is now exuberant and layered to the point of being baroque-Judd’s enigmatic categorizations hold true with remarkable alacrity.

Mr. Fukui is an artist who, literally, juggles many balls: a typical work lays upon a ground of richly detailed, dense gestural and/or collaged texture a rigid grid structure populated at the intersections of its ruled lines with irregular clusters of colored uniformly sized dots and, less frequently, actual balls (they could be beads or marbles) dipped in paints of the same primary and nursery colors.

The viewer soon gets used to these grids and balls so that they shimmer on the retina like a layer of pointillism. There is, however, an insistent democracy between the layers, and within each layer, despite the irregularity, an all-overness that achieves order without symmetry or ubiquity. The collage materials, where he uses them, hover ingeniously between interestingness and gratuity. In fact, his whole project seems to be a bravura balancing act of meaning and decoration, as if these aesthetic categories themselves are willed equivalents of order and chaos.

Dots and balls of a sparer nature but no less whimsy and charm filled the works of Alexander Liberman between 1950-1960, an elegant selection of which, installed in direct emulation of a show staged by the artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960, closes at Ameringer Yohe this weekend. Reviewing the Parsons show in Arts magazine, Judd noted that “the economy is admirable.”

These works are, indeed, about economy for the sake of vigor and dynamism rather than reduction for its own, cerebral or theoretical sake. They look to Russian Constructivism, (the “Yellow Continuum” series directly recalling Rodchenko and El Lissitsky) but despite their precionism and hard-edged clarity they equally bring to mind the pulsating, wobbly disks of Miró or the child-like joie de vivre of Calder, especially Liberman’s last disk painting in this show, an untitled work from 1960 that pits a hand-drawn larger yellow and smaller red ball against a dazzle of ultramarine.

Liberman was the legendary art editor at Condé Nast who managed to maintain a serious practice as a fine artist despite the pressures of his job and the snobbish distance, before the era of Andy Warhol, between the worlds of art and fashion. He was a great collector and patron of artists, but there is plenty of positive evidence in these joyful, bracing works to overcome any suspicion of the depth of admiration felt for this artist by such peers as de Kooning, Newman, and later, of course, Judd.

On the face of it, the late Fred Sandback-the subject of a two-part exhibition at Lawrence Markey and the uptown premises of David Zwirner-was as minimal as they come.
His trademark material was store-purchased brightly colored acrylic yarn, stretched taut between floor and ceiling, or forming right angles to a wall. These lines of string inevitably force awareness of their environment in a way that displaces attention from the object itself to its impact, a classic hallmark of minimalism.

And yet, severe, pristine, reductive as Sandback first appears, the effect of his string pieces is strangely sculptural. You become aware not so much of the room itself, although that is a factor, as of planes defined in space. And the sense of implied continuation, the thought that the lines must continue through to other rooms and spaces, adds a poetic element alien to hard core minimal art. Despite his drastic means, Sandback was ultimately more of a connector to artistic traditions than a disruptor of them. His professed preference for the expressive figuration of Giacometti over the presumed affinity between his own work and the Russian contructivists is richly suggestive and rings true.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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through December 5, 2003

Al Taylor: Wire Instruments, 1989-90
Lawrence Markey
42 East 76th Street New York NY 10021-2711
Tel 212 517 9892 Fax 212 517 9894

November 13 to December 20, 2003

The classical world is continually being addressed anew in art and literature. Recently, in Anne Carson’s new translation of Sappho’s verse “If Not, Winter” Carson combines the verbal and visual by utilizing the whiteness of the page, magnifying the absence surrounding Sappho’s work. The poems, extant as scraps of text, appear on the page as bare fragments, surrounded by blankness. This is how this ancient world appears to us, in bleached, isolated shards that seem to hold traces of an ideal world of beauty and wisdom that we somehow hope can inform the present.

C&M Arts has assembled examples of Picasso’s work which addresses this world of long ago, realized after a sojourn in Rome and Pompeii. Here on display are some of his most serene works. Baigneuse a la Serviette de Bain, for example, depicts a standing female nude; her waving hair and towel picking up a wind as she walks away from the sea. The entire image, assembled with delicate flutters of gray brushstrokes, seems to float on the large sheet of handmade paper. There are also a number of Greek and Roman sculptures borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complementing Picasso’s paintings and drawings of classical heads, drapery and bodies rendered to express a sculptural solidity.

A few streets away at Lawrence Markey gallery is an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by the late Al Taylor, his “Wire Instruments” as he called them, also seem to address the classical age. Here we are dealing with works that are quite literally lyrical; they resemble partially abstracted lyres that the ancient poets used accompany them as they sung their verses. Taylor’s sculptures are made from wood found on the street and are delicately assembled with wire. They resemble Picasso’s sculpture “Cubist Guitar” but in their elongation and the whitewashed atmosphere of the painted wood, they are also reminiscent of Greek or Roman temple architecture. One can imagine a few lines from Sappho accompanied by plucks from one of Taylor’s shakily heroic instruments.

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Frank Stella: Recent Work, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, through June 28, 212-563-4474

Suzan Frecon Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, 42 East 76th Street, through June 14, 212.517.9892

What happens to proto-minimalists when their creativity outspans their spawn’s? Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, veterans of the extreme reductivism of the 1960s, inserted themselves into 101 Art History on the page just before Minimalism. But they managed to outlive – and arguably outgrow – such key minimalists as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. They were both pioneers of the shaped canvas: monochrome in Mr. Kelly’s case, pinstriped in Mr. Stella’s.

Mr. Kelly’s work fills three separate spaces of the Matthew Marks Gallery, with paintings ranging from 1999 to this year and self-portrait drawings from 1944-92. The experience of seeing eight of the shaped and multi-paneled canvases in a grand industrial space is disconcertingly scaleless. One can stand at a similar proportional distance to these large works as a reader does to pictures in a book, and it is in the nature of Mr. Kelly’s depersonalized aesthetic that his monochrome shapes assume the emblematic quality of graphic design. For instance, “Red with White Relief” (2002), a near rectangle of red with a white triangle superimposed at the cut-away top left, reads like a shirt launderer’s logo. Other works, however, are richly satisfying in their subtle perceptual complexity. Not the prim rectangles of clinical color, so much as the more sumptuously colored trapezoids and curved forms. These free-float on the wall and in the imagination alike.

It is not unprecedented for Mr. Kelly or his curators to present works based on direct observation in relation to his severe geometric abstractions. The 1996 Guggenheim retrospective offered discrete rooms of his photographs, linear drawings of flora, and collages. At a banal level, these ameliorate the severity of his abstraction. In the case of the current exhibitions, however, the heightened shape-awareness induced by Mr. Kelly’s best paintings carries across to what would otherwise appear conventional, if accomplished, self-portraits. Harry Cooper deftly argues for such a reading of these self-images in the handsomely produced catalog.

There is an extraordinary range of styles in these drawings- including tight, illustrative realism, modern classicism, and hints of the modernism of Klee, Matisse, and Picasso. One from 1949 recalls the clipped angst of Lucian Freud, who was actually in Paris at the same time. Despite varieties of line-quality, from bold Chinese brushwork to spindly penmanship, and subtle fluctuations of emotion, from boyish aloofness to a suitable nervousness – in 1987, while strapped up at the Mayo Clinic – there is unmistakable unity of purpose and personality in this remarkable body of drawings.

***

If Mr. Kelly anticipated Minimalism, Mr. Stella precipitated it. Where Mr. Kelly strove for the cool impersonality of Byzantine icons, Mr. Stella could coldly assert, “What you see is what you see.” It is not so surprising, therefore, that while Mr. Kelly’s career has glided along its serene path, Mr. Stella’s has been marked by violent oscillations and seeming contradictions. Formally speaking, the smart-assed cerebrality of the early, black-stripe paintings are a far cry from the histrionic graffiti-baroque reliefs of the 1980s and 1990s. But the differing styles connect at the level of provocation..

The new sculptures on view at Paul Kasmin are, by the standards of their immediate predecessors at the same gallery in winter 2001, relatively couth. The aluminum tubes, pipes, and trusses out of which they are made are uncolored – mercifully, as Mr. Stella is a consumate vulgarian in color. One piece from 1998-02, “Die Kurfurstin (The Electoress),” is from his von Kleist series and relates to the joyous extravaganza unveiled at the National Gallery in Washington in 2001. It uses a white fiberglass material to magical spiraling effect, recalling the Russian Constructivists as well as the roofs of various Guggenheims.

In similar playful mood, “Bamboo Trophy I” (2002), evokes the crown on the Statue of Liberty. But while whimsy, exuberance, and invention are in bountiful supply in these generally likeable works, it’s impossible to get too much sculptural purchase on them. In the absence of convincing structure and form relationship, his disposition of effects is ultimately gratuitous. The artist’s claim that his 3-D works are paintings not sculptures smacks of special pleading on behalf of scatter. Overload proves a poor surrogate for complexity.

***

Suzan Frecon brings an intimist sensibility to the genre of hard-edge abstraction. A show of new work, which closes this weekend, offers a painterly antidote to the brutal elegance of Ellsworth Kelly. Even in pared down, minimal compositions, her touch is soft, subtle, and alive. In much the way that Mr. Kelly’s austere abstraction is somehow humanized by his drawings and photographs, appreciation of Ms. Frecon’s is augmented by her watercolors. They are not on view at Lawrence Markey this time, but their quirky deliberated handwriting and vaguely primitive, non-western shape vocabulary find equivalents in theinvested surfaces of her oil paintings and their subtle orientalism. (There are intimations of the turban, the scimitar, and Moorish archways among her new motifs.) Palette has a lot to do with Ms. Frecon’s tenderness: She abstains from the primaries or cool, clinical colors to explore wine reds and terra cottas and pulsating greens. Her painterly touch strikes a gorgeous balance between restraint and sensuality.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 12, 2003

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