The promotional video shows the five exhibitions discussed by The Review Panel, March 13, 2015 at the National Academy Museum. Scroll down for the media files to hear what the critics had to say. The next panel takes place April 17 when critics Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss the Triennial at the New Museum and the Invitational at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Supports/Surfaces
Canada
June 7 to July 20, 2014
333 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie)
New York City, 212 925 4631

Right now there is a great deal of interest within the New York art world in looking backward, seeking visual inspiration in modernism. Two current group shows are exemplary models of this revisionist historical thinking. Starting in the 1960s, many otherwise varied artists in Europe and New York employed shaped canvases. Inspired by the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition “The Shaped Canvas,” Luxembourg & Dayan, housed on three floors of a majestic, very narrow Upper East Side townhouse, has organized an exhibition of 28 paintings employing this device. Starting around 1966, a group of Frenchmen of the Supports/Surfaces movement developed a remarkable synthesis of deconstructive philosophy, the political ideas of Mao and the decorative pure color found in Matisse’s late cutouts. Canada, a downtown gallery, has assembled a show of 22 paintings by these artists, in collaboration with the Parisian Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Harvey Quaytman, Elizabeth Murray and Kenneth Noland painted abstractions on shaped frames; Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann used them to present figurative subjects. Some painters, such as Ron Gorchov, used the shaped canvas as a way to structure their pictures. Richard Prince, whose 1994 Untitled (Protest Painting) contains the outlined shape of a sloganless protest sign, is exemplary of artists who set shaped structures within a pictorial rectangle. In presenting a marvelous variety of shaped canvases, Luxembourg & Dayan generates some surprising, unexpected juxtapositions: Pino Pascali’s Coda di Delfino (1966), a jokey dolphin-shaped painting on wood, is set alongside Creede II (1961), a copper-colored, shaped work by Frank Stella. Jeremy De Prez’s Untitled (2014), which presents a seemingly rumpled plaid design, is hung next to John Armleder’s Lotta di gladiatori — The Best (2014). The exhibition ends with two marvelously funny pictures, Steven Parrino’s very orderly The Chaotic Painting (2006), a triangle shape, and Jacob Kassay’s Partial Credit (2014), a not-quite-rectangular canvas with the title printed on the right edge of the frame.

The Supports/Surfaces painters were a loosely organized movement centered in the South of France, linked together, at least initially, by their fascination with bookish philosophizing. Searching for an alternative to the practice of Clement Greenberg’s color field painters, these artists freely appropriated ideas from Michael Fried’s formalism and the Marxism of Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, writers associated with the Parisian journal Tel Quel. Jean-Michel Meurice created strips of intense color like Vinyle (1976); Claude Viallat presented repeated patterns on dyed fabric or rope lattices hung directly on the wall, as in 1972/F14 (1972); Louis Cane employed repetitive rubber-stamping — Toile tamponnée (1967) is an example.

Artists who otherwise had no connection with one another have employed the shaped canvas. Using a shaped canvas doesn’t require any high-powered theorizing. And so it’s unsurprising that this pictorial format has been adapted by such a motley assortment of figures as Lucio Fontana, Mary Heilmann and Damien Hirst, on view at Luxembourg & Dayan. By contrast, although the Supports/Surfaces works can be seen as deconstructed paintings, what remains of that art form when you remove the stretcher and display the unstretched canvas or, conversely, present just the frame, sans canvas? This style of art making was parasitic upon what now seem like dated critical, cultural, and aesthetic theories. French writers drew an equivalence between what in the catalogue Joe Fyfe calls “the fabric of society” and the structures of bourgeois painting, making a link between the “radical social engagement” of French Maoists and deconstructive visual practice. If you remove the unstable supporting synthesis of formalist interpretation and political analysis, all that remains of Supports/Surfaces art is good looking decorative constructions. That perhaps explains why these artists haven’t had much impact within the American art world. When the New York artists looked to Europe for inspiration, it looked to Germany. As yet these Frenchmen don’t belong in the post-modernist canon. The show at Canada was handsomely hung, but by presenting this art with too little reference to its original context, the catalogue did not adequately support what could have been an important revisionist exhibition.

Note:

My account of Supports/Surfaces borrows from Raphael Rubinstein, “The Painting Undone: Supports/Surfaces” at https://www.artcritical.com/2004/02/01/the-painting-undone-supportssurfaces. The quotation from Joe Fyfe comes from the foreword of Surface/Support (New York and Paris: Canada Gallery with Galerie Bernard Ceysson, 2014).

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March 8 to April 20, 2013
64 East 77th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City,  212 452 4646

All ten works from Alberto Burri’s 1986-87 series, on view at Luxenburg & Dayan and exhibited in the United States for the first time are titled, “Nero Cellotex” (Black Cellotex.) Celotex (with one “L”, at least in the US), was developed primarily as an insulating ceiling cover, and does not – as it happens – come in black. From the 1950s until 1975 Burri had used various commercial materials, including Celotex panels, as a support for his relief pieces, but in this late series his attention was diverted to Celotex itself.  He discovered new dimensions of blackness through excavating, chiseling and layering textured Celotex and another industrial material, the plastic Vinavil.

These works engage us with their human scale, their surfaces tempting to the touch, and while minimal in depth compared to his earlier work, they operate on sensory subtleties of texture and blackness.   Deep gloss black is worked against a dry frosted grey-black, the knifed-on scumble of one area of surface facture contrasting with the butter-smooth flatness of another.  The organic abstraction sometimes veers towards curvaceous, erotic (thigh/buttock-like) shapes.  In others, the forms remain formally dressed in their black, kimono-like vestments.  In some, an array of stark block or boulder-like forms resemble crop circles seen from a height.

A solitary and assiduous artist, Burri is best known for his Sacchi series from 1949 to 1960.  In these he used found and discarded burlap sacks, combining them with plastic sheeting, cements and an array of non-art materials, he burned and stitched, retaining the palette of discovered colors in the altered materials. Burri shared with Lucio Fontana a concern with spatial development, except where Fontana pierced or slashed behind the picture surface, creating incidental relief texture, Burri built outward in his wide-ranging choice of anti-conventional and new industrial materials, towards the viewer.  The pieces – swelling, stitched and extruded – were melted, glued, surgically cut and mended using burlap sacks, cements, pumice stones, tar and plastic sheeting over wood and Celotex substructures.

In his later series, the Cretti (“Cracks”), Burri simplified the visceral, sculptural objects and textures that had been the hallmark of his earlier work. The surfaces start to resemble volcanic and desert craquelure. His monochrome impulse culminated in a vast earthwork from the 1980s, Grande Cretto, in which an entire ruined town – Gibellina, Sicily, which had been abandoned following the earthquake of 1968 – was buried by the artist in white concrete.

Italian artists of the Arte Povera movement in the late 1960s and ‘70s found in Burri a predecessor, responding in particular to the older artist’s commitment to truth to materials, to allowing the materials to speak for themselves.  But Burri was committed to an ideal of formal purity, eschewing metaphoric or personal associations in his choice of non-art materials.  A young doctor in the Italian army during the Second World War, Burri was captured by American soldiers in 1944 and interned for two years in the desert of Gainsville, Texas, where he began to paint. When the war ended Burri returned to Rome and joined with artists of the Gruppo Origine, staging his first oneman show at Galleria La Margherita in 1947. Despite maintaining a singular and philosophic distance, Burri is associated by historians with art informel, the European counterpart to abstract expressionism, while Jean Dubuffet’s art brut and the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters are also cited as influences.  Interestingly, Richard Artschwager, 8 years younger than Burri but with striking similarities in background – he too served in the Second World War and completed a degree in physics before turning to art – was also drawn to Celotex as a material, although with aesthetically opposite results.   The Burri Foundation, located in a restored palazzo in the artist’s Perugia, Italy hometown of Città di Castello, may well b e as worthy of pilgrimage as the Grand Cretto in Sicily.

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April 26 to June 30. 2012
64 East 77th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City,  212-452-4646

Domenico Gnoli’s last and celebrated New York show debuted in 1970 at the influential Sidney Janis Gallery.  A year later, the dashing young Italian artist was dead. During the final five years of his life, Gnoli created dozens of powerful, prescient works, a selection of which are presented at Luxembourg and Dayan in a beautifully curated exhibition.  Their quirky, charming townhouse gallery is the perfect venue to reintroduce this unknown artist to America.

His signature finish is achieved through a mix of acrylic and sand resulting in a clay-like texture, which adds a sensual solidity to the transformed domestic subject matter.  It is thus not a surprise that fashion icon Muccia Prada is one of the artist’s collectors.  Certainly Gnoli would have been aware of Elsa Schiaparelli’s clothing designs, since her last show was presented in Rome in 1954. By a nice coincidence, Prada and Schapiaparelli are the subjects of the Metropolitan Museum’s current show, “Impossible Conversations.” Gnoli’s exploration of fashion reflects in close ups of sartorial details, women’s cascading hair, patterned fabrics.  His aesthetic was a direct provocation against the reigning Arte Povera movement of his times.

At eighteen, with the reputation as a precocious genius, Gnoli exhibited his early work with masters like Giorgio Morandi and Giacomo Manzù.  Born in Rome in 1933, his mother an artist and his father an art historian, Gnoli’s youthful wanderlust led him to Paris and London, where he worked as a successful theatrical set designer, an influence that remains visible in his dramatic zooms and bisected details.  As he continued to exhibit paintings, Gnoli’s work began to be included in several mid-fifties New York shows. In 1963, he married the sculptor Yannick Vu after which they divided their time between Rome and Majorca.  Yu has been crucial in organizing this show: 18 paintings of varying sizes from 1964-1969 are on display. Fragments of a bed with two human outlines beneath a patterned blanket, a surrealistically bisected brick wall, and especially the clothing images imbue ordinary bourgeois reality with an almost psychedelic slant.

Known for its august history of craftsmanship, Italy has a passion for “bella figura.” While contemporaries like Mario Schifano and Michelangelo Pistoletto explored a Pop sensibility and Piero Manzoni worked conceptually, Gnoli delved into everyday materialistic life with a unique, gently sardonic perspective.”Striped Trousers” (1969), for instance, focuses on a fractal of a man’s pleated pants, a contemplative perspective inflected by sly sexuality, the Italian eye for rigorous tailoring, and a mysteriously somber palette. “Borsetta da Donna” (1969) sees a rich, reptilian skin shaped into a structured purse.  A hint of a handle in a bizarre angle creates a monumental celebration of the iconic power of pocketbooks, long before the current “trophy purse” mania.

His monochromatic series of “Monster Drawings” create a bestiary of such wonders as a giant snail lounging on an upholstered sofa or an ostrich perched on a car seat. Prodigous drawing skills heighten the surrealistic imagery.

Gnoli ‘s deceptively prosaic subject matter belies his wholly original virtuosity, which is heightened by astounding angles and poetic perspective. These coolly contemporary images invite contemplation and admiration.

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On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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