September 13 to October 22, 2016
45 East 78 Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

More than 25 years since they were made, the paintings in “Sean Scully: The Eighties,” now at Mnuchin, have lost none of their potency. In fact, for this viewer, they have only increased in resonance. The early ‘80s represented a transitional moment in Scully’s career, and by the end of the decade a mode of painting emerged that was assertively and recognizably the artist’s own. Moving to New York City in 1975, Scully worked in a stringent, hard-edged minimalist style. This changed definitively following a stay at the Edward Albee Residency on Montauk in 1982. Included in this exhibition are several works made on found wood during that residency. This resourcefulness proved to be of great significance for Scully’s development as a painter.

Bear (1982) is comprised of two vertically joined panels. The left panel is horizontally striped with alternate dirty white and black bands; the right panel is narrower, and while both panels are level at the top edge, the right half extends below at the bottom edge and is striped with broader blue-gray and black bands. The two sides appear to splice together contrasting realities, like montage in cinema. They picture an idea of simultaneous proximity and distance — a central concept in Scully’s painting from the 1980s. More can be said of duality in Bear as the two sides of the painting move at different visual speeds, the right panel tranquil in comparison to the agitated movement of the left panel. Oil paint is applied in an aggressive, rhythmic way, adding to the sense of musical interval and percussive measure. In paintings such as Bear, elements are already present that through variation and change of emphasis proved adequate to Scully’s ambition — any changes made are intuitive and responsive to paintings already made, rather than for the sake of change or embellishment. Shelter Island (1982) again contrasts bands of black and grayed white on two panels — this time on linen, one stretcher deeper and so more forward than the other — on one side the bands are vertical, and on the other horizontal. Typically, the painting is frontal, its surface actively worked in oil paint, wet into wet. This remains so for all other paintings in this exhibition, and it’s just as much in evidence in Scully’s paintings seen at Cheim & Read as recently as early 2015.

The off-white and black bands recur — take, for example, A Green Place (1987). In this instance, single bands of black and off-white occupy a rectangular segment inserted at the top right of the composition. Together they form a horizon line between what could be seen as a dark sky above and pale sea below. Horizontal bands of red comprise another rectangular section inserted on the left side, contiguous with the painting’s left edge. Together, these rectangles, like paintings within a painting, operate alternately as windows or figures within the surface. The vertical orange and green bands that otherwise fill the composition provide the wall or ground against which these shapes function. While remaining abstract, associations are not expunged. The painting recalls elements of a Henri Matisse painting and the indebtedness shared by both artists to fabric patterns (in Scully’s case, stripes) seen on visits to Morocco.

Two more paintings are entirely composed of off-white and black bands. Both somber and sensuous, they are possessed of an acute intensity. Triptych Aran (1986) is the more reductive of the two, whereas Empty Heart (1987) — consisting of three superimposed blocks of vertical and horizontal black and white stripes — is exposed and stark. A more chromatic atmospheric light is produced in other paintings, though there is always a gravitas that leans composition toward invention rather than playfulness. For instance, A Bedroom in Venice (1988) is muted with soft blue light that brings to mind the humid air and radiant light of that city and its effect on color sensation. Longing, melancholy and urgency all prevail in these paintings. This denies a place for complacency and evinces a drive and focus that both address art-historical connections, and the contemporary world vis-à-vis the particularity of Scully’s own experience, be it emotional or visual.

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Barry Schwabsky’s new anthology, The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), collects his columns for The Nation between 2006 and 2014, providing a clear record of a surprising variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. We get his response to shows of old masters and modernist heroes — Diego Velázquez, Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse — and his often-critical views of famous senior contemporaries, such as Alighiero Boetti, Dan Graham and Ai Weiwei. We also get his sympathetic take on a number of lesser-known and emerging artists, including Laurel Nakadate, Zoe Strauss, Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. And in the introduction, as well as in many of the reviews, readers get brief, instructive statements about the present-day role of art criticism, the contemporary art market, and about the role of art schools — three of the art world’s perpetual quandaries.

As art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky may be reasonably compared with the most famous holder of that post, Clement Greenberg. When Greenberg championed the Abstract Expressionists, calling them the only legitimate heirs to early French Modernist tradition, he appeared a prophet. By contrast, Schwabsky, modestly recognizing in his introduction that contemporary art critics have only a marginal practical role, aspires “to open up […] perspectives without, I hope, belaboring them.” While Greenberg provides a skeleton history of Modernism from Edouard Manet to Jackson Pollock, it’s abundantly clear that no such master narrative can conceivably extend into the present. But now, Schwabsky suggests, thanks to “an inner transformation in the nature of art itself,” it solicits “participants, collaborators, communities.” For this reason, the role of politics has also changed. Greenberg’s art writing, guided by Marxism, sententiously contrasts high art and kitsch. For Schwabsky, however, the goal is to “let the critical distance between art and politics — between my writing and its context — display itself.”

Schwabsky’s presentation of these important arguments is very elliptical, so I hope that elsewhere he will spell them out. Here is how I would place them: after art history became an academic subject, in the 1960s Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss (and her followers at the journal October) attempted also to turn art criticism into a discipline housed in the university. In pursuit of that goal, they introduced a methodology and technical vocabulary into writing about contemporary art. But this project failed. And so nowadays our best critics are poets (like Schwabsky), journalists, or perhaps moonlighting academics such as Schwabsky’s immediate predecessor at The Nation, Arthur Danto. And this means that Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire and even Adrian Stokes (the maverick 20th-century English writer who is repeatedly cited by Schwabsky) remain the most relevant role models for critics.

Schwabsky is an eloquent, compulsively quotable writer. His essays, he says, “aim to keep art unfinished.” Without ever seeming to try too hard, he is very effective at summarizing artists’ achievements in tightly coiled felicitous phrases. Kara Walker’s “instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist,” he nicely observes, is “the aesthetic equivalent of what the marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition.” Gauguin’s Polynesian women, he suggests, are “almost indecipherable. […] Something in them remained as mysterious to him as he was to himself.” I love it when he calls Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) an “immersive and synecdochical painting.” And I admire him when, in a surprising review linking the abstract paintings of Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries, he suggests that they both “aspire to grandeur — with a pictorial vocabulary that to some may seem painfully narrow.”

Critics, whose raison d’être is to scrutinize particular works, need to have a sensibility — which is to say that they are unavoidably more personal in their enthusiasms than art historians. But art historians deploy a method, and so generalize. Suppose, then, that an art historian devoted to contemporary art were to read The Perpetual Guest (as many no doubt will). What general view of the subtitle’s “art in the unfinished present” would she come away with? Schwabsky’s account of how Nancy Spero’s “effort to unmoor painting from the Western tradition finally did converge with Matisse’s earlier one” would show how our best critics link contemporary art with its antecedents. Reading in his discussion of Christopher Wool that “The price of things is crowding out the value of things” would reveal how skeptical our critics are about our overheated art market. And studying his account of Gordon Matta-Clark — “artist of fragments (who) left an oeuvre that feels whole” — could inspire the art historian to resist conventional critical clichés. Above all, I would hope that the contemporary art historian responded to his very dry sense of humor. His analysis linking the prospects of abstraction with Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?,” for example, is worth more than a lot of formalist or sociological analysis. “A dominant aesthetic,” says Schwabsky in his account of the 2009 Venice Biennale, “always undermines itself.” At this time — when older formalist and Marxist theorizing is no longer applicable, but has not, as yet, yielded to new approaches to art writing — he offers a reliable, necessarily unfinished guide to the dilemmas of the present.

Schwabsky, Barry. The Perpetual Guest. Art in the Unfinished Present (London & New York: Verso, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2. 304 pages. $24.95

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In 1963 William Rubin identified in the work of Ellsworth Kelly “a particularly American combination of hedonism and the puritanical.” Kelly, who died December 27th, aged 92, at his home in Spencertown, NY, was, indeed, an artist who defied easy categorization. An exponent neither of minimal art, color field abstraction nor hard edge geometric abstraction, Kelly’s hybridity was equally typified by his diversity of medium, ranging from three dimensional layered canvases to free standing, flat, sometimes folded, painted metal objects. Always deceptively simple, the focused acuity of his work could be mistaken as reductionist, or purely formal, if viewed too quickly or carelessly. He settled early in his career into a preoccupation with observed line and shape, often realized in exactingly defined forms with intensely saturated color, or through the contrasts of black and white. He continued to explore such subject matter with the same urgency his entire life. In a recently -filmed interview we see him gesture towards paintings in his studio that he had to finish, he said, within his lifetime. There was no letting up, for this artist, exhibiting in all four of Matthew Marks’ gallery spaces in May and June of this year.

Before moving from Paris to New York, in 1954, Kelly had spent the previous six years working and traveling in France—a hugely formative experience that set him apart from the Abstract Expressionist scene, setting him up for the independent orientation that would characterize his position in the city he where he would soon be living and working. In France it was the non-performative abstraction of Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi that most absorbed Kelly. An appreciation of Romanesque churches, meanwhile, led to an awareness of painting’s relationship to architecture. The move to New York was, in part, inspired by a favorable review of Ad Reinhardt that signaled possibilities for his own distinctly non-gestural work back home.

The spare and rigorous beauty of Kelly’s paintings continued a process of refinement and depth that was unabated. The search for shapes and colors that correspond to the memory of selective visual events made his art thoroughly life-engaged, a way for memory to remain in the present tense in relationships between forms and colors. Though his paintings were often derived from things actually seen—the source admittedly not usually evident—in the sublime plant drawings the source was, of course, abundantly clear. But the same visual pleasure and intellectual curiosity in found or revealed form evident across his oeuvre, whether in drawings, paintings, collages, carved reliefs or painted objects. His works derive from, and bear, deep contemplation,

The select number of artists truly able to sustain passionate reverie in distilled form makes one realize, how difficult and rare is the ability to expose emotion and poise in subtly modulated, streamlined form. Blinky Palermo, himself indebted to Kelly, is one such artist. Another example would be the late cut papers of Matisse, . Kelly’s project for the design of a chapel offers comparison to Matisse’s own Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the Côte d’Azur. Kelly’s chapel designs, dating from the 1980s, were gifted by the artist earlier this year to the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas which is working towards its realization. Fittingly, the chapel brings full circle Kelly’s French connection. In 1951, he had made a trip to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles where he had noticed the large colored panels on the façade. “I didn’t want to use color for decoration but I liked the idea of color used in architecture,” he has said. After a lifetime of producing dynamically balanced paintings and sculptures, it is anticipated that architecture and the colored light from colored glass windows will add to and combine with the experience of a suite of black and white paintings in Kelly’s chapel. As with Matisse’s chapel, another great colorist and innovator will offer us an immersive, sensual encounter that amounts to the deletion of boundary between physically felt space and visually allusive color and light—a spirituality, embodied in the continuous present.

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Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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Entering Ameringer McEnery & Yohe, those who have followed Franklin Evans’s work over the last 10 years will recognize the artist’s application of readily accessible, process-spun materials to the gallery walls and floor. Materials that might otherwise be pulled from a painter’s trashcan, including paint-scuffed masking tape, clippings from photo albums and incomplete works on paper, are positioned in bursts of action that may at first seem disorganized. The solo exhibition, “paintingassupermodel,” is Evans’s first at Ameringer and succeeds as a personal rumination on Yve-Alain Bois’s 1990 book Painting as Model. Celebrated abstract paintings by Matisse, Mondrian and Newman, which Bois discusses in his book, make appearances in the exhibition.

Evans’s typical array of materials is supplemented at Ameringer by enormous inkjet prints on paper and canvas running longitudinally along the right side of the gallery and hung in overlapping bands from floor to ceiling. Overtop the printed matter, eight discrete, densely colored paintings on canvas are hung at slightly different heights throughout the gallery at more or less eye-level. Other supports for paintings, which appear to be hung backwards, look like window frames covered in color-copied photos. Jutting from a support beam in the center of the gallery, two rectilinear Plexiglas sculptures are adorned with tape and clippings. On the left, a Mondrian painting has been recreated in strips of black tape, its dimensions stretched horizontally to fit the gallery wall.

Visually engaged by Evans’s materials, ideas in Bois’s book are spliced and resituated. Evans grapples with Bois’s primary argument, that art theory loses meaning when applied dogmatically to critical problems — that, for modern art to be understood, it cannot be stripped of its context or, to the opposite extreme, divorced from its technical making. Evans expands these ideas by presenting his process as the unpolished model (literally a “pin-up”) and by turning the gallery into a Rubik’s cube of cultural fallout. The abstracted female figure in Matisse’s Romanian Blouse (1940) is repeated prominently on walls and in a few of the paintings. In matisseasmodel (2013), Matisse’s subject has been re-painted into square patches that intermingle with flats of saturated color. Slight differences in the many iterations of the woman’s face reinforce Evan’s incessant act of re-interpretation — a honing-in on Matisse’s painting as Bois does in his chapter “Matisse and ‘Arche-drawing.’” As exemplified by the ubiquitous model, Evans’s references are almost never linear. Digital photographs of his installation hang at one end of the gallery, and then those spaces appear in actuality in the rear of the space — a kind of mirror imaging that Evans has described as a response to Rauschenberg’s 1957 Factum works.

Evans’s approach to Bois is a salient aspect of “paintingassupermodel” — it scrutinizes a lineage that is relevant to Evans’s practice — but that focus is not all the show has to offer. In fact, the subtext of Bois’s book dissipates the more one’s eyes follow detour after detour through the skewed grids of Evans’s canvases. The implicit formalist grid in irwinorange (2014) looks as organized as an aerial city map from afar and more like a Gee’s Bend quilt upon closer inspection. The artist’s keen sense of humor can be felt in his pliant, idiosyncratic painting vocabulary and in his witty titles. The word model takes on multiple meanings; Internet printouts of male and female models, gleaned from the worlds of fashion or soft-core erotica are intermittently spaced around the gallery to form an underlayer of camp. The title of one recent painting, boo,iseeyou (2013), is a quip appropriated from the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Models are also presented in the form of statistical charts, derivatives and spreadsheets that trace (rather unromantically) Evans’s own path through the New York City art world. Having spent half his twenties working in finance, the artist continues to be a strategist and a quantifier. Giant spreadsheets and typewritten lists adorning the largest wall at Ameringer are digital relics pulled from old hard drives. Among these enlarged documents is an outdated list of NYC galleries that Evans recorded in 2002. Practical notations reveal how Evans got his bearings, how he plotted what was what and learned who was who. Across from the gallery’s entrance, to the right of the spreadsheets, a pixilated, life-sized photograph of the artist hangs at balcony height. In the image, Evans stands nonchalantly at three-quarter view with his back turned to the wall, which represents his past work. He faces yet another list — ARTnews’s “200 Top Collectors” — which becomes another obstacle and extension of the narrative. Through these clues, an artist’s career becomes another model to be examined, that of artist as aspiring super-artist.

Despite his implicit use of autobiographical content, Evans is not really a storyteller with his art as much as he is a record-keeper, a philosopher and an interpreter of what he reads. If Evans’s career continues to be plotted, and if one can imagine such a chart for this purpose, the coordinates might be made with one axis for the artist’s resourcefulness (of idea, of material, of professional adaptability) and another axis for the passage of time. Evans positions and bravely repositions his material past much like he rereads or reconsiders texts, like he has done with Painting as Model. His process persists as a slow and thoughtful evolution of fast-looking art.

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The genius of the exhibit “Matisse: His Art and His Textiles,” is that it provides insight into how an artist works — the material and intellectual processes by which art is made. Hilary Spurling, the Matisse biographer, originally suggested the exhibition’s concept to the Royal Academy in London and acted as consultant to the show. Included here are approximately 75 paintings, drawings and prints, exhibited alongside actual textiles, all from Matisse’s own collection. The textiles have never been exhibited before, and were stored by the artist’s relatives until Spurling discovered them in her research. Spurling’s belief is that no one truly recognizes how important textiles were to Matisse’s career. In her catalogue essay, Spurling seeks to prove the impact Matisse’s upbringing in Bohain had on his work. In Bohain, handloom weaving was a prime industry and Matisse’s family had been weaving there for generations. Spurling links the ‘daring’ nature of the textiles created by Bohain weavers to Matisse’s own individuality and iconoclasm. In contrast to Spurling’s rather factual and biographical discussion of the artist’s relationship to textiles, Jack Flam’s catalogue essay provides an aesthetic, pictorial analysis of Matisse’s relationship to decorative materials. Flam demonstrates how Matisse used the decorative “to extend the energy within individual things beyond their physical boundaries and to create, in effect, a kind of metaphysics of decoration.” Unfortunately, the documentation of the textiles in the catalog is not very thorough or well organized.

The exhibition covers almost the entirety of Matisse’s career, but it notably bypasses what has traditionally been considered Matisse’s most important and most revolutionary period: the mid-teens. This alone indicates that the curators are trying to reinterpret Matisse’s career.

Spurling dedicates considerable attention to exploring Matisse’s life during the 1920s, when he made the so-called “Nice period” paintings. This might reflect her desire to reconsider the works that have generally been perceived as both politically problematic (“Orientalist” odalisques), as well as a retreat from the radicalism of the 1910s. The exhibition is dominated by odalisque paintings. In fact, the entire exhibition is harem-like, with dimly lit rooms, arched doorways framing a North African haiti (a pierced and appliquéd hanging), and one very atmospheric group hanging of textiles — ikats, an actual toile de Jouy, batiks, and silk damasks, from Italy, France, the Middle East, India, and Morocco — all flowing down loosely from dowels hung high on the walls.

The first room of the exhibition provides a succinct account of how Matisse developed his individual style between 1890 and 1909. A painting from 1890,Still-life, Books and Candle, contains the image of a textile — a tablecloth beneath objects. Although the tablecloth is beautifully rendered it does not take on deeper meanings. By 1909, however, Matisse’s use of textiles in his paintings becomes more complicated. His Still-life with Blue Tablecloth uses fabric to create a field of energy. Pattern fills the entirety of the painting, and the three still life elements — a copper coffee pot, a compotier of fruit and a green flask — no longer sit atop the table, but appear to float within the textile, completely united with its atmosphere. The textiles become symbolic representations, what Matisse would later term “signs,” and the patterns begin to begin to take on a life of their own. The blue tablecloth in the painting is based on a textile which is also on display — a nineteenth-century French printed cotton and linen fabric Matisse apparently adored and called (incorrectly) his toile de Jouy. The actual fabric consists of a delft blue pattern against a white background, but in the painting, the white is transformed into aqua, enriching the overall harmony. These imaginative transformations of subject matter prove that Matisse was not a realist, but rather an inventor of harmonies that have a tangible yet oblique relationship to reality. Matisse uses the pattern the way he uses color, to extend his representation of the subject, whether it is still life, figure or interior. For example, in The Moorish Screen (1921), the patterned screen enlivens the conversation between the two women. A violin case, off to the side, is a reminder of the musical motif, but Matisse generates the presence of sound by having at least four distinct patterned textiles bump up against one another in this room. In Odalisque with a Screen(1923), a model raises her arms in the same posture as the palm leaves to her right, which are echoed in turn by the palm shaped pattern of the red and white textile in the background. In Seated Odalisque (1926) Matisse rhymes the red diamond pattern with the model’s accentuated orange-red nipples.

In the fourth room of the show paintings from 1926-28 and 1937 face off. A group of five paintings from 1937 all represent women posing in striped robes. Three such Ottoman and Turkish robes are on display, one of which — with purple and white stripes — appears in a few paintings. Again, it is instructive not just to compare the actual robe to the painting, but also to note how Matisse simplifies the patterns to serve his purposes, and uses the continuous lines of the stripes to create a calligraphic flowing line that unites and expresses harmonies and feelings. While he clearly relishes the use of pattern in painting, he never gets lost in the details of the patterns.

This is also clear in Woman with a Veil (1927). The Ottoman red and green robe depicted in the painting is on display beside it. While the actual robe’s patterns are detailed and ornamented with curved lozenge shapes, Matisse simplifies them into a linear diagonal grid. By the time you reach the final rooms of the show, simplification takes on whole new meanings. Kuba cloths are juxtaposed with a rather densely hung wall of paper cut-outs, a chasuble maquette from which Matisse created priests’ garments, and a costume for the ballet Le Chant du rossignol. Here especially, Matisse’s ability to use bold color and geometric and organic forms allusively and evocatively is apparent. While the patterns of the toile de jouy were organic, resemble vegetables and flora and fauna, the patterns on the Kuba cloths are geometric and abstract. Matisse’s last works, the cut-outs, hover somewhere in between the geometric and organic realms. Matisse did not just use textiles to create Oriental fantasies or environments of patterns. Patterns and shapes are used to express what is not easy to express — like the wavy lines of the Roumanian blouse — which express the dream-thoughts of the female figure in The Dream (1940). This exhibition shows us how textiles inspired Matisse to create an alphabet of arabesque forms which he improvised with, like a skilled musician.

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“Joel Shapiro: Recent Sculpture”
PaceWildenstein until July 31
534 West 25th Street
212-929-7000

“20th-Century Sculpture”
Acquavella Galleries until May 22
18 East 79 Street, at Madison,
212-734-6300

Someday it will have to be explained why the most vaunted exponents of modernism in the 1960s spent their senior years chasing a romantic muse. Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro, and Helen Frankenthaler have all noticeably gone this route.

Ms. Frankenthaler, whose show of 10 new paintings opened last week at Knoedler & Company, began her career at the cutting edge of abstraction. She was a crucial transitional figure between Jackson Pollock and the “post-painterly” generation. Just as Caro and Olitski, who were famous for cool, sparse abstraction, traded their hallmark styles, respectively, for expressive figures and sublime landscapes, so Frankenthaler, in her new work, succumbs to an urge to depict.

These paintings, on paper and canvas, are sumptuous, absorbing, and masterful, but you have to pinch yourself to remember that she was once an artist pushing the boundaries of the language of painting. If these pictures were a tenth of their size and admitted fractionally more narrative incident they could be taken for the work of a Victorian. Her “Yoruba” could sit besides a William Trost Richards of the 1870s.

Ms. Frankenthaler actually came out of landscape. Her poured and stained gestural paintings of the mid- to late-1950s – the seminal “Mountain and Sea,” for instance – often took landscape as their starting point. But now the references to nature are literal and overt, with horizons and promontories. “Bacchus” (2002) is almost a Caspar David Friedrich redone in a funkier palette. What a palette, mind you: The purples of this moody nocturne glow and brood simultaneously. She achieves extraordinary effects of depth and airiness through audacious layering of her acrylic paint.

It is somehow touching that this veteran abstractionist should reverse historic due process, turning “inscapes” back into landscapes. By so doing she reconnects with Old Master painting, and emphatically disconnects with minimalism. But it is telling that the most beautiful painting in the show, “Warming Trend,” is also the least legible (more Turner than Whistler). The painting fluctuates at different distances from blues and violets to turquoise, purple, and mauve. In more than one sense, it is phenonemal.

***

In many ways an old-fashioned constructivist, Joel Shapiro’s career reveals a sly ability to run with Modernist hares while hunting with Minimalist hounds. By adopting motifs like little houses, chairs, and stick figures, he tweaked life back into Minimalism’s ponderous forms. Mr. Shapiro is not Minimal art “lite” as such, but nonetheless he animated an austere movement with welcome humor.

Scale has always been a lively element in his work, a means to startle, as well as to address representation. Diminutive has more typically been his thing, with Monopoly-board houses and dollshouse chairs. Now, in a show of five new sculptures, Lilliput has conceded to Gargantua. The 21-foot ceiling of PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery struggles to contain the largest piece. As if to add insult to injury, the sculpture’s components – bronze-cast wooden beams – rhyme inadvertently with the building’s exposed I-beams.

The pieces that work best are the ones that are the least figural. And yet, ironically, “working” means conveying bodily movement and animation. This is sculpture that has internalized a sense of the body without needing to depict the body. The largest sculpture, a bronze from 2001-03, is actually not the strongest. Most of it reads literally as a stick figure, throwing back its torso and kicking out a leg, but it has a huge protuberance that doesn’t reconcile to a figural interpretation. Suspiciouslynecessaryfrom a structural perspective, its comes across like the absurd crutches of a Dalí figure.

Far more sensual and satisfying is a nearby piece in wood and metal from 2002-03. Individual components can’t be reduced to this limb or that, but there is an exuberant downward spring- as in a fencer’s thrust or a certain kind of jive. The shiny metal hinges, and a flamboyant diversity of grains and stains in the cool wood ensure that the surface of the piece keeps pace with the liveliness of its structure.

This is an important exhibition, for Mr. Shapiro and for sculpture. Not only are there big sculptures but a big conception of what sculpture can be.

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And just what conceptions there have been is recalled in a stupendous display of 20th-century sculpture at Acquavella. On two floors of his princely Upper Eastside premises, William Acquavella has brought together nearly 40 pieces, many borrowed from private collectors. Matisse is royally represented. There is a rare chance to study the five progressively (or, equally, “regressively”) pared-down portraits of “Jeanette” from 1910-13, which start with a relatively benign, convincingly modelled head and culminate in a dynamic representation where the forehead and nose virtually stand out as an autonomous form.

These inevitably draw comparison with the extraordinary 1931 “Head of a Woman” by Picasso (even here, there is a mini Matisse-Picasso dialogue) where the hair and nose form themselves into a coiling limp phallus. The later sculptures downstairs feel somewhat cramped and rushed through, but upstairs there is a joyous technicolor contest between Miró and Calder, and an oxymoronic lead “Air” by Maillol.

This article first appeared in The Sun, May 15, 2003.

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