Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture at Michael Werner Gallery
January 28 to March 26, 2016
4 E 77th Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York, 212 988 1623

Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
March 3 to April 23, 2016
515 W 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage at Alden Projects
March 5 to May 8, 2016
34 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)
New York, 212 229 2453

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) was a late starter, only becoming a visual artist when he was 40, having spent 20 years trying to make a living as a poet. And he died relatively young, on his 52nd birthday. But as demonstrated by three concurrent shows — at Paul Kasmin, Michael Werner, and the Museum of Modern Art — he was highly productive during a short period. An additional show at Alden Projects displays exhibition invitations, posters, letters, and other similar materials.

There are 200 works, on view at his MoMA survey, including books of poetry and photographs, works made before Broodthaers formally entered the visual arts. His transition can also be seen there, when he turned the unsold copies of his last volume of poetry into the sculpture Pense-Bête (“Memory aid,” 1964), his first artwork, for his first solo exhibition. Once he turned to making art, he created a number of sculptures, which recycle mussels and eggshells, his signature materials. They are ordinary, used-up organic forms. Mussels are often served in Belgian restaurants and he thought of them as poetic. Mussel shells, he wrote, are hulls, two conjoined complete forms. And eggs, of course, are symbols of life and fecundity.

He put eggshells on furniture in Armoire blanche et table blanche (“White cabinet and white table,” 1965), on painted canvas in Untitled (Triptych) (1965-66), and in a box labeled as containing exhibition invitations, in Je retrouve à la matière, je retrouve la tradition des primitifs, peinture à l’oeuf, peinture à l’oeuf (“I return to matter, I rediscover the tradition of the primitives, painting with egg, painting with egg,” 1966). Cooked mussels are found piled in a pot in Grande casserole de moules (“Large casserole of mussels,” 1966) and displayed in crates in Parc à moules (“Tray of mussels,” 1966).

In 1968, announcing that he was no longer an artist, Broodthaers appointed himself director of his own museum: Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (“Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”), an installation project that began in his home and was later restaged at documenta and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. MoMA displays documentation — announcements, films, slide shows and also objects — generated by that career. One finds postcards of paintings, maps of the museum, photographs of the exhibitions, slide shows and display cases. Untitled (General with cigar) (1970), features a found thrift-shop painting of General Philippe Pétain (treasonous Chief of State in Vichy France) with a cigar stuck in his mouth, part of Broodthaers’s recurring interest in smoking and its prohibition as poetic and bureaucratic propositions.

Four years later, in 1972, Broodthaers announced that he again was an artist, and hired a sign painter to print words on canvas, and on the walls and ceiling of a gallery. He made Série en language française (Series de neuf peintures sur un sujet littéraire) (“Series in the French language, Series of nine paintings on a literary subject,” 1972), which includes “Andre Gide smoking,” “Paul Valery smoking,” and so on. And, written in English, he produced nine painted canvases, Série anglaise (“English series,” 1972): a set of prints featuring the names and birth and death dates of English luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and others.

Starting in 1974, he recycled his earlier work, employing old-fashioned displays with palm trees, carpets and 19th-century display cases, in exhibitions that he documented on film, calling them “Décors,” which can be translated as “installations” as well as “film sets.”

The gallery shows provide a valuable supplement to the MoMA exhibition. Uptown, “Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture,” at Michael Werner, focuses on his writing, one of his major concerns, and includes collages, drawings, films, collage, sculptures and one of his décors, Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (“Say Everywhere What I Have Said,” 1974). In Chelsea, Paul Kasmin presents paintings on plastic and Broodthaers’s books, along with the reconstruction of another décor, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas it- Le Perroquet (“Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So — The Parrot,” 1974), a recording of him reciting his poem “Moi Je Dis Mois Je Dis Je…“

Starting with Hegel, and extended by Marx and, more recently, by any number of Marxist critics, the idea that history (and art) proceeds by critical negation has become received opinion among many leftists. This is how T. J. Clark understands Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, and how Theodor W. Adorno described Modernist music. And it is how Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who contributes to a catalogue produced for the MoMA retrospective, understands Broodthaers.

By now, however, it should be apparent that art-as-critique has become a ritual, just another artistic tradition. Our museums (and art galleries) embrace their most distinguished critics. Just as the once-feared “death of painting” has yielded an ongoing tradition of painting, so the deconstructive art of Broodthaers has become part-and-parcel of both the gallery system and the public art museum, though he certainly aimed to upend this dialectical narrative by such acts as the destruction and/or reuse of his own previous work. Duchamp showed that any banal artifact might become a readymade; Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons demonstrated that a replica of a commercial product might become art. Hans Haacke made commercial art critiquing the commercial gallery system, and Broodthaers (among others) revealed that anti-art might itself be the subject of display and commerce.

I suspect that some leftists are frustrated by this situation. I’m fascinated with the ways that our culture honors and supports its critics. The narrative of the Hegelian dialectic, which is the conceptual basis for this process of negation, has come to a standstill, which isn’t to say that the history of art has ended, as Hegel feared-and-hoped, but only that the seemingly radical pursuit of negating gestures, having become an end in itself, is a source of objects which are as aesthetically delectable as any Modernist masterpieces. Broodthaers critiques the art world from within, and so leaves its practice, to which he contributed, more firmly in place. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh argues that Broodthaers disputes “the false and preposterous claims that artistic practices could engender radical political or cultural transformations.” That, I think, is not quite correct. In fact, the present apotheosis of Broodthaers as an artist is a radical cultural transformation, just not the liberatory one that people of the arts so often talk of in vague and longing terms. Indeed, in a marvelous posthumous revelation of the reach of Broodthaers’s idea, MoMA is publishing a limited-edition facsimile of his book Atlas (1975). The deluxe version, which contains a supplement, the uncut press sheet included by Broodthaers in the original publication, is sold exclusively at MoMA stores.

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October, 31 2012 to January, 5 2013
4 East 77th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, 212-988-1623

Almost two decades ago the Pace Gallery presented “De Kooning/Dubuffet: The Women,” showing images which the Times reviewer Michael Brenson found “startling, creepy and sometimes painful.” As Brenson goes on to rightly note, at that time the female nude had become an almost impossible subject for contemporary artists. The era in which Manet, Picasso and Matisse could present their transgressive visions of woman’s bodies had ended. This Michael Werner exhibition reawakened my now unavoidably vague memories of that show. Like de Kooning and Dubuffet, Eugène Leroy loves heavily encrusted picture surfaces. Someone might, I imagine, visit this show, look too quickly and leave unable even to identify their ostensive subject, the female nude. Compared with Leroy, the earlier painters I cited presented their subjects with the immediacy of Ingres. It’s of little use noting that Leroy, born in 1910, only became famous in old age—he died in 2000. For who amongst his contemporaries made paintings anything like these? The female figure is visible in Nu vert (1978), but in most of these pictures, Nu blanc couché au grand visage (1991) for example, you need to take on faith the veridicality of the title. When you step back or move close, do the outlines of a human body fall into view? In the gallery I found that question surprisingly difficult to answer.

But Leroy’s dilemma, as I understand it, lies deeper than some concern merely with trendy ideas of political correctness, which did not, I expect, mean much to him. To survive in a culture swamped by photographic images, figurative painters need  some way of defending their traditional manner of art making.  Either they can bracket the seductive figurative references of their images, like Luc Toymans; or present ironical erotic pictures- as John Currin does masterfully; or focus on truthful representations of banal subjects, this being the concern of Liliane Tomasko, for instance. Leroy, who uses the heaviest pigments of any artist whose work I have seen– he makes Frank Auerbach’s people by comparison look like those of Alex Katz—pursues none of these options. That description may make him sound like a traditional figurative painter. But what old master or modernist did a painting that looks remotely like Untitled (1994)? When looking at Nu en fête (1996) I think to myself: How traditional were the techniques of Soutine!  And if when viewing Marina nue (1997), I recollect Giacometti, that is only to emphasize, by contrast, how unclichéd is Leroy’s style. Leroy is an extreme painter because his technique is extraordinarily original; because his painting has nothing to do with fashion, which too often dominates in our upscale art galleries; and because his paintings inspire prolonged, close looking and pregnant, speculative reflection. No wonder I visited this exhibition twice, and came home baffled, charmed, and ready to return.

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September-15 to October 29, 2011
4 East 77th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212 988 1623

Abstract Expressionism was the first major painting style created wholly in America.

Although many of the artists were depressive personalities, their ambitious art depended upon the support of a militarily victorious society that, thanks to its post-war prosperity, had good reason to feel successful. And so, when their art was emulated by Frenchmen, Italians and Japanese, inevitably the results were very different. Per Kirkeby (1938- ) was trained as a geologist in his native Denmark. His catalogue essay, “Europe/America,” nicely illustrates what happens when a gifted writer borrows a language which is not his own. His paintings are the visual equivalents to this linguistic drift.

Responding in a highly distinctive way to American Abstract Expressionism, Kirkeby uses nature as his source:

Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty . . . is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting. *

Sometimes he shows close up sunflower patterns. Frequently he inserts rounded large organic forms behind narrow lines of paint running horizontally across the picture. His distinctive palette, with its reds, greens, yellows and blues is darkly luminous. Occasionally he opens up the picture, allowing you to look as if into a distant landscape. All seven paintings in the show are Untitled, all were made in 2010 or 2011, and all are vertically oriented rectangles. In the natural light of the gallery, they look different in the morning and near closing time, when the windows cast shadows on the two pictures on the right hand wall.

Like Willem de Kooning, Kirkeby is a virtuoso at creating unity from what, judging just from my poor verbal description may sound like visual chaos.  In fact, out of varied colors, very various brushwork (often using short awkward strokes) and a variety of shapes, he creates an always-satisfying pictorial unity.  You can better understand this show by going twenty-three blocks downtown to deKooning’s MoMA retrospective. The Dutch-American master is a fleshy artist, even when he paints landscapes; Kirkeby, by contrast, is a Northern Romantic in the tradition of Munch, Nolde and Strindberg. These two masters thus have totally different sensibilities. We Americans tend to think that Abstract Expressionism is a style of the past, dependent upon a worldview that no longer commands assent. And we have become suspicious of painterly virtuosity. This exhibition shows that we are wrong—Kirkeby’s splendid paintings demonstrate that Abstract Expressionism is a living tradition.

* quoted in Helaine Posner, Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992)

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Sculptor, printmaker, and painter A.R. Penck was born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1939. Developing his schematic, pictographic paintings in the 1960s, Penck worked out a style that extended a series of signs and signals congruent with his interests in math, cybernetics, and behavioral theories. In the 1980s the artist enjoyed considerable recognition, becoming known as one of the most interesting practitioners of the then-new figuration alongside well-known figures as Jorge Immendorf and Georg Baselitz. As a promulgator of esthetic systems, in which a black-and-white imagery of recognizable things correlated with a larger, overall scheme, Penck made paintings that looked like the writings and sketches of an indigenous culture, albeit one with the ability to see into the future. Earlier work was rather abrupt and discontinuous in its presentation of his totemic pictorials, but as this show indicates, Penck has cleared out a lot of the randomness of his art, working up large patterns that on closer inspection reveal male figures, symbolic objects such as isolated eyes, and even crocodiles and skulls, which add a touch of the macabre to his highly articulated compositions.

The four 2007 works from the “System Paintings” series are large black-and-white acrylic works on canvas; all of them have been painted from edge to edge with male stick figures and abstract symbols whose lexicon seems to have come from a language we as viewers do not know. The paintings’ busy patterns suggest a hieroglyphics describing social interactions that are more anthropological than they are esthetically realized. Saving the imagery from what we might call barbarous chaos is Penck’s highly skilled orientation and spacing of the visual components of an individual work. As a result, even if we cannot read the pictographs as narration, we can enjoy them as suggestions and interpretations of a greater social—and visual–cohesiveness than they might at first seem to have. As viewers, then, the experience of System Painting—New Old World, with its central white figure topped by an eye and supported beneath by another figure, shows us how much can be communicated when both recognizable images and abstract symbols vie for our attention. In the lower-left corner, a figure seems to be holding a gun over a fire: the mixture of primitivity and sophistication shows us that, as Penck puts it in his title, both the new and the old can coexist in relations that might otherwise seem arbitrary in a less organized visual field.

In System Painting—Last one looks at male figures painted black, each with a visible phallus, which organize the painting’s system. In the case of this particular work, letters catch our attention along with more symbolic forms that fill the picture’s dimensions. In a nice if obvious nod to the memento mori, Penck includes two skulls in the lower-left corner of Last; off to the right is a figure holding a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. In the center a figure seems to be standing on some sort of cycle, whose wheels are set next to the skulls. Does the world Last in the title suggest something like a last judgment, a final moment in human history? It is hard to say, but it makes the viewer feel that Penck has his own symbolism very much in mind when he paints—we may, or may not, be correct in intuiting its meaning. In two smaller works, again from 2007, we see Penck working with simpler shapes, creating an even-handed equilibrium using abstraction. In fact, one of the works is called Balance; its structure consists of a circle, a pentagon, and a triangle, as well as smaller, open circles and exclamation points right-side up and upside down. An “x” balances stands next to what looks like a large, backwards capital “E.” Working in hieratic fashion for decades now, Penck deftly involves his symbols with people, in ways that fascinate even if they cannot be easily explained.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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Mary Boone Gallery, New York NY
April 28 – June 24, 2006

Michael Werner Gallery, New York NY
April 27 – June 14, 2006

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) Erwin Panofsky argues that the builders of Gothic churches did not need to read scholastic philosophy in order to adopt a similar worldview, for “they were exposed to the Scholastic point of view in innumerable other ways….” Very often art too reflects the period style of its supporting culture. By displaying Judd’s art on the twentieth and twenty-first floors in midtown Manhattan, in rooms with large windows on all four sides of the building, Christie’s allows us to see how his sculptures and wall pieces mirror the architecture of America. Look from his boxes and stacks to the windows of the nearby skyscrapers, or compare his corner piece linking two panels with a black pipe and his wood blocks with horizontal and vertical lines to the banal architectural structures outside the gallery. In the city at large, as in Judd’s art, regular geometric divisions are omnipresent. He reconstructs our urban environments, making aesthetic the city’s basic visual vocabulary. It was instructive to walk from Renzo Piano’s newly opened reconstruction of the Morgan Library and Museum a few blocks uptown to Christie’s. The new steel-and-glass pavilions at the entrance, thrust into the older Renaissance-style palazzo designed by Charles McKim, bear a striking resemblance to Judd’s boxes. Christie’s most generous gift to the public (April 3 – May 9, 2006), the highest display of art I have yet visited, and one of the best, effectively presented Judd’s vision.

James Lee Byars’s “The Rest is Silence” was dispersed amongst gallery spaces of three New York dealers. And so when you traveled from Michael Werner uptown down to the Chelsea galleries of Mary Boone and Perry Rubenstein, it was natural to reflect upon the relationship of Byars’s art to its urban setting. The front room at Michael Werner was filled by The Angel (1989), 125 spheres of thin clear glass fabricated by a Murano glassblower, set in gracious curves. And there were two untitled drawings, an early one in Japanese ink that resembles Richard Serra’s later oilstick art on paper, and a late Byars gold design on Japanese paper. The Rubenstein show included the absolutely baffling Self-Portrait(1959), a wooden totem-like form; the granite Untitled (Tantric Figure) (1960); four gilded marble sculptures (1987/1995), figures which raise questions about death and philosophy;Untitled (American Flag) from “Two Presidents,” a relic from a 1974 performance; and The Sun (1990), 360 pieces of marble installed to form a circle, and centered so that you cannot walk entirely around it. At the entrance to Mary Boone was The Conscience (1985), a gilded wood and glass case containing a tiny golden sphere. The enormous Concave Figure (1994), five units of Thassos marble, was in the main gallery; and then The Spinning Oracle of Delphi (1986), a gigantic golden vessel you can look into, filled the back room. Unlike Judd, Byars did not have a signature style, but rather made objects that invoked a presence once associated with sacred art. When you approach a crucifix or Buddhist temple sculpture, you come to things that stand apart from everyday practical life. The sacred thus exists within a separate world, physically close to, but distinct from, the space in which we live and work. When Arthur Danto distinguishes between the physical object constituting Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) and the actual work of art, he secularizes this very traditional way of thinking.

Judd had a lot to say about the problems of the American art world–he was a famous polemicist. To my way of thinking, however, the ultimate limitations of his analysis are inadvertently revealed in his statement reprinted in Christie’s generously luxurious catalogue: “My work … was not made to be property … It is not on the market, not for sale….” But that, of course, is what has happened. That the auction proceeds will support the Judd Foundation, a good cause, does not undercut the problems here. Judd wanted his art to stand outside the culture, but that was not possible–how could it be? Artistic materialists like Judd believe that everything can be made explicit. Religious cultures, by contrast, think that the causal order can sometimes be suspended. They believe that the causally inexplicable intervention of the sacred within our world, which we may call grace or (along with Danto) transfiguration, makes possible spiritual experience and what historically is often associated with it, namely art. Judd’s very American art, in which everything can be revealed, because ultimately nothing remains to be concealed, expresses the worldview of a secular materialist society. Byars comes as it were from another place.

I better understood The Angel after seeing Carl Andre’s familiar floor plates magnificently installed in the back gallery at Paula Cooper (April 1-29, 2006). In this large, mostly empty space you can get to the far wall without treading on the sculpture. But many people choose to walk on the sculpture, whether because it is on the floor or because it is composed of industrial materials or, perhaps, as an expression of hostility. By contrast, The Angel really demands to be protected. However critical Andre and Judd were of art world politics, the style of these pragmatic materialists was at one with the working philosophy of present-day American corporate society. The art of Andre and Judd is relatively easy for Americans to understand, for it expresses our everyday style of living. Byars remains baffling. In his treatise The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (2002) Thomas McEvilley acknowledges the support of his friend Byars, “who for several years cherished a copy of the manuscript … which he carried about with him in two large shopping bags” (the book does not otherwise mention Byars). McEvilley claims that Greek and Indian philosophy, so seemingly different, are in fact deeply interconnected. Any “absolute dichotomy … between the Greek and the Indian needs to be reconsidered. It seems to have too much of that desire of the West to define itself by demarcating itself off from the East.” I can think of no better characterization of Byars’s unlocatable and yet pioneering “multicultural” art.

This article first appeard in print in art US, issue 14, July – September 2006

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Yves Klein: A Career Survery
L&M Fine Arts
45 East 78th Street
New York NY10021
October 25 to December 10

The French artist Yves Klein seemed to be a verb from outer space. The son of two painters, he came to art after pursuing a mastership in judo. He believed that an artist should have a bourgeois life and make radical art. He had a meteoric career that lasted all of eight years. He died of a heart attack at thirty-four. His art still carries velocity and pungency. Klein’s objects and performed events are alive in their elegance, audaciousness and coherence.

He is most famous for his paintings made by imprinting women’s painted naked bodies on raw canvas. These paintings were often produced during public performances. Klein wore a suit. A small orchestra accompanied the artist and his models. He denied the sexual element in these works, but it’s clearly present and the women, as evidenced in photographs taken at the time, are invariably beautiful.

Klein soon developed a method of spraying paint so that he could combine their silhouettes with the imprints. One of the things that is so amazing about Klein’s body of work is how he combined his diverse methods. One painting is a Dionysic array of imprints in blue, pink and black. Fire Color Painting (Untitled)has blue drips made with his patented International Klein Blue. It was made from powdered pigment and a special medium This particular blue gave his works an intensely tactile and retinal presence, cosmetic but immanent. His use of rose pigment and gold leaf underline the devotional aspect of his entire output.

L&M has a diverse array of monochromes, all dry, some sandy. Many seem to have needed many coats of paint to be properly resolved. They are tablet-like, with rounded corners. A heavily encrusted blue relief reminded me of the late paintings of Ralph Humphrey. Some of the sponge and planetary reliefs are an alien’s memories, to push the analogy, but are also like rock gardens and point up James Lee Byers strong similarities to this artist.

The fire paintings at Michael Werner have an interesting, somewhat violent just-after-the fact quality, different from the other works, which have the energy of an event taking place the moment you are looking at it, though they were made forty years ago.

Klein seemed to possess a cosmic religiosity but it was cut with moments of randy glamour. In a catalog photograph of a nude model working with Klein on his studio floor, he presses her lower back into the canvas as she spreads her arms, Christlike, and you notice that she’s wearing sunglasses.

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On view through July 9, 2004
4 East 77th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, 212 988-1623

Eugène Leroy works his magic slowly. The female nude (his usual subject) lurks among shadows-or at least, that’s the way it seems. When the image clicks, there are no shadows, but contradictory as it may sound, deep space and iconic presence. The nude is both made out of and hemmed in by a sumptuous overload of what read, initially, as gratuitous marks-dabs of pigment upon a heavily encrusted paint surface, or in the case of his charcoal drawings, a group of which are now on show at Michael Werner, scratches, rubbings, and scribbles on the large page.

But as you dwell upon his pictures, which both compel and reward attention, an unexpected economy emerges. The formal elements define something emotionally credible not despite but because of their nebulous, nervous, tenuous qualities.

Leroy, who died in 2000 at the age of 90, was a modern painter with old-fashioned tastes and preoccupations. He was a kind of latter-day Frenhofer, from Balzac’s romantic tale of painterly hubris, The Unknown Masterpiece. His touchstones were Rembrandt and Russian icons. He had a strong kinship with Giacometti -in his dogged, studio-bound search for authenticity – but in formal terms he found much that needed working out in Monet and Cézanne.

And yet untimeliness served his reputation well. In the 1980s he forged a belated, international repuation, riding the crest of the neo-expressionist wave; now he seems one of the most substantial and enduring of late Twentieth Century painters of the figure, a distinguished older cousin of the School of London painters, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud.

He often drew a distinction, when talking about his work, between what he termed the painting and the image. This suggests a platonic notion of form – in which image is a priori, its reification inherently compromising – that contradicts the actual experience of his pictures, with their gutsy, expressionistic, tactile application and their fulsome, female presence. His nudes, once they emerge from obscurity and settle into view, actually have a classical roundness that recalls Maillol.

A conceptual separation of vision and execution seems at odds, as I say, with the striving for authenticity and real presence. But actually, a strange, uneasy, yet exhilarating tension between depiction and means makes sense of a dichotomy of seeing and making. He is an artist acutely conscious of boundaries, all the more so when he transgresses them. Often, a richly awkward almost desperate mark making is needed to denote the body in its physicality and otherness. And yet, for all their dualism, these works have no truck with a classic opposition of figure and ground, which would be a quick fix solution to his painterly dilemmas. His work is a constant struggle between the eye and the hand, rather than some effortless, serene accommodation of one to the other.

This comes out more strongly in his graphic works than his canvases. He is best known for oil paintings of unsettling impasto, where surfaces are heavily invested-literally and metaphorically. Color tentatively glows within a murky bog of pigment. Whereas in slowly accreted surfaces there is a harmony between the pace of facture and perception, in the graphic works, fast marks still make for slow reading. The relative clarity and definition to color and mark alike, and a rich sense of the inherent qualities of medium–gouache and chalk, only serve to heighten the conflicts between sensuality and form, touch and sight, real presence and projection or memory.

A version of this review first appeared in The New York Sun, July 1, 2004

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“Markus Lüpertz: About the Three Graces” at Michael Werner, through May 29 (4 E 77 Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212 988 1623

“Daisy Youngblood” at McKee through May 29 (745 Fifth Avenue between 57 and 58 Street, 212 688 5951)

Despite the vagaries of his artworld reputation, Henry Moore endures in popular affection as one of the most accessible and satisfying of major twentieth century artists. These contradictory perceptions are in fact linked: His popularity raises suspicion on the part of cognoscenti who often dismiss him as a period piece, a kind of “entry level” modernist who presents an essentially humanist vision through a fusion of avantgarde styles.

Such views misconstrue his achievement, however, as a modern romantic. Synthesis is fundamental to a vision which finds holistic commonality between the primitive, the prehistoric, the organic, and the geological.

Moore is the subject of a stunning exhibition of several dozen important drawings all of which have been loaned by the foundation he established during his lifetime. It is presented at the New York premises of the old established London old master dealers, Hazlitt, the first public exhibition at this space, and commemorates the completion of a catalogue raisonne of Moore’s drawings. Such an exhibition really belongs in a museum.

While Moore’s sculptures became ubiquituous in postwar recontructed cities, it was actually through graphic work that he established his breadth of appeal. A controversial innovator in carving in the interwar period, with the outbreak of World War Two he took to drawing, and to modeling maquettes, as his principal means of expression. He was commissioned by his friend Kenneth Clark as a government appointed, “Official War Artist,” chosing the Blitz as his subject, depicting shelterers in London’s subway system, the “Tube”. These were exhibited at the National Gallery, where Clark was director, on walls bereft of masterpieces packed off to shelters of their own, in the Welsh mountains. In terms of popular repute, the Shelter Drawings turned a wildman maverick into a hero of the people overnight. Without resorting to sentiment, he managed to invest his subject with tenderness and empathy, revealing a situation that was at once historically specific and primordial.

The current show opens with drawings from life of standing or seated women, and improvised receling figures. Despite his affinity with abstraction and his deconstructive liberties with anatomy, a crucial aspect of Moore’s vision remained rooted in observation throughout his career: He would periodically break off from sculpture to draw, in sustained periods, from a model. Although the vast majority of his works depict women, his vision was essentially unerotic. He was drawn towards monumental, stocky heavy-limbed figures, always presented as self-absorbed, placid and grounded. Even in “Reclining Figure,” (1929) where the body is broken open to reveal inner fissures, through a use of brazenly colored collage elements that radically flatten the picture plane, a sense of wholeness and composure prevails.

What makes many of these drawings so extraordinary is the sense of a sculptor using graphic mediums experimentally to advance his highly particular understanding of form. Moore would center a reclining figure on the page, as in the charcoal and wash “Reclining Figure,” (1933), and then fill the margins with countless approximations of the same figure from different angles, exploring two fundamental aspects of his sculpturality simultaneously: a sense of form in the round, and of a dynamic relationship between interior and exterior. The drawings reveal a fluid evolution within the artist’s mind that would be carry across, in sculptural form, to an equivalent volumetric sinuousness.

In “Studies for Sculpture in Various Materials,” (1939), a profusion of sculptural ideas, in contrasting scales, fill the page to form a pulsating tapestry of ideas. Other drawings would explore further this issue of scale, which was so important to him, placing sculptural ideas in vast panoramic vistas, or socially accomodating groups within imaginary walled compartments. The polished, presentation drawings are as fascinating for what they reveal about scale as the more sketchy, automatic ones are about fluidity.

Moore discovered by accident the expressive potential of the repulsion of watercolor by wax crayon, a device he would use to particularly dramatic effect in his Shelter Drawings, as in another war commission, his drawings of coal miners at work (the artist’s father had been a miner). He could convey with almost spooky effect a sense of humanity alive within the bowels of the earth. The crayon would pick out contour lines, rather like jigsaw pieces, describing volume by linear means.

The pictorial naturalism that comes across in Moore’s late drawings can be problematic even for the hardened admirer: an addition of realistic hands and a sweet face to the otherwise business-as-usual biomorph in “Recling Woman in a Setting,” (1974) seems to trivialize his own language. But there are stunning surprises, even in the late drawings. “Man Drawing Rock Formation” (1982) which has charcoal, chalk and other mediums over lithographic frottage, recalls the rubbed charcoals of Seurat (one of which Moore owned). This drawing is almost a manifesto for romanticism: Rock encrustations inspire patterns of growth and form in the mind of an artist who is literally absorbed in the act of observation.

Markus Lüpertz has often seemed too good for the historical company he keeps. He is identified as part of the neo-expressionist wave that came to the fore in German art of the 1980s. He shares with his peers in that movement a willingness to collide the sensual and the cerebral; he parts with many of them, however, in the heights he attains in both directions.

His new exhibition at Michael Werner, just a block from the Moore drawings, presents sculpture and hand colored etchings on classical themes. His classicism bears a strong German accent, mediated by a Nietschean sense of the dionysian. There is often a tension in Mr. Lüpertz’s work between full-blown expression and an element of irony and historical aloofness, especially where he deals with mythic subjects tinged by association with the Third Reich.

The show is dominated by four hieratic heads, strikingly and disconcertingly displayed at ground level, that are named (mixing Greek and Roman) for the protagonists of the Judgement of Paris: Venus, Hera, Athene, and the hapless Trojan prince himself (all 2002). At once other and familiar, as befits the gods, they pit rough against smooth, earthy color against neutral grayness, legibility against inchoateness, volume against plane.

The “Three Graces,” (2000) are again handcolored bronze; just over two feet high, the group relates to a monumental aluminum work on the same subject placed publicly in Berlin recently. Their stockiness might put you in mind of Moore’s early drawings, if you’ve come from there, but their undulations, at once gracious and jocular, reference beauty, if obliquely. A far cry from the prim, smooth curves of Canova, these graces recall those of Cranach or Rubens, and the bathers of Cézanne.

Henry Moore and Markus Lüpertz each in his own way references the timeless and the tragic in sculpture. Daisy Youngblood achieves a quieter, but equally lingering melancholy in her extraordinary work.

McKee is showing more than a quarter century of her poignant images in clay and bronze of animals, mothers and infants, and holy men. McKee presented a overview of similar scope in 1999. In the intervening period, Ms. Youngblood received a MacArthur genius award and has relocated from New Mexico to Costa Rica.

The portraits of named spiritual teachers sitting in meditation, or preaching, are blessed with grace and charm, but the more startling works are her wistful animals, especially those in low-fired clay and found wood. It is rare to find a modern scultural animalier who strikes such a balance as Ms. Youngblood does between symbolic potency and observational credibility. She achieves the former without resorting to overt primitivism or direct reference to archaic precedents, and the latter without the fuss of naturalism.

Even where her symbolism might, from the telling of it, sound contrived, as in “Horse Crucifixion,” (1975) with its Bambi-like mournful victim suspended from a twig, or “Horse on a Rock,” (1980), with its cleft forehead revealing a hollow interior, sentimentality is spared by a pervading sense of cosmic resignation. The tender economy of her animals share with those of the prehistoric cave painters a sense of unrushed urgency.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 6, 2004

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“Georg Baselitz: Recent Paintings”
Michael Werner until February 7 (4 East 77th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-988-1623).

Does this career sound familiar? A decorated German ex-serviceman dreams of becoming an artist and ends up in politics. Inspired by folk myths of the artist as a hero who will save his nation, he becomes the subject of a cult following, speaking to the faithful at interminable length. While few follow his labyrinthine thought, charismatic delivery carries the day: Women adore him, in his gray uniform, and he has his image plastered everywhere.

Naturally, I am talking about the artist, Joseph Beuys. But if this résumé reads like that of a more notorious example of German romanticism gone awry, it is not entirely coincidental. Beuys set himself up as a kind holy fool of art, at once prankster and prophet, showman and shaman. The nation he sought to save was both in denial of its own legacy and in the grip of crass consumerism. Beuys was the trailblazer of postwar artists as diverse as Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Georg Baselitz: each in their way would remind the newly afluent, liberal German public of their uncomfortable past.

Beuys had a personal myth to rival any Wagnerian hero’s. Shot down as a young Luftwaffe pilot over the Russian Steppes, he claimed to have been saved by a friendly tribe of Tartars who covered his burnt body in fat and wrapped him in layers of felt. Thus fat and felt became symbol-laden materials in his art: Installations, performances, objects produced in multiple revelled in these drab, sinister substances, his tragic trademarks.

For generations of German museumgoers, art history officially culminated in Beuys’s lugubrious Wehrmacht grayness and ominious accumulations of lard- making the kunsthalle a kind of aesthetic death camp. His performances often entailed rambling lectures, and the chalkboard at which he detailed his anthroposophical-cum-ecological meanderings would be preserved as a drawing. Beuys’s subversive objects and inscrutable scribblings would be packaged obsessively, in, prissy vitrines, at once fetishizing these objects and debunking the logic and orderliness of their presentation .

Beuys’s international reputation was phenomenal, but outside his specifically German context the occultism and counter-cultural preaching were taken at face value, and the iconoclastic dimension lost its edge. Really, he was the flip side of Andy Warhol: Where the consumerist banalities of his American friend were ultimately nihilist, his own drabness was, in an odd way, cathartic.

It is hard to know whether future generations, unversed in the myth and ideology that coat the Beuys pill, will swallow it. You certainly have to accept a lot of dogma to make Beuys part of your art creed. His objects and installations rarely have much by way of intrinsic aesthetic interest beyond stylish poverty and self-conscious obscurantism. That said, the collection of Dr. Reiner Speck, on view at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue space, is a palatable introduction. In fact, you’ll never see Beuys looking prettier.

Dr. Speck, a physician, collector, and literary scholar from Cologne, supported Beuy’s work from the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1986. His collection has its share of dada agitprop, including a pair of placards which together read “Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V,” as well as chalkboards and table drawings. But it includes many quirky, erotic, or touchingly enigmatic pieces.

A selection of the fabulous early figurines and drawings show a less portentous side of the Beuysian imagination. These drawings, looking to Klimt and Schiele in their kinkiness but to Bellmer and Wols in their spindly, warped forms, could almost have been made to illustrate the degeneracy theories of Max Nordau: They are knowingly feeble and febrile. “Virgin” (1952), a little doll-like torso wrapped in bandage, exposing a wax vagina, and placed coyly on a cushion, is deliciously perverse.

Actually, orifices abound in this collection (the good doctor was obviously unfazed by anatomy), appearing in a bagel-like mandala made from a rubber disk mounted on paper, and in a richly suggestive felt disk, smeared with fat and sporting two fingernail clippings. Ah well, boys will be Beuys.

A band of painters who came to international prominence in the 1980s looked afresh at expressionism, the very style and movement labelled “degenerate” in the 1930s. They courted disaster in a culture still uneasy with the legacy of fascism by revisiting myth, the primitive, and the irrational in art.

The chief representative of this school was Georg Baselitz, a painter originally from East Germany who made his career in the West. His oversized figurative canvases set a high standard of bombast and bravura. His trademark quirk was to place the figures upside-down, or at 90 degrees. His handling and depiction were deliberately slovenly and inaccurate, but all the more richly expressive for being so.

Now about to turn 66, Mr. Baselitz is showing a group of 10 paintings from 2000 at Michael Werner’s elegant New York space, around the corner from the Beuys show (Werner is a German gallerist based in Cologne). These works are the strongest and most engaging seen from this artist for some years.

All take as their starting point a set of drawings the artist had made as a teenager in the early 1950s: rather traditional watercolors of eagles flying among mountain peaks. The year of the original drawing is emblazoned in dots that read like lights, but also recall the obsessive, enigmatic dot motifs familiar elsewhere in Mr. Baselitz’s work. The subject and style of the boy artist’s drawings (reproduced in the catalogue) are sinisterly uninnocent in view of the role of eagles and eeries in Nazi iconography. The reworkings seem to acknowledge this.

Mr. Baselitz brings out the vulnerability of his appropriated motifs through repetition and fracture – not so much in the sense of doing violence to the motif as of exploring and abstracting it in a painterly way. The beefy bombast of earlier Baselitz gives way here to linear variety, painterly delicacy, and luxuriance of color that all suggest an emotional investment that transcends the theatrical. Contemplating the products of his own youth has brought out a new tenderness of touch. These results still acknowledge the troubled nature of history and memory, , but offers beauty as the means of healing.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 15, 2004

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