October 30 to December 14, 2019
45 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, mnuchingallery.com

Each had already developed signature ways of seeing and working prior to their meeting shortly before their 1958 civil union after a brief, intense courtship. Subsequent cohabitation, combined with travels to France, Spain and England, for a time created overlapping sensibilities and a shared language. A comparison of these works reveals color pushed to its limits, a painterly riffing and rhyming off of each other’s’ form and the presence of a new energy, seemingly kicked up a notch by the visual conversation born of their relationship. Both must have felt the challenge presented by the other’s painting, resulting in an explosion of competitive collaboration.

Inspired by Spain, Motherwell produced Diary of a Painter, (1958) a work from the same period as his iconic Elegy to the Spanish Republic that instigated the series of that title. In turn, Frankenthaler painted Courtyard of El Greco’s House (1959). Both employ abstract form that remains distinctly referential to local imagery: the black form in Motherwell is reminiscent of the matador’s hat, while a gateway, trellis and arbor can be recognized in Frankenthaler’s painting. A kind of mirroring also happens in a series of collages on view here in which we can observe the artists telling themselves parallel stories about life together. In places the narrative verges on the autobiographical: Bingo (1962) by Frankenthaler is an exuberant, red-footed actual bingo card, emphatically circled and gleefully declaring its winnings. Motherwell’s Hein, Ma Vie?, (1958) translates as “Huh, My Life?”, indicating existential wonder at existence in general. These “Is this really happening to me?” moments give the viewer a sub-rosa sense of joyful communication between the happy couple. Perhaps the most direct message, sent by Frankenthaler to Motherwell, is Happy New 1966, (1965) an enormous greeting card, jubilantly painted on paper and presided over by a big yellow sun. In later years Frankenthaler, asked what moments of her life she would most like to relive, is said to have answered “those first few years with Bob.” These really were the good old days.

Mnuchin Gallery’s publication, adds DAVID COHEN, is a fitting companion and souvenir of this splendid exhibition. Karen Wilkin has worked extensively on both artists individually, especially, of course, Frankenthaler with whom she was particularly close, which perhaps gives the prose here its unique blend of intimacy and accuracy, an example to her profession for how to write biographically and critically with interdependent grace. Take, for instance, her discussion of their respective palettes:

No one would ever mistake a Frankenthaler made between 1958 and 1971 (or at any other time) for a Motherwell, and vice versa. The two painters had very different color sensibilities. Frankenthaler was fascinated by the expressive possibilities of a full spectrum of often intense hues, while Motherwell, especially on canvas, investigated the emotional stimulus of rich tonal variations, with a fairly limited range of hues that apparently spoke eloquently to him. (Frankenthaler confessed to me that when he claimed the chalky blue of Gauloise cigarette packages as his own and asked her not to use it, she was willing to go along with it. “But when he claimed yellow ochre, it was too much.”)

Despite important differences, Wilkin makes the claim for the flowing commonalities that Kim Uchiyama observes:

[…] that their art sprang from internal imperitives; that the artist’s role was to reveal the unseen, not to report on the visible; that touch and color were potent carriers of emotion; that the art of the present was seamlessly connected to the art of the past; and more.

She describes with particular acuity the common drive towards “simpler, more economical imagery” in their distinct paths through the later 1960s (and years of their formal union) with Frankenthaler’s “large expanses of relatively few colors, strategically placed, with the edges of shapes carrying the burden of drawing” and Motherwell’s “even more (apparently) restrained Open series based on the infinite possibilities of drawn or painted interior rectangles played against the rectangle” of the support.

The late scholar and museum curator E. A. Carmean Jr, who died shortly before the opening of this exhibition, organized shows of both artists, rounds off the catalogue with delightful personal reminiscence of the one moment he saw them together after they had gone their separate ways, when Frankenthaler loaned the first Elegy painting that was part of her divorce settlement to an exhibition Carmean organized at the National Gallery of Art of seven Abstract Expressionists. He describes the look of shared pleasure he witnessed as the two artists looked at their friend David Smith’s sculptures together and its familiarity from photos of the couple in the years of their marriage.

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September 10 to October 19, 2019
45 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, mnuchingallery.com

Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1975 album, “That’s the Way of the World,” sits beside a stereo speaker, atop an antique English mahogany pier table, beneath Alma Thomas’s, Skylight, 1973, an abstract painting in sapphire blue hues. This painting (pictured in an Architectural Digest photograph) had been chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2009 for the private spaces of the White House. Today, Alma Thomas: Resurrection, on view at Mnuchin Gallery in New York, takes its title from another painting with a White House association. Acquired in 2014 and hung in the Old Family Dining Room, Resurrection was the first work of art by an African-American woman to enter the collection.

Mnuchin’s show, which is curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam, is Thomas’s first on the Upper East Side since 1976. Taking up the baton of recent Alma Thomas exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rajaratnam focuses on works from 1959 to 1976 that represent her mature style, distinguishing her from Washington Color School contemporaries such as Morris Louis and Gene Davis. By including rarely-seen works on paper, the curator also highlights Thomas’s iterative process, and her experimental studies on fine-quality watercolor papers.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978) was still painting in the small Victorian house that her family had occupied since 1907 in Washington, DC when she died at the age of 86. Thomas was born with a hearing and speech impediment. Her mother, a dress designer, believed that Alma’s condition was caused by the trauma that occurred during her pregnancy when a lynching party with ropes and dogs approached the family’s house. The family moved north in 1907.  In 2021-22, the Columbus Museum  in her hometown and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., will present an Alma Thomas retrospective that will broadly explore her creative life—her artistic practice, as well as her interest in gardening, fashion, costume design, and graphic design.

In the still-segregated nation’s capital, Thomas attended Armstrong High School where her dream was to become an architect and in 1924 became one of the first graduates of Howard University’s fine arts program. Loïs Mailou Jones, who taught in the department, invited Thomas to join the Little Paris Group, a salon that she cofounded with Céline Tabary, to discuss theories of modernism with other African-American artists, and to promote the artistic practice of art teachers. This must have been a lifeline for Thomas, who for 35 years worked as a devoted middle-school art teacher. She taught her students the latest dances, took them to lectures at the black-owned Barnett-Aden Gallery, designed marionette productions, and opposed the school board mandate to teach only vocational drawing to the “colored division” students. During summers, she rigorously pursued her own artistic education, earning a master’s degree at Columbia University in 1934, and studying painting at American University in the 1950s. While she worked representationally, I believe that all along she was experimenting within a continuum of abstraction that crystallized into a mature vocabulary around 1960, the year she retired and could devote herself full time to her art. Severe arthritis threatened this plan, but when in 1964, Howard University offered her a retrospective, she rallied and launched full force into the project.

One year after her retirement, she painted Blue Abstraction, 1961, with vigorously applied blocks of cobalt and marine blue, moss green, and red held in check by areas of bluish-black and white. Suggesting architectural forms or flickering lights at night, the interplay of horizontal and vertical strokes with encrusted textures remind me of Philip Guston’s pure abstractions of the mid 1950s.

Summer at its Best, 1968, exemplifies Thomas’s signature formal language and her insistence on beauty and exuberance—the experiences she sought in the seasons of her gardens, thunderstorms, or the mysteries of space exploration. Here, vertical curtains of saturated color are built up with short, inflected brushstrokes over a ground of white. The strokes, at times resembling dance steps or mosaic tesserae, follow an under drawing of pale pencil lines (like the warp threads in weaving) that subdivide the canvas. By overpainting with white here and there, Thomas controlled the swellings and attenuations of the color bands, and modified the intervals of light peeking through the colors. Her palette of marigold, chocolate brown, and goldenrod, shot through with cedar green, turns our thinking toward late summer landscapes, when a temperature drop stimulates one last push for trees to set winter buds and berries.

Her banner year was 1972, when Thomas became the first African-American woman to receive a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art. There she is in a photograph at the opening, turned out in the grooviest, patchwork-printed gown, holding a pair of white gloves with the self-possessed bearing of an artist who has worked very hard to rise above marginalization and achieve such recognition.

The Apollo Space Missions captured Thomas’s imagination, and her interest in the cosmos was translated into works such as New Galaxy, 1970. There is a majestic restraint in this work, defined by the chromatic interweaving of closely related blues and pinks—the colors of water, moonlight, and sunrise. And here, the horizon is turned on its side, as if seen from the rotating capsule of the spacecraft.

As in Springtime in Washington, 1971, Thomas infused her mandala or circular-motif paintings with a radiance that pulsates like music throbbing through a subwoofer. The white background evokes the hues of marble and sandstone of the buildings—exemplars of an ideal democracy— on The National Mall, while concentric rings are painted in the tones of candied fruits. It is these paintings from the early 1970s that perfectly meld Thomas’s belief in the redeeming power of color with her internalization of the Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten’s color theories.

In 1985, I was the art teacher at Diocesan Educational Campus, an all-Black, Catholic middle school in the Fruit Belt, a struggling but historically significant neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Art class always involved dance breaks to the music of Earth, Wind & Fire. I wish that I had known then about the life of Alma Thomas, because my students and I needed to hear the stories of many more African-American artists who circumvented substantial odds in order to create singular works of art that were steeped in their understanding of our complicated, shared history.

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March 15 to May 27 2016
45 East 78th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

–Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Prankster” is a word that comes up repeatedly in discussions of artist David Hammons and his work. Much has been made of his evasiveness, of the fact that he has spent his career flouting the art world’s propriety: his continual refusal to settle on a dealer; the propensity to make himself unavailable to curators even in the midst of show preparations; to stage exhibitions, performances, and installations with no prior announcement. Then there are the works themselves, from alluring abstract canvases you will never really see, as they’ve been shrouded with trashed vinyl tarps, to sculptures that cull beauty from empty bottles of $1.99 wine. But to seize and insist upon the perceived jokey qualities of Hammons’s art and persona resists the deeper significance of his output over the past 50 years. “David Hammons: Five Decades,” currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, offers a corrective to this narrative. Comprised of 35 works spanning from the late 1960s to the present, it’s a crystalline show that helps to elucidate the long view of an artist who has made a career of otherwise obfuscating it.

This is the third show of Hammons’s work presented by Mnuchin (formerly L&M Arts), and though much care has been taken to note that the gallery does not strictly represent the artist, it seems clear that Hammons finds satisfaction in the contrast of having his work — frequently made from lowbrow or dilapidated materials — showcased in the refined and august premises of the Upper East Side townhouse. It also eschews the sterility of the White Cube, of which Hammons has in the past proclaimed his disdain. Notably, just prior to this exhibition’s opening, Hammons arrived unexpectedly at Mnuchin and upended the nearly complete installation: rearranging, removing several works, and adding new ones. The entirety of this show at Mnuchin, as organized by Hammons, becomes its own distinct work of art, a complete whole made from its heterogenous parts.

Shrouds abound in the exhibition. Two large paintings, both untitled (2008–14 and 2015, respectively) are almost entirely obscured by ragged tarps that dangle across their faces. With two large sculptural works, also both untitled (2013 and 2014, respectively), Hammons has concealed ornate, gilded floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors, one with a black cloth and one with large sheets of galvanized steel. Aside from the more apparent association of this shrouding as a manifestation of Hammons’s own mystique, it also brings to mind the Jewish tradition of covering the mirrors in a house after the death of a beloved. One wonders whether these works, all made within the last few years, are indicative of an artist reflecting on his legacy in his elder years.

With the inclusion of the diminutive but potent In the Hood (1993), a shroud of another sort takes on a more politically foreboding tone. The work consists simply of the hood of a sweatshirt severed from the shirt itself, and hung on one wall. The dark void at the center of the hood, where a head should be, conjures the familiar image of the Grim Reaper, and when considering its high placement on the wall one can’t help but be reminded of the deplorable chronicle which pollutes American history — that of the scores of African-Americans lynched at the hands of whites through the decades. And at nearly a quarter-century old, In the Hood seems remarkably prescient as an object, anticipating the outsize symbolism of racial inequity in American culture that the “hoodie” has taken on — especially acute in recent years.

So loaded has that article of clothing become that poet Claudia Rankine selected In the Hood as the cover image of her award-winning 2014 book of prose poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, which reflects on black life and systemic injustice in the United States and whose pages are peppered with reproductions of artworks by prominent black artists. It also includes a passage dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman claimed Martin was suspicious in part because of the dark hoodie he wore as he walked down the street of a private community. The point is underscored by several black-and-white prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammons has hung in the same gallery, whereby the artist pressed his own body to the page and then added charged imagery like the American flag, or the spades of a playing card.

Robert Storr says of Hammons, in an essay included in the exhibition’s catalogue, “From the very start it is plain that he has set his higher goals as high as they come. Specifically that has meant escaping the sorry fate of ghettoization while slipping the noose of becoming a token ‘black’ artist in a predominantly ‘white’ art world.” Considering Hammons’s work solely through the lens of race runs the risk of reducing his conceptual athleticism to a single note. As an object, In the Hood is a descendant of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), down to the conscious, unexpected placement of the work. The viewer garners a solid sense of the roots Hammons shares with artists like Piero Manzoni or Joseph Kosuth, who were thumbing their noses at artistic conventions in the early 1960s. By being able to see the long trajectory of Hammons’s output gathered together in this mini-retrospective, we can also understand how the disparate parts align.

In the last gallery, a taxidermied cat curls up on a wooden drum stool. Called Standing Room Only (1996), it has been placed in the corner, the cat’s sleeping face pointed towards the window instead of towards the center of the room. A creature known for its cunning and detachment, the cat might be Hammons’s spirit animal. Aloof and mysterious, with his back to the world, we revere the cat for what he is able to pull off — living freely, and purely on his own terms.

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