When “ABC Art,” published in 1965 in Art in America, went the equivalent of viral, it launched the remarkable, decades-long, international career of art critic and art historian Barbara Rose. Rose, who was also a curator and filmmaker, died on December 25, 2020 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 and was active to the end. In that seminal article, she outlined clearly and forcefully the significance of the pared-down work by a coterie of little-known, lower Manhattan artists who would soon become Minimalist icons. Among them were Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Since that debut, Rose helped shape the discourse of some of the major art movements of the late 20th Century through a constant stream of exhibitions, publications and documentaries. While she concentrated on modern and contemporary art, she also explored European art history in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969). Fast forward to 2011, she became the first Morgan-Menil fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, resuming research on a project that linked the medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse with commentaries of Beatus of Liébana with the drawings of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Her first book, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967), highlighted artists who were not fully canonical: John Marin; Joseph Stella; Stanton Macdonald Wright; and she included Irene Rice Pereira among them, at a time when female artists were seldom—if ever—acknowledged in such surveys. Pivoting, Rose began to champion painters and painting in the 1970s, in defiance of Greenbergian formalism and the nearly universal declaration of the medium’s demise, transformed into an impassioned advocate. She curated American Painting: The Eighties, an exhibition of 41 artists at the Grey Art Gallery in 1979, in advance of the decade, the bravura a characteristic trait. It was both applauded and derided, also characteristic. But whatever criticism was lobbed at it, the essential premise, that painting was alive and kicking, was absolutely right. It was followed by a sequel, Abstract Paintings: The 90s at the Andre Emmerich gallery in 1992 as she reprised her commitment to painting many times over.

Other books by Rose included Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2006); and, more recently, Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium-USA-Italy (2016.) The latter accompanied the exhibition of the same name that she curated in Brussels, an exchange between artists from those three countries. In it, Rose laments our extremely unstable and changing times and our “increasingly inhuman, technologically driven, globally-networked world.” She defines the spaces of its reproduced imagery as postmodernist, borrowed from “photography, film and video.” To counter that, she said, we need a “rebirth of a pictorial space” which is “ambiguous and amorphous” created by a “visionary consciousness.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Rose attended Smith College, but completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1957. She studied art history at Columbia University, which was one of the top-ranked departments in the nation, with an illustrious faculty that included Julius Held, Meyer Shapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower. Among the friends she made then were filmmaker Michael Chapman, artists Carl Andre, Larry Rivers, and Stella—whom she married in London in 1961, when in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship to Spain. Her Spanish sojourn was the beginning of a long, requited affair with a country that became a second home to her, awarding her the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2010. Other awards include the College Art Association’s Distinguished Art Criticism Award in 1966 and 1969, as well as a Front Page Award in 1972. She did not complete her doctorate (contemporary art beckoned) but Columbia awarded her a Ph.D. in art history in 1984, in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

Rose wrote regularly for Studio International, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, New York magazine, Partisan Review, and others over the years, and was editor-in-chief at the Journal of Art, which she co-founded, covering a range of subjects that dealt with art, culture, and politics. As well, she wrote monographs on many, if not most, of the artists of the 1960s and 70s, a dazzling line-up that included Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence and Hunter College, among other institutions and was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine and the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC. She was curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—not without controversy—where she curated Miró in America (1982); Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit (1982); and a retrospective presciently, cannily dedicated to Lee Krasner (1983), too long eclipsed by her famous spouse. Rose’s films include the documentaries The New York School and American Art in the 1960s (1972). She collaborated with François de Menil and Philip Glass to make North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977).  Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978) was a solo effort, as was the film about the master printmaker, Tanya Grosman: A life with painters and poets (1979).

Rose was married four times to three husbands: art and music stars Stella and Jerry Leiber, and bookending them, economist Richard Du Boff, her first and last, who survives her, as do her children Rachel and Michael Stella and four grandchildren.

Rose was an art world fixture and provocateur. Criticism did not cramp her style or self-assurance.  She was a character, a force, a diva, quirky or brilliant or both, depending upon your perspective. She had panache, spirit, curiosity, and ambition, and disdained the increasing monetization and corporatization of the art world. She said, with typical pungency, in Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film, The Price of Everything, that she’d only been to one auction, and it was distressing to see “art on the auction block, like a piece of meat.”  Trenchant, outspoken, confounding, she could be formidable but also amiable. She could also be hilariously irreverent—and often salty. Let’s not rehabilitate her. She was bracingly, admirably who she was, and that was much more than enough.

The post A Character, A Force, A Diva: Barbara Rose, 1936 – 2020 appeared first on artcritical.

September 26, 2014 to January 25, 2015
225 Madison Avenue, between 35th and 36th streets
New York City, 212-685-0008

The testing of limitations is a recurring characteristic of modernist painting, notwithstanding the distracting idea of “medium specificity.” How, then, to express duration in a single still image, which sight and sense readily accept as manifesting simultaneity? Systems of musical notation have been developed to indicate (aural) events in time, and to the extent that a musical score is also a drawing, it suggests a solution to that problem.

On loan to The Morgan Library from the Menil Collection through January 25, Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) offers a different solution—one that is immersive, sensuous and pictorial. Roughly ten by 33 feet, it was painted in Rome in 1970 and features the reductive gray-and-white palette Twombly had by that time been working with for several years. Photographs of these paintings often accentuate the gray’s bluish undertone, making it appear denser than it is; the Menil canvas’s enormous expanse of translucent, brushy paint evokes not a chalkboard but thick smoke or deep shadow.

In white wax crayon, a loosely rectilinear diagram and accompanying semi-legible notations span the length of the canvas near its bottom edge. These convey a sense of intervals—of thresholds, shifts or transitions—along a left-to-right reading of the work.

The painting refers, we are told, to Le Voile d’Orphée (The Veil of Orpheus), a 1953 work by Pierre Henry,a pioneer of musique concrète. Composed for Pierre Schaeffer’s ballet Orphee 53, the cantata contains as a central motif the sound of tearing fabric, which apparently refers to the moment (found in some versions of the myth) when Orpheus, having led Eurydice from Hades, breaks the taboo imposed by Persephone by turning back to lift his bride’s veil of graveclothes, and gazing upon her. Considering that he is known as “the father of songs,” Orpheus’s timing here is pretty bad: the action would rend them forever asunder, as Hermes (who’s been tagging along)pulls Eurydice back into the Underworld, this time forever.

The first version of Treatise on the Veil dates from 1968, and hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A photographic reproduction of it is collaged into one of twelve untitled drawings in the Morgan exhibition, which appear to be studies and are presented, with great success, as fully resolved works. Laced even more abundantly than the painting with Twombly’s distinctive, ad-hoc calligraphic scrawl, they incorporate scribbles, smudges, erasures and rubber-stampings, as well as multi-panel collage structures.

Seven drawings feature six panels; four have five. Clearly, Twombly was engaged with the ideas of seriality, modularity, and progression that so enchanted many artists of the 1960s (and not only the Minimalists). The cellophane and masking tapes affixing these vertical, parallel swatches of paper to the larger sheets are showing their age, but that discoloration contributes to the sense of orchestrated scrappiness.

A slightly later drawing, from 1972, pares the structure down to four modules or “stages,” as they are labeled. It reprises the four-panel structure of Twombly’s 1968 canvas Veil of Orpheus (not in this show). Twombly, of course, was hugely influenced by Classical antiquity, and references to Orpheus can be found elsewhere in his oeuvre. The 1972 drawing contributes to the project’s tissue of references a black-and-white photograph of a woman, seen full-figure in profile, resplendent in an elaborate, flowing bridal gown. A flurry of graphite markings nearly obscures her.

In “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” Rainer Maria Rilke describes the journey these three figures made from the Underworld, through

…that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.

I don’t know if Twombly read these lines. But Rilke’s pathway is perhaps a kind of time line, which ends with the lifting of Eurydice’s veil; then time is reversed, as her rescue and thus the newlyweds’ fortunes are reversed.

The exhibition literature states that another source for the painting is by Eadweard Muybridge: a study of “the movements of a veiled bride walking in front of a train.” Though not visually supported in the exhibition, this tantalizing detail implies a photographic component to Twombly’s investigation of duration and the still image. Pictorial space can be elastic, of course, and the same might be true of pictorial time.

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Spencer Finch is well known for installations that reflect and alter perceptions of light and color. Typically they are installed in glass atriums or windows, and consist of colored gels or panels that act as intermediaries between external and internal chromatic effects. Finch often employs a scientific approach, gathering information on the intensity of color that is absorbed by a site, the movement of sunlight throughout a space, or the refractive qualities of water or clouds, translating the data into vibrant, kinetic works that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic silhouettes.

His current installation, “A Certain Slant of Light,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, consists of hundreds of square film panels affixed on all sides throughout the four-story glass walls of the Morgan’s Gilbert Court. As sunlight moves around the space each day, and during the seasons, it filters through the panels, sometimes casting intensely colored beams. Suspended from the ceiling, 12 clear glass panels turn slowly, transmitting further migratory reflections.

The piece takes its conceptual framework from books of hours — popular from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance — of which the Morgan holds the country’s most extensive collection. These were often lavishly illustrated prayer books containing several parts including, most importantly, the Hours of the Virgin, from which books of hours derive their name. This was a series of prayers to be recited throughout the day to the mother of Christ, who was regarded as an intercessor between humanity and God. They can be regarded as the iPhones of their day: religiously venerated, checked multiple times a day, directing life by the hour, and providing essential texts. A calendar was also a standard feature, not defined by 365 numerical dates as we would use, but structured around the feast days of saints, and events in the life of Jesus. The most important of these liturgical dates throughout each 12-month cycle were written in red, hence the origin of the term “red letter day.”

“A Certain Slant of Light” is intended to operate as a calendar of sorts, as well as an optical feast. When calendars in books of hours were illustrated, they depicted the traditional labors of each month, with color palettes varying according to those seasonal tasks. Finch has allocated a season to each side of Gilbert Court and varied the palette of his panels accordingly. The north wall is winter, the east is spring, the south is summer, and west, autumn. Throughout are intensely hued red panels, in reference to the most vital of dates in books of hours, only here they represent secular instances that Finch finds compelling — such as Isaac Newton’s birthday — and that were planned to align at noon with the sun’s trajectory on those dates.

The conceptual panoply upon which this project rests is magnificent: it spans centuries, draws directly from among the greatest canonical manuscripts, gleans motifs from the crowning events of religious history, while utilizing astronomy and the photonic power of our home star to ignite it. Even the press release conjures the sublime; though it is perhaps this illustrious framing that causes a sense of deficiency to come to light.

On a sunny day the visual allure of the piece is enjoyable, and it can be appreciated for this alone, but while many visitors may be only peripherally aware of the culture surrounding books of hours, the more one understands of them, the more derivative the installation becomes. The paralleling of colors, seasons and calendars istight and clever, but predictably, superficially so, as thin conceptualism often is when employed to imbue contemporary art with meaning and a patina of relevance. Here, it is insufficient to grant the piece its own authority or self-confidence when set against the mystical historicism surrounding Finch’s source material.

Despite the artist’s meticulous approach, there are practical incongruities that undermine the conceptual integrity. Knowledge of the work’s lofty inspiration doesn’t prevent its visual proximity to the kind of empty decorative design found in shopping malls — something Gilbert Court’s architecture convincingly emulates — where coloring vast glass swathes is an easy solution to transform bland environments. Furthermore, on overcast days the work is rendered disappointingly dormant.

Two of the four sides of the court are glass curtain walls with expansive connection to the sky beyond, effective backdrops for Finch’s panels. But the winter season is located on an internal glass wall that fronts offices. These panels are duller and, if the blinds are up, people can distractingly be seen working at their desks. Hopefully this isn’t explained as being passable because winter is a darker time. Autumn fares even worse, diminished and fragmented by the architecture where there are no substantial areas of glass, presenting an unwelcome contrast with how well the two external walls function.

Perhaps it was by necessity of having to fit in 365 panels, but placing them on the glass elevator seems excessive. Considering the sun’s stately influence and the sedate movement of light and color around the room, witnessing the elevator panels comparatively racing up and down is corrupting to almost comical effect. They are literally taken out of context. The work could be in place for a year and maintenance on such a long-term installation is important — peeling, bubbled panels cheapen the impression dreadfully. These points may seem like trifles, but collectively they undermine the work’s coherence and precision, separating it from the immense detail and quality that epitomize the artifacts from which Finch draws.

A larger question here is whether or not it is advisable in every instance for modern artists to reference as they please from art history just because they can or a site lends itself to it. When done with wit or social perspicacity it can initiate progressive dialog and render art valuable beyond economic worth elevating it into the canon. Grayson Perry, Kehinde Wiley, and Francis Bacon all engaged with art of the past to make fascinating cultural commentary. Alternatively, the Chapman Brothers’ smug, petulant vandalism of a series of Goya prints serves only to highlight their own vacuous posturing and artistic bankruptcy.

In selecting to operate between past and present, don’t contemporary artists have a responsibility to themselves, and their audience, to forge a meaningful relationship between eras, and excavate significant reason for doing so, or risk exposing their efforts as lackluster and flimsy in the face of the reverence bestowed upon art that has withstood the mercurial tastes of ages? Technical and visual execution must also uphold the artist’s intent.

Finch’s installation lacks the emotive capacity to fuel as much interest or controversy as some of the above-mentioned artists did, and while he was not trying to recreate an extant book of hours, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility to the vast gravity of his source. “A Certain Slant of Light” siphons the language and culture of the masters who created such tomes, and that it draws any lineage with those treasures is to its grievous detriment.

The post Lite Installation: Spencer Finch at The Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

July 20 to October 14, 2012
225 Madison Avenue, between 36 and 37 streets
New York City, (212) 685-0008

Josef Albers, a Bauhaus refugee from an increasingly intolerant Germany, immigrated with his wife Anni to the United States at the end of 1933. The move would be extraordinarily sanguine for the artist, who had been associated with the Bauhaus almost from its inception in 1919, first as a student and then as an instructor. Once in the New World, Albers found the consolations of nature, both in an America that was mostly still unspoiled wildernesses, and in Mexico, whose rectilinear architecture became the inspiration for his Adobe series. Trained early on by his father, who was a master tinker capable of carpentry, house painting, and plumbing, Albers was a man of unusual integrity, in both his person and his art. This independence of mind produced remarkable paintings: The artist’s nearly scientific wish to explore the glories and relations of color gave way to the great, and vast, sequence of paintings entitled Homage to the Square. The Morgan Library’s remarkable show of Albers’ works on paper presents studies for that series, as well as exploratory efforts for the Adobe series, and striking color studies. It shows a very different sensibility from the austere distinction of Homage to the Square.

The kind of exploration exampled in the Morgan’s show plays with the numinous accord of colors arranged in conjunction with each other. Indeed, at one point, Albers is quoted as saying, “The greens are envious of each other,” a slightly comic aphorism born out in two very painterly studies of hues Albers deems as green (to this viewer, black, purple, and gray are also evident in the color sketch). Albers, seemingly impeccable as a rational experimenter, is shown here as both tenacious and tentative in his discoveries, even evidencing an expressionist bent, a far cry from his personality and better-known art. Works on paper have an immediacy and a spontaneity that the supposedly more serious mediums of canvas and linen lack, and Albers takes advantage of this quality, working out structures of luminous tone and subtle structure. There is a red on red on red study for Homage to the Square whose luminescence is so strong it makes the viewer feel that a light source exists behind the painting. Equally interesting is the subtle yet visible difference between the picture’s three kinds of red, with the square in the center painted the darkest hue, while the other two squares are of successively lighter intensities.

Who would have thought that Albers was capable of such moving lyricism in his works on paper? There are drips here and there, and the lines between squared forms are not exactly straight; the edges of the painting are often rough rather than clean. The idiosyncrasies of the work do not add up to much in a conceptual sense, but they result in wonderfully expressive art. The Adobe series, far more rectangular in its forms, demonstrate the inherent attractiveness of symmetry. In one, from 1947, broad swathes of two dark blues act as the background, with the pink adobe house only partially seen and framed on its outer limits by green and, a different ground, black. On front of the pink façade, one sees a rectilinear orange form, with a square in the middle that articulates two black doors. Albers is very much an artist of restraint, but in works like this his restraint is joyous in nature. In study after study, his curiosity gets the better of his hand, and marvelous improvisations result. The viewer leaves with a more accurate, and larger, view of Albers as a painter.

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February 17 to July 1, 2012
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
New York City, 212-685-0008

When we think about the work of Dan Flavin (1933-1996), his drawings are hardly the first thing to come to mind. Instead, it is the fluorescent light sculptures that had the enduring impact on 20th- century art, making him one of the most significant minimalist visionaries.  But his works on paper remain little known. Curated by Isabelle Dervaux, this elegant, concise yet comprehensive exhibitionit reveals that Flavin cherished drawing, embracing it as a daily practice. This first drawing retrospective comprises over one hundred sheets from each phase of Flavin’s career.  By also presenting drawings by others artists from the artist’s personal collection, this excellent show allows the audience to recognize the extent Flavin to which found inspiration in both the act of drawing and in viewing examples by contemporaries and predecessors.

Flavin equally valued literal and abstract depictions of a subject. Over the years, his stylistically eclectic drawings ranged from abstract expressionist watercolors completed in the 1950s to pastel renditions of sailboats made in the 1980s. Some of his more traditional drawings date from the 1960s and 1970s. Usually made outdoors from observation, these depict the Hudson River landscape or the Long Island shoreline, places where he lived or spent much time.Realistically capturing the scenery with its waterscapes, rock and tree formations, they prove Flavin a fine draftsman. Though their inherent vocabulary differs strongly from his abstract sculptures, these drawings reflect the artist’s ongoing quest, through attention to detail, to establish a distinct sense of atmosphere based on nuanced observations of light and shade.

And yet, compared to his sculptures, which remain groundbreaking in their transformation of industrial materials into installations that contemplate notions of transcendence, most of Flavin’s drawings are surprisingly conservative, particularly in their use of materials. There are no experimentations with collage, for example. In fact, in many of Flavin’s drawings, his radicalism seems replaced with an affinity for classicism.

Flavin’s traditionalism in drawing might spring from insecurity. He was self-taught and never received a traditional art education. His sketches from nature and portraits tell of his passion for the act of drawing, but they also indicate a need to prove his skill. He had a deep appreciation for artists who could capture transcendental ideas through the mere use of line and light. Though he achieved the same in sculpture, his works on paper lack such higher aspirations. Instead, many of his drawings were products of an ongoing note taking. He usually carried a notebook and ballpoint pen to be able to jot down thoughts quickly and wherever he was at the time. These sketches do not embody finished renditions of original ideas, but rather appear as extensions of thought, often including written notes, numbers and dates.

Some of Flavin’s most accomplished works on paper refer to his sculptures. In these, fluorescent tubes are depicted as colored lines on plain grounds or else use words to designate color. They are characterized by a unique delineation of space through a minimal use of line and occasional color accents. They differ from Flavin’s “final finished diagrams”, which he began in 1971 as visual records of each installation. These records, made with colored pencil on graph paper, are distinctly less inspired and less immediate. In fact, later many of them were not done by him, but by his first his wife Sonja and their son Stephen, following his instructions.

Flavin’s personal collection illustrates how much he appreciated skill and draftsmanship in drawing. Above all, he found it in Japanese drawings, as well as nineteenth-century American landscape drawings. His interest in the latter began during the 1960s after he moved to Cold Spring, in the Hudson River valley, and continued through the late 1970s when he acquired a large number of works by Hudson River school artists on behalf of the Dia Art Foundation for the purpose of displaying them at a planned but unrealized Dan Flavin Art Institute in Garrison, New York. Flavin also collected 20th-century drawings: there are stunning examples by Piet Mondrian, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt in the exhibition.

Flavin became famous for works that did not reveal his hand: using factory-made fluorescent tubes, his sculptures were assembled by electricians. This exhibition, however, gathers works that show direct mark making and document the artist’s thought process when observing a subject, providing unprecedented insight into Flavin’s creative inspiration. For all that he is considered a minimalist, an abstractionist and even a conceptualist, in this not-to-be-missed display we encounter a different, private side of the artist, a man who was moved by romanticism and aspired to develop craftsmanship.

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By the time Stalin coined the phrase “engineer of the soul” to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have been applicable: Constructivism.

The suppressed impulse of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International enjoyed an unlikely afterlife, however, in the career of a Shanghai-born, California-raised Italian-American abstractionist. Mark di Suvero has populated sculpture parks, coporate plazas and university campuses across the world with fiesty, gravity-defying, bright red-painted or artfully rusted exclamations in steel.  Thrusting their limblike elements into the air in a spirit of defiant optimism, his structures operate like emblems of some long lost ideology.

An early masterpiece from his hand has been reconstructed at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, whose premises include an appropriately hangar-like structure to accommodate this 24 foot high steel and wood construction.  Di Suvero put together Nova Albion in 1964-5 on the beach in northern California using sawn logs and entire trunks.  The original wood has since rotted, but the steel elements bracing them together were kept in storage for decades.

Somewhat uncharacteristic in this more poetic than workerist early piece is the delicacy with which shaped and welded metal locks into warm wood.  Pure and perennial di Suvero, however, is the fearless sense of conquest the soaring forms engender.

Three works by di Suvero, meanwhile , are also on view in Renzo Piano’s atrium of the Morgan Library and Museum, through September 12, in what is billed as that institution’s first exhibition of contemporary sculpture.

A version of this article first appeared at nysun.com (the New York Sun) on June 14, 2010

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