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 7 to October 28, 2017
293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street,
New York City, paulkasmingallery.com

Assessment of an artist’s early work can be a tricky business. Often this period will have been manipulated to cohere with an overarching narrative associated with the artist, with focus placed on unearthing traces of what would later epitomize the mature style. An entirely different problem, however, plagues the reception of early Robert Motherwell.

Motherwell took a circuitous path to becoming an artist, one peppered with forays into academia and punctuated by multiple decisions to change his course of study to assuage his hankering, though often repressed, desire to envelop himself in modern art. Motherwell’s abandoned doctoral dissertation has had a lasting impact on scholarly treatment of his early work. The enduring credo has it that Motherwell bypassed traditional juvenilia and was instead in possession of a mature style and decided artistic philosophy at the very outset of his career.

When he graduated from Stanford in 1937 with a philosophy degree, Motherwell immediately enrolled in the philosophy graduate program at Harvard. He preferred courses on art theory and aesthetics, and elected to research Eugène Delacroix at the University of Grenoble, France. He soon moved to Paris, however, where he pursued his interest in contemporary art, rubbing shoulders with members of the intelligentsia and studying firsthand the art of modern masters. Returning to the United States, he switched gears and entered the graduate program in art history at Columbia, run by the fabled Meyer Schapiro. Witnessing his student’s primary interest in creating his own work, Schapiro introduced Motherwell to the downtown émigré Surrealist crowd. Despite his youth and unmistakably American characteristics, Motherwell became fast friends with its luminaries. He made a transformative trip to Mexico, for instance, with Roberto Matta, by the end of which he would come to consider himself an artist.

The Mexican paintings are where Kasmin’s Robert Motherwell Early Paintings begins. Remarkably, this is only the second-ever exhibition of the artist’s early paintings.

What’s more, Kasmin tackles a body of work that has been overshadowed by Motherwell’s critically lauded early explorations into collage and automatic drawing. Despite the commercial appeal of paintings and their prominence in Motherwell’s later career, his early paintings have long played second fiddle to artistic production in other media. It is only with the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series beginning in 1957 that Motherwell garnered a reputation as a painter. Kasmin’s exhibition therefore responds to a challenging mandate: to elevate both period and medium against received opinion.

Shining an isolated light on this body of work, with the help of impressive loans from the Dedalus Foundation, the exhibition has a rejuvenating effect. The downside of claiming that Motherwell arrived as an artist fully formed is the corollary assumption that early endeavors suffered from a lack of progress, not bearing the fruits of trial-and-error process that informs most artists. Instead, the 18 works selected for the exhibition, which emphasize serial groupings, attest to the radical development of the artist between the 1940s and ‘50s as we see him grapple with a cadre of influences from Surrealism and psychic automatism to Piet Mondrian and Joan Miró—retaining, rejecting, and remediating as he saw fit.

The most instructive example of his painterly development during this period is the triumvirate of works inspired by Mondrian. While the highlight of the first room of this two-room show might appear to be the first-ever public display of Three Figures, c. 1941 alongside his first complete painting, La Belle Mexicaine (Maria), 1941––a powerful figurative pairing given prominent gallery placement––moments of curatorial inspiration lay in other corners of the gallery. Recuerdo de Coyoacán, 1942, The Sentinel, 1942, and The Spanish Prison (Window), 1943-44 result from his encounter with Mondrian at the Dutchman’s first US solo exhibition at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in 1942. Motherwell was struck by Mondrian’s interrogation of the visual field as a zone to be simultaneously flattened and bisected.

Over time, the works grow progressively distant from the canonical grid paintings as each iteration allowed Motherwell to determine which aspects of Mondrian’s practice were pertinent to his program. The latest work, The Spanish Prison (Window)—its title referencing the Civil War—draws upon De Stijl’s detached, non-objective optical theory while distorting its anti-humanist position by introducing a quasi-figurative, imprisoned form. Blowing open Mondrian’s hermetic grid, this is a body contained and deconstructed by the confines of a vertical field.

More than a grouping of like works, positing these three paintings as a series demonstrates Motherwell’s preoccupation with variegating motifs as his central mode of artistic refinement. Furthermore, this trio challenges its very ontological classification as belonging to a discrete medium by virtue of the way in which the works reify the collagist practice that infiltrated Motherwell’s approach to painting. Linking disparate blocks of color amidst vibrant swaths of paint, Motherwell shows the capacity of paint to behave like torn and rejoined pieces of paper.

Nearing the end of the 1940s and delving into the 1950s, the second room of the exhibition charts another development in early Motherwell, his progressively becoming more abstract. Orange Personage, 1947 is situated against the back wall of the gallery, mirroring the placement of the figurative work La Belle Mexicaine (Maria) in the previous room. This application of parallel structure to the exhibition space clarifies the conceptual distance between the two figurative approaches: in the later work, Motherwell uses the vertical thrust of the canvas and simplistic geometric forms to describe the human form, drastically departing from the figurative, though abstractly obscured, painting of his first wife.

The revelation in Orange Personage, however, is to be had up-close. Covered with sand—likely from the beaches of East Hampton where the artist maintained a home—the work possesses visceral charge and local specificity. Incorporating found objects, natural and manufactured, into his works was a trademark of Motherwell’s collages. Living somewhere between painting, collage, and readymade, Orange Personage dissolves the boundaries of medium specificity.

While an exhibition of early paintings by a famous Abstract Expressionist might not seem anything out of the ordinary, this show is subtly subversive. Instead of simply making an argument for Motherwell’s painterly abilities, the collagist practice, serial pairings, and quotations of different artists at play here challenge notions that this is a show about paintings, a stylistically homogenous period, or Motherwell alone.

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At times, abstract painting can seem like a received package, with little space left to think outside of the box. In Virva Hinnemo, to overplay the postal metaphor, we have an artist “pushing the envelope” — in her case, literally so. A form vocabulary and a gestural lexicon familiar from mid-century American masters Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston meet the swift completion of their appointed rounds on flattened cartons as their repurposed, eccentric support. This strategy could have smacked of Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces or currently fashionable “provisional” abstraction, but somehow in the hands of this Springs, NY-based Finnish artist the work manages to come across as visually sophisticated but stylistically innocent. Their charming, unforced modernism fits right into the refreshingly old-fashioned surroundings of this plush new venue, sharing quarters with another of proprietor Anita Rogers’ enterprises and thus itself an eccentric support.

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David Anfam’s monograph, Abstract Expressionism (Thames & Hudson,1990) remains the mostlucid and plausible account of that movement. It has been thirty-eight years since New York City has seen a full-blown exhibition devoted to its greatest School, so this large gallery show curated by Anfam provides a great opportunity to evaluate his claims. The canonical Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning and others, are joined here by two women, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell; by the African-American Norman Lewis; by the photographers Harry Callahan, Barbara Morgan, Hans Namuth, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. And there are strong paintings by a number of figures often thought marginal to Abstract Expressionism, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger (born 1926), and Mark Tobey among them. Anfam’s title comes from Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. We need, he argues, to understand properly the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism, without treating it either as a triumph of chauvinistic mythmaking or as an episode in the Cold War.

I am modestly puzzled by the inclusion of Seliger and Lewis; by the Tobey which to me looks fatally finicky; and by the very large Pousette-Dart, Time is the Mind of Space, Space in the Body of Time (1979-82).  And I am disappointed by the absence of Richard Diebenkorn. But no doubt even Haunch of Venison, situated in midtown Manhattan on the twentieth floor, has limits in its abilities to procure loans. The show include some marvelously strange Pollocks, Number 17, 1950 (Fireworks), for example, and strong paintings by Motherwell, Rothko and Still. Krasner is not my artist, but Another Storm (1963) causes me to reconsider that judgment. Tworkov’s Idlng I (1970), uncannily related to Cy Twombly’s all-over pictures, makes me wonder what else I have missed. I wish that Anfam would say more about why his photographers are peers of Abstract Expressionists. Siskind’s Jalapa 46 (Homage to Frank Kline) (1973) does, I grant, show a Klinean motif, but in a small image. To my mind, the comparison of this and the other photographs to abstract paintings seemsa pseudo morphism.

But it would be ungracious and inappropriate to evaluate A World Elsewhere critically simply as an exercise in taste. Since in a general way this art, though not all of the paintings on display, is mostly relatively familiar, what is most valuable here is the perspective provided by Anfam’s catalogue. As he rightly notes, most recent scholars tend to treat Abstract Expressionism as a step moving very quickly towards the next generation, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But that narrative, he urges, fails to deal seriously with the visual qualities of this art, and its highly ambiguous place within American literary and political culture. That Anfam is British perhaps explains his marvelous sympathy with this movement, which he eloquently describes as “an indelible artistic episode in the history of a wish for a world elsewhere probably as old as human longing itself,” and why he then quotes Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

When it withdraws into its happiness,
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas.

What then should a history of abstract art after Abstract Expressionism look like? Answering that question will take another exhibition, one I hope Anfam organizes.

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October 15 through November 22, 2003

This show encompasses a number of different styles and formats, namely cutouts and collage, and the definition of “cutout” is meant to be multi-faceted.. Cutout generally means cutting out shapes and placing them on some sort of background. Cutouts allow artists to draw without the use of chiaroscuro. Crisp edged cutout forms have been used by artists to emphasize color and outline. Cutout has also been an essential part of modern art because of the way it flattens out forms and the picture space. Collage on the other hand, creates ambiguity in two-dimensional space. Photos, text, drawing, painting, and other materials, such as wallpaper, pieces of construction paper, and candy and food wrappers can be combined in the same composition. Through collage, artists have been able to subvert subject matter, add psychological or political dimensions to their work, approach drawing and painting in new ways, suggest new kinds of pictorial space, introduce text into their work, and redefine pictorial realism.

In Kara Walker’s work and the small pieces by Alex Katz in this show, notions of foreground and background are presented unambiguously; the picture plane is not deconstructed. The cutout is used either to sharpen the contrast between picture planes (Walker) or to heighten the tension between two-dimensional space and the suggestion of three-dimensional forms (Katz).

Walker uses stenciled cutouts to create a jarring contrast between fore and background, which makes her work more disturbing and surreal. The black stenciled forms she places on a solid white background (“Jockey,” 1995) have political implications, but also fool us into thinking we can easily read the action and the figures. In fact it is not clear exactly what we are looking at. The gender of the figures, what they are wearing and holding and doing is unclear. We are not sure how the figures are interacting with one another, even though their outlines are crisp.

Three small collages by Alex Katz from the fifties (“Cat,’ 1959, “Roadmaster,” 1955-56, and “Two Figures,” 1955) are perfect examples of how artists use simple means, snipping away at tiny pieces of colored paper, to portray complex relationships. The trimmed edges of the colored paper capture the nuances of the figure of a sleeping cat, two lovers lounging on the grass, and a parked car. Katz’s Rowboat, 1964, is a piece made of painted wood cutouts of two people in a rowboat floating on calmly rippling water. The cutout figures have been painted black, and when placed on a white background, create the illusion of three dimensional space, rippling water, shadow, and solid form and figure, without resorting to line drawing or the modulation of colors.

The isolating effect produced by the cut-out can be used in a variety of ways. One of Katz’s full length portrait cutouts of friends and colleagues (“Frank O’Hara,” 1959-60) transforms the gallery space into a background for the figure. The cut aluminum figure by William King (“Magic,” 1972) has a ghostly erotic presence. From one angle the shape looks like a female figure, bending to the floor with her rear end in the air. Viewed from another angle, this reading falls apart and the shape becomes completely abstract.

Like many artists in this show, Robert Motherwell uses collage to enhance the drawing process and reinvent form. Drawn or painted elements commingle with newspaper clippings, images, and text to form an agitated whole. Ellsworth Kelly juxtaposes different materials,a fragment of a naked woman over a row of mountains (“Horizontal Nude,” 1974), a bar of color pasted over the Statue of Liberty (“Statue of Liberty,” 1957) to create new kinds of pictorial space and to recontextualize cultural icons. A few artists in this show follow in the tradition of cubist collage and make new forms and new spaces using fragments of observed reality and patterns and textures such as Lee Krasner’s “Study for Mosaic at 2 Broadway, New York,” 1959, and Frank Stella’s “Lanckorona,” 1972.

The most exciting rarities in this show are “Woman,” 1969-70, by Willem de Kooning, believed to be an armature or study aid for a sculpture he never made, and a small but beautiful gouache découpée by Matisse (“Alga on Green Background,” 1947). An India ink drawing on a wood cutout, “Woman” is immediately recognizable as a de Kooning because of the familiar high heel shoes and flailing breast shapes. This object was probably one of the many fragments of unfinished projects or ideas the artist had strewn about his various work spaces. The Matisse consists of a purple tendril shape (which appears in many of Matisse’s late works) placed on a green background. The piece has an aqueous feel to it, and the colors are enchanting.

This show makes it clear that artists used collage and cutout to disrupt or flatten or complicate the picture plane and to introduce different materials into the same composition. Photography undermined the realism welded by painters and draftsman for centuries, but collage and cutout allowed visual artists to manipulate two-dimensional space in ways not available to the photographer, at least, notprior to the invention of graphics software. Collage and cutout transformed the very notions of abstraction and realism, and the works in this show exemplify the liberating spirit they brought to modern draftsmanship and painting.

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