April 28 to September 27, 2015
2 Columbus Circle
New York City, 212 299 7777

traveling to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, October 30, 2015 to February 28, 2016

The stated purpose of this show is to consider the notable contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. Certainly an argument can be made for paying more attention to the contributions women within craft traditions, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were largely dominated by men. Artists such as Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Toshiko Takaezu and Karen Karnes used such materials as metals, textiles and clay in ways that push their work toward fine art concerns, demanding to be seen in a fine art context. Yet to date, while each of these artists is well known, their collective contribution has remained unexamined.

The current show at MAD aims to adjust this imbalance, in part through sheer volume of works presented — over 100 individual works by 42 artists fill every gallery on two floors. The range is comprehensive and ambitious. By including important Scandinavian designers such as Rut Bryky and Vivianna Torun Brulow-Hube, the parallels between women working in Scandinavia and the United States are highlighted. And by focusing on European émigrés such as Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, the legacy of modernism within American craft is established. Bauhaus trained, Albers and Grotell brought with them the conviction that craft could serve as an arena of modernist innovation.

The exhibition begins on the second floor where it focuses on a particular cadre of artists, who besides Asawa, Karnes, Lenore Tawney and Takaezu included Sheila Hicks and Alice Kogawa Parrott, who were influential as designers, makers and teachers. As the show points out, this pioneering group came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself, which was founded in 1956 at the center of the emerging American modern craft movement.

Marianne Strengell and Grotell taught for many years at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where their students included Takaezu and Parrott. The placement of works by mentors, protégés and colleagues underlines the networks and alliances that influenced and sustained these women throughout their careers.

Many pairings of “craft” and “fine art” have been integrated to encourage viewers to reconsider traditional categories and, de facto, to rethink modernist narrative in light of gender. For the most part this works well, although some of the pairings need more explanation. It is not clear why works by Lee Krasner and Eva Hesse, for example, have been paired with Takaezu and Tawney. They didn’t influence each other much and the formal connections are slight. But this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a feast of works by women rarely seen together on this scale.

One need only think of the careers of male artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Peter Voulkos and Scott Burton, to recognize the need to further examine the concerns raised by this show. Noguchi did a great deal of design work throughout his career, including lamps, chairs, set design but he was always located firmly within a fine arts context. Voulkos made wheel-thrown vessels throughout his life, but he is widely recognized for pushing clay into the realm of sculpture. Perhaps the most dramatic comparison might be Burton, who designed objects out of marble and stone intended to be viewed aesthetically while at the same time functioning as chairs, tables, etc. This paradigm can be traced right back to Constantin Brancusi whose Endless Column ensemble, erected in Romania in 1934, includes a large stone table with twelve stone chairs that Brancusi himself felt was as important to the whole as the column itself. The point being that male artists have not had problems playing with craft traditions and making utilitarian objects, but women who made work in craft areas were historically relegated to this arena.

Nevertheless, the exhibition at MAD is celebratory. Viewers venturing through the connected rooms will make many surprising discoveries: Marianne Strengell’s Forecast, a rug made from 80% aluminum for Alcoa; framed weavings by Anni Albers; a striking metal construction by Vivian Beer for instance. A piece titled DE—SIGN by Gabriel Ann Mahler, which includes a garment and a video exploring stereotypical male and female postures and clothing, was a revelation for this viewer. For the most part, the fourth floor is filled with later generations of artists and designers. Yet, as one enters these galleries, dominated for the most part by works of industrial design, one encounters an interesting counterpoint and nod to design legacy in a pairing of ceramic works by British ceramicist Magdelane Odundo. These raven-black clay forms are stunning: they provoke, startle and mystify by being at once vessel and sculptural form.

One of the delightful ironies of the exhibition is that it includes the work of contemporary artists such as Polly Apfelbaum. Apfelbaum is firmly rooted in a fine art context but her large, site-specific installation of textiles was inspired by A Handweavers Pattern Book. She pushes back toward a craft heritage by choosing not to paint on stretched canvas but on silk in such a way that the piece spreads out as a series of colored scarves. She confidently makes feminist connections to craft and clothing.

“Pathmakers” does a great deal to meet its goal of locating women within central currents of mid-century modernist narrative. Most importantly, this exhibition opens the opportunity for new lines of enquiry into the intersections of craft, gender and modernism.

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June 8 to September 12, 2012
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York City 212-423-3500

When Hilla Rebay, the founding director of the Guggenheim, was forced out of that museum, James Johnson Sweeney became the second director (1952-60). Rebay had focused on collecting Vasily Kandinsky. Sweeney’s wider taste encompassed the classic Abstract Expressionists – Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Jackson Polllock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – and also a host of other figures. This large exhibition of about one hundred paintings and sculptures by nearly seventy artists presents the abstract art he admired. Sweeney collected many Americans, some famous now, and others who perhaps deserve attention: James Brooks, Herbert Ferber, Grace Hartigan, Ibram Lassaw, and Isamu Noguchi. And he purchased many Europeans, Carla Accardi, Pierre Alechinsky, and Karel Appel to name three, and some Japanese abstractionists, Yutaka Ohaski, Kenzo Okada and Kumi Sugaï being examples.

American-style abstraction became an international style in the 1950s, and was presented In New York. But although this exhibition juxtaposes familiar and now obscure figures, it fails to provide an interesting revisionist perspective on this fascinating period. Part of the problem is suspect connoisseurship. Asger Jorn intrigues me, for no less than T. J. Clark called him the greatest painter of this decade, a claim not supported by the two works on display. Sam Francis is, in my judgment, a great, somewhat marginalized figure in the 1950s, but that judgment is not honesty supported by the art on display. Recently we have seen in Manhattan a revelatory Lucio Fontana exhibition (reviewed here). Memories of that show make the two paintings hung here seem sadly slight. The one Clyfford Still on display is tremendous as is one of the Yves Kleins, but the works displayed by Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Emilio Vedova are not going to be admired even by their champions. Three years ago (reviewed here ) an upscale New York gallery presented a serious exercise in connoisseurship of abstract expressionism, with a challenging catalogue essay in a setting, which inspired serious visual reflection. By contrast, this much larger exhibition is a very routine affair. Neither the selection of art nor the hanging is revealing. You don’t come away with a revisionist account of this important period.

In covering much discussed territory, a great museum needs to be imaginative.    Here the presence of minor works by such much-exhibited figures as Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt doesn’t expand our thinking about the history of recent abstraction. Nor do the essays in the massive catalogue – which go over now very familiar material – provide revelations. When so much has been said about Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, perhaps there is something to be said for considering Sweeney’s critical judgments. But whatever his importance as a curator, he doesn’t come across as a challenging thinker. It would have been good to view a strong presentation of some once well-known artists who have fallen into relative obscurity. Do Yaacov Agam, Martin Barré or Theodore Roszak deserve serious attention? And what about the abstractionists from outside Manhattan? Was Clement Greenberg right to write off the Europeans, Serge Poliakoff and Pierre Soulages for example, in favor of his American Abstract Expressionists? Focused visual contrasts could inspire reflection about these questions. This exhibition doesn’t provide them. When financial pressures make ambitious loan exhibitions increasingly difficult, it might be interesting to present the Guggenheim’s reserves, in a way that provided novel insights into that institution’s place in the formation of our present taste in 1950s abstraction.  But this show doesn’t. It is a missed opportunity.

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33 MacDougal Alley: The Interlocking Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi
PaceWildenstein, 32 E 57th Street, East of Madison Aveunue, phone: 212-421-3292, through October 4

Lee Krasner: “After Palingenesis,”
Robert Miller 524 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, phone: 212-366-4774, through Oct 11

Three stunning, timely exhibitions of celebrated but underrated American modernists remind New Yorkers of the incredible resource offered by the more serious commercial galleries. Among them, right now, Knoedler, PaceWildenstein, and Robert Miller form a kind of second Whitney – one for which you don’t have to stand in line, or pay!

Richard Pousette-Dart was a first-generation abstract expressionist who has been consigned to the second tier. He stares out at history from the left end of the middle row of Nina Leen’s canonical 1951 group photograph for Life magazine of the so-called “irascibles” – one of the youngest in the line-up. But where, say, Adolph Gottlieb or Clifford Still get a chapter each in “The Triumph of American Painting,” Irving Sandler’s landmark study of the movement, Pousette-Dart barely earns a couple of mentions. And yet he was both a forerunner and a great painter.

History is comfortable, however, to dwell on as few strong names as possible. You might expect revisionist art histories to correct injustices, but the opposite happens: The academics – who aren’t connoisseurs interested in quality – compound the canonical lineup by accepting them as givens, focusing their revisions on theoretical issues. It is left to artists and collectors to engage in genuinely critical revaluation.

This show of Pousette-Dart’s precocious “mythic heads” of the 1930s will throw a spanner in the works as far as sorting wheat from chaff is concerned. Dwelling on the period 1935-42, the exhibition shows an artist hitting the scene as a ready-formed individualist. The works are both of, and ahead of, their time.

If you stopped the clock in, say, 1940 and judged the protagonists on what they had achieved so far, Pousette-Dart would stand head and shoulders over Jackson Pollock. Of course, the clock didn’t stop, and it was precisely in the act of working through the frustrations and pent up energies of his misdirected earlier efforts that Pollock forged so unique and revolutionary a personal expressive language. In Pousette-Dart’s case, in fact, the sense of crystalline resolution that always blesses his work might also be its fatal flaw.

The mythic heads look with fierce critical intelligence at the possibilities offered a young American by Picasso and Braque, Miró, and Klee, and above all, non-western art. They also relate to a new direction in American painting, at once modern, classic and mythopoeic, explored by the “three musketeers,” whom Pousette-Dart befriended: John Graham, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. Actually, Pousette-Dart, whose mother was the poet and theosophist Flora Louise Dart, anticipated Graham’s subsequent turn to the occult.

The portrait of Flora from 1939-40 is an extraordinary work. It relates as much to Marsden Hartley as to the artist’s continental mentors, while it anticipates a painter like Richard Lindner. It might seem remote in touch and ambition from the open color fields that Pousette-Dart would pioneer in the following years, but it connects to the spirit of abstract expressionism in the way symbolism and plastic intensity form a synergy.

***

In the year the Pousette-Dart show ends, 1942, the Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi slipped out of the internment camp he had entered voluntarily six months earlier and made his way to New York. He found in MacDougal Alley, long established as a haven for sculptors, “an oasis … perfect in every way” for sculpture. The environment he created there looked forward to the Zen garden he went on to establish amidst the urban industry of Long Island City. This later became his museum (it is currently under renovation).

The 1940s were miracle years for Noguchi, in which he produced some of his most exquisite and characteristic works. The exhibition includes around a dozen pieces that have their genesis in that period as marble carvings and some decades later would be cast in bronze and other metals. (The artful lighting of this design heavy installation obfuscates the differences in surface quality between metal and polished stone.) Like Pousette-Dart, Noguchi was looking at once to European and extra-European sources while finding his own voice. Many of his biomporphic standing figures look like surrealist personages from the paintings of Picasso, Miró, and Tanguy rendered three-dimensionally.

What gives them particular edge is the way they are formed from interlocking planes. Noguchi found a cheap and suggestive material in marble slabs, which had been prepared that way for the building trade (for façades). Carving directly with pneumatic tools, he devised a technique of interlocking that by-passed welding or gluing. The effect is to make them seem more ethereal and other-wordly. Indeed, what’s extraordinary about these standing figures of Noguchi is that they dissolve the opposition between the constructive and organic that mattered so much to sculptors at that time. They are at once jagged and rounded, and they intimate liveliness without disguising the mechanical logic of their facture.

***

When Jackson Pollock rushed into town for the “Irascibles” photograph, it had never occurred to anyone to include his wife, Lee Krasner (except, of course, Lee Krasner herself). The one woman to break into that class portrait was Hedda Sterne. This was undoubtedly a grave injustice, for Krasner was as significant a player in advanced painting as plenty of the men who were included.

Her 1999 retrospective (it was at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001) revealed an artist as interesting for her inconsistencies as her accomplishments. This should not be misunderstood: She had high points, but the very restlessness and risk that continued to characterize her career ought to endear her to history, not alienate her.

While the Pousette-Dart and Noguchi exhibits visit their protagonists at early career moments, Robert Miller presents a sumptuous display of late works, from 1966 to the year of her death, 1984. In many of these, however, the artist herself critically revisits her youth, for she found a fecund art material in her own early, failed drawings.

It is not so rare for artists to cannibalize their own efforts in this way. The process can be related to the way a painter might use prints or reproductions of their own work as a compositional starting point. The fact, incidentally, that Krasner first sorted her discovered cache of drawings, which had been made while a student of Hans Hoffman, and kept the good ones diminishes any notion of exorcissm in this exercise. What is more startling about these late works is what they say about the relationship of expressivity and style in her mature aesthetic outlook.

The 1960s paintings show Krasner capable of painterly exuberance and gestural gusto. But energy is always contained by form. These loose, “automatic” paintings give way to hard-edged designs of almost constructivist precision in the following decade. The last phase is a synthesis of these preceding opposites. By incorporating charcoal drawings that were passionately engaged with a cubist sense of space into radically flattened, cut-out compositions (forcing the duality by leaving the background canvas raw), Krasner places her own authentic and formative search for depth within quote marks. Hard-won drawings that had been so specific about space are reduced to generalized texture, a kind of ready-made pentimenti. Such liberty with language connects in a surprising way with younger contemporaries. Paintings that are the culmination of long career are equally and bizarrely of their time. The point would be driven home were one to place a 1984 Krasner next to a David Salle of the same year.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 18, 2003

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