Before you catch Magritte at the Museum of Modern Art this month, take a look at the contemporary version of Surrealist painting: Gladys Nilsson and Julia Benjamin. Gladys Nilsson (born 1940) has long been associated with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, a moniker that belies the utter goofy-strangeness of her work, and that of her husband, Jim Nutt. Her watercolor and gouaches introduce a cast of characters from a pre-modern village, embedded within densely-realized landscapes of preening trees and tottering flowers. The gooey-lyrical abstract oil paintings of Julia Benjamin (born 1984) share Nilsson’s obsession with figures in space. In Benjamin’s case, strokes and dabs of color people the canvas and oddly mirror Nilsson’s skewered compositional style. Installed side-by-side, the paintings speak to each other as two-sides of the same story.

Gladys Nilsson / Julia Benjamin is on view until October 20, 2013 at the National Exemplar. The gallery is located at 381 Broadway at White Street, 2nd Floor, and is open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 7 PM. Contact: thenationalexemplar@gmail.com

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May 5 – June 26, 2010
527 West 29th Street
New York City, 212-925-6190

Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art.  His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt’s wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida’s at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt’s earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this.  Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.

Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.

The current series of refined women’s heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt’s vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.

It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone.  In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt’s silent women simultaneously look at us and through us.  Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.

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Reviewed by David Carrier

Several generations ago two followers of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, proposed to change the nature of art criticism. Just as Erwin Panofsky and other German art historians of his generation had transformed art history, so Fried and Krauss sought to replace journalistic art writing, including Greenberg’s informal style of criticism, with philosophically informed, heavily-footnoted academic discourse.  Then art criticism, too, could move into the university. Within the academic world, Krauss and her followers at October triumphed. And some of the artists they championed—Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman and Gerhard Richter, for example—became stars. But beyond the ivory tower, as Jerry Saltz’s new collection of writing demonstrates, the paradigm shift refused to budge.

Saltz is a great art writer who rarely fails to amuse, entertain and instruct. This magnificent book, the sequel to his 2003 collection, Seeing Out Loud, contains discussions of art world sociology; gallery and museum reviews, including many devoted to younger figures; and an interview by Irving Sandler.  Ferociously opinionated but oddly modest, Saltz is consistently concerned about fair presentation of women artists. He is note perfect on sociology, neither cowed by the super rich nor resentful of their power. He has a riotous description of an auction. Saltz, who has marvelous street smarts, is perfectly capable of making independent, unpopular judgments. Of Cindy Sherman he writes: “all the adulatory reviews and academic blather about how she critiques the male gaze are as annoying and blinkered as they are daunting” (p. 196). On Richard Serra: “his sculpture is the apotheosis of a public art . . . it involves lots of money, power, heft, connections, space, and large audiences” (p. 205). Disagreement he calls “a form of respect” (p. 46). As the essay on Jim Nutt shows, he is capable of showing enough respect for his own former opinions to explain why he has come to reject them entirely.

A compulsively quotable phrasemaker, Saltz is enviably gifted at summarizing complex objects or institutions in tight, usually short sentences. Of Brice Marden’s abstract paintings he concludes: “Depending on your point of view, Marden is either a keeper of the faith of painting or caught in a formulaic feedback loop” (p. 388). When he calls museums “the delivery mechanisms of art” (p. 397) he pulls together a complex train of thought. Abrasive sometimes in his judgments of other critics, he can be funny, as when he writes: “The art world is like high school with money” (p. 69). In three successive essays, he tracks his changing responses to the new MoMA. That museum, he rightly concludes, is too small, and its commitment to showing only its masterpieces is limiting. In short: “MoMA is becoming a madman who thinks it is king” (p. 99).   John Currin, he writes is “the Arnold Schwarzenegger of painting: charismatic, ballsy, and hyped” (p. 149). At his best, Saltz shows how vacuous and windy almost all academic writing is. Fountain, he says, “is the esthetic equivalent of the Word Made Flesh: it is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art” (p. 139). This four page account of Duchamp and iconoclasm contains more material of substance than many a pedantic PhD thesis on the subject.

Saltz was attracted to art criticism, he explains, by reading Artforum, but thankfully he has shaken off that influence. His writing is driven entirely by immediate experience. Or as he puts it: “My ideology is that I hate ideology” (p. 426). He never hesitates to reject pretentiousness: “Sometimes the art world, presented with a vacuum, overinterprets it or assumes that something that says nothing must say something—why else would all these other important people be saying otherwise?” (p. 259). He doesn’t use many literary allusions. Nor does he offer larger historical perspectives, references to older art. When he calls Velázquez “the Shakespeare of painters” (p. 52), then for once his gift for phrase making fails him. Saltz has a short attention span, and so is the ideal commentator on art that mostly resists contemplation.  When he reviews Arshile Gorky, admiring him while noting that “his hard-won surfaces and meticulous shapes strike people as labored or too idealistic” (p. 371), you see the limits of his sensibility, which is formed on contemporary art.

When Saltz remarks that he usually sees thirty to forty shows a week, and goes to the Met forty times a year, then you feel that his intellectual life revolves entirely around being a critic. As he puts it, without the art world, “not only would I be out of a job . . . I’d be out of my mind as well” (p. 43). In my experience, and I don’t see thirty shows a week, it’s easy to get burnt out after seeing so many bad exhibitions. And it must be very hard, I imagine, to write as much as he does. What I find most admirable, therefore, is Saltz’s ability to retain his enthusiasm. He loves the art world  not just when it succeeds but, equally it seems, when it so often fails him.

Jerry Saltz Seeing Out Louder: Art Criticism 2003-2009 Hard Press Editions: Lenox, Massachusetts in association with Hudson Hills Press: Manchester, Vermont and New York, New York.  2009. ISBN 978-155595318-8. $40

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