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.

The post Not The Readymade Modernist After All: A revisionist take on early Robert Motherwell appeared first on artcritical.

Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture at Michael Werner Gallery
January 28 to March 26, 2016
4 E 77th Street (between Madison and 5th avenues)
New York, 212 988 1623

Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
March 3 to April 23, 2016
515 W 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage at Alden Projects
March 5 to May 8, 2016
34 Orchard Street (between Hester and Canal)
New York, 212 229 2453

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) was a late starter, only becoming a visual artist when he was 40, having spent 20 years trying to make a living as a poet. And he died relatively young, on his 52nd birthday. But as demonstrated by three concurrent shows — at Paul Kasmin, Michael Werner, and the Museum of Modern Art — he was highly productive during a short period. An additional show at Alden Projects displays exhibition invitations, posters, letters, and other similar materials.

There are 200 works, on view at his MoMA survey, including books of poetry and photographs, works made before Broodthaers formally entered the visual arts. His transition can also be seen there, when he turned the unsold copies of his last volume of poetry into the sculpture Pense-Bête (“Memory aid,” 1964), his first artwork, for his first solo exhibition. Once he turned to making art, he created a number of sculptures, which recycle mussels and eggshells, his signature materials. They are ordinary, used-up organic forms. Mussels are often served in Belgian restaurants and he thought of them as poetic. Mussel shells, he wrote, are hulls, two conjoined complete forms. And eggs, of course, are symbols of life and fecundity.

He put eggshells on furniture in Armoire blanche et table blanche (“White cabinet and white table,” 1965), on painted canvas in Untitled (Triptych) (1965-66), and in a box labeled as containing exhibition invitations, in Je retrouve à la matière, je retrouve la tradition des primitifs, peinture à l’oeuf, peinture à l’oeuf (“I return to matter, I rediscover the tradition of the primitives, painting with egg, painting with egg,” 1966). Cooked mussels are found piled in a pot in Grande casserole de moules (“Large casserole of mussels,” 1966) and displayed in crates in Parc à moules (“Tray of mussels,” 1966).

In 1968, announcing that he was no longer an artist, Broodthaers appointed himself director of his own museum: Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (“Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles”), an installation project that began in his home and was later restaged at documenta and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. MoMA displays documentation — announcements, films, slide shows and also objects — generated by that career. One finds postcards of paintings, maps of the museum, photographs of the exhibitions, slide shows and display cases. Untitled (General with cigar) (1970), features a found thrift-shop painting of General Philippe Pétain (treasonous Chief of State in Vichy France) with a cigar stuck in his mouth, part of Broodthaers’s recurring interest in smoking and its prohibition as poetic and bureaucratic propositions.

Four years later, in 1972, Broodthaers announced that he again was an artist, and hired a sign painter to print words on canvas, and on the walls and ceiling of a gallery. He made Série en language française (Series de neuf peintures sur un sujet littéraire) (“Series in the French language, Series of nine paintings on a literary subject,” 1972), which includes “Andre Gide smoking,” “Paul Valery smoking,” and so on. And, written in English, he produced nine painted canvases, Série anglaise (“English series,” 1972): a set of prints featuring the names and birth and death dates of English luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and others.

Starting in 1974, he recycled his earlier work, employing old-fashioned displays with palm trees, carpets and 19th-century display cases, in exhibitions that he documented on film, calling them “Décors,” which can be translated as “installations” as well as “film sets.”

The gallery shows provide a valuable supplement to the MoMA exhibition. Uptown, “Marcel Broodthaers: Écriture,” at Michael Werner, focuses on his writing, one of his major concerns, and includes collages, drawings, films, collage, sculptures and one of his décors, Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (“Say Everywhere What I Have Said,” 1974). In Chelsea, Paul Kasmin presents paintings on plastic and Broodthaers’s books, along with the reconstruction of another décor, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas it- Le Perroquet (“Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So — The Parrot,” 1974), a recording of him reciting his poem “Moi Je Dis Mois Je Dis Je…“

Starting with Hegel, and extended by Marx and, more recently, by any number of Marxist critics, the idea that history (and art) proceeds by critical negation has become received opinion among many leftists. This is how T. J. Clark understands Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, and how Theodor W. Adorno described Modernist music. And it is how Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who contributes to a catalogue produced for the MoMA retrospective, understands Broodthaers.

By now, however, it should be apparent that art-as-critique has become a ritual, just another artistic tradition. Our museums (and art galleries) embrace their most distinguished critics. Just as the once-feared “death of painting” has yielded an ongoing tradition of painting, so the deconstructive art of Broodthaers has become part-and-parcel of both the gallery system and the public art museum, though he certainly aimed to upend this dialectical narrative by such acts as the destruction and/or reuse of his own previous work. Duchamp showed that any banal artifact might become a readymade; Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons demonstrated that a replica of a commercial product might become art. Hans Haacke made commercial art critiquing the commercial gallery system, and Broodthaers (among others) revealed that anti-art might itself be the subject of display and commerce.

I suspect that some leftists are frustrated by this situation. I’m fascinated with the ways that our culture honors and supports its critics. The narrative of the Hegelian dialectic, which is the conceptual basis for this process of negation, has come to a standstill, which isn’t to say that the history of art has ended, as Hegel feared-and-hoped, but only that the seemingly radical pursuit of negating gestures, having become an end in itself, is a source of objects which are as aesthetically delectable as any Modernist masterpieces. Broodthaers critiques the art world from within, and so leaves its practice, to which he contributed, more firmly in place. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh argues that Broodthaers disputes “the false and preposterous claims that artistic practices could engender radical political or cultural transformations.” That, I think, is not quite correct. In fact, the present apotheosis of Broodthaers as an artist is a radical cultural transformation, just not the liberatory one that people of the arts so often talk of in vague and longing terms. Indeed, in a marvelous posthumous revelation of the reach of Broodthaers’s idea, MoMA is publishing a limited-edition facsimile of his book Atlas (1975). The deluxe version, which contains a supplement, the uncut press sheet included by Broodthaers in the original publication, is sold exclusively at MoMA stores.

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October 22 to December 5, 2015
293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street
New York City, 212.563.4474

The Blancs, a series of paintings that Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) created in the early 1970s, have shards of transparent color that are arrayed over expanses of white space. These delicate large-scale works vary in the intensity of their tonalities, but all have a kind of wind-blown unpredictability, so that we are not exactly sure of how the pieces have come to rest in their final configuration. Further deepening the conundrum is the tracery of faceted lines in the surface of the canvas that defines its topography like silent pentimenti.

Hantaï made the colored forms by folding and creasing the canvas, and then painting the exposed facets. By using this pliage method he created a kind of matrix, with white as a positive presence out of which emerge the painted areas. They read as fragments, activated tesserae in a field of emptiness.

The Blancs in the exhibition feel tenuous and torn, as if we are seeing the residue of a trauma in which much has disappeared. With their forms barely holding together, these works can still have a lilting elegance. Each painting employs its own distinctive palette, with acrylic used like watercolor. Separate shapes are defined by their own colors, but fluid paint is allowed to pool and bleed, and to create trompe l’loi effects that describe the previously folded canvas.

The most vivid and celebratory of the Blancs (all the individual works have this same title) is a canvas in saturated reds, blues, and oranges, supplemented by other colors. More typical is the painting that combines many small shapes in jewel tones and neutrals, and is strongly dominated by large white spaces. Particularly striking is an almost geological work with large irregular shapes that seem to be hanging in rough progressions. All of the paintings reveal Hantaï’s engagement with Cezanne and his areas of untouched canvas, and Matisse’s late works made of cut-out colored paper.

In the exhibition are single examples of works from series that Hantaï made before and after the Blancs. The Étude here is from an earlier series, and is dense with white shapes reminiscent of leaves or birds emerging from a green ground. Aquarelle is a circular work, with small fluttering shapes in blue and white. Tabula, with its raw multicolor grid of squares, is from a group of works that followed the Blancs.

Hantaï’s paintings bring up some intriguing questions about process, intention, and pure chance, which relate both to an earlier generation of artists including Jackson Pollock and John Cage, and to some of the current tendencies in abstract painting. Hantaï made a point of clarifying that when working with pliage he could not completely envision the final outcome. He referred to this as working “blindly”, and “painting with the eyes closed”. This renouncing of artistic means went hand-in-hand with an intensive material involvement that to a certain extent was freed from conscious control. This detachment has echoes of the Buddhist concept of “not knowing”, the mind letting go of its need to impose predetermined meaning on experience.

It is worth contemplating the Blancs in light of Hantaï’s interest in religious texts and symbols earlier in his oeuvre. There is no overt spiritual attitude here, but present is a sense of openness and light, where human activity is one with indeterminate space. Along with this is a feeling of the fragile contingency of any planning or permanence.

At the same time, when we view these canvases we recognize an awareness, a personal touch, an intuitive sense of physicality that make them paintings rather than samples of technique. In the artist’s words, the work becomes, “in spite of its banality, a breath, an opening, a transformation, and an amazement”. These words were quoted by Alfred Pacquement in the catalogue for the Hantai exhibition earlier this year at the Mnuchin Gallery in New York. Pacquement was one of the curators of the artist’s 2013 retrospective at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris.

Hantaï, who was born in Hungary and lived in France, used pliage for three decades beginning in 1960, creating distinctive series of paintings with great variety and depth. For a quarter of a century beginning in 1986 he largely withdrew from the French art world, rejecting the impingement of the market on his work. Beyond finding unique methods of making paintings, he pursued a way for his art to reveal something beyond the limits of the artist’s self. In Hantaï’s work is a philosophy of invention and effort paired with freedom and engaging the unknown. He is a painter to consider both for his achievements and for his embodying an exemplary spirit in his work.

The post Eyes Wide Shut: Simon Hantaï at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 to February 7, 2015
515 W. 27th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 563 4474

When viewing a painting, we usually have some conception (perhaps vague) of how it was made. We know that doing frescos required marking off sections of the wall, starting with sinopia, the underdrawings underneath the painted surface. We realize that an old master easel painting done in oil pigment involves a different manner of making, one more readily accommodating of reworking of the image. And we are aware that Modernists, too, employed diverse techniques — Morris Louis poured his abstract acrylics, as if making a tie-dyed shirt, working in a studio too small to allow unfurling his canvases, while Andy Warhol used silkscreens made from his photographic images to paint portraits in the Factory. In this marvelous show we see that Dokoupil, too, has added to the repertoire of art-making techniques. Starting in the early 1990s, he has made soap bubble paintings by placing metallic pigments and diamond dust on soap-lye, and allowing these forms to settle on his canvas. To properly understand the expressive significance of these works you need to know how they are made.

Everyone knows the children’s game in which you plunge a shaped wire into the liquid solution, and then wave it in the air, making small soap bubbles, which float upward, capturing the colors of the rainbow as they swiftly vanish. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (1733-1735) shows such a game. Viewing his painting, you are reminded that sometimes visual beauty, like life itself, may provide only fleeting pleasures. Dokoupil’s much larger, industrial scale bubbles, they are a-foot-and-a-half across, glow in high-pitched, pale colors set on an absorbent black background. Because normal soap bubbles are transparent, you look through them. In his big paintings, the largest are three meters square, those fleeting soup-bubble effects are fixed permanently, as if depicting glowing enlarged microscopic images — but of what? The pictures look like abstractions, but it could be argued that they are representational pictures with an unfamiliar subject. However we identify their content, they certainly are very beautiful works of art. And being presented in Kasmin’s magnificent 27th Street gallery, one of the most visually welcoming Chelsea spaces, significantly enhanced this exhibition. Looking from the street through the glass entrance wall, even before entering you could see the glowing paintings lit from the row of skylights.

Contemporary art, Dokoupil seems to be saying, can still have the magical power to give pleasure by making transient visual effects permanent.

The post Pop History: Jiri Georg Dokoupil’s Modernist Bubbles appeared first on artcritical.

Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

The post Burning Inside: Passion, Politics, and Disruption at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.

A Mercedes just burst into flames, right in the interior middle. Mercedes are kind of universal, right? In movies and on the news you always see members of a junta or cartel kingpins or threatened pro-Western dignitaries or suspicious CEOs riding around in Mercedes. And then you see the blackened husks of those cars in the aftermath of civil strife. They often provide a kind of proxy for the bodies we don’t see on the news. There are, perhaps, burned Mercedes in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now. The fire just kind of leapt up. The space around the car is totally undefined blackness and the flames spread and there’s no sound except for roaring and crackling auto combustion. There are few cuts in the video and you just see the fire engulfing the car as the camera pans back and forth. Pretty quickly it’s an inferno spewing sooty black into the night sky. The video was made in Vietnam, which, along with its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines especially recently, has experienced more than its share of violence. The tires are burning and the paint is puckering with boils. The camera gets really close, circling the car. Have they drained the oil, the gasoline and other flammables from out the vehicle’s organs? Could it explode? Superflex is from the Netherlands, where you probably see scenes like this far less often. But if they had Mercedes in the 17th century, there would have been Dutchmen torching them. Lawrence Weschler’s essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” does a great job at piercing the myth of still reflection in Dutch masterpieces, reminding you that just outside his beautiful paintings Vermeer’s countrymen were conquering the world (including Vietnam) and setting it up for the kind of crises that lead to flaming luxury sedans today. The tires are gone on one side; the thing takes a contrapposto stance in the darkness, fire still chewing at the headlights and guts. It’s still burning when the credits start rolling. All this happened in about eight minutes — is it in real time? How long does it take to completely destroy a car and leave only a charred skeleton on the roadside, rebels trudging past, for civilians to ponder the horror of?  NOAH DILLON

The post Superflex in “Bloodflames Revisited” at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.

April 24 to June 14, 2014
515 West 27th Street
New York City, 212 563 4474

[The catalogue accompanying this exhibition, edited and introduced by the curators, includes a commissioned essay by Nobel prize-winning neur0scientist Eric R. Kandel and a 1952 story by Roald Dahl written in response to the Soutine exhibition at MoMA in 1950.]

Seventy one years after his death, Chaim Soutine’s work is vehemently alive.  A few years ago the Helly Nahmad Gallery held a memorable exhibition, Soutine/Bacon, which made much of Bacon’s work look wan and perfunctory by comparison.  Now, Paul Kasmin Gallery has assembled sixteen works, also curated by Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, co-authors of the catalogue raisonné. At Kasmin’s West 27th Street space all but two works can be seen—as they were painted—in full daylight. You will be hard pressed to find richer works on view anywhere in the city.

Nevertheless, Soutine remains an outsider to the mainstream narrative of Modernism; he belongs instead to the still largely unwritten alternative history of modernist figurative painting. Well aware of all the developments from Post-Impressionism through Cubism, Soutine absorbed their lessons but rejected the language of abstract signs, and chose to develop his art out of the sensually rich tradition of nineteenth century naturalism: Corot, Courbet and their forerunners Rembrandt, Chardin and Goya. Foremost in this was his commitment to painting from life, which allowed him to connect emotionally to what he saw, to wed his strong temperament to a deep empathy with his subjects.  Working directly from life also allowed him to evade academic solutions to depicting the world, instead paying attention to the complex nature of our seeing; how we map the world as we turn our head and our eyes. This essentially personal vision is quite different from the social metaphor implicit in Albertian perspective.

There is nothing routine or indifferent in a work by Soutine. He was an ecstatic and painting was his vehicle into rapture. Few so-called expressionists have had Soutine’s capacity to render painterly effects, no matter how crude, into emotions so fully felt, so convincing. And this experience is heightened by its crabbed and bittersweet aspect: at once joyous and anguished.  Indeed, the kinesthetic rhythms that animate his landscapes and portraits, which also knead the hanging and splayed bodies of dead animals, suggest the bodily experience of dance and song, especially the plaintive cry of the human voice. This is the pictorial equivalent of García Lorca’s idea of Duende, a demonic possession that comes from a trembling in the moment, in being truly present in the work itself. Yet, this expressive ambition could strain the capacity of a painting to achieve coherence, and it is this negative capability that established Soutine’s avant-garde reputation as a man possessed by feelings beyond his control. This is the cliché about Soutine that suppresses any fair acknowledgement of his intelligence and his rare ability to synthesize opposing influences without succumbing to mere imitation.

Too often we have been told that Soutine was a man who painted without concern or interest in composition.  After spending some time in this show, I came away with an opposing view. Moving from picture to picture, I was continually struck by the variety of successful pictorial inventions. In the early and uncharacteristic work, Landscape with Donkey, (1918) the motif is at some distance from us as it unfurls into an arabesque governed by the suppression of tone for color, a dusky orange/green dyad, evoking early Bonnard.  In his most extreme landscapes, from his Céret period, it is El Greco who presides over the swaying alley of trees, the warped buildings and hills pressing up toward the surface in sensuous orgies of luminous writhing paint.  In the brilliant wide panoramic view, The Rainbow, Céret, (1920) Cézanne’s rhomboid structure is used to simultaneously shape and destabilize the landscape. In another work from 1919, The Red Castle at Céret, space seems to curve in all directions, as the windblown trees are swept back and forth, yet pictorially pressed up against the surface, so that space seems to open up only at the edges. Isn’t this precisely what happens thirty years later in de Kooning’s great Excavation? Aren’t these the same exemplars that brought Braque and Picasso to similar structural qualities in Analytical Cubism a decade earlier than Soutine?

The show’s focus is on still life, especially the nature mort of rabbits and fowl. I wish this had been more truly the show’s focus, for it is here that we enter into the greatest intimacy with Soutine’s contemplation of being and non-being, of gazing in fear and wonder in the presence of death. This is what I would call his spiritual quest. Each of these works has something marvelous: the iridescent flesh of a rabbit being attacked by animate forks, the contorted twitching of a skinned rabbit made evident by the visual ripples of a table’s irregular shape, a brace of pheasants set like jewels upon a radiant yellow cloth, a glowing icon –perhaps an inspiration for de Kooning’s Montauk Highway. And in another mesmerizing work, we are made tolook down on two pheasants displayed against a white cloth, projected up to the picture’s plane by the delicate diagonal shaft of a small side table, the blue, orange and yellow hued bodies seem to swim in the cloth, propelled by their rhythmic contortions, like the souls in Pontormo’s drawings of nudes for his lost Deluge.

Most memorable for me is the Plucked Goose of 1933, which achieves a sublime, tactile presence, realized with a searching calligraphy.  As I looked closely, opening myself to the painting, I was drawn inexorably into Soutine’s experience, into paint made most naked flesh.  Framed by a blue-black table, the body’s flesh glows from within, subtle desaturated pinks and blue purples. The fragile but lustrous body is materialized by the action of the paint smearing into modeled form. Stabbings and streaks of purple whites and pinks describe the remains of the head, neck and wings. Here and there tufts of unplucked remnants heighten the immanent mystery of the body.  It is less violent and less spectacular than his various depictions of a carcass of beef, but more profound. It is a stunning experience that stands with Gericault’s Anatomical Fragments and Goya’s The Butcher’s Counter.

It may also be significant that this is the only depiction of a dead fowl done in the thirties, and the only one shown decapitated.  It certainly can stand as a symbol for that tragic year, the year Hitler came to power. Even if this work was produced without the slightest conscious thought to its potential meta-meaning, Soutine could not have been oblivious to the current political climate, as an Ashkenazi Jew from the Pale of Settlement, used to the contempt of Russians, and devoted as a painter to expressing his existential anxiety as a Jewish émigré.

When the Nazis overtook France, Soutine fled to the south, to shelter in Champigny-sur- Veuldre, where he painted one of his last works, Maternity, in 1942, shortly before his death. A distressed, petit young woman holds a dead or unconscious child in a pose that is essentially a pieta—yet another symbolic painting of martyrdom, like Marc Chagall’s painted protest after Kristallnacht. While the emotion in Maternity is quite palpable, it remains psychological and isn’t adequately sustained by the picture itself. By this time, Soutine was painting very little and his anxiety had accelerated the severe attacks from the stomach ulcers from which he had long suffered. In August of the following year, he collapsed and died after an emergency operation in Paris. Picasso was one of the few that followed the coffin to the cemetery at Montparnasse.

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David Carrier, Eva Diaz, and Marjorie Welish joined David Cohen to discuss Alison Knowles at James Fuentes LLC, Jaq Chartier at Morgan Lehman, Iván Navarro at Paul Kasmin, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

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CHAMPAGNE ON ICE

A remarkable swell took place after the doors opened, and not just fare-goers making for the various courtesy bars. The powerful and glamorous A-list crowd amassed quickly, imbibed, and prepared to consume art. The mood was generally upbeat and optimistic, if not exactly replicating the feeding frenzy of the “bubble” years.

INEFFABLE OBJECTS OF DISPLACED DESIRE

THE SWEET SMELL OF TRANSGRESSION

Power Londoner Jay Jopling’s White Cube was right at the entrance, with a “real” Damien Hirst skull painting, a wall-scaled Gilbert and George and a seductively ominous work by New Yorker Phillips.

DEEP CONVERSATION

Perhaps they are discussing how you can display a giant yellow swastika and not have that be offensive. McEwen’s solo, “I Am Curious Yellow,” complete with matching carpet, aimed only to please.

SHIVER ME TIMBERS

Paris’s Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin continues to showcase flashy theatrical work from a cutting-edge international stable, very art-fair friendly. New Yorker Coffin’s absurdist hero was one of the few literally over-the-top pieces to be seen this year.

HAVE NUDE, WILL TRAVEL

Veteran master of pop figuration Wesley made a statement with this utilitarian suitcase at the booth of Chelsea gallerists Fredericks Freiser.

GERING IN FLIGHT

57th Street dealer Sandra Gering, now partnered with Madrid’s Javier Lopez, showcases a range of punchy, graphics-oriented work, including this wall-scaled gouache and graphite piece by James.

PYROTECHNICS AND PASSIONS

Nares strong solo at the large, centrally-positioned booth of Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin, featured huge iridescent iconic brushstrokes isolated against dark saturated colored grounds. One of Nares’s movies, with its percussive formal manipulations, was also on hand, adding ambience.

STRIPES AND STRIATIONS

In from St. Louis for a brief 36-hour stay, abstractionist Lundsager was working with Greenberg Van Doren Gallery to plan her solo exhibition, slated for the weekend. A representative work hangs behind her in the storage closet. “I love being here,” she said of New York and its buzzy environs, formerly her home.

A DISCERNING EYE

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR

“They’re acrylic with silver plating,” he explained. “They’re very temporal.” Best of all, “they kind of record you,” he elaborated. This might explain their popularity. Both works were sold—and Kassay is among the fair’s “hot” young artists.

ALL DRESSED UP AND…

It turned out the lattes were free, if you know Armory Fair-founder Paul Morris, or had another “in.” It seemed like more people were “VIP” than not, judging by the shortage of seating. We’ll see how many make it to the MoMA party, still standing.

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“Just as his early paintings questioned the conventional relationship between a picture and its supporting field, these new polychrome relief sculptures from his Scarlatti Sonata series challenge viewers to adopt new ways of interpreting three-dimensional forms. Composed of coils, lattices and geometric volumes shot through with steel tubing, these works pull the eye along twists and turns that are both muscular and lyrical.”

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