February 20 – March 28, 2020
224 W 30th Street #1005 (between Seventh and Eighth Aves)
New York, monyarowegallery.com

In the small rectangular space of Monya Rowe Gallery, up on the 10th floor of a midtown building, Vera Iliatova’s solo show – titled “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” – takes her viewer on a surreal, nostalgic walk reminiscent of 1980s school day walks in St Petersburg, Russia. Slightly more than half a dozen moderately sized and small oil-and-acrylic paintings completed within the past year hang quitely on white walls. Iliatova reflects on her own past with deep longing for times both missed and long since passed, bringing strange, forlorn, cross-continental energy into the depicted spaces. 

One striking factor in all of these paintings is her master skill of composition. Specifically, the complexity of composition in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (2020) echoes Nicolas Poussin’s Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man (1655). The poses in both paintings are derived from Roman antiquity, as if statues came to life and were captured in a still. The stillness in Iliatova and Poussin’s work is eerily similar but the subjects could not be more different. Iliatova handles multi- figure compositions with Poussin’s grace and, in this particular work, also ties in the architecture of stairs with organic rhythm. While the staged nature of her painting – in a contemporary context – may at first glance appear uncomfortable, the classical construction feels unmistakably familiar. In this case, teenage girls with wandering glances appear hanging out together, but remain emotionally removed from each other in an industrial building amid an anachronistic landscape outside the window. Iliatova’s painting thrives on that familiarity: young women, most likely school-age (right about when Iliatova herself moved to the United States from USSR), are positioned in poses suggesting conversation and interaction. Upon closer observation, however, every single figure appears implicitly lonely, gazing down or past the others. Where Poussin’s depictions of such gazes and poses play up the drama, in Iliatova’s work they mirror a state of being, one representing both nostalgia for a time since passed and a lost opportunity for connection. Upon first glance, one of her other paintings in the show, The Ties That Bind (2019), has a similar sentiment to Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1638). Rhythm and composition are striking in the same way, but the meaning and the somewhat bizarre arrangement of young women in a park in Iliatova’s work sets them apart from the 17th century painter by bringing them into the contemporary. 

Similarly, Iliatova’s color palette reflects on the particularity of time and place. Granite grays cast a shadow over this body of work. The warm pink gray colors are reminiscent of riverbank pedestrian paths along the Neva and Fontanka Rivers in St. Petersburg where so many school girls have spent evenings hanging out after classes. Iliatova uses a distinct palette – well known to any St. Petersburg native – evoking the region’s long, dark winters, its rainy summers. The stone city that was built on swamps by Peter the Great is close to its inhabitants’ hearts, even the ones who left at a budding age. 

Iliatova uses paint to visualize the intangible subject of nostalgia. Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the setting, there is a clear, recognizable sense of longing for the past. She doesn’t just yearn for one time or place, though, but a full bouquet of places, styles, relationships and interactions. Even though the light and feel is straight out of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s landscapes, the buildings in some of Iliatova’s works, such as The Big Reveal (2020), are somewhat industrial, bringing it into a modern context. The landscape is perhaps a wink at 18th and 19th-century painters, but the most fascinating mishmash occurs in the fashion of the figures. The combination of sweaters, dresses and patterns ranges from the 1960s to the 1990s and even today, where vintage clothing finds a new life through thrift shops. For example, a reclining figure in the foreground in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible wears a turquoise dress; this dress is reminiscent of a 1980s-era Bloomingdale’s catalog, but the adjacent figure could easily be taken as a contemporary passerby on the street in Gowanus. The mystery comes from the artist herself, who finds her models’ outfits in crevices of Brooklyn’s thrifting shops. The choice is conscious and deliberate as Iliatova paints and repaints every figure to be both relatable yet a standalone monument to time. How does one capture time in a still image? Iliatova seizes these moments by painting her subjects in passive actions such as reading, stretching or gazing outward.  

The painterly application of brushstrokes suggests both timing and an allusion to classical painting. Iliatova is a superbly skilled painter, who depicts her world with poetic intelligence. She employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention. Every element of application is thorough with realistic and painstakingly depicted figures to almost Gerhard Richter-esque, blurred backgrounds. She marries elements of the history of painting within bare square inches of her paintings, but does so seamlessly and effortlessly.  This expert mix of contemporary and classical style, combined with surreal anachronism transport viewers to another time and place while maintaining an air of familiarity. 

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In Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, we are absorbed for three hours and a minute by two cherished institutions: Wiseman himself and the eponymous museum. Tension in the interplay between the two makes for compelling and demanding cinema, raising significant questions about the experience of art and its interpretation.

Considering how many countries around the world have one it attests to the singular nature of London’s old master collection that no topographical qualifier is required for “the” National Gallery. Made up almost entirely of free-standing paintings from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century — there is no sculpture or applied arts, nor even prints and drawings from the same hands as the paintings — the National Gallery is legendary for its compactness and consistent quality. While boasting a fraction of the holdings of, say, the Louvre or the Hermitage, and not necessarily claiming to have more masterpieces in aggregate, it is the extraordinarily high proportion of works of great quality that is striking. Excepting obvious turn around for conservation or loan, everything is always hung, and viewable seven days a week for free.

Frederick Wiseman’s omission of the definite article accommodates National Gallery within his oeuvre. This, his 39th documentary (there have also been one or two feature films), turns attention for the first time to a museum by a director whose foci of institutional critique have included anything from the military to a monastery, a police department to a mental institution. Often, minimalism lent titles social science aloofness: Hospital, High School, Juvenile Court, Public Housing. Thus National Gallery adroitly exploits a gray area between generic type and genius locus. Wiseman was a law professor of leftist leanings who turned to documentary filmmaking to understand the workings of institutional ideology. His films immerse viewers in the bathos of quotidian oppressions, those telling moments where individuals get pushed around by the system. Now 84, his recent projects have steered a path through more rarified groves than the cradle-to-grave institutions that occupied his earlier work. Indeed, National Gallery belongs to a sequence that includes At Berkeley and portraits of the Comédie Française and the ballet of the Paris Opera. But the forensic fly-on-the-wall structuralism that he established as his austere and rule-bound modus operandi from the get go still adheres. First, he secures access to an institution on his own terms. In the resulting film he doesn’t interview people, set questions, call upon talking heads, insert commentary, or even caption objects or speakers. His pace is not so much leisurely as exhaustive: interlocutors are allowed to play themselves out, on the give-them-enough-rope principle that interactions or speeches presented in the round more fully expose their underlying ideology. Over a 12-week period in the winter of 2012 he shot 170 hours of footage for National Gallery before piecing together like a collage the eventual production. The film actually flows quite effortlessly, despite the intellectual work and slowed down attention demanded of the viewer. If you stick out the first hour the second and third will speed by.

At its outset, after tastefully restrained silent long shots of individual, framed works on variously damask or painted gallery walls, you will get the sense that you are in for a long haul of dispiriting institutional critique. A laconic, patrician gentleman some of us know as the director, Nicolas Penny, confers with an almost stereotypical PR woman. The institution has never completely done the job of defining itself, she is saying. “We are a number of things: conservation, research, preservation, heritage, education… We are also a ‘visitor attraction.’ I know the word is horrid but we are also that.” Penny winces and in a rare moment of tolerated grandstanding says that he really doesn’t mind if a blockbuster like “Leonardo” is followed by an “interesting failure.”

There will be plenty more management meetings in the hours ahead, as a committee absorbs news of a massive government cut or debates exploiting or standing back from a sporting event that is advertised at ending at the National Gallery. A lot of time is given up to the conservation labs. In a stirring moment of humility a lecturer explains that the hours of fastidious restoration — some sense of the labor of which is captured, stroke by stroke, by Wiseman — can be cleaned away by a future generation of conservators in minutes. The intervention, in other words, isn’t permanent. A less passive journalist than Wiseman — the old fashioned kind who finds experts with differing views and interviews them — might have discovered that this piety only refers to what’s painted in. The National Gallery is notorious for over-cleaning. Stripping glazes, and with them potentially intentional half tones, is not reversable.

But the film is predominantly and increasingly shot upstairs rather than downstairs, in public hours rather than downtime.  And most of the talk in this highly voluble documentary is about individual works of art. We hear the gallery’s almost theatrically effusive docents at work; we eavesdrop visiting curators examining a Watteau; we watch a TV presenter (Matthew Collings) rehearse his spiel on a Turner; we are given that rousing and emotional lecture with a conservation class; we catch a snippet of an academic conference. Craftily breaking his own rules by sticking to them Day For Night-style, we watch TV crews asking the questions Wiseman might have wanted to ask himself. Invariably the talk is about intentions: what is the right context in which to imagine this religious painting now quietly contemplated in a gallery? What did this artist mean? Thoughts about form are less likely articulated these days than ones about context and content. We glimpse sketchers from time to time, and private visitors stealing a half hour (advantage of free museum) to commune with a treasured work, but whatever they are thinking evades the attention of the fly on the wall.

Wiseman, the sometime lawyer is, tellingly, soundman on his set rather than behind a lens. This is not to say that the picture isn’t sumptuous and visceral, with frames being carved or flowers arranged or a nude drawn in a life class, besides the pictures within the picture and the occasional detail. But this is primarily a movie for the ear. The sound bites are, in radio terms, bleeding chunks.

And yet, this viewer found, just when he was desperate for a joke or some nice music, that Wiseman popped in both: a piano recital, and then an old codger chatting up a bemused young woman in front of Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf. “The good news is that I got Him down to ten,” he says, referring to Moses and the tablets of the law. “The bad news is that Adultery is still in.”

National Gallery: (Dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2014) 181 minutes. Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, with screenings daily at 12:30, 4:15 and 7:50PM, through November 18.

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Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

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April 26 – June 30, 2012
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-630-0722

Just what is it about America’s love-hate relationship with French culture? There was a time when it tipped to love: Americans were among the most significant collectors of 19th- and early 20th-century French art. By the postwar era, however, Clement Greenberg was arguing for the “force” of American painters over the “charm” of the French. Donald Judd was even less enamored. In a 1964 interview, he dismissed the “structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition,” adding for good measure, “It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.”

The change of heart, of course, paralleled the waning of the French School and the ascendancy of New York. But it also had something to do with the nature of French art itself: its very stylishness, and its predilection for the fastidious and idiosyncratic. When we were seduced by it, we fell hard; when we weren’t, we wouldn’t go near it.

Art, though, is not fashion, and style not the final measure of an artist. There’s no better reminder of this than Schroeder Romero and Shredder’s remarkable retrospective of nearly thirty drawings and paintings by Jean Hélion (1904-1987), an artist whose work powerfully combined the raw and the elegant, the primal and the complex. Curated by Deborah Rosenthal, the exhibition spans over fifty years of the artist’s work, illuminating the consistency of his aesthetic even as it evolved from pure abstraction to the highly figurative. Coinciding with the exhibition is the reprinting of “They Shall Not Have Me” (Arcade Publishing, $24.95), Hélion’s gripping account of his two-year incarceration and escape from a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Given his propensity for crafted forms, massaged contours and provocative color, you’ll seldom find a more distinctly French painter than Hélion. But what really matters is that he was a great artist—a forceful draftsman, a superb colorist, as well as a first-rate modernist: a cerebral painter who didn’t conceal strategies inspired by a profound understanding of the masters.

Mondrian was an early influence, and Hélion found original ways of re-creating the Dutch master’s climactic sequences and intervals. In one of the earliest pieces in the show—a small, briskly executed gouache from 1934—rough pairings of shapes sea-saw and clamber up the paper, each uniquely characterized: a heavily incised rectangle balancing a lighter, rounding form; smaller shapes above, echoing and extrapolating on these tensions. Imagine a painting by Mondrian, loosened in motif and technique, but relinquishing not a spark of its rhythmic intensity.

Hélion wrote eloquently about art, and he described his process in a 1937 essay titled “Avowals and Comments”:

By all kinds of successive manipulations, some instinctive and dark, some intellectual and conscious, I reach a structure which, at certain times, becomes strong, dominant, individual.

The nearly four-by-five-foot canvas Équilibre (1936) reveals a far higher degree of finish than this gouache, but its forms are every bit as energetic. The design circulates between four cores of overlapping, shield-like forms, each articulated to a different degree, with angled planes stretching in-between. Some shapes orbit others, or speed towards a stable point, or pace out an extended passage. The pressure of colors—dense, vacant, burning, limpid—charges the measure of each interval with emotion. Or do colors measure the emotions of forms? Like all Hélion’s work, Équilibre seems simultaneously propelled by the rational and the sensual.

Describing one of the Louvre’s great Poussins in his 1938 essay “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm,” Hélion illuminates the animating effect of color:

Thus a current is running though the picture, carrying the spectator to all points, everywhere gaining an acceleration, a new speed, a new quality. By a series of rebounds, the color transforms itself. One red jumps over to a blue to an orange. One brown jumps to red over a black…

In Équilibre no element is more crucial than one of the smallest: a slender, horizontal wedge of blue near the canvas’ lower edge that anchors the circulating masses, and holds them just below our point of view. It serves as a kind of floor line, establishing the support of earth, the departure of verticals, the density of space around them: in other words, the most primal sensations accompanying our own occupations of space.

Stylistically, Hélion’s paintings from the late ‘30s bear some resemblance to Léger’s, but Hélion is drawn more to strange, glancing particulars. Though highly abstracted, his images conjure surprisingly earthy effects. Bobbing at one end of the long horizontal canvas Abstraction (1939), for instance, two faceted forms have all the presence of heads, though lacking any kind of facial features. At the canvas’ opposite extremity, a condensation of arcing and minutely overlapping forms becomes a cloven mound, viewed from slightly above. The intensity of its presence, and of our relationship to it, is uncanny. “In a picture an element is real when it behaves like nature, when it coincides with its currents,” Hélion wrote in his essay on Poussin.

It’s really not that much of a leap, then, to the figurative images he pursued from the late 1930’s on. The small gouache Pegeen (1944) tangibly captures the presence of the artist’s wife—despite her absurdly long neck and highly abstracted hair—in front of the fellow-forms of a sport coat in a store window and a wall’s patch of flaking paint. Again, colors weight all: sidewalk below, storefront held above, figure before, our viewpoint held by punctuating details. We’ve seen this conviction of form before in Courbet and Matisse, but Hélion edits his perceptions in an original way, extracting his subject out of raw events with almost unsettling poise.

Considering its intimate scale, “Jean Hélion: Five Decades” touches on a surprisingly wide range of the artist’s explorations. A crisply angular portrait of a be-hatted man in a 1939 painting seems just a stone’s throw from the earliest abstractions. A 1949 canvas of a seated nude reveals the outlined arabesques and odd, rippling details of work from the late 40s. A number of more realistic drawings and paintings, dating to the 50s and 60s, combine multiple studies of a particular motif on a single sheet or canvas. In each of the ten scenes comprising Page de Musique, (1962) the artist employs a “simple” palette—buoyant off-whites, retiring blue-grays, deeply absorbent earth-reds, insistent green-ochres—to vividly locate the curves of a tuba between an angling skylight and the floor’s diagonal shadows. By some magic, Hélion makes the resilient contours sensuous, and the sunlight concrete.

Though more painterly in technique, canvases from his last active years reflect the same eye for the essential and oddly telling moment. The shadows cast by an umbrella in Mannequinerie en solde (1978) crucially advance one’s eye through a web of color-located spaces, each hue preparing the leap to the next: soldier to manikin, to bucket, to object-laden table. For me, Hélion’s late paintings sometimes have the aspect of flamboyant exercises—cerebral rhymings between objects and their stand-ins, arrangements for the sake of arranging—rather than the spontaneous, portrait-like summations of even his most abstract works. Elements, at times, locomote without gaining momentum. But more often the late work simmers with Hélion’s usual energy, as does the small pastel-and-gouache Suite Pucière (1978), which potently measures out a procession of piled hats and pitchers along a bench top.

Expectations of art have changed a great deal since the Havemeyers bought Monets and Albert Barnes acquired Matisses. We’ve grown more sophisticated about art, and have added auras of appreciation to the art we encounter. Abstract Expressionism showed us how a painting could measure the psychic tremors of an artist’s searchings. Pop Art demonstrated that an artwork might magnify cultural purposes by recontextualizing them. Minimalism showed us how a sculpture could recall the transcendence of life by incarnating the transcendence of art.

None of these auras illuminate the work of Hélion. Rather than presuming a role for art—as transcendent object, or omniscient sign—Hélion simply absorbed, with a remarkably astute eye, great instances of traditional painting, and pursued its possibilities in his own way. While many a postmodernist artist might toss all of tradition down the drain, Hélion found it vibrant and rich enough to re-invent from within.

And yet, a wide, anarchic streak informs Hélion’s process, relying as it did on independent and spontaneous experience. In the same “Poussin” essay, he wrote: “Art is not the praising of eternal values; it is the permanent transformation of those values.”

And though the New York School, a decade later, practically fetishized the idea of being “in” the painting, Hélion affirms that for the best artists of any era, whatever their style, the connection to the work is always consuming, evolving, and regenerating. From “Poussin,” again: “The created form becomes creative. What is built, rebuilds the conception. A continuity between man and his work is started.”

Love or hate his style, you should include Hélion in your personal canon of notable artists. He’s our best recent link to Mondrian, Poussin, Giotto, and beyond.

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December 1, 2006 – March 4, 2007

[at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC to June 24, 2007]

Merlin James: Painting to Painting
New York Studio School
8 West 8 Street
New York City
212 673 6466

February 8 – March 24, 2007

Saul Steinberg (1914-99) loved to draw. He depicts architecture; cowboys; fashion; furniture; Manhattan social and street life; opera sets for Rossini and Stravinsky; portraits of artists, such asDelacroix (after Nadar) (1994) and Giacometti’s Face (1983); and still lives like Breakfast Still Life(1974). He combines drawing and photographs as in Woman in Tub (1950) into which he sketches a nude, and Excavation (1951-52) with little houses added. He does calligraphy and over-the-top seventeenth-century allegories, and draws small American towns and big cities in this country and Europe. And he also uses other media on paper: cut brown paper bags for his Six Masks (1959-65); leaking ballpoint pens for Road, Samarkand, USSR (1956); rubber stamps for the all-over composition, Indians, Cyclists, Artists (1968); rubber stamps and postcards for Nine Postcards(1969); and thumbprints in Passport (1951). Everyone knows his often reproduced View of the World from 9th Avenue (1976), showing the world as seen looking westward from Manhattan. But equally deserving of attention is The West Side (1973), which reverses the viewing direction; or another map, The Flat Earth (1991) which, as the title says, evens out the planet.

Steinberg is consistently and amazingly inventive. Consider Untitled (Paris/Sardinia) (1963), in which two talking women reveal how different their vacations in central Paris and the island of Sardinia were. Or look at The Line (1954), a 29-section, folded 33-foot-long Chinese scroll-like drawing too long to be fully displayed, a virtuoso illustration of the many uses of one horizontal line. Across the hall at the Morgan’s display of drawings, “Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings,” Sinibaldo Scorza’s early baroque Orpheus and the Animals (1620-21) also reveals a rich imagination. But while Steinberg displays the skill of an old master draftsman, almost all of his subjects are modern. Like newspaper illustrator Constantin Guys, the subject of Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Steinberg is “always, spiritually, in the condition of (…) convalescence.” Such a return to childhood, so Baudelaire adds, which is so typical of modernism, comes only when an artist “is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things,” even if they seem merely trivial. Displayed in one not-noteworthy gallery, subdivided with partitions, the 117 works of art in this exhibition tell the history of the twentieth century. In his adopted country, Steinberg was marginalized as a mere illustrator, Ernst Gombrich’s favorite modernist. What a strange fate for the creator of the anamorphic Five false paintings (ca. 1971) of standing figures, Marcel Duchamp, and a painting by Mondrian; the dazzling November 26, 1965 (1965) that uses ink and watercolors to tell what happened to the artist on that day; and considerable art devoted to explicitly political subjects, such as Ex Voto: Execution of King (1951) and Street War (Cadavre Exquis) (1972/74).

Merlin James (b.1960), an art writer who paints, does small pictures, rarely more than two feet tall or wide, after details from the old masters or old photographs. Sower (2001) is from Jean-François Millet; Castaways (1984) from boating scenes by Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet; and Ruin (Ruisdael) (1995) from Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape with the Ruins of Egmond Castle (ca. 1650-55), which, itself a ruin, has a hole cut through the canvas. Sometimes his details are almost unidentifiable. Without the comparison images, I would certainly not have connected Cat and Fête (2000) to Titian’s Concert Champêtre (ca. 1510) or linked Jude Farm (2004) with Sir William Nicholson’s Judd’s Farm (1912). Often James’s sources are visually obvious, as when Bathroom Mirror (2006) re-does Pierre Bonnard’s Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror (1943-460, or Parapet and Sky (2005) reworks a picture of a Naples rooftop by Thomas Jones. But some are frankly esoteric, like paintings by Jean Hélion or photographs from the Alinari Brothers. And his most complicated picture, Étretat (2004-05), is based on paintings showing that beach by Courbet, Monet, and Matisse. Judging just from this description, James’s procedure might seem a form of art historical appropriation. But not at all — in fact he uses the resources of European art history to make paintings in his own style, with a muted palette. Harvest (1995-97) redoes a detail from the background of Nicolas Poussin’s Summer, or, Ruth and Boaz(1660-64), brightening the tonality; and After Poussin (1995) reworks Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens (1648) into a very dark image indeed.

Because Poussin is mostly written about in terminally academic ways, it is enlightening to see a painter’s response to the visual qualities of his art. Just as Cézanne was said to re-do Poussin after nature, so James in effect re-does painting after the old masters, as if for him the painters’ subjects traditionally found in the real world could effectively be replaced by materials all assembled from within art museums. The history of painting is rich enough, he shows, to give a sufficiently gifted painter all the subjects he can reasonably require.

I am in awe of Merlin James and Saul Steinberg, for in their very different styles they show everything that we can reasonably expect visual art to present; James in his painterly manner with the aid of the old masters, and Steinberg, a great linear artist, directly drawing from life. And they share a certain dry sense of humor not found in much contemporary art. In-between going back to these exhibitions, I made my Chelsea rounds, seeing the usual image appropriations, installations, large-scale photographs, and videos used to stage debates about politics. But after seeing Merlin’s and Steinberg’s shows, the concerns of the rest of the American art world look pretty parochial–and their historical allusions, much of them too obviously ambitious, a little strained.

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