A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 29, 2004

Philip Pearlstein tests limits – his own, his models’, his admirers’. He is not always an artist who is easy to like, but for anyone serious about painting he is impossible to ignore.

The exhibition of 18 of his new canvases at Robert Miller offers a timely contrast in terms of strangeness and skill to the young celebrity mannerist, John Currin, whose Whitney retrospective has inspired such frenzy.

Mr. Currin, a phenomenal crowd-pleaser, is a true successor of Salvador Dali, combining as he does showy displays of “mastery” and a determination to shock, whether through wilful inanity or sheer nastiness, or both,. Mr. Pearlstein cuts deeperinto the ranks of the old masters than Dali, however, forging a direct line to Ingres.

Because perversity is Mr. Currin’s sine qua non, we quickly tire of it. In Mr. Pearlstein it is pervasive, the byproduct of a truly warped yet intense pictorial intelligence. Where the younger artist delights in slippery, fast, virtuoso painthandling, the older bewilders despite a frankly boring delivery.

True, Mr. Pearlstein impresses skill-lovers with his nutty determination to paint each hair on a man’s chest, each stitch in a quilt, and with such pictorial feats as depicting things as seen through a transparent plastic blimp or reflected at odd angles in mirrors. But he is the kind of painter who is more likely to submit to awkwardness than to triumph with slick solutions. He is as obsessed with looking as Mr. Currin is with looks.

The real perversity of Mr. Pearlstein’s works is that, though he is fundamentally unpainterly, his (literally) incredible images couldn’t exist in any other medium. The camera, for instance, would obscure the discrepancies between two-dimensional rendering and three-dimensional observation. Precisely such weirdness is his true subject. That is why he has to paint.

The connection to Ingres has nothing to do with the French master’s ethereal beauty of surface, for which Mr. Pearlstein’s all-American deadpan is a poor substitute. Rather, it is in the license Ingres’ example gives him to distort in the name of a higher truth – a truth beyond first appearances. Actually, Mr. Pearlstein seems so excited by the problems of seeing and constructing that the actual making is merely a chore: Like that of another latter-day Ingres, Lucian Freud, Mr. Pearlstein’s unlovingly slow execution almost punishes the viewer for intruding upon his scopophilia, his own private obsessive absorption in the act of seeing.

Mr. Pearlstein’s idiom hasn’t essentially altered since the 1960s, when – deliberately provoking avant-garde taboo – he started to paint nudes, from life, in elaborate studio set-ups. He brought a ruthless modernity to a time-honored (and dishonored) academic practice. Unexpressive touch, stylized cropping and foreshortening, and awkward, affectless poses became his instantly recognizable trademarks.

Yet within the tight constraints of this style there has been development. Despite the labor-intensity of his mode, he is prolific; despite the initially alienating uniformity of his production, he is fascinatingly diverse. Once seduced, the eye is delighted and surprised. His paintings have grown wackier from show to show – and better, too.

The current one, for those with eyes to see it, is an apotheosis. His compositions have become notoriously crowded, both with objects and effects, and his art seems to have as much to do with the arrangement of his set-up as with its rendering in paint. It is almost as if he were an installation artist whose “work” could be seen only in paintings, rather than as objects in a gallery. The youngsters Mike Kelley and Vanessa Beecroft would have to collaborate to produce anything as startling in flesh and toys.

Mr. Pearlstein’s models compete for space with a plethora of still-life objects – which is, essentially, what they are, too. He is a compulsive collector of Americana and other artefacts. “Mickey Mouse Puppet Theater, Jumbo Jet and Kiddie Tractor With Two Models” (2002), places two of his familiar models amid the eponymous memorabilia. The game played is the cops-and-robbers that adults never tire of in art: the battle of reality and artifice.

In this case, the artist reverses the dichotomy of the organic and the mechanical. The depiction of bodies is more stylized, that of things more animated. Mickey’s features, for instance, are fixed in astonishment, while those of the models are resigned. The hairline of the male sitter rhymes with the black-and-white division of Mickey’s face, as the model’s beard does the mouse’s eyebrows. Mr. Pearlstein has poked fun at his own nerdishness by placing the name “goofy” on the Disney puppet theatre so as to preside over his composition.

This is typical of a testing and teasing of meanings in Mr. Pearlstein. An African-American woman, who in his last show was posed with a bird-house model of the White House, is seen in two canvases here with a swan decoy. Such playfully un-PC gestures are worthy of Mr. Currin, or for that matter David Salle or Eric Fischl. Or indeed, of Picabia, the dada provocateur about whom Mr. Pearlstein wrote his MA thesis at the outset of his career.

In the pictorial universe of Mr. Pearlstein’s studio, fluorescent lamps mercilessly democratize surfaces, abetting the anti-painterly rendering of flesh, tin, wood, and fabric as equal reflectors of light and color. The shadows in two relatively sparsely populated canvases from 2003, “Model with Butcher’s Sign” and “Model with Old Iron Butcher Sign #2” is, by Mr. Pearlstein’s standards, voluptuous.

Besides the shadowplay, there is also play between the flatness of rusty cutout metal and the sinewy bulbuousness of smooth flesh in dangerous proximity to it. In each picture, the woman’s legs open to form a “V,” which rhymes invitingly with the arrangement of knife, hook, and saw in the sign. (The artist, who delights in visual and verbal punning alike, might like to know that in East London Cockney rhyming slang the phrase “Butcher’s hook” stands in for “look”).

In these compositions, however, the shadows, a fleeting presence, are the most intense, involved, observed “objects.” They seem to say that seeing is more sexy than skin, that the real erotics of painting has to do with the phenomenology of perception, not the existential facts of naked bodies in time and space. Yet, to prove the point, the presence of the latter is required.

The post Philip Pearlstein: Recent Paintings at Robert Miller Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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

The post Richard Pousette-Dart at Knoedler & Co, Isamu Noguchi at PaceWildenstein, Lee Krasner at Robert Miller appeared first on artcritical.

The work of Roberto Jaurez contains nothing that is extraneous to the art of painting. It bristles with a combination of glowing depths and fresh, imaginative line. A super abundance of beaded spirals, wavy triangles and rectangles (sometimes flat sometimes three dimensional), beehive-like clusters of hexagons, gelatinous pods, and wild circles can barely contain itself. Transparent and opaque structures wrestle within the void.

Not unlike de Kooning, Juarez jabs at surfaces and muscles the brush around. Both artists have created brilliant but very different palimpsests. We also find traces of the pinks and greens de Kooning used in his work from the 1960s.

Jaurez’s mixed media works on canvas are explorations of the processes of drawing and looking. They are spontaneous and full of discovery, the way blind contour drawings are. He successfully creates a complex relationship between foreground and background, and is not interested in rendering specific objects. Mondrian created an orderly urban tomorrow. Juarez has given us his interpretation of the chaos of contemporary life in the city. There are the faintest traces of recognizable objects, but patterning and limber brushwork prevail. Geometric forms, triangles, circles and rectangles, dominate many of the compositions, but they are not hard edged. In fact many of the paintings are beautiful, aqueous messes or rhythmical linear entanglements. Bryant Park Tiles, 2001, is a busy surface built of drab olive greens, pungent crimsons and impure whites, highlighted by pale yellow ochre and light tan. This chaotic mass of rectangular forms and violent scribbles consists of a red orange background, a grid-like tile pattern, with white-ish green slash marks floating on top of it.

Viewing the mixed media freestanding works done on hinged panels (the screens) is an awkward affair. It is difficult to determine how to read the separate sides. Should one side be looked at before the other? Is there a meaningful relationship between the two? I found myself trying to remember what the side I could no longer see looked like. Traces of architecture, giant archways and cross beams at odd angles, appear in Humo One and Humo Two. Blue Structure, 2001, contains an exquisite symphony of squares to make Hans Hofmann jealous from beyond the grave. Both sides of Coin Circle, 2001, my favorite panel piece, are tributes to geometric forms; hexagons and triangles. The patterning is intuitive and the possible interpretations of the work are limitless. In the paintings Kether Place, 2001, and Circulation, 2001, there is a perfect balance between randomness and pattern. The monotypes (Nubes Uno, Dos and Tres) are made up of overlapping pale colored circles. The overlapping circles are like reptilian scales seen through a magnifying glass. Unfortunately the colors in the monotypes are wan.

In the mixed media works one can see hints of scaffolding, ladders, fire-escapes, honeycombs, the embossed patterns on sewer caps, rows of windows. Faint charcoal drawing is everywhere, and is discernible if one looks hard enough. Drips of pigment are sporadically placed. Juarez uses geometric forms as a starting point and they become the overarching theme. They also temper the expressionist brushwork. Each piece in this show is filled with an abundance of ambiguous shapes. The sketchy quality of the work only strengthens it. I sat Indian style on the floor of the gallery staring at several of these paintings for over an hour. I never grew bored and I appreciated different aspects of the compositions as I scanned and rescanned them. I was overwhelmed by the richness and vibrancy of Juarez’s optical imagination.

The post Roberto Juarez appeared first on artcritical.

September 22- November 3, 2001

Cox’s “American Family”, recently seen at her first solo show at the Robert Miller Gallery, a large group of family snaps fanned out on the floor of a side room. Set against the large-scale erotic images in the other rooms, this group of vacation shots and family momentos may appear to be a point of departure, or the safe domestic ground for the artist’s sexual bravado. But, as with many aspects of the show, this deserves another look. Images suggestive of patriotism, Catholic piety, and strongly asserted black and Jamaican identity complicate, and in some instances blunt, the irony of mock-heroic iconography in a few larger photographs, and the casual eroticism in a few smaller ones. And, one can’t help but notice, amidst the many references to Cox’s African heritage, that her husband is white, the children posed elsewhere in African garb are of mixed race. Over and again in this show, what appear on the surface to be bold assertions of identity or sexual empowerment are offset or rendered ambivalent in the graphic subtext. In a film close-up of french kissing, for instance, length and silence wear at the satire of hardcore pornography, the relentless thrust and counter-thrust of the two tongues suggesting a mute and ambiguous stalemate in an oral battle of the sexes. On a wall nearby, male legs in drag open and close slowly, the man’s sex faintly visible in the darkness between his thighs. The parody of sexy posturing is neutralized by its visual obscurity (we can’t get the punch line because we can’t make it out) and the tease by its scrambling of gender. Cox drew Mayor Giuliani’s ire with “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” a frontal nude of the artist assuming Christ’s place amidst his disciples. Looking at her follow similar appropriation strategies in this exhibition one finds, more often than not, that the work is appealingly unresolved. One of the more erotic images in the show – which features yellow, red-tipped roses fanning from a lap to just below the subject’s bare breasts – hangs opposite Cox’s African reworking of Manet’s “Olympia”, sans black servant. The offering of roses is thus detached from its original context. The political and sexual audacity of the black servant assuming the temptress role is largely, but not entirely de-contextualized and softened in Cox’s photograph, which replaces the servant with her sons in tribal garb. In other works, the obviousness of her art-historical appropriations renders the appropriation almost beside the point, the artist’s nakedness appearing all the more vulnerable. It is possible that the images of Cox in fetish gear or her juxtapositions of nudes and childhood snaps were meant to shock. The remarks of visitors to the gallery, however, tended to be glibly or blandly objectifying (‘nice abs,’ ‘nice rear,’ ‘I’d like to know who her personal trainer is’). It could be argued that we are now in a post-erotic time, at least in regards to visual art, since our capacity for shock has been depleted in other contexts. If this is so then all the better for Cox. She should exploit the change of erotic zeitgeist, however it plays out, as an opportunity to tease out further doubts and confusions underlying her sexual bravura.

The post Renee Cox appeared first on artcritical.