Brian O’Doherty is justly renowned for his short book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976). In any case, as a much-acclaimed artist and a veteran critic, he deserves this presentation of his writings. Collected Essays brings together substantial personal reminiscences of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, who were his friends; accounts of travels to Las Vegas and Miami; discussions of medicine that are informed by his early experience as an MD; descriptions of the work Orson Wells and other filmmakers; and selections from his art criticism of the 1960s and ‘70s, dealing with Richard Chamberlain, George Segal, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. There’s a marvelous account of how he took Marcel Duchamp’s heartbeat to compose a portrait of that artist and the story of how, as a political gesture, he took the name Patrick Ireland (1972-2008). “As a young man in Dublin,” he writes in a brilliant introductory essay on masquerade, “I felt the need to assume a persona that stretched the borders of a culture where literature always flourished and the attitudes to visual art were warily provincial” (pp. 8-9). O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture.

As examples of his luminously lucid, jargon free analysis, I especially admired his highly instructive account of the role of windows in Hopper’s paintings, the problems with the dark paintings in Rothko’s Houston Chapel, discussion of neon signs in Las Vegas, and an analysis of Stella’s early reception. But because he doesn’t provide an overview on the very diverse themes of these essays, it’s left to the reader to tease out the unifying concerns. And it’s not clear who will read this book through – except a very patient reviewer. Perhaps Inside the White Cube provides the unifying perspective much needed in the present volume, with its appeal to the role of the spectator’s space. When O’Doherty describes the ways that Hopper’s “aim was to keep the spectator right there, looking” (p. 21), using his windows in his “mysterious realism” which “invites you in to test the logic of his space with reference to your everyday experience” (p. 39), his account is revelatory. And his claim that Rothko’s dark late paintings show “an urge to experiment in ways he had not previously allowed himself” (p. 83), extends that analysis in a surprising way. I regret, then, that O’Doherty doesn’t go out of his way to make this overriding concept, which points to surprising parallels between Hopper’s realism and Rothko’s abstractions, entirely accessible, nor indicate how it might bring together the concerns of the other essays in this volume.

What is the right format for republication of a famous critic’s writings? When Clement Greenberg collected his criticism in Art and Culture (1961) he provided a carefully edited selection of his essays; he was famous enough that no elaborate editorial discussion was needed. When Michael Fried collected his criticism in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), he offered an elaborate introduction describing the genesis and development of these writings. But although O’Doherty’s Collected Essays opens with respectful brief essays by Liam Kelly and Anne-Marie Bonnet, they don’t really tell enough to provide a full perspective on his career, much of which now is historically distant. I sought out this volume, I confess, because I wanted to know if how he had rethought his history of the commercial art gallery, in light of its recent development. But I was frustrated by the very condensed five-page account, whose title, I admit, is suggestive: “Boxes, cubes, installations, whiteness and money.” “Art and its reception,” he rightly says, “always intersected finance. Art is made to be coopted” (p. 331). What then follows? “The white cube I described over thirty years ago is no longer the same place. The stresses on it from within have increased” (p. 330). True enough – but surely there is much more to be said. Right now I can think of no more interesting challenge for anyone interested in contemporary art and its market than spelling out the implications of these claims.

Brian O’Doherty, Collected Essays. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.) Edited by Liam Kelly. Introduction by Anne-Maria Bonnet. ISBN 9780520286542, 342 pp. $85 hardback, $34.95 paperback

The post “Right There, Looking”: Brian O’Doherty’s Collected Essays appeared first on artcritical.

January 12 to March 17, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, Third Floor, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Two major gallery presentations of the artist Hans Hartung (1904-1989) –  the exhibition under review here and Hans Hartung: A Constant Storm, Works from 1922-1989 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street (through Feburary 18) – are currently resolving a curious paradox. Since the 1970s, the groundbreaking and highly inventive modernist has been cited as an understudied figure on this side of the Atlantic. This observed neglect, however, hasn’t been remedied by comprehensive considerations of his oeuvre in American exhibitions, nor, for that matter, in English. The tide is now changing, as the two New York shows and a concurrent display at Simon Lee Gallery in London portend the artist’s rediscovery. The exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary, in particular, affirms the exigency and rewards of reviving Hartung.

This tightly curated exhibition showcases the German-born, post-war French artist as a veritable master of medium: An almost mathematical sensibility for line and composition are shown to tame his highly inventive artistic processes and violent automatic gestures. A mythology of isolated periods of genius has emerged around Hartung’s work, as he is most widely regarded for either the “long grasses” of his early career or his reinvention by way of frenetic spray-gun paintings during his senescence. Covering four decades of prolific production in fourteen works, the exhibition establishes coherence between the early experiments in regulated line and the later, anarchic spray-gun renderings by revealing the artist’s guiding principles and theoretical preoccupations.

In particular, the exhibition divulges Hartung’s enduring exploration of line as a central compositional device. Tracing his manipulation of line from the earliest work in the show, the 1952 monochrome T-1952-3, to a pairing of ambient works from 1982, illuminates the artist’s use of line as both formal structure and emotional envoy. Where T-1952-3 records Hartung’s gestural slashing of the canvas, for which he has become classified as an “action painter,” his later works T1982-H29 and T1982-K29 transpose torrid scrawls of mental exertion amid atmospheric zones. Searing his signature linear scratches atop bands of placid gradations of color in the later works produces a complex tonal register that moves from unbridled action to staid retrospection within a single canvas.

Though the artist’s fascination with line remains a constant throughout his career, he continually innovated around the line, both in its conceptual ideation and in his technical execution. The examples from 1982 evidence Hartung’s response to the growing Parisian interrogation of calligraphy, calling to mind the Eastern influences of Hartung’s Art Informel confreres Zao Wou-Ki and Lee Ungno. Perhaps owing to his colleagues’ deconstruction of traditional Eastern ideograms into sites of abstraction, Hartung’s conceptualization of calligraphy allows line, in his handling, to multiply in signification—all at once line is a test of malleability, a marker of vital emotion, and a conduit for language. Through its explorations of line, the exhibition also studies the artist’s changing methods of applying paint on canvas. In T1982-H29 and T1982-K29, for example, Hartung achieved his network of dynamic lines by thrashing the canvas with a paint-covered tree branch.

While Hartung’s quasi-calligraphic lines communicate his participation in Parisian modernism, they also symbolize his American relevancies. His unique tree branch painterly process, for example, immediately recalls Pollock’s drip. Similarly, his atmospheric backgrounds signal Rothko. Importantly, Hartung and Rothko recognized their shared artistic sensibilities and maintained a convivial friendship. Following Rothko’s death in 1970, Hartung even suggested that Rothko’s iconic paintings were galvanized by a trip to Hartung’s studio in the late 1940s: “[He] saw a painting in progress, in which large horizontal monochrome strips crossed the canvas; the painting was at an intermediate stage and I had not yet added the graphic elements. Rothko was especially interested and moved.” Maybe Hartung’s reputation as a connoisseur of line has been responsible for the lack of take up in America. The Nahmad show reveals Hartung’s equal attention to ambient atmospheres—in works like T1966-H11, T1980-R36, and T1982-E8—in a way that should more securely locate his achievement within an American sensibility.

A hinge-point of this exhibition is the grouping of three captivating paintings from 1971 [see installation shot, above]. Taken individually, the works are as philosophically rigorous as they are spiritually evocative. Jewel-toned curvilinear masses orbit atop uniformly black backgrounds as rounded parallel black lines slice swaths of color with destabilizing precision. While some of these works touch upon a cosmological realm, Hartung also engages in what was a vibrant conversation at that time among contemporary painters about the modernist grid—the aesthetic ordering principle first promulgated by artists such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. In this gesture, Hartung liberates the bound geometries of the grid, discards primary colors in favor of a daring palette, and casts them in a galaxy of their own design.

This highly meditative triad of works lends further insight into Hartung’s displacement of de Stijl’s rigid parameters. In T-1971-R19 and T-1971-R21, the artist brackets the vertical edge of the paintings with blocks of color, amplifying the assertion that these are paintings, rendered on canvas, contained by their own materiality. By defining the limits of the canvas, Hartung debunks the high modernist lore that grids radiate into infinity, extending beyond the work endlessly.

Hartung’s spray-gun paintings were a radical departure, instigated after a stroke limited the artist’s mobility in 1986. In the vein of Matisse’s cut-outs, Hartung’s adversity is often seen as the creative catalyst for his artistic reinvention in his last years. The robust presentation of his work at Nahmad Contemporary puts these seemingly divergent works back into conversation with his oeuvre as they have us seeing the frantically sprayed lines as continuations of his charged gestures with brush and branch. The selection of works in this show makes for a generously navigable understanding of the artist without limiting our sense of Hartung’s dynamic, indomitable explorations of concept and technique.

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Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

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The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

The post “I Was Free To Do As I Pleased”: Regina Bogat on her Life as an Artist appeared first on artcritical.

WILLIAM CORBETT: It’s 1954. He’d been an abstract painter for six or seven years, with a number of successful shows. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar, where he spoke in that Kline-ese that Frank O’Hara caught so beautifully in “Franz Kline Talking” (1958). He’d moved around, possibly rivaling Hokusai’s 734 addresses. When you see photographs of his homes, you see why Kline once said, “Bohemia is a place where a dog would go to die.”

This is a pretty big painting, at this time, but he was to paint bigger pictures. He was dead in 1962, but now he’s in his late 40s, maybe at the top of his game, though the money hadn’t yet come to him.

Let me go back: I said coming up here that one of my interests in Kline is extra-aesthetic. My early childhood was in East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which isn’t far from Lehighton, where Kline grew up. I was 12 in 1954 and didn’t know anything about him. But when I learned about him and saw his work in the early 1960s, I immediately recognized the landscape elements. I responded to those as if I’d come home in a way. Here you can find the train tracks he saw up and down the Lehigh River. I’m not saying he was trying to abstractly paint a landscape. I’m saying those things were so deep within him that they naturally came out when he picked up a brush.

This has associations with buildings, with timber and with scaffolding. A number of his pictures can be read that way. But I’m now seeing something I haven’t seen before: he has a number of paintings, such as Wotan (1950), where there’s an off or wobbly square. It’s starting to emerge here, and that will be a central image. He’ll clean this up in many cases, all that wonderful stuff, all that ideogrammatic stuff. He always said, “I don’t know anything about ideograms”; he liked to disassociate himself with that. And I believe him.

There’s also another quality that I associate with New York: the billboard size that he was moving toward, just like most of his contemporaries. Those guys went to the movies. They began to get a sense of scale. We know he worked from small things and blew them up with a Bell-Opticon projector. Imagine that he’s starting with intimate drawings — covering his studio floor, drawn on telephone book pages. And he’s blowing them up.

I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate the viewer in that immediacy, and then to make it happen in paint. A work like this, it seems to me, is absolutely recognizable, because it’s a clear, firsthand apprehension of a reality. That communicates to me.

These men, and the few women, liked to remind you that they were at work; you see the uncleaned drips. For Harold Rosenberg this was Action Painting. Alright, I get that, and I think that’s probably right. With Kline it’s a little bit different, because when you know the Bell-Opticon, the action’s over! But he’s doing something else. I think it’s like when I would first go to openings, in the early 1960s, the painters would come in with their clothes and their shoes all paint-stained. And, man, it always looked so hip.

It sends a message.

But I think there’s more: he wants to show that the work he put into this is part of his aesthetic. Not that he’s going to be praised as, “Oh, Franz, what a hard worker,” but for his notion of what could come at the end of a brush. It could be a splatter, or incomplete lines where the paint has run out of the brush. He also, I think, wanted to give a sense of the moment, make you feel present. As you pointed out, he used house paint and the image is now getting lost: it’s cracking, yellowing, it’s a conservator’s nightmare. In a way, I think it’s too bad that conservators feel compelled to restore this painting to what it was.

How’s that?

Well, just like de Kooning, he used house paint because he couldn’t then afford fine paint. But it means this painting is for the here and now. And I think that in the back of his mind he may have had the idea that it would change and move into a new here and now.

I think of Auden going back to his poems and second-guessing them, even famous ones like “September 1, 1939” (1939), changing lines because he thought better of them. I’m ambivalent about that. Did he think there would be a perfect poem? What about the poem in its moment? Didn’t it have the right to be there? I think we lose something by taking Kline’s paintings away from that original impulse. But I wrote a sequence of poems about Kline, and when I opened it again recently, and began to read again, I did an Audening and made a few corrections.

I remember these paintings fresh and new, and I’ve watched them age over time. I can hold that all in my mind. But if you think of the bohemian guy, living the life he did, painting in one studio after another, using house paint, it seems to be part of his aesthetic. It would age, absolutely — needing a kind of footnoting. Those footnotes would be a little like restoring this.

I think that about a lot: it’s hard to pull the former context up with you, and it’s hard to pull the present back into the past.

Absolutely, and it’s going to be hard. That’s part of the great pleasure of looking at art. Does it take us back there? This certainly takes me back to what was, after all, a black-and-white world: the photographs, the movies. You can imagine this being an aerial shot of the city in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It has the life of that moment.

I’m curious about the painting’s development, because some marks (such as the drips) reveal that it was turned upside down. Do you have any thoughts about why that is, or how that works in the image itself?

Well, I wonder where this was in his studio. As soon as you said that, I thought, OK, he didn’t frame this. This is probably by Robert Kulicke, as you can see by the small gap you see all around the edge. It’s modest, and it certainly puts the painting forward.

This looks like color in the center, some gray, which is unusual for him at this time. He didn’t come back to color until very late. And some of those paintings I find the least compelling. Or I’m torn. I can’t tell: is it because he didn’t know how to use color? Or is it because I’m so used to the moves he makes and want to see them in new combinations and permutations?

Now that we’re being more formal, I’m thinking that this is a spur-of-the-moment picture; but he got to an underpinning. That’s why the Opticon is so important. I think many people imagine that Kline pulled out the canvas and the brush and just whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! But you don’t see much under this, which is where the Bell-Opticon is. The casualness, the spontaneity, isn’t mocked, it’s not parodied, but he sees it as a start with a different ending. It’s not like de Kooning, where the approach is first to get it right and then fuck it up.

He also talked about the whites being as important and the blacks, which you can see in how they’re laid on with the white dripping out over the black at the top, or vice versa along the left edge. There’re also formal echoes between the white fields and black marks in places.

It’s the blacks that I always remember, but I wouldn’t see them without the whites, so they’re at least as important in that way. Form’s gotta have a ground. He’s right. We can’t ignore the great things he did on phone book pages. It’s obviously an issue of not having any money and using the materials at hand. And it’s black on shitty paper and over phone numbers. It’s a little bit like those monotypes that show up on de Koonings, like Easter Monday (1955-56), where the pictures on the newspaper are transferred into the paint. It’s another aspect of him that de Kooning influenced, and that touched everybody. De Kooning caught all that was going on in New York so profoundly that it was hard to look at it. People were drawn to those painters. I can’t think of too many painters that came out of Kline.

Well, Brice Marden perhaps, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker — painters who work at that synthesis of painting and drawing you talked about earlier. I think you could describe them as being indebted to Kline.

Yes, indebted, but indebted for what? What kind of effect did these have? I think that part of the reason why they didn’t follow him is that he takes care of all the possibilities he opens for the viewer. What you’re inspired to with this painting is that, Jesus Christ, if he can do that then I’ll do exactly what I can do. I’ll feel free. Because, again, in a world of color, he’s reminding us that black and white are colors. In a world of Action Painting, he’s putting the word “action” in quotes. This is more radical in some ways. And radical art, of course, can spawn any number of minions.

And think of the one-of-a-kind things he did: no one’s gonna come up with a phone book page after Kline, unless you’re using it ironically, or you’re doing it in such a way that it becomes part of the work.

Right, that it’s for Kline or it’s quoting him very directly.

We’ve touched on this a little already, but I wonder if you could talk about how this space affects the painting or how you feel the painting affects the surrounding space.

I’m aware of the room. I’ve been coming to the Modern since about 1959. I was young and knew very little, and I got educated here. I believed the story, and then I began to discover that it’s just a story. Maybe it’s a necessary narrative. Walking in it now is like picking up the books of poets I’ve loved: I’ve read them so much, but at times I’m a little tired of them. Other times I want that pang, want to be back there. And every once in awhile something knocks me out.

I usually don’t look at them as long as I’m looking at this. And this painting, as so often, is growing on me. This is across from a Barnett Newman and you have Helen Frankenthaler here, and near Mark Rothko, de Kooning — all people he knew. Rather than being frozen, this is part of a bigger story.

I wonder what this looked like in Kline’s studio, or in a home, what it first looked like in a gallery. Now it’s ensconced. Has it lost something because of that? Inevitably. I’m sure it affects you. But that’s what a museum does. And in this case I’m standing with this at my left and the Newman at my right; that might not happen in another place.

I wonder how his art — or this painting in particular — finds its way into the work that you do.

I wrote that sequence of poems about Kline and I know a lot about him. I have the background of Lehighton. The paintings are in my head, and I like writing documentary poems. It was fun. There were so many words that kept coming up: suave, and the black of the tuxedo’s lapel. I also wrote a suite, around the same time, to de Kooning. I keep on wondering if I’ll get another one out of somebody. Joan Mitchell keeps coming up. So first of all, there’s the viewer literally inspired by an attempt to get some of that from it. For me, as somebody who loves paintings without knowing why he loves them, and still loves them and the study of them, and wants to know more about the artist, it’s their example, in every way.

One of the things I always like to know, and is a dream for me, is how you get the compositional elements — all that flurry and hurry and bustle — into something that can come up just in the sound of words or the juxtaposition of images. Words seem to insist upon a kind of linear meaning, especially if that poetry comes through the ear as well as the eye. As I wrote about Kline and his work, it often came through finding something that got me writing about art in the beginning. James Schuyler very modestly said, “I just wanted to know what it was like to use words to describe things.” I want that, too. And this gives us new possibilities. We thought of the railroad tracks, the city aspects, the calligraphy, the scaffolding. Those become words, and it’s not just what’s there, it’s what’s here, inside you. For the reader, it’s something to give them the sense of standing here now, the delight I feel in talking about it at this minute. But it also opens it up, so that they could internalize that.

I guess that there’s something else, too. I’ve certainly spent more hours seeing movies, and now television, than I have looking at paintings. What’s the difference? Well, there is a hand involved in this and I’m always aware of it. We’re aware of it from the drips. I can see a person here; I can imaging those studios.

You can see the motion of the hand and the gestures it’s making.

Absolutely. There’s also something here that’s generational, I guess: the first painting I saw that really said to me “This could be yours” was an abstract picture. It pissed my parents off, just like listening to jazz did. It certainly separated me from the world I grew up in. But it turned me on in ways I couldn’t figure out. There are things that choose you just as much as you choose them.

As a poet and an art writer, you hope it’s still out there, and that you don’t get to bottom of it. The stuff you get to the bottom of never finds its way into your work. And if it does, you’ve gotta get over it and get out of it.

One of the things I miss in this picture and that I really love is his signature. Kline had one of the great signatures, that blocky, stick-fingered print. It always moves me. I wonder why he didn’t sign it…

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Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

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October 24, 2014 to February 11, 2015
1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City, 212 423 3500

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924-2001) was a contemporary of second-generation American abstract expressionists like Sam Francis (1923-1994) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Like them, he was an abstractionist. Beyond that, the most mature paintings in this Indian painter’s mini-retrospective at the Guggenheim (which travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice next Fall) look like nothing I have seen that originated in New York or even Paris.

These subtle works are radiant yet passionately restrained. Paint has been scraped away until the surface hue remaining is as thin as air, while the small, vague shapes patterned upon them suggest no writing or imagery of any kind.  Their vertical format suggests Chinese or Japanese scroll paintings, as well as Indian tapestries, murals and miniatures. When the dominant colors are grays and smoky yellows, the association with East Asian art is enhanced—but when brilliant reds, orangey-yellows or clear blues predominate, the Indian subcontinent looks more like their home.

Not least, this difference from American and European abstract painting is due to the fact that Gaitonde was born and raised in India. He spent almost all of his adult life there, assimilating his nation’s cultural heritage and other Asian art besides the Western art that came his way. More importantly, what he made of all these influences is more than their sum total. His style is personal as well as multicultural.

This show was largely organized by Sandhini Poddar, an adjunct curator at the Guggenheim. In her engrossing catalog essay, she describes the artist as “short, stocky, self-centered and confident,” a man who “tended toward solitude.” Never married, he lived for his later decades in a single-room rental apartment-cum-studio in New Delhi–though he’d long since become one of India’s best-known painters. He’d represented his country in two Venice Biennales, and shown elsewhere dozens of times, in solo and group exhibitions, at galleries and museums, mostly in India, but also in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Switzerland, Eastern Europe and Singapore.

Still, that single-room rental in New Delhi may well have carried with it reminiscences of Gaitonde’s childhood home in a working-class tenement in Bombay (now Mumbai). This childhood was in the days of the British Raj, and the Bombay art school that he entered around 1945 was patterned on the Royal Academy in London.

Known for short as the “Sir J. J. School of Art,” it was named for Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, a Parsi merchant who underwrote its founding in 1857. When Gaitonde entered, it still required students to draw from plaster casts of antiquities, paint portraits in the academic manner, and do studies from the nude model. The winds of change were blowing, however, and in 1947, India became independent. India’s cultural heritage achieved new relevance, while “modernity” and internationalism appeared other ways to declare the country’s freedom from colonialism.

Gaitonde graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1948, and stayed for two more years as a fellow. By the time he left, he’d studied Indian techniques and aesthetics there, as well as being exposed to Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Braque. The contemporary art scene in Bombay, meanwhile, was in its infancy. The first commercial art gallery was not to open until 1959, so Gaitonde joined the Progressive Artists Group. It staged exhibitions of Indian artists pursuing non-academic styles, but such styles were more likely to be expressionist than abstract.

Gaitonde experimented with figuration in a traditional Indian mode, in a European style influenced by Georges Rouault, the French expressionist, finally modeling himself on Klee. The Guggenheim show commences with one 1953 Indian-style drawing, followed by five Klee-like works on paper. Then, around 1957, Gaitonde begins to evolve into pure abstraction.

In the mid-‘60s, he spent a year and a half in New York on a Rockefeller-financed grant. He visited Rothko, watched American movies and explored the city’s streets. His paintings were shown in Manhattan gallery exhibitions, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired one, but the 1960s paintings in the current exhibition are overly familiar. With dark, shiny surfaces, horizontal formats and careful paintbrush squiggles imitative of calligraphy, they look too much like what ‘60s New York expected of Asian painting. Only after Gaitonde had returned to India, immersed himself anew in the Zen Buddhism that had long been his solace, and settled in New Delhi in 1972, does the work begin to go beyond anything done before.

He abandoned paintbrushes, laid his canvas on the floor, and, according to Poddar, “began utilizing a ‘lift-off’ process: tearing pieces from newspapers and magazines, he transferred color from these cut-outs by applying rollers onto the verso of their wet, painted surfaces and subsequently erased aspects of the transfers with palette knives.”

The fruit of this technique, which owes as much to Rauschenberg as to Rothko or Indian tradition, can be seen in the largest gallery of this show. The dozen carefully-spaced paintings that surround the viewer, all done between the mid-‘70s and the ‘90s, create a serenity conducive to contemplation and meditation in the grand tradition of Zen.

“Everything starts from silence “ Gaitonde once said. “The silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences.” In this exhibition, he bequeaths that silence to the noise-harassed Manhattan viewer.

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Blockbuster exhibitions can be extremely small. When recently the Frick presented the London Cimabue alongside its Manhattan mate, in the small room next to the bookstore, a revelatory visual relationship was displayed. Emulating that American practice, this vast German museum, which usually displays only old master paintings, showed within one tiny gallery just three pictures, two small Giottos and one Rothko, all from Berlin collections. Between Giotto’s Crucifixion on the left and his Death of the Virgin Mary on the right, was Rothko’s No. 5 (Reds), in a marvelous intimate setting. In The Artist’s Reality written in 1940, Rothko described Giotto as the master of plastic-tactile art. A phase from that book is quoted on the wall at the entry to this exhibition: “It is Giotto’s color . . . that produced the great effect of tactility.” Rothko was interested in how, without using perspective, Giotto could create pictorial space. And he was fascinated with Giotto’s capacity to present tragedy, which was the goal, also, of his own classical abstractions. He wanted that his pictures have the same intimate relationship to spectators as the paintings of Fra Angelica, another early Renaissance figure he admired, as found in the monk’s cells at San Marco, Florence.

As the thick catalogue notes, there is a long critical tradition relating Rothko’s art to sacred European painting.  Building upon, and criticizing this literature, the catalogue contains nine essays on Rothko’s ways of thinking about spirituality, Giotto’s iconography, and, also, the story of how the director of the National Gallery in Berlin came to purchase this Rothko. What light does all of this interesting information share on our visual experience? I grant that this juxtaposition allows us to sharpen our attention to the fabrics represented in the Giottos. But Rothko never saw these paintings. Following Greenberg, very many commentators have sought to link Abstract Expressionism to old master tradition. And emulating Rothko, numerous art writers have related his abstractions to sacred European painting.  Turning from the catalogue to this display reveals the basic problem inherent in such comparisons. No. 5 (Reds) looks different from these Giottos. That Giotto fascinated Rothko does not show that viewing his pictures had any influence on his own art.   The catalogue drives some exhibitions. Its catalogue sank this one.

After minimalism and pop art came photorealism. Prominently featured in Documenta 5 (1972), this art form provided German collectors with their image of America.  But while the best minimalists and pop artists established their credentials, most of the photorealists had less satisfying careers. Chuck Close went on to become famous, though with portraits somewhat different from those here on display. Richard Estes, who deserves to be revived, continues to make magnificent pictures. Wonderfully successful in Nedick’s (1970), he falls into banality in The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, Summer, 1979 (1979) when he makes no use of the reflections that give life to his representations of urban architecture. Recently Robert Bechtle has had a major retrospective. But Tom Blackwell, Charles Bell, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Audrey Flack (the one female photorealist), Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann , Richard McLean,  John Salt, and Ben Schonzeit, who are interesting minor artists, have effectively disappeared.

Deutsche Guggenheim generously allows us to reflect on this recent history. Readers of Charles Baudelaire’s greatest essay “The painting of modern life,” and the now famous account of Impressionism by his Marxist academic champion, T. J. Clark, can understand why these paintings attracted  attention. When the photorealists show contemporary subjects—depicting automobiles, family scenes, motorcycles, public advertising, storefronts and the other apparatus of everyday life– are they not doing what Baudelaire’s hero, Constantin Guys, wanted an artist to do?  They present the pleasurable beauty of contemporary life. But whether because they inspired no distinguished theorizing; or because these paintings are fatally close to their photographic sources; or simply because in the 1980s the American art world moved on: in any event, these artists have not established their place within the postmodernist canon.  Perhaps the problem is that photorealism was too neutral, too little involved in political critique. In the wings of this show one can envisage Jeff Wall, whose altogether more aggressive take on our culture turned out to be the wave of the future. Unlike him, these photorealists merely show what they see. There is one masterpiece in exhibition, Malcolm Morley’s Open Golf Championship (National Open) (1968),  a picture that shows that even a sports event can inspire a painter.  It deserves comparison with Adolf Menzel’s pictures found nearby in the Altes Museum. But in this mean-spirited hanging, which is much too tight, this great painting lacks breathing room. (And in the catalogue, I could hardly believe my eyes,  Morley’s image is bled across the centerfold.) Having assembled this magnificently revealing exhibition, the Guggenheim failed to carry through.

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