The United States in the mid-twentieth century produced a wider range of artistic styles than is generally acknowledged in the art history books, and the critical preference for abstraction obscured the achievements of many good artists who did not reject representation and tradition. An excellent example of one of these overlooked artists is the sculptor Peter Agostini (1913- 1993), a selection of whose work can be seen at Salander-O’Reilly through June 23rd.

Agostini was deeply committed to the classical tradition of studying from the model. His sculptures are influenced by Modernist and Renaissance masters. The artist stated that his painterly clay and plaster life studies of the human figure, which vary in size, and his masterful studies of a horse in action, were heavily influenced by such Renaissance masters as Verrocchio and Donatello, as well as Tang dynasty tomb sculptures of horses.

Agostini’s most unusual works are his castings of everyday objects such as clothes lines and clothespins, egg cartons, bottles, and soft inflatables such as balloons and twisted automotive inner tubes, combined in a variety of ways with other elements.

These works, produced in the fifties and sixties have been associated with Pop Art, but have a different origin and artistic effect entirely, and are closer in spirit to the painters categorized at the time as ‘romantic realists’ such as Edwin Dickinson, Ivan Albright and Walter Murch. These painters combined cubist and surrealist ideas with virtuoso naturalism and a concern for rich paint surfaces and romantic decay.

The surreal and ambiguous group of cast plaster and hydrocal pieces included in the show, such as “Butterfly” of 1959 and “Swell” of 1965, where a semi- inflated rubber inner tube cast with great precision is twisted in a way that makes the identity of the subjects of the castings (i.e. the inner tube, etc.) quite clear, suggests many readings, but especially the female body (or genitals). In “Squeeze” (1960) the artist makes this very explicit by including of a pair of hands which could be caressing one another or caught in the act of sculpting or creating. These works have always attracted attention, but aren’t Agostini’s best.

The castings are too raw and don’t synthesize with his additions to them. They produce a result that is closer to the conceptualism of a Racheal Whiteread than the sketch-like unity that Agostini sought. They lack the unity and internal rhythm that mark his best work.

By the seventies Agostini had abandoned the casting of real objects and began to make life studies of the nude figure and horse. These figural works are haunted by a certain nostalgia for ancient art and a love of the fragment. The group of elegant small clay and plaster sketches included here, like most of his best work, emphasizes touch and the integrity of the materials. The large terracotta “Untitled Head” (1972) retains a sense of the lump of clay that it is made from, the features drawn directly into the clay in a way that recalls Ruben Nakian.

The life sized “Old Apollo” (1976) demonstrates Agostini’s classicism and his fascination with decay and archaic objects. This is a vigorous sculpture the style of which has been emulated by his Agostini’s best pupils, Chris Cairns and Bruce Gagnier, as Gagnier’srecent show at Lori Bookstien demonstrates. Agostini’s horses however, are inimitable.

There are three medium-sized examples in this show. They are subtly stylized, the proportions manipulated in the interests of unity and compactness. There is something uncommonly right and timeless about these works. They are as convincingly connected to cubism as to the Tang Dynasty. They represent, in their freedom, a generosity of spirit and deep sensitivity. They are spiritual self-portraits and ultimately, Peter Agostini’s greatest legacy.

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Ansonia Pharmacy Windows
6th Avenue and 10th Street
March 14 to April 18, 2006

OK Harris Gallery
383 West Broadway
March 25 – April 22, 2006

Reactionary bores often claim that a “Real Artist” is someone that pursues a “Personal Vision” and is not concerned with ‘Strategizing.” Strategizing, in a sense, is the Kissinger-ization of art. Henry’s realpolitik applied to art as curiosity filtered through goal-oriented ambition

For example, Chuck Close said that he began his career wanting to ensure that when “Someone saw a group show with Chuck Close in it they would remember that there was a Chuck Close in the show”.  Fair enough.

On the other hand, young William S. Burroughs spent a summer of his adolescence in a Boys Wilderness Camp in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The idea was inculcated in the young scouts that “Anything that was worth doing, was worth doing well.” Burroughs reaction to this encomium was deciding it was more important to do something because you found it interesting. Whether you did it well or not was beside the point.

These were a few thoughts that went through my mind as I came across works made by two middle-aged men who appear somewhat out of the loop, but so interested in what they are doing they don’t seem to care. After walking around under the spotlit atmosphere of this past month’s art fairs and related events, their slightly obscure work is enormously refreshing.

Peter H.Begley, in his exhibition at Salander O’Reilly, at first glance appears to make paintings that one still sees in some of Paris’ Left Bank galleries, where time seems to have stopped somewhere around the time of Chet Baker’s first arrest. Begley’s paintings are all Parisian views, streets and buildings as might have been experienced by a blind giant who has run his fingers over all the surfaces.  Begley’s odd technique aids him in depicting the streetscape as continuous sculpture. The paintings are acrylic and oil on waxed paper, mounted on canvas. They have strange little nubs of acne-like growths and weird palette-knife swipes of light paint, and great, involved energy.

All of the works are triptychs. In Cityscape #4, the outlines of buildings’ edges rise and fall in a wobbly pattern of black pips with red highlights, as if the tips of matchsticks were emerging from the lime green ground. The paintings seem to owe something to Giacometti as well as to hack tourist painting but there is attention and conviction. They are surprisingly charming.

I noticed Keith Long’s work in the windows of the Ansonia Pharmacy when walking up Sixth Avenue one day. These reliefs, made of found wood, including wooden hangers which are used to keep them on the nail, successfully confuse the viewer as to their vintage, whether they are, in fact, new or antique. Like Berger’s work they successfully escape their moment in time. This is perhaps a questionable ambition for an artwork, but it made me think of the Ming dynasty painter and teacher Kung Hsien, who made a statement that I often quote: “A work of art should be both familiar and strange.”

Long’s other exhibition at O.K. Harris in SoHo, feature larger works, also reliefs made from found wood, that have a similar, unguarded, take-it-or-leave-it quality. They are not beautiful or transcendent but have a salty dog, beatnik quality married to Zen calm. They are all figurative and gently gimcrack, featuring female torsos, mermaids, snakes, fish and antlers. Long appears to be hiding a natural elegance behind scrimshaw corniness. He leaves knowing irony out of his work and it is not missed.

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January 7-31, 2006

This review first appeared in The New York Sun, January 12, 2006.

SALANDER-O’REILLY IS SHOWCASING CHRISTOPHER WINTER’S Bavarian kinder kitsch as a courtesy to Asher Edelman, mega-collector. Described by the Wall Street Journal in 1998 as “one of the most notorious raiders on Wall Street in the 1980s,” Mr. Edelman once taught a business course at Columbia University called “The Art of War.” As Thomas Kamm reported, he offered $100,000 to any student who would identify a takeover target for him. (Columbia banned the offer.) The Association of Trial Lawyers of America, in the October 2002 issue of its journal “TRIAL,” discussed the fierce legal battle between Mr. Edelman and the Société du Louvre, the main subsidiary of Groupe Taittinger (of champagne and Baccarat fame), which claimed he wrongfully manipulated the market for the company’s securities.

Why does this matter in an art review? Because the sensibilities of speculator-collectors determine the character of what we think of as contemporary art. Going by Mr. Edelman’s well-known business history, it is a reasonable guess—though only a guess—that Edelman Arts is long Christopher Winter. Of interest here, apart from the mechanics of cultural influence, are the qualities of mind on show.

Mr. Winter would be a YBA (vernacular for Young British Artist) if he were not an expat Brit who lives and works in Berlin. At 37, he is friendly with Saatchi’s Sensation crew but, as the press release croons, he has “advanced to the company of such painterly heavyweights as Markus Lupertz and Gerhard Richter.” If that does not bring you to your knees, maybe mention of Joseph Beuys will do the trick. The gallery wants us to know that the painter’s Düsseldorf mentor, Fred Schwegler, was a protégé of the sinister Beuys.

Mr. Winter’s cartoony “Virgin Forest” series substitutes disconnected allusions for coherent content. It alludes to a welter of things without being “about” anything substantive beyond the commissioned rhetoric of a catalog essay. Many of the paintings would be meaningless viewed singly. What could you make of two birds pecking at a disembodied eyeball if you had not seen that scrap of printed green cloth elsewhere on its wearer? (The paintings are not sequential but the costumes are repetitive.)

Among Mr. Winter’s sources of allusion are horror movies. Rewind to “The Shining,” “Jaws,” and “The Blair Witch Project” for several canvases. Other obvious spurs to imagery are Caravaggio, Balthus, Caspar David Friedrich, Andrew Wyeth, comic books, graphic novels and photos from the 1950s. The show is a jumble of suggestive appropriations carefully outlined and laid down in flat acrylic color, mainly brash green and black. This “synthesis of visual similes” bears the same relation to painting that watery Eschwege Pils bears to the great unfiltered kellerbiers of Wurzburg.

Take “Neverland” (2005), where a diluted Balthus meets Hänsel and Gretel. A grinning boy in lederhosen and feathered alpine hat joins an underage St. Pauli girl in the Bavarian Alps. Mouths agape, they are poised to tuck into an hallucinogenic mushroom as if it were a Black Forest torte. An ersatz pastoral, the scene would be perfect behind the bar at the Pfefferberg in Berlin’s Mitte district. On offer at Salander-O’Reilly, and buttressed by the hired appreciations of Charles A. Riley II, PhD., it looks like a bid for disposable American income.

Then there’s “The Shadow” (2005). Hänsel lies on the ground face up, his head between the legs of Gretel who doubles over like a trollop-in-training, tush to the spectator. One leg is unaccountably smeared with a blood-like shadow. Menstruation? Rape with a broken bottle? Who knows. But as if to illustrate “the binary code of pastoral and satire,” her underpants are clean.

You only need to look at one of these paintings to know which way the trolley is headed: Innocence is a myth. So corrupt the little ones as soon as possible. They’ll eat it up. No one is too young to die, sleep with snakes, play with drugs, sex or violence. Get with it, dude. Didn’t you read the catalog essay? This what the artist calls “discovery and experimentation from a child’s point of view.”

Mr. Riley II places the artist in the company of Archimedes, Juvenal, Lucilius, Horace, Chaucer, Swift, Dryden, Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Alfred Hitchcock and the Brothers Grimm. Then there’s Theocritus, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Sidney, Tasso, William Blake, Shakespeare,Thomas Gray and Wordsworth; plus the operas of Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Wagner and Benjamin Britten. Names keep coming: Poussin, Michelangelo, Holbein,Velazquez, Georgione, Guarcino, Reynolds, Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Kandinsky, Balthus and Courbet. These are all “worthy antecedents to Winter.”

The lunatic grandiosity of the essay banks on the lack of sophistication of its audience (“These are weighty comparisons for a newcomer.”). A single glance at the actual source for any one of these canvases tells us the name of the game: Read my allusions, not my painting.

Winter’s current series balances the right degree of slick graphic clarity, burlesque and coy nastiness to appeal to today’s breed of bottom-feeding collectors. Adept at tropes of arrested adolescence and the pasteurized irony that has become an art industry staple, he works a trendy dead end. No culture can cannibalize itself—mocking everything, affirming nothing—and continue to survive. If smart-ass nihilism is your stein of Oettinger, you will be able to swallow this show.

The exhibition draws attention because of the prominence of its promoter and the prestige of the venue. But a durable culture requires more than what Croesus’s wallet dictates. At stake is our ability to retrieve a sense of public reason—call it the common good—distinct from market cunning.

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Giorgio Cavallon: Paintings
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries

Both shows through April 30

What, for a painter, surpasses the nobility of the human figure? Why, several human figures—or so we might gather, thumbing through any history book of western art. So many of the “mega-hits,” from Leonardo’s “Last Supper” to “Night Watch” to “ Guernica ,” consist of groups of strategically interacting people. No wonder ambitious painters continue to be drawn to such heroic feats of composition.

The trouble is if you’re not Leonardo, those half-dozen figures disporting across a landscape or interior are liable to look less like individuals with inner lives than marionettes jerking on strings. With dismaying speed, epic poetry can turn into traffic engineering.

Graham Nickson is one painter who rises to these challenges and prevails on his own terms–though with such bristling intensity that visitors to his ninth exhibition at Salander may at times feel they’re getting the same workout as his straining figures. The paintings, some of them huge and the product of over two decades of work, mostly depict a favorite theme, bathers at the shore. All reveal the familiar, formidable attack with strident colors and tightly knit dramas of pose and counterpose.

Although performing natural tasks in fairly ordinary settings, his figures gesture with the deliberateness of Neoclassical history paintings. Picture that magisterially raised arm in David’s “Death of Socrates.” (It’s no coincidence that Mr. Nickson, now in his late 50s, is Dean of the New York Studio School and originator of its grueling Drawing Marathon.)

Despite his turgid color, the artist’s drawing dominates in these paintings. But in many areas, his hues vibrantly support the energy of his contours, lending a remarkable presence to gestures and light. In the lower left section of the immense “Edge Bathers” (1983-2005), a kneeling figure leans forward, placing her forearms on the towel spread before her. (She doesn’t look exactly comfortable, but then “comfort” here is an alien concept.) The artist energizes this inspired construction—taut angles of elbows springing from the great arc of a foreshortened back—with a few perfectly calibrated hues: a deep, dusky scarlet for the shadowed towel, rich purple on shaded flesh, vivid lights for their illuminated counterparts. Above, with a rare touch of mischief, the artist has placed a single lick of lightning against the implacable horizon.

In “Theoria” (1989-2005), contours and hues combine again to lend part of the image a wonderfully specific vitality. A standing woman stares upward at a clutch of balloons, her tipped head holding powerfully at our exact eye level. Her vertical form stretches below with monumental sureness, its length measured out by opposing notations of bathing suit, ribs, and knees. The sand at her feet seems ponderously far from the head, in large part because of subtle pressures of color: though both are varieties of orange, the sand quietly throbs as if absorbent of sunlight, while the skintones alongside radiate light, and it’s a marvel how this subtle difference urges the figure’s vertical rise out of flatness.

Both of these paintings are made up of smaller panels that might be almost complete works on their own. In fact, this process of accretion appears to form the basis of Mr. Nickson’s working method; the main elements seem to grow, crystal-like, from inner cores, a technique especially effective for the dense modeling of figures.

Be sure not to overlook two of the artist’s more modest efforts. One of two landscapes above the desk, the spacious “Dark Island Dawn, Jade Sea,” (2004) features dark blue/violet ripples of clouds climbing into space above a luminous blue-green sea. The smallish image reminds us of the looser direction Mr. Nickson has pursued for many years in the medium of watercolor.

One side effect of the highly deliberated drawing in his figure paintings is that the hues, while occupying aggressive points on a color wheel, are often surprisingly passive when it comes to a composition’s largest rhythms. Intensity of color and pictorial presence are not necessarily the same thing. In “Reflection,” (1989-2005) light pours through a window into a darkened interior, leaving a sequence of lights on a woman’s hair and the wall behind. Unlike that striking passage of sand-to-sunlit-flesh in “Theoria,” these patches, though varying in hue, have exactly the same pictorial weight. Rhythmically the hair has just as much of a rapport with the wall as with the rest of the figure.

A colorist like Matisse or Veronese hierarchizes his color, particularizing with weights of hue each step of the movement from the largest ground/sky divisions down to the subject’s details. Mr. Nickson’s potent drawing, though, tends to be the sole determinant of scale and focus, leaving certain passages of color in a kind of compositional purgatory. To the left of that powerful vertical figure in “Theoria” is another individual clutching an inflatable whale. Here the same electric pinks and stolid purples describe elements of both man and whale, flattening and completely deflating their presence in the surrounding color sequences. The result is so complete as to seem deliberate—and one wants to cry out: Enough drawing! Let color speak!

“Sandbar Bathers” (1999-2005), too, at once rewards and tries the viewer. Here, the artist beautifully renders the dynamic pose of a woman stretching a towel behind her back. Her arms angle vigorously through the turgid orange of fabric, opposing the subtle tilt of hips. Concise drawing and vibrant hue reinforce each other with a kind of classical muscularity. But move to the figures on either side, and color practically disappears as a compositional factor; the drawing explains complex overlappings of forms, but the colors mumble and dither. In fact, one has to look twice at this thirteen–foot wide canvas to register its overarching concept of space–figures planted in foreground, sandbar arcing behind–because it’s captured only in its drawing.

This should all be viewed, of course, in the light of the age-old debate about the primacy of color or drawing. Do you aspire to Ingres’ probity of line, or Delacroix’s eloquence of color? Mr. Nickson seems quite unapologetic about his choice.

But before resigning yourself to this fact, take a peek at the two rather casually painted figures airing a green towel on that distant sandbar. Their hues hold their places with the limpid authority one finds in the “Jade Sea” landscape, and it’s a bit of painting all the more striking because it seems an afterthought.

The artist’s intentions for drawing are evident in every square inch of his canvases, but his color—in-your-face, but elusive; vital here, disconnected there—remains an enigma. It’s all part of these uningratiating, forceful paintings—and explains, perhaps, why they’re so intriguing.

*****

In the first-floor gallery at Salander, the paintings of Giorgio Cavallon (1904-1989) are considerably lower-keyed. More joyful in execution and milder in ambition, these painterly abstractions have an immediate, comparatively innocent appeal. But they reward prolonged looking.

The artist uses a lively range of color to animate compositions of slightly rough rectangles with occasionally rounded forms. His technique is unaffected, as if the business-like brushstrokes were simply what the artist found adequate for his purposes. His goal, on the visual evidence, was focused and consistent: the uncovering of innate qualities of color and form and the movements between them. This the paintings achieve with aplomb.

There’s no doubt about the artist’s influences. A native of Italy , he immigrated to the United States in 1920, and shortly began studying under Charles Hawthorne. But it’s the impact of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied for almost a decade in the 30s and 40s, that rings through every painting here. Countless artists may have passed through Hofmann’s schools, but Mr. Cavallon’s paintings, with their uneven blocks of color, are especially close to his teacher’s stylistically.

Mr. Cavallon has a gentler touch, and seems more inclined to layer colors in subtle veils, but one finds the same sense of exploring, of proceeding from hunches and seeing where they lead. The eleven paintings here amount to a survey of the last four decades of work, and one can trace his steady development within the lyrical confines he set for himself.

A work from 1948 (untitled, like almost every painting in the exhibition) neatly shows off the pulsating energy of the gridded patterns he favored in the 40s. There may well be a hundred different colors in this painting, each confined to its own cell but reacting in a distinct way to its neighbors: eclipsing it, shouldering against it, or wedging or slipping behind. An even-handed simmer of color-forms on the left third of the canvas evolves into a more unsettled rhythm at the center, with some forms lengthening and dominating in size. At far right, the match-ups have become more uneven still: a sizeable blandly off-white rectangle tussles with a fuchsia-hued ribbon bracketing it on two sides, neither willing to yield.

Several canvases from the 50s show how the artist began placing his colored forms against white fields. The pale backgrounds, quietly throbbing from many underlying tints, lend a slightly otherworldly aspect. Looser and broader shapes appear in later decades. A large painting from 1988, the year before his death, shows him still composing at full speed.

Mr. Cavallon exhibited extensively during his lifetime and his work is in the collection of several major museums, but he didn’t enjoy the level of fame of some of his colleagues. The temperament behind these paintings is one of unassuming earnestness, and this alone—never mind the parade of attention-hogging “isms” in the last half-century—would be enough to relegate a painter to the “under-appreciated” category. Judging from these plain-spoken but articulate paintings, he deserves better.

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September 8 to Octobrt 2, 2004

We have a convenient shorthand phrase for the making of meaningful marks on canvas: “the Painting Process.” But it isn’t really a single process, nor even a finite one. For representational painters the challenge has always been two-fold, at least; they must first come to grips with their own visual experience, and then find a way of rendering an equivalent in paint. (Cézanne showed just how compelling this restless dichotomy of observation and reconstitution could be, but in fact this struggle is as old as painting itself.) The “process” actually continues even after brushes are laid down, because the reconstituting, in circular fashion, shows the eye how to see.

Of course this isn’t the kind of process every artist has in mind today. Many pursue a conceptual engagement with symbols and statements, rather than the sheer variety of impetus of color and line. This wouldn’t necessarily be a loss, except that fewer painters, abstract and representational alike, seem inclined to extract from visual experience its full potential.

But there still are painters who look long and deep. An exhibition at Salander-O’Reilly features the landscape paintings of two such artists, Stanley Lewis and Gregory Botts. The pairing is intriguing. Both show how even the tradition-laden genre of landscape can be renewed through the process of seeing, but they do this through entirely different means.

Now in his early 60s, Lewis has had for many years a following of admirers among colleagues and students. His four medium-sized and two tiny paintings here have the standard subjects and rectangular format of landscape, but they are anything but tame. His canvases are so matted with strokes of thick paint that they seem almost to swell from their supports. Deep, irregular troughs cut through his surfaces, the result of repeated cutting off and repositioning of entire sections of paintings. The images themselves are crisscrossed by careening impulses; streaming horizon lines–always angled or curved–divide these worlds into forms surging above and below, with big foreground wedges sectioned off by thrusting fences and paths.

What is so remarkable about the images is their final tautness of design. Despite the agitated attack, each element seems minutely considered, its visual weight and location measured against the accumulating whole. The drawing of forms sometimes gives them an almost hallucinogenic speed, but oddly enough this only seems to confirm the fidelity to optical experience. One feels almost as if one’s eyeball were planted at the center of his canvases: as the tree in “Matt Farnum’s Farm, Chautauqua, NY” soars from the horizon, it spreads above and over our viewpoint as it makes its ragged way to the edge of the canvas-here, identical with the limits of our perceptions.
Lewis’ muted colors, too, seem designed not to charm but to do pictorial justice. When his tilting, predominantly khaki-green planes set up the punctuations of more intense notes of red and yellow, the relationships have the ring of observed truth. An up-close pickup truck hogs the entire front corner of “Farnum’s Farm,” but the unexpected delicacy of its coloration, faithful to the weather and hour of a particular day, turns it into a subdued, hulking bulwark against the tide of streaming grass. By contrast a house perched distantly on the horizon, silhouetted by hard contrasts of sky, stares starkly back at us from far behind those same layered greens. The effect is of intensely cohesive impressions-of snapshots finding their gravity, if you will.

At points the paintings suggest an artist on the brink of perceptual saturation-Lewis’ eye seems unable to pass up any event, including the truck’s Chevy insignia–but they arrive finally at a kind of quivering, temporary equilibrium through sheer focus of intent. It’s as if Lewis “wanted to make Expressionism into something as permanent as the art in museums”, to paraphrase Cézanne’s self-proclaimed goal for Impressionism. Despite this (or perhaps, because of it), one suspects that Lewis would happily pull any of these canvases off the wall and start hacking again. His goal appears to be not a fixed perfection but an unboundable synthesis of seeing and making. It’s hard to think of another painter who so completely shuns preconceptions about traditional painting while reaffirming its most interesting possibilities. These days it’s a rare virtuosity: one caring nothing for itself.

The paintings of fifty-two year-old Gregory Botts, with their agile surfaces and crisply fragmented designs, draw upon perceptions in an entirely different way. Where Lewis’ obsessively rehashes, Botts’ finesses, encompassing both sweeping forms and discursive details with a supple bravura. Appropriating the elegant paradoxes of Cubism, his images flirt with stylistic adventurism, but more than most of his contemporaries he’s saved by a sure grip on formal tensions–in his case, too, arising out of keen observation. Botts gets loads of mileage out of economical tactics. In a section of “Western Sky #2,” the largest of his three paintings here, patches of luminous ochre, evanescent blue, and a spacious, warm off-white are all it takes to produce tangible fact: the weight of a cloud in a late afternoon sky. Silhouetting stylized sunflowers, the sky is in turn framed by a surround of grayed, more loosely brushed shapes that turn out on closer inspection to be a panoramic version of the same sky and flowers: a playful gambit of simultaneous/alternate views.
Where Botts’ color animates the sequences, references to Cubism or Pop seem irrelevant-who cares what an artist borrows if he makes it authentically his own? Botts’ constructions generally convince, although two heavy ultramarine bars running vertically across “Western Sky,” don’t help; they mechanistically repeat other blue elements rather than urging rhythms to the next degree, and one can’t help wondering wistfully what Juan Gris might have done.

But “Spring Vanishes Scraps of Winter” has no such shortcomings; here, the surround of neutral-colored, abstracted forms becomes the tense, measured foil for another glimpsed landscape-this one, too, made varied, rich, and spacious by a few well-chosen hues and shapes. Within, the ease of the movement from huge hovering petals to a tiny bit of distant shoreline is striking. Neatly punctuating the frame of grays are cryptic details-an odd rectangular scrap marked with a squiggle (perhaps the artist’s initial), a small white diamond shining from behind several curving, overlapping planes–that expand and intensify the scale of the rhythms. One sees a lot of cartoony images and splashy, doily-like abstractions in cutting-edge galleries, but they rarely achieve this weight of composition. This makes Botts’ contributions especially welcome; he shows that a free-wheeling, self-conscious exploitation of sources-now nature, now history, now his own in-progress facsimile of nature-can indeed result in meaningful painting.

Facing each other across the walls at Salander, the paintings of Lewis and Botts almost suggest Earnestness regarding Facility. Neither quality by itself, though, would make for memorable painting. The catalyst is the intensity of perception and reformulation in the language of paint, and it’s this reformulation that ultimately makes an image ‘real,’ whether it’s representational, abstract, or somewhere in-between. These two painters at Salander show that painting is indeed still something of a hallowed calling–that is, it’s a major art form, its learning curve is steep, and dedication to it leads to intense, idiosyncratic results.

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“brush, pencil, chisel, knife”
511 Gallery, 511 West 25 Street (212.255.2885).

Industrial Beauty
George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street (212.645.2621).

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration
Axel Raben Gallery, 526 West 26 Street, (212.647.9064).

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions
George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57 Street, 212.644.5665).

Versions of these reviews originally appearedThe New York Sun on Thursday, July 22 and Thursday, July 29, 2004

Willard Boepple: Sculpture

Willard Boepple is a sculptor whose vocabulary draws from the look and language of architecture. Architecture is a social art, a reflective instrument of the society for which it builds. Any sculpture that aggressively refers to it, leaning on the prestige of the architect’s craft, makes itself vulnerable to distinctions between the communal aims of architecture and the more individualistic ones of fine art. It risks the charge of mimicry, which is what remains once structural complexity, weight-bearing concerns and purposes of shelter and assembly are removed.“Room” (2000) is a nine foot high skeletal house-shape in patinated aluminum. Light on its feet and open like a trellis, each of its four sides resembles the leading of Frank Lloyd Wright’s characteristic stained glass windows. Here are the same closely paired verticals on each side of a broader rectangle, joined at intervals by short parallel bars. Where quadrangles of colored glass might be, Mr. Boepple drops aluminum panels perpendicular to their posts to serve as shelving.

Viewers are likely to wonder where on the lawn this shining gazebo would show to best effect. Seen straight, unfiltered through the lens of stylish discourse, it is unmistakably an upmarket garden folly. Picture it covered with wisteria vines, shelves stocked with dahlias and wild strawberries in Italian pots. Yes, I know the thought is inadmissible “in the ateliers of any pedantic fine art,” to use Wright’s phrase; and it is hardly what Mr. Boepple intended. But what an artist intends and what he achieves are not identical. It is a fallacy to confuse them.Mr. Boepple’s three dense, painted poplar “temples”, each from 2003, suggest compressed tabletop rearrangements of David Smith’s rectangular forms for “Cubi IX” (1961). Anyone interested in modern sculpture will be reminded also of the cubical variations of Jacques Schnier and Hans Aeschenbacher from the same period.

Designated as temples, Mr. Boepple’s block configurations assert kinship with the ancient megaron, precursor to Doric structures. (The megaron informs Wright’s Unity Church, which he referred to as a temple.) But Mr. Boepple’s suppressed entrances do not lead to any interior sanctum; they go clear through to the other side. Sacred space is displaced by a box puzzle, a simplified maze that exposes its own blind alley. If you rest a drink on top, no deities will be offended.

brush, pencil, chisel, knife”

511 Gallery (formerly Miller/Geisler) celebrates its name change with a group show of 13 of its artists. The exhibition is ambitious, aspiring to stretch common understanding of what constitutes painting and sculpture. It promises art that moves beyond crusty constraints to become more elastic in definition.

Lurking here is the assumption that tradition is an antique, like the stiffened antimacassar on the back of great-grandpa’s chair. It is an attitude aimed at audiences who comprehend tradition as a reiteration of the past rather than an inheritance to be interpreted by each generation for its own purposes.

511 showcases the fruits of that mistake. Post-industrial folk art is the reigning genre. Unlike the pre-industrial kind, made by untrained individuals, the post variant is a mass product forged in an art school vernacular. Outsider art is now insider art, a reversal enabled by pundits, promoters and academics for whom artwork exists as a mere incident en route to the commentary.

Jennifer Odem dyes a cheap crocheted table cloth red, soaks it in acrylic medium, then flops it on the floor to set. Ed Fraga takes the votive path with “Cathedral” ( 2001), a crude plywood construction that cobbles a headless Christmas ornament with a tiny landscape cut to the shape of a palladium window. Epoxy is his crucial medium. Matt Ernst’s series of small “Guideboats” (2002) gives a good imitation of the sort of thing children carry home from camp. Mark Cooper’s “Endless Column” (2002) is a roadside totem, cousin to ones that appear along the East River Drive under the overpass to the Triborough Bridge.

The most persuasive works are by those artists who are not straining for a style. Bryan Le Boeuf’s “Trois Bateaux” (2004), the centerpiece of his recent solo show, gives evidence of maturing to certain artistic convictions, something quite different from style. He combines sympathy for the human figure with a quirky, mildly surreal compositional wit. Watch to see where he takes it.

Sculptor Mark Mennin is similarly satisfying, mindful of the traditions of his craft. His single, small marble “Head” (2003) is a finely worked mask of a fleshy, homely male elevated by materials to a solemnity the model might lack in life. It projects from the wall at a slight angle, reminiscent of medieval gargoyles or a portrait head from the sedilia in Westminster Abbey.

Popular appreciation of landscape hinges on the romance of a good view. By contrast, the scenery of urban infrastructures—the natural setting of urban artists—is more challenging.

Even middling painters can produce attractive pictures of beautiful places. It takes more robust sensibilities to seek order and grace in city sights readily ignored. Easy pleasure is not available. Viewers are on their own to discover the emotional keynote to scenes that have nothing picturesque about them.

Industrial Beauty

“Industrial Beauty” exhibits cityscape paintings and drawings by 24 artists. So much intelligent work is here that there is not enough column space to give it its due. Let me start with Stephen Hicks who impresses with the beauty of his paint handling and the vigor of his perceptions. He brings emotional depth to ordinary street corners and mobile homes. Pitch-perfect color and careful drawing, disguised by the fluidity of his paint, elevate these small paintings above the random realities they depict.

Elizabeth O’Reilly draws magic out of the 3rd Street Bridge and derelict buildings on the Gowanus Canal. True as her paintings are to their locations in and around Red Hook, they serve as microcosms of the effects of modernity on the outer boroughs of every city. She shares with Mr. Hicks a lively brush and an optimism toward her subjects. Nicholas Evans-Cato’s wide-angled “Panorama” (2003) captures the atmospheric damp of rain-washed streets. Shadowless gray light, cool tonalities, gleaming puddles and sweep of space evoke Gustave Caillabotte’s Paris on a rainy day.

Ron Milewicz’ “Court House Square” (2003) is a coloristic tour de force, subordinating naturalism to the geometric structures of his motif and a high-keyed palette. The Citicorp building in Long Island City looks glorious in yellow. Geometry is also the hallmark of Rick Dula’s imposing cement factory, mathematical clarity of form taking precedence over subjective sensations.

Andrew Lenaghan negotiates the complexity and visual clutter of urban scenes with an ease of concentration that reminds me of Antonio Lopez-García’s great views of Madrid. So much is depicted, you barely notice how much is merely indicated or left out. Sudden touches of subtle color move the eye around the canvas; smooth surfaces belie the actual density of his paint.

Lois Dodd’s characteristic insouciance lends a hint of whimsy to factories in Jersey City. Richard Orient’s Long Island fish hatchery is touched with the same melancholy that informs rural barns. Thomas Connelly reveals the controlled order of a loading dock; his nightscape of a commercial lot is a harmony of brooding tones.

Diana Horowitz’ courtesy toward the man-made landscape is a constant pleasure. So is the work is Roland Kulla, Stephen Magsig, Constance La Palombara, Andrew Haines, Stanley Goldstein and others here.

Apart from Ms. Dodd, the show contains few names known outside New York painting circles. If celebrity is your guide to quality, you might as well catch the next Hampton jitney. But anyone with eyes will be glad to have seen this show.

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration

Collaboration in the arts has a long tradition; and pooling skills to extend the range of individual talent is a worthy activity. So I had hopes for this show.

I should have known better. Unlike the anonymous cooperation of the old workshop system, contemporary couplings exist to produce a two-headed prima donna. In Axel Raben’s exhibition of nine artist pairs, art work takes a rear seat to the synthetic dyads which are the true artifacts. Viewers are thrown into the faithless arms of the press release for guidance.

David Humphrey & Jennifer Coates have a game going: one suggests a subject; the other draws it. Thus, a “composite authorial self” is created. Drawings include a bare-bottomed Santa squatting to pass snowflakes; a cartoon cat biting a bunny beside a plateful of maggots. In this way “habits are disabled, inhibitions are dissolved … and skill-shortcomings encouraged.” Precisely.

Laura Lisbon & Suzanne Silver investigate “the mutual interference of layered mark-making.” They take turns scribbling on legal paper and post-it notes with colored pencil, likening their process to the Talmud (compiled over centuries by multiple commentators). To support their self-assessment, they exhibit their email correspondence, a text inclining to the grand.

Creighton Michaels, an otherwise attractive abstract painter, foregoes painting here for a conceptual gig. He inserts twig-like dowels individually into the wall, creating visual patterns similar to those in a kid’s book of mazes. Mr. Michaels’ installation is lit, sort of, by James Clark’s fluorescent bulbs in plastic bags. Bulbs are spotted with thumb prints, like a perp sheet. Team effort is deemed “an environment … a land of a thousand dances.”

Craig & Sean Miller provide handmade miniature shipping crates topped by a doll house gallery exhibiting a nano-sample of another artist’s work. These may be interpreted as “sculptures, performance pieces or a group portrait of contemporary art practice.” Unless a crate is just a crate.

The unspoken aim of all this conspicuous mutuality is to demonstrate that the artists make the grade as intellectuals. Art making is largely a platform for self-centered egos; the work of hands is a minor interest.

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions

Joan Brown ‘s work was a fey offspring of Bay Area figuration and funk art. Making and breaking rules to suit herself, she could be exasperating but she never bored.

On view at George Adams are works from the early 70’s: cardboard sculptures (begun in her kitchen from household materials while her studio was under renovation); a metal cutout; and large-scale paintings and drawings.

The more distant the post-60’s counter culture becomes, the more the paintings recede into the era and movements that generated them. But the constructions, rarely exhibited in her lifetime (1938-90), convey in full Ms. Brown’s distinctive inventiveness and humor. The fun of their making is still there to be seen.

Assembled here for the first time as a body of work, the constructions articulate a nimble faux-naif sophistication that survives the tropes of their times. Cutout couples dance around the deck of “Luxury Liner” (1973), a Noah’s Ark for party animals. The smokestack belches a musical score. “Divers” (1974) hangs from the ceiling so we can see the swimmers from above and below the water line. “Dancers on a Car” (1973 is just that: a couple waltzing across the hood of a 1940’s-style sedan, a Florine-Stettheimer-like fantasia in 3-D.

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“Abstract sculpture has the wonderful potential of catching people coming around a corner and making them say, ‘what the hell is that?'”

So says Willard Boepple (pronounced BUP-lee), whose point is proven at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries where he is staging his first solo New York show since 2000. Enter the marble foyer of this tony, Upper Eastside establishment, and glaring away in the downstairs room is what at first looks like the frame of a prefab garden hut. An impractical array of slats and beams and the dazzling metallic glare of burnished aluminum put paid to that idea, and initial familiarity gives way to deep sense of otherness.

Incongruous as it is, this nine-foot square open cube is not a pop-surreal artefact after all. In fact, the more you engage with it, the more drawn in you are by the intuitive decisions about placement and space. You can walk right through it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook: there is work to do, putting aesthetic flesh on this sculptural skeleton.

Shock may be vital, but for Mr. Boepple it is only a starter. “This thing, this object, this collection of wood or steel, has to justify its existence. This thing- does it make toast? does it hold open the door?- or is it just meant to be looked at? I love that engagement. What a test, to have to justify itself.”

Mr. Boepple is an unabashed modernist: an innovator within a strong, defined sculptural tradition that renews itself through passion and surprise. The artist once spoke of wanting his sculpture to be as naked as music, an ambition that makes sense of the strange mix of complexity and streamlining that characterizes his work. His aesthetic is refined, with enormous emphasis on economy and restraint, but he is no minimalist. He is not interested in reduction per se. In fact, the tighter the work, the more packed it is with formal intrigue.

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, VT in 1945. For a modernist sculptor who started out in welded metal this is rather like being born in Nasheville, TN for a country and western singer. In his youth, Bennington, with its legendary, progressive arts college, attracted some of the leading figures of the second generation New York School: the British sculptor Anthony Caro, taught there, while Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland lived nearby. The critical guru to this group, Clement Greenberg, gave his famous “Homemade Esthetics” seminars at the college, which was dubbed “Clemsville” by foes of his strict formalism.

“I came from it, like it or not,” says Mr. Boepple about growing up amidst this modernist powerhouse. “It has all got such a bad name in the last twenty years, but what an education, what a group. What a vital, live time it was for art.”

Mr. Boepple, who thought at first he would be a painter, was setting off to New York to find a loft in his nineteenth summer when the sculptor Isaac Witkin detained him with an offer to work as his assistant. “The first day I worked for Isaac I knew sculpture was where I belonged. It was the very physicality, the material, spatial facts of gravity, thickness, it was a bolt from above.” He went on to fabricate many of the tough, spare sculptures Jules Olitski made in the 1960s.

But Tony Caro was “the scuptor to contend with,” says Mr. Boepple in a phrase redolent of the macho, oedipal sense of moving forward through aesthetic struggle. Mr. Boepple’s first series of direct welded steel sculptures were his fireplaces. Like all his work, the commonplace objects they resemble only became clear during the creative process: It wasn’t that he set out to depict fireplaces. Distinguished debut though they were, his fireplaces were very much in harmony with the efforts of Mr. Caro’s countless disciples. “I was looking for a way to get out of the Caro School. Basically, horizontality was his solution to staying abstract. I wanted to go vertical and find a way of standing up that was not figurative. That’s where the stepladder came from.”

The ladder form became the first of three highly distinctive sculptural idioms. Later would come his shelves, and then the rooms. In all these works, there is a striking resemblance to a form utterly familiar in day to day life, and that relate closely to the workings of the body. We climb ladders, put things on shelves, enter and inhabit rooms: all are shaped around ourselves without being bodies themselves.

“If you take a broom and stick it in the ground, you read it as a figure, as you do almost anything vertical, a bottle, whereas a ladder, because of its structural logic, plus its familiarity as something we know and use and feel, escapes that. Maybe it is just having three or four legs which makes them less figuratively read. If you schematize it, ladders probably relate more to architecture than the body.”

It is disconcerting to hear him comment that the ladder is less figural for having three or four legs because Mr. Boepple in fact walks with aid of crutches. This is the legacy of Guillain-Barré Syndrome which struck in 1982 and totally changed his life, and the way he would make art. He was totally paralysed for many months and was left with seriously restricted dexterity.

“When I am asked this question, which I often am, ‘Was there a big break?’ I would almost viscerally answer, No! When I picked up the activity of sculpture again, after that “interlude”, the ladders were where I began. But of course there were changes and differences not simply driven by the medium and the way of working.” He had to give up welding in metal and turn to wood, working through assistants. “As it happens, there is a logic to making ladders in wood, yet I would not have done them in wood were it not for the illness.”

He resumed his work on the ladders, but when a sense of things bursting out of each step took hold, his interest segued into a new form: the shelf. Perhaps his new physical realities conditioned the shift from a form which engages the whole body to one that relates to the hand. “The first of these things started with letter boxes, ‘in-out’ boxes that you have on a desk or shelf, very hand scaled, that you reach into and put things in,” he observes. “Much like the step ladder, it relates to the body with a visual logic that helps build the sculpture.”

The shelves, like the ladders, varied enormously from one piece to the next in terms of complexity or simplicity, movement or stasis. “They come out of the world of mechanical objects, sewing machines, stamping machines, paddles on a steamer, some kind of castanet, who the hell knows?” Often they have a sense of velocity, as if the elements were caught in the act of flapping around or rotating. But he was never tempted to make actual kinetic sculpture. “I want it to be seen the way it is when it is made. I don’t want it controlled by the wind or the viewer. I want the viewer’s participation in it to be driven by the object as it is seen, not by an arbitrary variety.”

Mounted on the wall, often forming a rectangle, the shelves can be read in theatrical terms, with incidents filling the proscenium like action on a stage. And then the rooms can be walked through, or even, in the case of a gazebo he has constructed at his Bennington property, inhabited. What does all this do the viewing experience: are his sculptures objects or environments? “Given the choice, gun to my head, I would say object,” he replies, but then he goes further: “It seems to me that the environment/stage notion is a pictorial way of looking at these objects, and I don’t think they are pictorial.”

They are sculptural in the sense of being involved with three dimensions, and yet there is a striking absence of tactility about the work. Perhaps this reflects the mediated way in which they are made, through assistants. It also goes to the heart of an aesthetic which emphasizes transparency. He was so curious about the inner life of his constructions that he took to casting them in resin, with ethereal, otherworldly and at the same time very empirical results. The rooms also grew out of a desire to make sculpture see-through.

“The rooms came out of a dumb idea. Thinking of the shelves in terms of domestic scale, I wanted to build a structure in which such objects could reside, but the structure itself stopped me and took over. It said, ‘Wait a sec- This is it!’ I did put one shelf in an early one but it looked liked an airconditioner hanging in a window.”

The way he colors or treats his surfaces also makes sculptural experience more visual than tactile. Color is always a late, and secondary decision. It often has to do with “pushing the woodiness of the wood into the distance so that you are aware of the form first and the wood second.” He resents it when people way, “What gorgeous wood, I love wood. And oh! It’s a sculpture.” It should be the other way around. Similarly, the brazen, electric dazzle of the metal surface of “Room” at Salander-O’Reilly dematerializes the aluminum. “You see through it more than you would if the surfaces were dark or solid.”

His career path can look as neat and in its place as his individual sculptures, with ladders evolving through shelves to the open rooms, and finding a synthesis in his calmly enigmatic “temples,” as he has reluctantly named the last group of freestanding wooden constructions. But Mr. Boepple doesn’t see his progress in anything like such placid terms. “Very often, the discoveries come from desperation, from not knowing where to turn or what to do.”

Does he wake up in the morning with a sculptural idea? “Often a sensation: Let’s do this with it.” With “it” implies that the sculpture is already underway. “I say ‘with it’ because a sculpture almost always comes out of the one before, reaction, variation. If the idea is not directly related to the last one then it is the sensation of getting physical–‘get boisterous, come on, these are too placid.’ It’s reacting: Attentuate, pound and pack, or Lift open, slam shut, jam.”

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 8, 2004

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May 5 to June 5, 2004

“He is the rare and exceptional genius and the father of modern landscape painting,” noted Delacroix noted in 1861. “He is still the strongest, he has anticipated everything,” Degas affirmed some 20 years later. “There is only one master here…Compared to him, the rest of us are nothing, absolutely nothing.” (Monet, 1897) The object of all this adulation is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and at least a couple twentieth-century artists seemed to have agreed: Picasso actually owned several of his paintings, and in 1912 Matisse listed his favorite masters as Goya, Dürer, Rembrandt, Manet, and yes, Corot.

Surprised? Corot obviously supplied these painters with what they asked of art, but his star has sunk considerably since–“The official Corot is generally a bore.” (Robert Hughes, 1996) Corot’s low-key paintings, with their traditional subjects, their unflashy brushwork and subtle colors, won’t grab those looking for demonstrative technique or psychological undercurrents. Unlike Manet or Courbet, his images never hint at subverting an existing order-Rule No. 1, of course, for any relevant art. And in regards to Rule No. 2, Corot’s work illuminates absolutely nothing about the connection between artist and audience, unless you find the escapist fantasy of feathery trees and mist-drenched lakes to be a kind of social commentary.

Matisse and Degas knew of what they spoke, however. Corot’s virtues are formidable, though they assume a kind of communication between painter and viewer instead of explicating it. Like Courbet, Rembrandt and other masters, Corot was supremely conscious of the geometric relationships of forms and colors, and for the receptive viewer his paintings communicate a remarkable vitality of gesture and scale, whether the subject be trees, figures, panoramas, or interiors. While not subversive, Corot’s work is certainly innovative. Unlike Claude Lorrain’s logical spatial recessions, his energized space is full of the contradictions of observed light; he “subverted” traditional notions of space by coaxing a purely empirical experience of nature, somehow untrammeled, through a classical discipline of forms and intervals. His quiet paintings are indeed the most powerful connection between neo-Classicism and Impressionism. (And you’ll notice that Matisse’s list includes no painters from either of these schools.)

For those who delight in this lyrical language of form, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries’ Early Paintings by Corot was one of the season’s real treats. The fifteen small oils date mostly from the artist’s first stay in Italy, the period from 1825-28 that marked the culmination of his years of study. He apparently considered these works just studies (exhibiting only one of them during his lifetime), but their crisp brushstrokes, bold delineations of masses and nuanced, planar colors make them among his most widely praised paintings today.

“Lake Como and the Town,” (1834) is the latest painting here, but it reflects the broad attack of his early style. Its motif-a cluster of domes and towers nestled under ragged mountains viewed across a glistening alpine lake-is nothing if not picturesque. Corot’s impulse, however, is not to render the scenic but to uncover its rhythmic meaning. He actually explained his approach: he first established outlines, then tones, then colors, and finally qualities of finish. One can sense the start of the process in the stark outlines of distant peaks that, crossing the image’s full horizontal dimension, eerily mirror the jagged shoreline at the viewers’ feet, elasticizing the painting’s entire middle space. Swathes of tones within this space separate elements into two camps: those areas warmed by sunlight, and those deprived of it. Subtle colors further differentiate the tones, and as these dozens of colored patches shift with the dictates of the light, their sequences also gather somehow into the “real” impulses of objects in space and light; gestures attain weight, so that mountains (wedges of elusive, mauve-green-gray shadows among warm, olive-hued flanks) lumber gracefully above the staccato, horizontal facets of buildings (pale pinkish flicks among somber reddish-umber shadows.) Close up on the canvas’ right edge (one can almost touch it) a dark tree trunk runs up the vertical dimension, rhyming playfully with the tiny, distant verticals of towers.

Strategically hung opposite the entrance, this small sketch quietly gleams from across the room. Its brilliance lies not in heightened “realistic” description but in a luminous comprehension of plastic rhythms. It neatly illustrates a point: though often considered a “tonal painter” Corot is actually a superb colorist. No tone in this sketch exists apart from color, which becomes the engine that drives the rhythms.

Another gem in the exhibition is “Venice: Santa Maria della Salute from the Campo della Carita,” (1828), in which brisk hues and strokes cohere as gondolas and canal receding towards a distant church. Their hues vividly capture the Venetian atmosphere, but the visual weight of these forms also initiates a larger rhythm in which dark swoops of prows oppose lights of domes, again animating the middle space. Eighty years later Monet was to depict the same kind of scene on his trip to Venice, and while his surfaces are more luscious and his atmosphere richer and denser, he rarely attained this sketch’s agile sense of rhythm and scale. In the Corot one arrives at details in their appointed time; as the waters of the canal recede into the painting’s depths, the eye rests finally upon a small patch of distinctly darker blue, and the pause lends a restive breadth to the whole shimmering plane leading up to it. One suspects that the artist reveled not just in the exotic stimuli of a scene, but also in what each element meant.

The same might be said of “Cloudy Sky,” (1826-28), a study of scuttling clouds that irresistibly begged comparison with the paintings upstairs in Salander’s concurrent exhibition, Constable’s Skies. Corot can’t match the churning volumes and empassioned brushwork of the English master, but again, he imparts something else: a sense of pacing-in this case, of moving from streams of clouds compressed along the lower edge to a broad and vacant portion of sky above, which the artist punctuates with a single, self-contained cloud. If there’s more Sturm und Drang to Constable’s skies, then Corot’s image has more of the fleet-footed variety of classical representation.

In later years, of course, Corot’s style turned increasingly towards the feathery, mist-drenched landscapes that (in the words of Vincent Pomarède, curator at the Louvre Museum) “perfectly matched the tastes of the provincial middle classes of the late nineteenth century.” The sentimentality of description in many of these works can indeed by cloying, but it’s worth noting that in his later life Corot often worked simultaneously in different styles for paintings that ranged from large mythological scenes for the Salons to intimate portraits, and from hazy river scenes to crystalline town views. A second, deeper look at these paintings reveals the same Corot at work, who, never content with mere description, always located the mass of a tree with the authority of a master. It should be added that throughout his painting life he was a transparently clumsy stylist by the Academy’s standards; the irony is that his naïve modeling, so regularly condemned by his detractors up until his late, “fuzzy” paintings, was to become part of the appeal of his early work for later critics.

Was he a naïve sentimentalist, or a practical man absolutely secure in his priorities? Quite likely he was both. Contemporary accounts confirm that he was a deeply kind and modest man, but also a painter of great ambition and determination. He endured two decades of relative obscurity and sometimes venomous criticism (“…There are those who call that painting. They are very kind…”), but once his career blossomed in late middle age, he could be diffident to a fault. (“It would take so little to make it a real Corot. Here!” he purportedly exclaimed as he reworked and signed one of the countless “Corot” forgeries. His more noble gestures include buying a house for the elderly and destitute Daumier and providing for Millet’s widow.) It might be fair to say that he knew what mattered to him privately in art and publicly in life, and found ways of accommodating the two.
Now if only Corot had been slightly more obliging, he would have produced not just a bumper crop of paintings in the currently popular style, but also a whole secret cache for future tastes. Oddly, such a scenario did come to pass, in a sense. After the artist died at the ripe age of 78, the Paris art world was surprised to find he had been quietly at work on a large series of figure paintings. Many of these works, as luminous in color and expansive in gesture as anything he’d done, with possibly a newly meditative quality, are among his most extraordinary efforts. These late figure paintings happen to be Degas’ favorite Corots.

They also provoke a tantalizing notion. Someday, might they too become the occasion for a Salander-O’Reilly exhibition?

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“Michael Steiner: Sculpture” at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries through January 3 (20 East 79 Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212 879 6606)

“Morris Louis” at Paul Kasmin Gallery, through December 31 (293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street, 212 563 4474)

Sir Anthony Caro is the most prolific and influential British sculptor since Henry Moore. To mark his eightieth birthday, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren has laid on a handsome show, which closes this weekend, of a dozen smaller pieces mostly from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. These include examples of two of his extended series, the often highly engaging “table pieces” and “writing pieces”.

Mr. Caro has devoted a career to breaking rules: first the received ones that greeted his arrival on the scene in the late 1950s, and subsequently the ones he invented himself, often to be followed dogmatically by acolytes. He insisted, for instance, on distancing sculpture from conventional statuary by placing it directly on the ground, without a pedestal of any kind. But then he re-embraced the plinth with aplomb, making the support vital and integral to the sculptural experience.

In the monumental sculptures for which he is best known, Mr. Caro reveals his twin allegiances to the soft modernism of Moore and the hard modernism of David Smith. His language oscillates disarmingly between the brutal and the whimsical, regardless of scale. In these smaller works, however, there is an uncharacteristic degree of expressivity and involvedness. We see him looking over the shoulders of his “two fathers”, as he has identified his mentors, to the common sculptural grandfather: Picasso.

The appropriately calligraphic “writing pieces”, in particular, recall Picasso’s early forays into direct welding, with Julio Gonzalez as his guide. “Writing Piece ‘This’,” (1979) employs as its found elements a rusty saw and some kind of handle or crank. There is barely any sense of “appropriation” in the Pop or surreal sense, but that doesn’t necessarily make Mr. Caro the pure formalist he has been cracked up to be: There are complex language games at play, as components both shed and regain their powers of signification.

These enigmatic pieces can evoke another kind of writing, which also militates against formalism: a sense of narrative. This is not to suggest that specific stories are being told-he is resolutely abstract; rather, the structure and complexity of the pieces denies the viewer the satisfaction of the single take, forcing an extended, almost sequential reading of the different events going on within. “Table Bronze ‘Chemical Box’, (1987) for instance, is an animated grid in the tradition of early Smith, the pictograms of Torres-Garcia, or even the Surrealist phase of Giacometti.

The variety of materials, including not just different metals but, cohabiting in single pieces, the welding and casting processes, all suggest restless inquiry. And yet despite his protean creativity there is a strange aloofness of touch, a lack of overt sensuality. Perhaps this is because so much of the grunt work is done by assistants. But somehow the restraint seems more intentional, an insistence that the true content is the relationship of parts, not the fashioning or finding of the parts themselves. This suggests that with all his dancing around and breaking of rules, Mr. Caro is, at heart, a formalist after all.

***

To the circle around Clement Greenberg, the New York critic who was so instrumental in promoting Mr. Caro at the outset of his career, Michael Steiner was the “white hope” for an American link in the constructivist chain. At the tender age of 18, Mr. Steiner staged his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966, just around the time when Mr. Caro’s ascension was being assured. Of the two, Mr. Steiner now seems more faithful to the idiom of open-form construction.

His current show at Salander’s-lie Mr. Caro’s at Artemis-reveals an uncharacteristic intimacy, in terms both of size and touch. Hardly intimate in mood, however, these grids have the unavoidable connotation of cages. The mottled surfaces, though literally sensitive to touch (they are cast from wax and patinated to look as if they were painted in dollops of tar) are alienating in their sheer oddity.

In a formal sense these works achieve their density through a fugal relationship of one grid misregistering with another (one grid will be on the diagonal to another on the vertical/horizontal, for instance). Large luminous gouaches play on a similar motif.

Other pieces court utility: they evoke machines or boats, with slats, pistons, and portholes, without reading literally as functional objects per se. In their ponderous way, these pieces hint at whimsy, but they are in a minority in this show. The lasting impression made by the bronze jails, with their grim surfaces and austere structures, is of tragic grandeur.

***

With these two Greenberg protégés under your belt, you will want to visit one of the critic’s favorite painters, Morris Louis. Paul Kasmin has a varied selection of large canvases from 1958-60, the years when, quite late in his truncated career, Louis hit his stride.

The artist was a prodigious editor of his own work, often taking his destructive cue from a shake of Greenberg’s head. While this show includes top notch examples of familiar Louis motifs within his stain painting idiom, including “Bronze”, a “veil” from 1958, and “Delta Upsilon,” and “Theta Gamma,” two “stripes” from 1960, the show includes works in which there are dense and, by Louis’s standards, almost brushy expanses of flat color. “Addition VI,” (1959) closely recalls Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountain and Sea,” (1952), whose seminal influence on Louis is well documented.

The chance to see works in the estate of the artist that the artist himself might never have exhibited is raising eyebrows among the Greenbergian “faithful” (I visited the show with a stalwart) but actually it can only do Louis good. The best case scenario is posthumous reinvention. The second best is confirmation that he had good taste as an editor and knew the worth of his more canonical inventions, despite the relative obscurity in which he worked, painting in a suburban dining room in Washington DC.: “Theta Gamma”, for instance, which really belongs in a museum (although American museums have plenty of Louis’s languishing in their vaults).

His genius was to discover forms distinct enough to avoid geometric reduction yet impersonal enough to convey color as an end in itself.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 26, 2003

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Gregory Amenoff: Paintings, at Salander-O’Reilly
20 E 79th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-879-6606, through October 25

Peter Heinemann: Flamingo Heaven, at Gallery Schlesinger
24 E 73, 2nd floor, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-734-3600, through October 30

The story of Picasso’s protean struggles with style is fraught with contradictions, and never more so than when it came to classicism. This was the moment (roughly 1917 through the mid-1920s) when the greatest innovator in 20th-century art suddenly seemed to lead its rear guard as well.

“Picasso: The Classical Period” is a sumptuous exhibition of two dozen works at C&M Arts accompanied by a catalogue by the redoubtable Picasso biographer, John Richardson.

Picasso’s classicism is seen as his answer to a general “call to order” among the avant-garde in the wake of World War I. After all that carnage, cubism, whose antics implied anarchy and fragmentation, cut too close to the bone. Other artists who followed this call, tempering their earlier modernist excesses with new restraint, harmony, and wholeness, included Leger, Derain, Cocteau, and Stravinsky.

But art is always more complicated than this. In Picasso, in particular, competing tendencies perplexingly overlap. The serene finesse of his Ingres-inspired portraits of his haughty new Russian ballerina wife, Olga, cohabits in his oeuvre with ongoing variations on synthetic cubism – the colorful “cheat” cubism with which he subverted his own analytical principles.

In 1917 Picasso visited Rome in the company of Cocteau and the choreographer Léonide Massine to work on the ballet Parade for Diaghilev. He also took a couple of excursions to Naples and was blown away by Pompeii and by the colossi in the Museo Nazionale’s Farnese galleries. The gigantism that would characterize his stocky classical nudes, including what Mr. Richardson calls the “bananization” of limbs, apparently had its inspiration here, though the contemporary example of Aristide Maillol must also have played a role. These influences took just three years to gestate, and a flowering of neo-classicism occurred in 1920.

This fabulously selected (or fortuitously eclectic) show reveals how, within this one specific style, there is a range of tendencies as diverse as the competing styles in the career at large: The microcosm compresses the diversity of the bigger mix. Some pictures here throw together different kinds of representation almost as boldly as the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” even as they adhere to the kind of compositional unity the earlier masterpiece eschewed.

The show celebrates the 10th anniversary of C&M Arts, the most tony of uptown galleries. Flexing some muscle, they have secured loans from the Met, the Modern (the seminal “Three Women at the Spring,” 1921), and other named collections. Choice examples of Greco-Roman statuary are interspersed throughout the show. In a way, though, the real gems here are the drawings and oil sketches, in which Picasso frequently betrays more than he does in the big machines.

The pastels, in particular, have a tough awkwardness that recalls the tortuous early romanticism of Cézanne, and is a far cry from the poise and tenderness of the conte crayon “Portrait in 3/4 Profile” (1923) or the almost Rococo finesse of “Conversation” (also 1923). A small (32″ long) “Bathers” recalls, in its central figure, Cézanne’s grand Bather of 1895. Whatever revolutions or counter-revolutions occurred in Picasso’s crazy career, Cézanne remained the unchallenged constitutional monarch.

Picasso sometimes looked to the ancients with a freshness that belies any sense of the “retardaire”; at other times, he filtered the classics through 18th- and 19th-century revivals. But even as he played games with language, he pushed that language forward. The enigma of Picasso is that, even as a pasticheur, he retained the energy and drive of a pioneer.

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Gregory Amenoff came of age as a painter in another period of bombastic revivals: the early 1980s, an age of plate-smashing neo-expressionism and camp classicism. His neo-romantic landscapes, with their mystical overtones and old masterly touch, may have seemed a counter to such excesses, but he shared many characteristics of the period, too. He was no stranger, for instance, to the stragegic dislocations of scale and language.

Mr. Amenoff’s works have often been complicated, in a wild-man sense, throwing the eye around with a bewildering array of effects. The ambitious, highly wrought landscapes in his current show at Salander-O’Reilly are similarly dense, and as intriguing as any he has made. What is new is a convincing harmony that suggests maturity of vision. Complication is seen growing into complexity.

Mr. Amenoff’s language hovers between the perceptual and the metaphysical, between groundedness and mysticism, detail and the grand view. “Eastertide” (2003), a 10’wide panorama, has the viewer peer over jagged foreground rocks at a long highland view. The contrast between the zig-zagging, flattened-out rocks and the soft greens of the landscape behind recalls the geometric-organic contrast in Miró’s early Catalan landscapes, not to mention Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden.” To my eye, the most likeable painting in the show is the much smaller “Ecco Pool II” (2003), which has the compacted glow of a Marsden Hartley or an Albert Pinkham Ryder.

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Peter Heinemann’s compact, eccentric exhibition at Gallery Schlesinger should not be missed. It consists of an 8′ x 12′ diptych, “Flamingo Heaven” (2003); three supporting drawings; and an early, Beckmann-esque self-portrait. For many years, Mr. Heinemann has led a weekly drawing workshop at the School of Visual Arts, and the interchange here between his empirical life drawing and the stylized figuration of his mural is quite fascinating. His charcoal drawings consist of myriad quick studies arranged on two large pages, and often heap figures on top of one another in darkening clusters that contrast with spares expanses of empty page, in a way that brings to mind Botticelli’s Dante illustrations.

The outlined figures in the mural, meanwhile, bring more decadent forebears to mind, from Beardsley to the newly fashionable outsider Henry Darger. In the drastic economy of his figuration there is even a hint of SVA’s most famous alumnnus, Keith Haring, although Mr. Heinemann is incapable of Haring’s degree of banality. Mr. Heinemann depicts a Garden of Earthly Delights in which, after a bacchanal (Puvis de Chavannes set to the Beatles), everyone is turned into a flamingo. There is music-making, jousting, and flirting by a cast of cartoon characters of diverse size, scale, and style. There are Native American Kachina heads, Mohican hairdos, characters of different generations and epochs, even (by the look of it) Martians. Stock characters dance, do the splits, or loll about post-coitally. Mr. Heinemann’s heaven is blessed with a miraculous interplay of flatness and depth, density and openness, overlap and individuality.

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