April 8 to June 13, 2008

Despite the exhibition title, bluebirds appear in only two of the seven paintings in Peter Heinemann’s latest exhibition at Schlesinger. Far more evident are their pursuers: the three cats that frolic, groom and pounce through his quixotic canvases. Their half-comic, half-fearsome demeanor could sum up the tone of the artist’s own curious investigations in paint. The exhibition, Mr. Heinemann’s twelfth with the gallery, is presented in conjunction with Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects.

Compared to the brooding self-portraits that the artist painted for some 30 years, these recent paintings suggest domestic harmony – or perhaps something more like household rollicking, because on closer inspection they turn out to be far from tame. Heinemann’s intensity, always apparent in his incisive, schematized shapes and hues, now describe with awkward purposefulness the trappings of rustic life: still lifes of dry good scales, vases, and lawn ornaments, and outdoor scenes populated by bird feeders and flower gardens – and, most notably, by the cats which by turns resemble inert, furry spheres or rocketing pillows with lethal teeth.

Heinemann leans on a few modernist devices, such as simplified outlines, flattened, single-color backgrounds, and, occasionally, the combining of frontal and overhead views. These he employs, however, towards thoroughly original ends. In “Studio Still Life,” (2007) an array of ordinary objects – kerosene lamp, scale, and a life-size sculpture of a chicken – disport themselves across two small tables in a lively circulation of angles. Subtle rhymings soon become evident: the blade of a fan, mirroring the chicken’s tail; the tip of a cat’s ear passing the corner of a table; the tiny orange note of a distant cat – glimpsed through a window – echoing the chicken’s red comb.

Things get curiouser and curiouser in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, with charm and threat mixed in equal proportions. In “Pink Tree & the Bluebird of Happiness” (2008), the same orange cat, now up-close, hurtles towards a bird, its leap measured inch for inch by a climbing vine of flowers. The tips of two sneakers at the canvas’ extreme lower edge indicate the presence of the artist, who proceeds to fix on his own targets. These include the odd, pink, shield-shaped tree facing us squarely in the mid-distance, its frontal impact matched by a square bird feeder framed by another tree trunk. Little clouds scoot above a woman in a remote field, while, a few canvas-inches away, a squirrel – equal in size because of its proximity to the viewer – shimmies up the birdfeeder’s pole.

Every domestic event in these paintings takes on aspects of the paranormal as Heinemann dissects it for pictorial possibilities. In “Prophet Pirate Poet” (2007), the mouth of a vase of daffodils on a table echoes the curling tail of a cat on the floor behind it. Curving flower stems play against the loops of the birdfeeder’s post and a lantern’s handle in “Summer Still Life” (2007). Heinemann’s colors support such conundrums throughout, giving weight to each visual pun. In this respect the images recall the arcane intensity of Arnold Friedman’s paintings, or perhaps the early work of Milton Avery, only charged through with a sly edginess.

Die-hard devotees of Bonnard or Matisse might wish for more climactic outcomes – for a gathering of these tensions towards a singular effect: the edification of an interior unified by a particular illumination, or the broad counterposing of interior and exterior light. But this is nitpicking; the artist’s affectionate mistrust of his world is contagious.

“Cement Chicken” (2007) strikes a high note, of a sort, with its reverberations of intersecting pursuits. Here the orange cat leaps towards an unseen object, while tiers of flowering plants arc behind like a succession of ocean waves – and in-between, a cat, a longitudinal stretching of yellow-gray fur, snares a hapless bluebird. Taking in the scene with impassive, beady-eyed curiosity is the chicken sculpture – and, one suspects, Mr. Heinemann too.

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GWEN HARDIE: FACE PAINTINGS 2005
Dinter Fine Art until December 23 (547 W. 27th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-947-2818).

RICHARD WALKER: BEACON ROAD PAINTINGS
Alexandre Gallery until December 30 (41 E. 57th Street, 13th floor, at Madison Avenue, 212-755-2828).

(only Hardie and Harvey sections appeared in print)

Stephen Harvey’s eye is as acrobatic as his lithe models. In elaborately choreographed studio setups, he has nude female figures spread-eagled, tipped, and splayed on lushly animated sheets. Stridently lit, they cavort wildly with their own reflections. When, at times, they seem to fly across the canvas, viewers are left to deduce that the bodies in view are mirror images.

The mirror has been crucial to Mr. Harvey’s work for many years, but it is no longer a visible prop. This makes the suspended limbs in these paintings all the more startling — they throw the viewer into a pleasingly vertiginous, ambiguous space recalling a Tiepolo ceiling. And it is not just the artist’s perspective that has taken a gymnastic turn. The models have given up on the decorous poses familiar in Mr. Harvey’s earlier work, opting instead for corporeally expressive extremes: They lunge where they were once content to lounge.

Smooth flesh and crumpled sheets make for a highly sexed atmosphere, yet a chaste air pervades Mr. Harvey’s show at the intimate Gallery Schlesinger. Apollo, rather than Dionysius, is the presiding deity at what is more of an Olympiad than an orgy. The games these pictures play have to do with perception — nudity and athleticism are a strictly cerebral tease.

Mr. Harvey’s art has evolved within the strictly circumscribed genre of the studio nude. These latest works are unprecedented in his oeuvre in terms of scale, verve, and focus. His palette is a long way from the lugubrious monochrome of his 1990s blue period; he has also shed the almost filigree-like black outlines that used to make his paintings seem like colored-in drawings. The color is now a big-time player in the form of garish crimson, purple, even turquoise sheets against sumptuous glistening flesh.

The paint is swift and fluent in delivery, although there is no attempt to match the expressivity of the poses with painterly gusto or flourishes. Mr. Harvey is an obdurately flat painter, and insists on a democracy of treatment across the pictorial plane. (The exceptions occur in the small, deliciously impastoed untitled canvases.) He does, however, concede, in painterly terms, some differentiation between actual and reflected flesh. In “Nalu” (2005), the curves of a crouching, wisp-waisted model are accentuated almost to the point of chiarascuro; in contrast, there is a subtle dulling of tone and thinning of brush for her mirror-view rear.

Where the big early influence on Mr. Harvey was Paul Georges’s dramatized sense of the studio as locus of voluptuous self-discovery, the new work looks elsewhere. Here are elements of the tightly coded mannerism of Philip Pearlstein and the existential contortionism of Lucian Freud, but unlike these stalwarts of the studio nude, Mr. Harvey demands a degree of balletic dynamism from the model.

Only in two canvases — “Curvatura” and “Halawa I” (both 2004) — is the artist’s presence overt; a pair of feet and a hand, respectively, are spotted on the periphery of these compositions. Otherwise, he is the absent presence for whose benefit the challenging, suggestive poses are struck. Often, narcissistically, the model stares at her reflected self. Sometimes, she is so close to the mirror that her actual and reflected self conjoin, visually, as a single, extended body. In “Curvatura,” there is a disconcerting moment where the reflected head meets a mass of black hair atop the actual body, making her look like a Hans Bellmer doll with the head twisted out of shape.

But the intention doesn’t come across as willfully perverse (at least in the erotic sense). Mr. Harvey’s mannerism makes anatomical sense once you manage to place the figure in real space. He remains a lover of drastic, almost sadistic cropping, but sometimes, as in “Halawa I,” the edge of the canvas has a solidifying force, as if the backward-lolling figure were finding support from the pictorial frame. Rather than ends in themselves, Mr. Harvey’s extreme, forced poses are at the service of perception, forcing painter and viewer alike to confront limbs free of conventional associations and comfortable, gravity-bound familiarity.

Gwen Hardie shares radical cropping and defamiliarization with Mr. Harvey, but her painting occupies a very different place in terms of sensibility and ethic. The Scots artist, who relocated to New York recently, achieved a significant reputation in the U.K. with her ethereal, near-abstract figurative paintings that cited psychoanalysis and Buddhism in their explorations of the self. In recent years, she had exhibited abstract paintings with subtle trompe-l’oeil effects, in which it seemed as if a pointed object were pushing into the back of the canvas to suggest a point where planes diverge. The body is back in her third New York solo show — her first at Dinter Fine Art — though near-abstraction remains the order of the day.

Ms. Hardie’s sumptuously austere selection of three “Face Paintings” blow up isolated, less than obvious intersections of facial features to create an oxymoronic state of intimacy and alienation. “Face 03.24.05” (2005) presents a facial segment from upper lip to nasal tip in a 6-foot-square canvas. Looking at this enigmatic, out of focus image I couldn’t help thinking of Sargent’s portrait of Madame X, misreading the black shadow of nostrils at the top corners of the composition as negative space around shoulders and neck, the lip as the red satin bodice, the crevasse as breasts. The other two canvases are more straightforwardly realistic and legible, and to my eye less interesting, although “Face 11.23.04” which shows the eyes, nose, and brow of the artist, evidently squinting in self-regard, is a serene painterly delight.

The debut New York show of Ms. Hardie’s fellow Scot, Richard Walker, is currently on view at Alexandre Gallery. It is a gem. Mr. Walker recently held a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Conn. In the months he was there, it seems, he developed an American painting accent. His small, evidently plein-air responses to wintry woods, painted in a deft, fresh hand on masonite, strongly recall Lois Dodd (which is no doubt what alerted him to Mr. Alexandre), Edwin Dickinson, and Alex Katz.

Mr. Walker is known in the U.K. for focused, understated, sparse interiors that recall Hammershøi, Corot, and Menzel, but the new landscapes look to be swifter in both observation and execution. The painter’s loosening up has entailed some bravura touches—joyously spontaneous scumbling, sgraffito, and painterly splurges — without diminishing his calm, thoughtful perceptual acuity.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 8, 2005

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“Nobu Fukui” at Stephen Haller Gallery through May 18 (542 W26 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 741 7777)

“Alexander Liberman: No Regrets” at Ameringer Yohe, through April 24 (20 W 57th Street, bewteen fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212 445 0051)

“Fred Sandback” through end May at Lawrence Markey Gallery 42 East 76th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212 517 9892, and at Zwirner and Wirth, through May 1, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-86

Minimalism was so strenously and self-consciously iconoclastic, with its prim reductions, its insistently banal primary structures, and its chromophobia, that there is an almost equally iconoclastic pleasure to be had in work that takes up some aspect of this movement but recklessly adds whimsy or gaiety.

Several shows up right now that fit this bill. None of the artists set out to debunk minimalism: one historically precedes it, others dutifully pay homage to the movement. But it doesn’t require a radical misreading of these artists to see an implicit critique of puritanism in their catholic displays of gesture or color.

The small painted boxes of Stuart Arends know how to behave in polite company: They have been collected assidiously by the Panza di Buomo Collection in Italy, which specializes in minimal and monochromatic art. But they are touched by a delicacy and personal, even poetic quality that belies any sense of severity.

The artist has insisted on their status as paintings rather than sculptures, suggesting in a statement that accompanies the show that he arrived at the box as his preferred support out of a desire to deal with a painting as an object “rather than just a format for illusions”. The box isn’t suggestive of a receptical; rather it is just a canvas whose wrap around edges happen to have equal weight to its frontage.

The painting is made up of neatly delineated, irregularly overlapping rectangles. There is a specificness to his touch, which is restrained but personal, sealed-in (with much use of wax) and at the same time differentiated, with a different kind of brushstroke for each rectangle. As if to emphasize the personality of these charmingly particular objects, Mr. Arends has called his show “Friends,” giving each piece a person’s name. His show is a party where you want to linger and meet everyone.

In 1965 Nobu Fukui elicited a cryptic description from Donald Judd, the high priest of minimalism, in a brief notice in Arts Magazine: “The paintings are well done; there isn’t anything wrong with them-they aren’t elegant, bland or affected-but they are like other paintings.” While Mr. Fukui’s work has changed radically in the intervening decades-his aesthetic is now exuberant and layered to the point of being baroque-Judd’s enigmatic categorizations hold true with remarkable alacrity.

Mr. Fukui is an artist who, literally, juggles many balls: a typical work lays upon a ground of richly detailed, dense gestural and/or collaged texture a rigid grid structure populated at the intersections of its ruled lines with irregular clusters of colored uniformly sized dots and, less frequently, actual balls (they could be beads or marbles) dipped in paints of the same primary and nursery colors.

The viewer soon gets used to these grids and balls so that they shimmer on the retina like a layer of pointillism. There is, however, an insistent democracy between the layers, and within each layer, despite the irregularity, an all-overness that achieves order without symmetry or ubiquity. The collage materials, where he uses them, hover ingeniously between interestingness and gratuity. In fact, his whole project seems to be a bravura balancing act of meaning and decoration, as if these aesthetic categories themselves are willed equivalents of order and chaos.

Dots and balls of a sparer nature but no less whimsy and charm filled the works of Alexander Liberman between 1950-1960, an elegant selection of which, installed in direct emulation of a show staged by the artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960, closes at Ameringer Yohe this weekend. Reviewing the Parsons show in Arts magazine, Judd noted that “the economy is admirable.”

These works are, indeed, about economy for the sake of vigor and dynamism rather than reduction for its own, cerebral or theoretical sake. They look to Russian Constructivism, (the “Yellow Continuum” series directly recalling Rodchenko and El Lissitsky) but despite their precionism and hard-edged clarity they equally bring to mind the pulsating, wobbly disks of Miró or the child-like joie de vivre of Calder, especially Liberman’s last disk painting in this show, an untitled work from 1960 that pits a hand-drawn larger yellow and smaller red ball against a dazzle of ultramarine.

Liberman was the legendary art editor at Condé Nast who managed to maintain a serious practice as a fine artist despite the pressures of his job and the snobbish distance, before the era of Andy Warhol, between the worlds of art and fashion. He was a great collector and patron of artists, but there is plenty of positive evidence in these joyful, bracing works to overcome any suspicion of the depth of admiration felt for this artist by such peers as de Kooning, Newman, and later, of course, Judd.

On the face of it, the late Fred Sandback-the subject of a two-part exhibition at Lawrence Markey and the uptown premises of David Zwirner-was as minimal as they come.
His trademark material was store-purchased brightly colored acrylic yarn, stretched taut between floor and ceiling, or forming right angles to a wall. These lines of string inevitably force awareness of their environment in a way that displaces attention from the object itself to its impact, a classic hallmark of minimalism.

And yet, severe, pristine, reductive as Sandback first appears, the effect of his string pieces is strangely sculptural. You become aware not so much of the room itself, although that is a factor, as of planes defined in space. And the sense of implied continuation, the thought that the lines must continue through to other rooms and spaces, adds a poetic element alien to hard core minimal art. Despite his drastic means, Sandback was ultimately more of a connector to artistic traditions than a disruptor of them. His professed preference for the expressive figuration of Giacometti over the presumed affinity between his own work and the Russian contructivists is richly suggestive and rings true.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 22, 2004

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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.

***

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.

***

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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