March 20 to April 22, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th Streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Though this exhibition of the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies (1924 – 2012) spanning a thirty-year period of his career presents what seem to be ten randomly selected works: Neither a representative overview of his output, nor a chronology of his work’s development, the exhibition instead provokes close readings of individual works, and of the material and philosophical variations among them.

Noticeably excluded are the classic years of the 1950s – ’70s, a period during which Tàpies’s works negotiated the cultural abyss that World War II left in its wake. Those materially brutal works expressed both his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, and the postwar urban landscape. Bridging the ethos of the French Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, works from that period are splattered with paint, inscribed with gestural marks, and incorporate found materials and objects.

My first impression was that this exhibition indicates how, by the ’70s, Tàpies’s primitivism and ferocity had been tamed: the tactility of his work had become refined, and his vocabulary of signs and symbols made more accessible. His use of found objects and low materials no longer represented a challenge to painting’s conventions—instead his use of household materials such as the gray woolen blanket that provides the ground for Black Mark and Arrows (1978) is formalist, and the earthy substance and water faucet in Aixeta (2003) appears marked by a faux naïveté. Gone is the correspondence between Tàpies’s work and the early neo-Dadaist works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, which had made Tàpies of interest to painters in the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Yet, all is not lost. There is something here, which might have gone unnoticed if this show consisted of more classic works or were more tightly curated. Given this selection, it appears that by the ’70s, Tàpies was no longer seeking existential agony and beauty in the abject. This less familiar Tàpies seems to be engaged in the more Postmodern project of questioning: what does painting do, what might painting have the capacity to record? This doubtfulness is suggested by the slowness of these works. The gestural marks are no longer abrupt or spontaneous; instead they depict images. Their materiality is now a formal device as well as a sign. Subsequently, the effect of this is something akin to what happens in later works by Francis Bacon and Robert Motherwell—artists who, like Tàpies, had used gesture, earlier in their careers, to communicate urgency, intuitiveness, and intensity.

The earliest painting in the show, Door-Wall (1970), is almost a tabula rasa—a stripped-down version of his signature “matter paintings” from the ’50s. Unlike those, this one consists of a thin, lightly textured, beige rectangle made of paint mixed with sand and glue. Its edges are irregular and convey a sense that they might crumble at any moment. Anchored to the bottom edge, the rectangle is bound on three sides by a raw canvas border, its bottom edge also bearing a series of what might be read as scuff marks or fingerprints. Within the margins there are scratchy pencil lines that simultaneously re-enforce the door-ness of the image, and its provisionality.

There are two ways to read Door-Wall: literally, or as a metaphor—an image designed to call something else to mind. In contrast, Composition (1972) presents little to no ambiguity. It literally appears to be what it is: a composition consisting of a burlap weaving mounted slightly askew on a piece of dark cloth. Within the textured surface of the burlap is another composition, tripartite in structure. Its upper half is a tight, patterned weave; the lower half a looser, irregular weave, with fringe along the bottom edge. On either side of the burlap rectangle are bundles of twisted galvanized wire, individual strands of which are woven horizontally into the burlap. Of course we can read Composition as an illustration of figure-ground relationships, and as such, an analogy for painting itself. It has all the elements: line, surface, form… but, unlike in Door-Wall, these elements are presented without being indexical.

The painting Black Mark and Arrows (1978) seems to further elaborate Tàpies’s self-referentiality and formalist strategy. These concerns order three later painting as well: To Painting (1989), Base-Matter (1995), and Four Stripes (1998. The other works in the exhibition are more varied; there are two assemblages that include found objects and four late works from the early 2000s, which are image-based: a still-life, a landscape, and two paintings representing hands. Some of these latter works include written words as well.

From the diversity of works included in Paintings, 1970 – 2003, I conclude that over these thirty years, Tàpies became concerned with painting as a realm of representation. By alternating between the symbolic and formal, the works call attention to the artist’s evolving understanding of painting as both thing and analogy; and his appreciation over time of painting’s artificiality and theatrics, as well as its potential authenticity.

The post What Painting Might Do: Antoni Tàpies at Nahmad Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

“He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue/ what a jolly boring thing to do.” So sings David Bowie in his 1971 song “Andy Warhol” on his seminal Hunky Dory album. Recently the rock musician himself has been thinking a great deal about art, but with no signs that he or his fans are getting bored. He is prominent among over forty pop celebrities exhibiting artworks in aid of the charity Warchild, to help set up a music and art therapy centre in Sarajevo. And while his formidable collection of modern art keeps growing, he has even turned his hand to art criticism.

The prestigious journal Modern Painters, whose founder, the late Peter Fuller, was critic of the Sunday Telegraph, usually carries essays by the likes of Richard Wollheim, David Sylvester and Robert Hughes, doyens of high brow art appreciation. When editor Karen Wright invited Bowie to an editorial meeting even the most sceptical members were charmed, especially when he claimed he might be able to set up an interview with the highly elusive Balthus, at 86 the last survivor of the pre-war Ecole de Paris. Balthus and Bowie both live in Switzerland, and made friends at an opening for the painter’s young Japanese wife, Setsuko.

“My original intention was just to be the liaison in all this”, Bowie tells me. “I gave him a call and proposed a meeting, suggesting I would bring a ‘qualified’ journalist with me, to which he replied, “Good Heavens, no, I can’t stand art journalists. They are always so intellectual. I’d prefer you to do it, dear boy'”.

“I haven’t been referred to as ‘my dear boy’ in decades”, says Bowie. Asked if he feels a creative affinity with the painter, he says “The common ground we seem to share is the will to work obsessively, and a strong resistance to judgements of our work. Put it out and be damned – quite often, as it happens! Other than that, we are time and worlds apart, which has made for a rather lovely friendship.” The exchange, which took place at Balthus’s gargantuan eighteenth-century chalet at Rossinière in the Vaud, proceeded at a leisurely and anecdotal pace. In fact it runs to twenty pages, by far the longest article ever run by Modern Painters. Their chatter is charmingly under-edited, leaving Balthus’s continental English intact. “Are you still the King of the Cats?”, Bowie asks Balthus, alluding to the erotic overtones of the sphinx-like felines that often attend the prepubescent girls in his paintings. “When you get over 86 things change”, comes the stoical reply. Setsuko interrupts to offer Swiss chocolates. As a photographer sets up equipment around them, testing his flash, Balthus reveals his remoteness from the world of his young interviewer. “Are you used to photographers?” he asks of the supreme manipulator of self-image and pioneer of rock video, the man who has been Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and the Man Who Fell to Earth.

There is little actual talk of art, but plenty of reminiscence about personalities such as Marlon Brando, with whom Balthus used to lunch in the 1950s, and Rilke (his mother’s lover) who championed him when he was still a prodigy. Bowie introduces the subject of English painters, as that is the school he collects. Balthus laments the loss of his friend Bacon, whose paintings he never liked, adding “I have a horror for dear little Freud who I was shocked to hear that he was seventy now. He was a charming young man which I knew when he came to Paris about 30 years ago. I was really shocked by the last thing I saw. So Berlin painting!” And when Bowie enthuses about the romantic landscape strain in British painting, tracing a tradition from Samuel Palmer through Ivon Hitchens and David Bomberg to contemporaries such as Maurice Cockrill, who figures prominently in his collection, Balthus says “Yes, Palmer. I know of him”. It is as if Balthus is not so much from a different generation as a different epoch.

Like many of the artists featured in the Warchild exhibition, which opens at Flowers East Gallery on September 28th, Bowie was at an artschool. Brian Eno and Brian Ferry, for instance, studied with Tom Phillips and Richard Hamilton respectively, and have both collaborated with Bowie musically. But he is sanguine on how much art-training influenced his early development: “My own background in so-called art training was limited to four years from the age of 14 on an art course at Tech. This was the innovation of Owen Frampton, to steer ‘talented’ students through to art school status. But I only had eyes for the saxaphone and life on the motorway. I briefly worked as a junior artist at an advertising agency in London , but was completely hopeless, skiving off to lunchtime R&B gigs or to pour through American imports at HMV.”

“Since the beginning of this year”, he says, “I have been working almost constantly with Brian Eno on what seems to be a thousand and one different projects.” When he was asked to contribute to the charity show, he thought he would just let them have a couple of charcoal sketches from his studio. “I have taken to drawing rather a lot while recording recently, as it seems to stimulate some new ideas in both mediums. But then I thought I’d use this situation as an excuse to experiment with computer collage.” While other celebrities have made small works in keeping with the title of the show, “Little pieces by big stars”, Bowie has produced a portfolio of 14 prints (in an edition of 14) entitled “We saw the Minotaur” and an additional poster. The strange, menacing figure in “Joni Ve Sadd”, a self-portrait perhaps, is made up of tiny computer squares with a tiara of haloes that looks like it has been collaged from one of the occultist publications he collected during his Hollywood years in the mid-1970s. The poster “Minotaur” has a similar 70s look – album cover cum science fiction illustration – with a heavily drawn charcoal figure set against collaged backdrop of what look like mountains from a renaissance painting set within an exotic Moorish arch.

“I would describe them as flashy, faintly topical and vulgar”, Bowie admits, and it would indeed be hard to make too great a claim for them. But is Bowie falling prey to the Swan factor? There is an epidemic among celebrities – pace Naomi Campbell’s ghost-written novel “Swan” – of thinking that being famous for one thing permits one to do anything. Sylvester Stallone is launching a career as painter, model Elle McPherson as actress, Naomi Campbell not only as novelist but as pop star too. John Lyttle, in the Spectator, debunks the wanna-be renaissance men and women of the mass-media age. “Children, of course, think they can do everything without practice, without preparation, without due thought. Stars, like children, are easily deluded.” But Bowie’s interest in the visual arts is of a different order, for they have always stimulated his main career, which has as much to do with image and performance as music and lyrics. Justifying the eclecticism of his music he once said “When you are an artist, you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the art forms are the same in the end.” But in acquiring those skills he has never lacked modesty and determination. He studied mime with the great Lindsay Kemp, for instance.

His collecting has often related to his creative interests. In the mid-70s he went to Berlin, partly to escape an unhappy time in America but also because of an obsessive interest in Germany of the 1930s. Left-wing friends disavowed him of his infatuation with Nazi regalia and symbolism. Meanwhile he discovered artistic soulmates in the Brücke Museum. “I waded quite heavily into Expressionism”, he admits, collecting Heckel (who influenced the title track of his “Heroes” album) and Schmidt-Rottluff. “Not the paintings but the woodblock prints at which I think they excelled.” His own drawing style is heavily indebted to expressionism, but as much to the British painter David Bomberg as to the Germans. “I constantly return to his and Lanyon’s work. Both in their own ways lift the taut skin of the British character and reveal the stunningly romantic nature underneath. I learn something new from every piece I have.”

Bowie has always kept up with music fashion, often, of course, anticipating it. His most recent album, “Black Tie, White Noise” incorporates elements of acid house, for instance. Critic David Buckley has compared him to the Beatles as a brilliant popularizer of avant garde ideas. But in relation to the latest neo-conceptual art he is robustly sceptical. “Recently, I was looking at some work with a well-known European dealer. Part of this display was a video of a young artist chastising himself with a whip. I mentioned to the dealer that the artist didn’t seem to be swishing very enthusiastically, to which he anxiously replied ‘Oh, I can assure you that in about 20 minutes he really brings up quite a blush on his buttocks’. I forgot to ask the price.”

He finds time for at least one avantgarde maverick however. “I had that Damien Hirst in the back of my taxi the other week. Actually it was at dinner. So much bullshit is talked about his work. For me the act of killing a sheep or shark and putting it in a smart box is entirely evocative of the senselessness of most of our actions in this the latter part of the millennium. I don’t care if it’s art or not, I appreciate it as an expression.”

The post The Thin White Duke: David Bowie, 1947-2016 appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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Michèle C. Cone,  Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Ai Weiwei, Slater Bradley, Sarah Sze, and Lola Montes Schnabel.

The post January 2012: Michèle C. Cone, Ana Finel-Honigman and Anthony Haden-Guest with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

In becoming aware of Schnabel around 1979 – who, in those days, was showing at the Mary Boone Gallery – I was admittedly skeptical, largely due to the excessive application of objects, such as steer horns, branches, and ceramic plates, that adorned his painted wooden panels. In retrospect, my problem was less with the rancorous appearance of these objects than with the presumed semiotic connections being imposed upon them by that new colony of infestation, “art writers.”  In spite of Schnabel’s curious lack of formal demeanor, his ambitions were clearly bent on reviving allegory in painting (and eventually in film).  In comparison with the fray of emerging painters of the time, Schnabel’s work had a certain radical touch, somewhat insouciant in comparison with the “Tenth Street touch,” shown by painters twenty-five years earlier. By removing himself from the cynicism employed by commonplace expressionism in the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself closer to what astronauts called “the right stuff.”  While the broken plates and sprawling tarpaulins did not gel with my minimalist sensibility, they eventually managed to uplift the squandering anti-aesthetic discourse of those decades to a more physical level as painting moved from its soporific semiosis into the limelight of spectacle. Through a series of unhampered surface disruptions, Schnabel transformed the heavily mannered paintings of his early years into a curious, if not elusive lightness outside the reach of Transavantgardia, East Village graffiti, or the kind of American art school painting epitomized by David Salle.

Lightness in painting is difficult to obtain nowadays, and when it occurs, it appears differently then it did in certain Northern Baroque painters, such as the Alsatian steward, Sebastian Stoskopff, or that dour Dutchman, Frans Hals.  Yet, by the twenty-first century it appeared necessary to rejuvenate this point of departure in painting toward an instant photographic point of view.  Some of the most magnetic photos in this jerky, smudgy sequential portfolio are the sepia-toned and painted, 18 X 24 inch Polaroids of American actor qua wrestler Mickey Rourke. What makes these images of Rourke so appealing is the immense bravura, the tattooed torso, and the unguarded grimace of this postmodern Peter Lorre, this half-crazed, persistently debauched, sex-ridden actor that will go down in history a cut above the pretentiously bewildered dungaree-boy, Johnny Depp. Somehow one cannot avoid praising Schnabel’s generosity as he positions his lens on his subjects.  This would include the magnificent aging Lower Eastside rock star, Lou Reed, who bears a simulated King Arthur sword amid the overgrown flora at the artist’s seaside domicile in Montauk, and Herculean tenor Placido Domingo whose feigned machismo reverts to a sublime Etruscan melancholy. There are others, of course, ranging from the perennially elegant actor, Max van Sydow, to the stubbornly coy Christopher Walken.   Most touching perhaps are the rough-edged Polaroids of Schnabel’s two sons, Cy and Olmo (the latter’s head is framed in a shawl on the cover of the book). These are the intelligent wild children of nature, youthful fauns in the out-of-doors cavorting in the garden of delights, bearing the pulse of a generation in the throes of conflict twixt the virtual and the tactile realities of human emotion.

There are also a portraits of Frank Stella, Rula Jebreal, and Takashi Murakami – each posing as if for a screen test – clearly casual, yet carefully articulated, each representing selfhood liberated from the director behind the camera. There is an art to doing this, and the art is convincing throughout the book. Even when the scenery appears vague and uninteresting upon first glance, there is an overall sense of a purpose in the photographs, a sense that the subject and the scenery belong to art.  Rather than dwelling on objects, Schnabel focuses on light.  Rather than the furniture in a room, we are shown an installation. Rather than the pose of a rephotographed psychotic from the 19th Century, we are shown a contortion of a human head slightly tilted to one side. The hands imply an irregular occurrence where the mind rapidly diverts from the presumed innocence of the sitter’s expression.

In turning the pages of these highly engaging and visceral Polaroids – a photographic technology that reached its peak in the early 1970s – I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s remark that to make art requires that the artist revert to obsolescent techniques that preceded the latest advance.  I immediately relate this to Nam June Paik, known for his ingenious assemblages built from old 1950s TV cabinetry, but it may apply just as well to the work of Schnabel. Polaroids offer a certain arcane accuracy to the user that is full of surprises. Because of the clumsiness of the large camera, it is not always easy to control or to hold in place. As a result, happy accidents may occur, with a kind of accuracy the artist may not have intended.  One gets the impression in looking at these Polaroids that Schnabel is somewhere between painting and film-making, and that his life is a constant quest to discover a world that he has not yet experienced.

The culminating affect of this portfolio, edited with an introduction by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, elicits a feeling of intimacy.  This raises the question as to whether Schnabel seeks to capture his destiny through a transformation of what is common into some higher level of meaning. I enjoy the suspension of this notion, as it does not force the issue. Instead, there lingers an exuberant, tantalizing world in which everyday life becomes an adventure, filled with emotions that continue to blossom forth as the camera moves happily from one portrait scenario to another, always on the edge of expectancy.

Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Julian Schnabel: Polaroids. New York: Prestel, 2010. ISBN 978-3-7913-5076-9, 192 pp. 100 color illustrations, $49.95

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“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 21, 2005

Eighteen months ago, on these pages, I treated the latest paintings of Julian Schnabel to severe deprecation. In regretting any absence of resistance to the hubris of his own indulgent markmaking I invoked the memory of his classic, 1980s “plate” paintings, which notoriously integrated smashed crockery into the fabric of their support.

C&M offers a rare, and I must say, welcome opportunity to examine vintage Schnabels in depth. They offer a reminder of what made him such a novelty after the uptight, minimalist-conceptualist 1970s, lending new meaning to the phrase, “bull in a china shop.” The cumulative charge of these robust works, holding up nicely for their age, have a sometime skeptical critic hankering for another look at the perhaps too hastily dismissed recent efforts.

That said, even a no-holds barred “Maximalist,” as catalogue essayist Robert Pincus-Witten describes Mr. Schnabel, benefits from a good editor. Both floors of the tony uptown gallery are packed with paintings. Packed is also the word for the individual works, with their trademark excess of imagery and material, both in quantity and type. But there is energetic variety in pace and a clear sense that choice examples have been found which give this show sparkle. A narrative of restless curiousity and protean inventiveness comes across in this overview of the 1980s, with just a few hints of future directions, which is denied in presentations of new works (at PaceWildenstein in 2003 and Gagosian in 2001).

The smashed plates retain a sense of loutish outlandishness. In some works, like “The Patients and the Doctors,” (1978) and “Divan,” (1979), the actual, rather cheap crockery retains its color and pattern, and there is a sense of it as a happening—the actual crash is occuring in real time, which is the viewer’s. Their decorative elan recalls Gaudi’s Parc Gruell, their immediate inspiration, while the implicit theatricality reminds of Mr. Schnabel’s long years of employment in commercial kitchens. In works of a couple of years later, like “Aborigine Painting,” (1980) there’s a contrast to the appropriationist emphasis of the first plate pictures, as the plates, submerged in color, sink into the wood support.

Even so, of course, they retain their plateness, not to mention their chutzpah. The pictures are invariably made up of separate panels, often in different support materials, that take away from any sense of the conventional easel picture, which the scale and surface would unlikely admit anyhow. That said, by the critical standards of the time it was painting per se rather than the unconventionality of the approach which made waves. To the institutional avantgarde these seemed reactionary with their expressionism, their novocento imagery, and their gaudy excess, while to more classically-minded connoisseurs their intentional badness made them seem like just another assault from the iconoclasts’ endless armory. The evocation of Francis Picabia’s “transparencies” was enough to suggest Dadaist intentions.

Mr. Schnabel was “maximalist” in the sense of giving to painting not so much “everything but” as everything “in” the kitchen sink: It wasn’t only smashed crockery that he threw into his pictures but slices of animal hide, Mexican and Greek souvenir pottery, a magesterially weathered log found on the beach. Supports include at once luxurious and rubbishy materials like tarpaulin, velvet, found doors. It was as if he were offering himself up as a one-man Baroque to complement the arte povera renaissance of the previous decade, with its emphasis on humble materials and dreary absences of color. A secular Jew, Mr. Schnabel even threw in an opulently Catholic iconography to match his forms and textures: “Resurrection: Albert Finney Meets Malcolm Lowry” is the title of a 1984 paintings using grafitti-writer’s aerosol, wax and moulding plate on ecclesiastically purple velvet.

Of course, it could be argued that Mr. Schnabel traded in a stereotype of Catholicism as all emotional physicality and pietist excess. But however oafish and insolent his use of pictorial languages and his appropriations of Catholic motifs, the impulse seems borne of a genuine, and expressively desparate, nostalgia for a lost order in which images could generate veneration.

At a certain level, however, his imagery set out to shock. “Ethnic Types #15 and #72” throws an Indian and an African face into an exotic mix of animal hide cutouts, with picture-book Romanesque chalicies and crudely painted animal motifs to keep them company. Like his contemporaries, Eric Fischl and David Salle, Mr. Schnabel’s racial imagery seemed to swing with the pendulum against the political correctness of the 1970s artworld.

“Ritu Quadrupedis,” (1987) can literally be read as a manifesto painting: made up of the words of its title drawn in big white block letters, except for the first two “Us” which are brown, with an appropriated religious banner covering the “U” of “Ritu”, the letters fill a cruciform (Greek cross) tarpaulin support, over which yellow paint is then splattered and besmirched, at times suggestive of footprints. In its hubristic ambiguity the image is typical of Mr. Schnabel: The phrase comes from religious literature; St. Teresa, for instance, was said to have walked around her convent “ritu quadrupedis,” on four legs, as a sign of humility. But that is not a virtue that springs to mind with Mr. Schnabel, who instead stresses animal passion and brute indifference to received conventions.

This certainly tallies with the mystique of the artist as presented by the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Photographs have the bear-like Mr. Schnabel standing outside his Hampton’s house in pyjamas, wearing sunglasses like a Blues Brother. Or seated in a theatrically humungus studio, again in pyjamas. Like his painting style and iconography, this studiously nonchalent sartorial choice seems publicly private.

A note in the catalogue by C&M chairman, Robert Mnuchin, recounts the experience of viewing works hanging on the fence of the artist’s Hamptons tennis court. This might seem a trifling anecdote but at a certain level it suggests itself as a mixed metaphor (brash and courtly, sporting and aspirant, alienated and at home) of this at once complex and rather simple modern painter.

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“Julie Heffernan: New Paintings” at P.P.O.W until November 8 (555 W. 25th Street, second Floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-647-1044).

“Laura Harrison: Building Portraits: Surface and Space in Landmark Structures” at PSCA until November 1 (86 Walker Street, Sixth Floor, between Broadway and Lafayette Streets, 646-613-1252).

There is a noble tradition of Bad painting with a capital “B.” It is a modern spin on mannerism: Instead of merely accenting their work with distortions of perspective, color, composition, and so forth, some artists attempt to will themselves into a state of ineptitude. A noble tradition, and Julian Schnabel does not belong to it.

There are basically two branches of Bad: the anal and the incontinent. Artists of the first variety ape the hackneyed horrors of Sunday painters and thrift-store finds, and are essentially conceptual in their iconoclastic intent; Francis Picabia and John Currin are Bad painters of this stripe. Those of the second are more ambitious, expressive, and risky. (Sloppy-joe messiness is more ambitious because, beyond kindergarten, excesses with paint tend only to occur in a fine-art context. Mind-boggling meticulousness, by contrast, is a defining characteristic of Outsider art.)

The masters of fast-and-loose Badness are artists who have entered their “old-age style”: Painters such as Picasso and Philip Guston were proven masters before electing to become desperados. Like clowning, the appearance of goofiness requires a special kind of control.

However much Julian Schnabel seems to aspires to the beastly sublime, it is painfully apparent with his latest show of lethargic, gratuitously outsized doodles that he is merely bad with a forlorn, bedraggled, lower-case “b.” In his handling of the genre, neo-expressionism has ceased to have any vitality or purpose. It has become, like cigarette smoking, a pathetic and outdated habit.

PaceWildenstein, at its Chelsea premises, are showing five of Mr. Schnabel’s recent “Indian” paintings -based on turn-of-the-20th-century portraits of native chiefs – and half a dozen gargantuan sculptures of the 1980s. Though the latter take up more space, and are greviously unoriginal in the faux-dionysian bravura, they are somehow less offensive. Totemic turds crudely pierced with found-object heads and limbs have been done already, and far more convincingly, in the sumptuously primitive sculptures of Cy Twombly and Joan Miró. But any 13-foot tall patinated bronze of vaguely archetypal shape and rough surface will make an impression. Not so smeared paint.

On every inch of his canvases, some of which stretch up to 9-feet high, Mr. Schnabel indulges in a hubris he wouldn’t tolerate from himself or his minions in a single frame of his finely crafted movies. (“Basquiat,” 1996, and “Before Night Falls,” 2000, are the pictures this artist should want to be remembered by). His new paintings revisit territory more than amply explored by Mr. Schnabel’s superiors in the neo-expressionist camp, namely Malcolm Morley and Georg Baselitz.

To explain what’s wrong with Mr. Schnabel’s paintings, it is not enough to say, for instance, that the drawing is limp and illustrative: Those are precisely the kind of dubious intentions and calculated strategies that, when purposive and thought through, can be interesting. Genuine mannerism is about testing endurances, twisting language, pushing against medium, and then suddenly capitulating to it. It’s about really good painting that goes bad, or vice versa.

Mr. Schnabel gives himself nothing to resist (not even some smashed up crockery, as in his trademark early paintings). He splurges blobs of paint over an underlying sketch that is itself nothing but a splurge. There is no push-pull between quality and mediocrity because with him it’s all the latter. He is like a B-movie karate-fighter kicking at an open door.

***

There is welcome relief just across the street at P.P.O.W. Julie Heffernan is a “natural mannerist” – an oxymoron, of course, because mannerism is per se unnatural. Forced, stylized, strategic, and effect-driven, it exploits the received rather than the discovered. Yet within Ms. Heffernan’s camp idiom, she achieves genuine intensity and richness of expression.

In this show, her third at the gallery, her technique is dazzling in a modern-academic kind of way. “Self-Portrait as Agnostic II” (2003), for instance, is a tour de force in its handling of reflections in a polished floor and a warped antique mirror. This may be John Koch rather than Velázquez, but Koch is a good place to start.

Technique is inconsequential if not harnessed to vision; Ms. Heffernan’s most marvelously is. In golden, glowing aristocratic interiors that date anywhere from the High Renaissance to the Rococo, mysterious dramas are played out: Gorgeously attired ladies spontaneously combust, birds descend in flocks, alchemical landscapes sprout from bedsheets.

All Ms. Heffernan’s paintings announce themselves as self-portraits. They are also allegories of sorts, engendering dialogue between touch and self, consciousness and imagination, style and expressivity. Best of all, Ms. Heffernan has the quirkiness of magical realism without the sordid silliness of so much latter-day surrealism. With her, mannerism is definitely a price worth paying.

***

Laura Harrison’s debut show at the offbeat Tribeca loft gallery of Paul Sharpe is a must-see. She, too, is a mannerist of sorts, eking out poignancy and nostalgia in the very act of painting. In thrall to vintage photographs, especially those of destroyed buildings (such as the old Penn Station) or Venetian palazzos, she plays the painterly alienation card like an old violin. Her images, sparsely painted with a dry brush, bear a strong resemblance to those of the British painter, Merlin James, while a sense of the precarious and the ephemeral ties her to Belgian Luc Tuymans. She also looks to respective forebears of these two artists, Sickert and Hammershøi.

But Ms. Harrison already has a voice of her own. Although some unresolved experiments in larger scale and crudely shaped canvases mar this selection, a group of six medium-sized canvases in the gallery’s inner sanctum is profoundly moving. These have the delicate, knowing slightness of Elizabeth Peyton’s portraiture. Not despite but because of their fragility and seeming inconsequence, they are real tear-jerkers.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 23, 2003

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March 14-April 20, 2002

There are six very big paintings in this show and one tall ugly sculpture. If critical judgment must be reduced to “You get it or you don’t,” then I guess I don’t. Five of these paintings are based on a picture of a blonde haired girl that Schnabel allegedly stumbled upon while visiting a thrift store. These enormous canvases range in size from 10 to 13 feet in height and 9 to 12 feet in length. There are enough large patches of sky blue in this room to make you queasy. In each of these paintings a drippy band of paint stretches from the right or left edge of the canvas across the part of the face where the eyes would normally be, but does not quite reach the opposite edge. Schnabel has left the eyes out of every image. These paintings are painfully self-conscious. Schnabel, using wax and oil paint, attempts to emulate the painting style of an amateur. The lips and noses recede, the shadows and highlights float above the surfaces, the flesh tones are smeared on to faces like rouge. The modernists used the visual vocabulary of the insane and primitive cultures to put the final nail in the coffin of academicism. Since we are in the age of “anything goes” I am not sure why post-modernists, including Schnabel, still think that bad painting is interesting or necessary. By aping a distinctly naive painting technique Schnabel tries to elevate the marginal to a higher plane, lending his name to the whole process. According to the press release Schnabel left the eyes out of these giant paintings of faces “as a means to force the viewer to look at the paintings and not the eyes.” I for one never felt that the presence of eyes in a portrait interfered with my ability to enjoy the formal qualities of the whole. Removing the eyes undercuts the psychological impact and diminishes the viewer’s curiosity. If the eyes were painted in and then scratched out these images would be more unsettling. Judging by the amount of time each gallery-goer I encountered spent looking at these monstrosities, (if you consider spinning around slowly with a smirk on your face and hurrying out of the room to be looking) one wonders if they would have held more interest with the eyes left in.

Also, why bother doing a series of these images? If he spent his time painting one really good portrait of a giant girl it would have greater artistic value then these self congratulatory tributes to bad painting. I can’t help but imagine Schnabel whispering in my ear, “Look at what beauty I found in the junk shop.” On a formal level, the color schemes are abysmal, the opposite of intoxicating. The forms, self-consciously ill proportioned and insensitively rendered, are as unimpressive as they would if encountered in a much smaller and more modest format in the thrift store racks. The painting and sculpture in the west gallery (Ahab, 2002 and Anno Domini, 1990) are thoroughly unappealing. The bronze sculpture looks like a spiked phallus from hell and the uninspired monument to expressionist brushwork on the wall behind it is a typical Schnabel song and dance: a splatter here, a dry caked up area there, some obscure fragments of text thrown into the mix for good measure. The pointless Latin title really irked me. All that is really impressive, at the end of the day, is that Schnabel owns a big enough warehouse in which to create these half-hearted attempts at great painting.

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