September 13 to October 22, 2016
45 East 78 Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

More than 25 years since they were made, the paintings in “Sean Scully: The Eighties,” now at Mnuchin, have lost none of their potency. In fact, for this viewer, they have only increased in resonance. The early ‘80s represented a transitional moment in Scully’s career, and by the end of the decade a mode of painting emerged that was assertively and recognizably the artist’s own. Moving to New York City in 1975, Scully worked in a stringent, hard-edged minimalist style. This changed definitively following a stay at the Edward Albee Residency on Montauk in 1982. Included in this exhibition are several works made on found wood during that residency. This resourcefulness proved to be of great significance for Scully’s development as a painter.

Bear (1982) is comprised of two vertically joined panels. The left panel is horizontally striped with alternate dirty white and black bands; the right panel is narrower, and while both panels are level at the top edge, the right half extends below at the bottom edge and is striped with broader blue-gray and black bands. The two sides appear to splice together contrasting realities, like montage in cinema. They picture an idea of simultaneous proximity and distance — a central concept in Scully’s painting from the 1980s. More can be said of duality in Bear as the two sides of the painting move at different visual speeds, the right panel tranquil in comparison to the agitated movement of the left panel. Oil paint is applied in an aggressive, rhythmic way, adding to the sense of musical interval and percussive measure. In paintings such as Bear, elements are already present that through variation and change of emphasis proved adequate to Scully’s ambition — any changes made are intuitive and responsive to paintings already made, rather than for the sake of change or embellishment. Shelter Island (1982) again contrasts bands of black and grayed white on two panels — this time on linen, one stretcher deeper and so more forward than the other — on one side the bands are vertical, and on the other horizontal. Typically, the painting is frontal, its surface actively worked in oil paint, wet into wet. This remains so for all other paintings in this exhibition, and it’s just as much in evidence in Scully’s paintings seen at Cheim & Read as recently as early 2015.

The off-white and black bands recur — take, for example, A Green Place (1987). In this instance, single bands of black and off-white occupy a rectangular segment inserted at the top right of the composition. Together they form a horizon line between what could be seen as a dark sky above and pale sea below. Horizontal bands of red comprise another rectangular section inserted on the left side, contiguous with the painting’s left edge. Together, these rectangles, like paintings within a painting, operate alternately as windows or figures within the surface. The vertical orange and green bands that otherwise fill the composition provide the wall or ground against which these shapes function. While remaining abstract, associations are not expunged. The painting recalls elements of a Henri Matisse painting and the indebtedness shared by both artists to fabric patterns (in Scully’s case, stripes) seen on visits to Morocco.

Two more paintings are entirely composed of off-white and black bands. Both somber and sensuous, they are possessed of an acute intensity. Triptych Aran (1986) is the more reductive of the two, whereas Empty Heart (1987) — consisting of three superimposed blocks of vertical and horizontal black and white stripes — is exposed and stark. A more chromatic atmospheric light is produced in other paintings, though there is always a gravitas that leans composition toward invention rather than playfulness. For instance, A Bedroom in Venice (1988) is muted with soft blue light that brings to mind the humid air and radiant light of that city and its effect on color sensation. Longing, melancholy and urgency all prevail in these paintings. This denies a place for complacency and evinces a drive and focus that both address art-historical connections, and the contemporary world vis-à-vis the particularity of Scully’s own experience, be it emotional or visual.

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Balancing discipline and emotion, Sean Sully’s paintings from the early 1970s exude a curious mixture of formal consideration and felt observation. Grid (1973), for instance, strikes a note of homey quirkiness with its layers of pattern superimposed within the eponymous hard-edged structure, a bit like the patches held together by a beloved pair of jeans. Seeing works from the outset of Scully’s career in a renovated warehouse in a humble corner of Queens – Cheim & Read’s outer-borough new venture – inevitably makes us connect with the collective energy of the massed hipsters at work nearby.

May 20 to July 1, 2016
16-13 Stephen Street, Queens, NY –

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Alexi Worth: Green Glass Doors at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25, 2015
Reviewed in these pages by Roman Kalinovski, this was a project room solo that played with boundaries on different levels. Perceptual provocateur Alexi Worth found a theme worthy of his visual mischief: the locked doors of almost completed building or renovation projects. The motif vied with his nudes on the beach or copulating couples precisely thanks to their chilly voyeur-inducing exclusion. Elaborate carpentry and mesh supports played off depiction against construction with surface wit and psychological depth.

Alain Kirili and James Siena at Art Omi, October 11, 2015 to January 3, 2016
This was a year of double exposures for sculptor Alain Kirili, who has divided his career of the last forty years between New York and his native Paris. Two shows brought his latest line-in-space sculptures in forged metal to two-person shows: two halves that add to more than one whole for an artist for whom dialogue, whether with peers, historic mentors or artists in other mediums (music or dance) is axiomatic rather than expedient. One show was with painter Bobbie Oliver at Peter Hionas Gallery, a coupling of the dealer’s suggestion; the other, however, very much of Kirili’s own devising, was with his friend James Siena at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY. Siena, legendary as a painter and draftsman, and whose sculpture also takes line for a walk, enjoyed his sculptural debut earlier this year at Pace Gallery.

Susannah Phillips at Lori Bookstein
A natural complement to the exquisite Morandi show a block away at David Zwirner Gallery, Susannah Phillips brought a brooding luminosity to her spatial meditations in paintings where the structural elements communicate with the silent intensity of still life. The mountainous scenery of several pictures created a tension between schematic reduction and observational presentness striking a chord somewhere between Milton Avery and Ferdinand Hodler, holding the elements – water, land, sky – in suspense. In more urban images, Richard Diebenkorn and Wilhelm Hammershoi were the presiding ghosts. Upping the ante in intensity were images of a nebulous space, perhaps a holding bay, ambivalent between interior and exterior, where forms pulsate in the dark.

Alternate Histories: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne, January 15 to April 11, 2015
Before New Yorkers could enjoy Seccessionist masterpieces amidst the plutocratic splendors and wafting caffeinated aromas of the Neue Galerie, the redoubt of Austrian and German Expressionism in this city were the altogether more sedate, businesslike premises of Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street. This venue was a transplant from Vienna where it was founded in the 1920s by Otto Kallir, father of the present owner Jane Kallir, and originally named, indeed, the Neue Galerie. This jubilee exhibition brought together examples of the different strands that have ensured St. Etienne a crucial, vital role in New York art consciousness: arresting images from the likes of Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka and Kollwitz; American “primitives” like Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses; and that fearless living expressionist (no need for any “neo” prefix) Sue Coe.

Tom of Finland at Artists Space, June 13 to September 13, 2015
Touko Laaksonen, better known to connoisseurs and masturbators everywhere as Tom of Finland, enjoyed a steamy double header at the sprawling SoHo and Tribeca premises of Artists Space this summer. On Greene Street an elaborate installation afforded intimate corridor upon corridor of framed drawings and collages from which his published images derived. With glistening graphite he caught the erogenous sheen of muscle-bound workmen bulging in denim and leather uniformed hulks encountering each other in ever-cheerful, spontaneous orgies: S&M with a smile was his hallmark. Down on Walker Street, an utterly exhaustive, thematic vitrine arrangement recalled the fact that  image horder Laaksonen’s background was in advertising. The exhibition archived his sources with an indexical totality that would have impressed Aby Warbug, a veritable iconology of lust.

Alex Katz at Barney’s, Spring 2015
Every year seems to be Alex Katz’s year as far as increased visibility for this prince of painters is concerned. Notwithstanding the absurdly overdue retrospective that New York museums are denying this realist master, 2015 saw its fair share of spectacular outings: new works that took startling liberties with expectations, at once reduxing and reinventing his familiar landscape motifs, closed the downtown space of Gavin Brown, for instance, while Mary Ryan showed a stunning set of nine screenprints, each 80 inches by 30, of women in little black dresses that nodded to The Black Dress, his iconic 1960 portrait of Ada repeated six times in a single canvas. There were big museum shows at the High in Atlanta, GA and at Colby College, ME, but the stand out memory for this critic were his windows at Barneys: with typical chutzpah Katz blacked out the store windows with a parade of starkly elegant figures etched into the glass, a provocation that pushed style outwards to the street rather than luring the stylish in, cajoling passersby with a frisson of exclusion. A related display of paraphernalia on the sixth floor produced for the store under the auspices of the Art Production Fund brought together linens, vanity products and kitchenware, all impressed with startling graphic flowers, heads, or dogs carved black out of white, white out of black. A beach spread purchased by this viewer to spare his couch from dog hairs was expensive for a towel but a bargain for an Alex Katz.

Francis Bacon at Gagosian (Madison Avenue), November 7 to December 12, 2015
When you are a world class modern master and the products of your late work seem, quite literally, washed out, the job of criticism, obviously, is to explain how dissipatedness is a sign of genius. For years, at Bacon retrospectives, of which there have been many, the oeuvre is shown to end on a dry, thin, almost evaporated note. But gather just late works, as Gagosian have done, intelligently and persuasively installed, and the late period does indeed cohere around faded grandeur as an organizing principle. Bacon, at his best, was brazenly decadent, anxiety inducing and tragic; this actually serves to make the “defects” of his late works a virtue. Inveterately inventive even as he wallowed in his own mannerisms, he could turn sterile precision into its own kind of terribilità.

Sean Scully at Montserrat, dedicated June 2015
Sean Scully turned 70 in 2015 and a slew of international events marked the occasion. Laurels included a major exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a sculptural commission in south-western France and a sumptuous display in a palace on the Grand Canal, a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where his land-sea-sky partitioned stripe paintings, reveling in a new gestural looseness, assumed a symbolic role in their temporary home akin to “il Sposalizio del Mare,” the allegories of Venice’s betrothal to the sea. But the jewel in the crown of his birthday celebrations took place in the mystically fabled monastic complex of Montserrat, in this hills overlooking Barcelona. For the Dublin-born, London-schooled, New York-tested and Munich-proved artist, Barcelona has for long been the third node in the split nucleus of his peripatetic career. Within Catalonian national identity, and by extension Scully’s identification with the city, Montserrat has profound resonances, so the invitation to decorate an entire chapel – he has provided paintings, windows and sundry sacred furnishings – provides its own kind of allegorical significance in relation to his mentors, Rothko and Matisse.

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The promotional video shows the five exhibitions discussed by The Review Panel, March 13, 2015 at the National Academy Museum. Scroll down for the media files to hear what the critics had to say. The next panel takes place April 17 when critics Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau join David Cohen to discuss the Triennial at the New Museum and the Invitational at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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artcritical‘s holiday season party for writers and editors, speakers on The Review Panel, advertisers and friends was graciously hosted this year by painters Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko in their Chelsea studio. In what has become something of an artcritical tradition some of our regular panelists and writers read from a classic text, this year an excerpt from part one of Oscar Wilde’s dialogue, The Critic as Artist.

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David Rhodes: Schwarzwälde at Hionas Gallery

September 8 to October 13, 2013
124 Forsyth Street, south of Delancey Street
New York City, 646-559-5906

The range of effects and the nuances of affect presented by the paintings of David Rhodes would be remarkable enough in an artist who set himself few restraints.  And yet – initially at least – the defining characteristic of this New York debut exhibition of the Berlin-based British painter is the stringency and starkness of its pictorial system.

On raw canvases that follow the same tripartite division, in a deadpan application of one acrylic black, Rhodes arranges three sets of parallel stripes.  These vary considerably in thickness but – in the painting process – the black is clearly worked against strips of masking tape of maybe just two or three widths.  And as (rather like a woodcut) it is the exposed raw canvas rather than the acrylic strokes that registers as the signifying stripe, the variables are like those of barcodes—at once infinite and uniform.

The gestalt in each image resulting from this ubiquitous strategy somewhat resembles a corporate logo of the 1970s: reading from left to right, the three sets go top left to bottom right, back to top right, down to bottom right.  In one or two paintings of sparse population and thin exposed stripe we can almost read “VA” allowing for the absence of the A’s crossbar and the doubling of its and the V’s shared inner diagonal.  But generally his hieroglyph eludes the Latin alphabet, while seeming alphabet-like – a kind of semiotic reverse, in this respect, of Al Held’s Alphabet series, seen last spring at Cheim & Read.  To those of Rhodes’ and this author’s age and upbringing the closest association might be the London Weekend Television logo that, tellingly, incorporated its initials and a map of the River Thames in animation.  These paintings imply movement within insistent stasis.

Art historically the most striking resemblance is to Frank Stella of the period of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor although, again topically, the early grid works of Sean Scully (on view at the Drawing Center) are another apt point of reference.  Rhodes actually occupies expressive territory closer to the later works of both those artists while retaining the formal rigor of their earlier efforts.  Thinking about him this way helps us locate his “minimalism” as proto, or post, in the sense that the restraints of his system serve emotional rather than purely cerebral ends.  His art is one of economy rather than reduction per se (is modernist not minimalist as some might put it).

There is unmistakable warmth to the paintings, despite their pared-down qualities.  This results from what could be dismissed as studio contingencies and yet feels intentional, possibly even integral.  Tolerated rub and burr lend surfaces the feel of (again) woodcut despite the undisguised materiality of canvas and absented tape. But even if Rhodes were able to program a Roxy Paine-like robot to dispatch his paintings for him, several ensuing perceptual phenomena would continue to enrich – to mitigate and complicate – his streamlined modus operandi.

There is the effect, for instance, of proximate bands of black triggering retinal sensations of other colors so that in one painting there might seem to be alternating black and blue.  Then there are the disconcerting twists and tapers, in multiple possibilities, where one set of diagonals jar with another in what New Yorkers might want to call the Flatiron effect.  The differing canvas sizes seen in the close quarters of Hionas’s Lower East Side gallery and the inclusion in the back room of a couple of works on paper bring home the crucial variables of scale and support in determining the impact of this reduced vocabulary.  There is a lot that can be said within strict adherence to a format.

It’s instructive to compare Rhodes with fellow Brit Ian Davenport whose current show of sumptuous stripes at Paul Kasmin is itself fortuitously timed with Ameringer McEnery Yohe’s overview of the perennially scintillating Gene Davis.  Davenport juxtaposes skillfully held-in-check chromatic brilliance with the flourish of exuberantly unpredictable puddles in what nonetheless seem like exquisitely orchestrated marbling as the paint oozes out of his pipes of color.  Returning to Rhodes, after this over the top pop, is rather like listening to Bach violin sonatas after a Baroque opera.  But as with Bach, you soon hear as many voices and as much emotion.

Gallery hours: 1 to 6 pm, Wednesday to Sunday 

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NEW YORK CITY: Wednesday, April 10.  The Drawing Center honored Sean Scully at its annual gala this year in true Irish style with the artist’s buddy Bono proposing a raucous, poetic toast.  The honoree responded in kind with a stirring tribute to his hosts. Bucking a trend in which institutions double their footprint or decamp to trendier locales as soon as the itch to expand takes hold, the Drawing Center, under long serving executive director Brett Littman, has remained true to their roots in SoHo, skillfully reshaping and upgrading their premises but staying put on Wooster Street and in the idea of drawing, albeit in a seemingly ever-expanding definition of the activity. Scully’s traveling exhibition, Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals, currently in Rome, focusing on a key transitional year in the 1970s, was organized by the Drawing Center, where it will show this fall.  The gala, meanwhile, at the Tribeca Rooftop, attracted an assortment of the artist’s rock star friends, including one from the kitchen!

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January 12 – February 18, 2012
NEW YORK: 980 Madison Avenue, 555 West 24th Street, 522 West 21st Street
Beverly Hills, London, Rome, Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong
http://www.gagosian.com

Damien Hirst’s The Complete Spot Paintings is a show of some three hundred works that for the next month has been given the unprecedented, exclusive, simultaneous run of each of Larry Gagosian’s eleven galleries around the world: a big-budget extravaganza in which a mega dealer fetes his mega star. In the age of the Art Career, shows like this one galvanize fans and detractors in equal measure.  But throw in the simplicity of these paintings—colored polka dots painted at regular intervals over a flat ground—and the fact that Hirst has only painted a handful of them himself, and we’re left with an ideological battleground for those who worship at the altar of conceptualism and those who disdain it.

Hirst’s ascent to stardom was rapid. Having organized the Freeze art show in London in 1988 while still in his early 20s, he attracted the attention and benediction of celebrity collector Charles Saatchi. Anointed one of the stars of the future in Saatchi’s Young British Artists exhibition in 1992, Hirst went on to represent Britain in the next year’s Venice Biennale and won the coveted Turner Prize in 1995. He has been a fixture of the art world ever since, scoring a major coup in 2008 when he eschewed his dealers entirely by bringing hundreds of new works to market directly through Sotheby’s. The exhibition, titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, reported nearly $200,000,000 in sales.

Known for such works as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—the dead shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum—and For the Love of God (a human skull covered in more than 8,600 diamonds) Hirst’s approach to art making is a torpedoes-be-damned embrace of the literal. Early works like In and Out of Love and A Thousand Years, meditations on life and death, actually contained the entire life cycle. In the former, caterpillars hatched into butterflies, which flew into and died upon sugar-coated canvases. In the latter, maggots were introduced into one of Hirst’s signature glass cases that contained the severed head of a cow. Feeding on the cow until they become flies, they flew around before being zapped by the electric insect trap than hung overhead. Offering the public super-condensed confrontations with mortality that were not even the purview of the farmer or outdoorsman, such works aspired to the grand theme of life and death in nature.

Taking the stuff of the natural history museum and bringing it into the art museum, Hirst has made the audacious bet that the literal can stand shoulder to shoulder with the metaphorical. Given the fun-house atmosphere that now pervades many major art museums, this bet seems like a good one. In the past two years in New York alone, one could slide between the floors of one museum, play in a bamboo tree house on the roof of another, and see the entire output of an artist hang, mobile-like, from the atrium of a third. In such company, it is not unreasonable to think of Hirst’s stable of pickled animals as perfect emblems of the zeitgeist.

But if Hirst’s installations appeal in their directness, his paintings suffer from the same quality. For painting, like poetry, is an art dictated by metaphor. If Hirst’s innovation was to show the world that a dead shark has all the resonance and associative power of a dead shark, his failure has been the lack of recognition that painting can contain the resonance and associative power of so much more than paint. So, despite the many layers of celebrity, money and art world mega-wattage involved, the impact of the Gagosian show lies ultimately in one layer alone: that of the commercial house paint applied in perfect round circles by Hirst’s assistants.

Painted in high gloss against flat white grounds, variously colored polka dots decorate rectangular and circular canvases of all sizes. The dots vary in their colors and dimensions from painting to painting, ranging from one millimeter to five feet. One contains half a dot. Others have four. One has 25,781. The small ones, which bring to mind dot candy, are slightly more interesting than the large, which look like Twister game boards. Optically, one’s eyes tend to follow the darker dots, in a sort of futile attempt to find something to latch on to. While the futility of such a course is, apparently, part of the point, the lasting effect is akin to looking at a giant word search in which the letters don’t ultimately connect.

That these works contain none of the depths of meaning that we expect from serious painting is due entirely to the artist’s inability to work in the language of metaphor. This not-uncommon problem in contemporary painting is in its various guises evidenced by a misuse of the medium’s formal devices. In Hirst’s case it is pattern and color that have been employed as stylistic affectations without regard to meaning. Gagosian has touted the artist’s color sensibilities, and Hirst’s quote on color is offered as a sort of raison d’etre for the paintings:

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had phenomenal love of color . . . I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

But using color does not make one a colorist any more than banging on a piano makes one a composer, and if the spot paintings are a manifestation of Hirst’s love of color, it seems a chaste love indeed. Ultimately, the paintings miss out on the profound emotional resonance of the effective use of color as metaphor. Thus, despite his candied hues, his employment of color to do nothing situates Hirst far nearer the official salon painters of the 19th Century than the Fauves.

As for Hirst’s other big formal device, it was only a matter of time before pattern got the super-flat treatment. Like the nude, pattern is a subject to which painters of each generation return, perhaps because it provides a historical benchmark by which the painterly tradition is both linked and updated. Those contemporaries who have used pattern to some interesting effect—Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully, Mary Heilman—have employed it the way Picasso used African art, as a motif that strips painting bare of all but its most fundamental, powerful components. For such painters, pattern offers neutral ground on which their true preoccupations play out.

The repeating patterns across LeWitt’s wall drawings become petri dishes out of which grow remarkably startling confrontations with optical perception. Repetition in a Lewitt allows for a mathematical basis by which to judge perception, the way regularly spaced trees or furrowed fields provide similar benchmarks for our experience of scale, space, distance, and even color, in nature. Scully, too, takes the strict confines of pattern as the basis for work that transcends its constraints. His subject is no more the repeated rectangle than Cezanne’s is the dishcloth. The ways in which his rectangles push up against one another, with subtle modulations within their volumes and upon their edges, give tremendous variety to his work.

The little something that does happen when the eye takes in Hirst’s vast fields of colored dots is more akin to looking at a snowy TV screen than a LeWitt. Such effects are more common in Hirst’s round paintings, where the vagaries of trying to keep concentric circles of dots evenly spaced lead to irregularities. That the eye can, in such cases, believe that it is traveling along one path and be thrown unexpectedly off on a tangent is the one and only interesting optical experience of this work.

Time and again, Hirst has pushed at the boundaries of the art world and found them to be exceptionally flexible. His big gambit, that an actual presentation of life and death would hold its own with mere allusions, has made him rich and famous. If, as Saatchi has predicted, Hirst’s name will be mentioned alongside those of Pollock and Warhol in the history books of the next century, it will not, however, be on the strength of “The Complete Spot Paintings,” which misuse the formal devices, and miss out on the real powers, of the medium of painting.

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June 18–September 12, 2010
200 Eastern Parkway,
Brooklyn, (718 638 5000

After his near death in 1968 when he was shot by Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol’s greatest art was behind him: that at least is the critical cliché. Great in the 1960s when he offered a critical perspective on celebrities and death, in the 1970s he supported the Factory with the much criticized, highly commercial portraits. And then in the 1980s, it is often said, he just faded out. This once radical innovator successfully pursued the rich and famous, and devoted too much attention to the journalistic record of this social life, Andy Warhol’s Interview; he failed to build upon his early achievement. Warhol himself often worried that he was passé. He feared that the trendy young Neo-Expressionists, Jean-Michael Basquait, Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel were outdoing him. And he worried about his place in history. When he visited the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1981, he decided that his own recent art looked “like nothing compared to that stuff.”

This show of fifty some works of art, which comes to Fort Worth from the Milwaukee Art Museum, critically examines that received idea. Usually after locating a style, a mature artist settles in to develop it. In 1962, after more than a decade working as a very successful decorator, Warhol developed his signature style very quickly. But in his last decade, he effectively deconstructed that style. Thanks to his financial success, he had the space and assistants needed to quickly create many very large pictures. Surprisingly sensitive to critical reviews, he kept restlessly searching, as if he were a young man seeking a style. His art in the period 1978-87 certainly was varied. He did Self-Portraits, some showing himself oddly disheveled; the Oxidation Paintings; the Shadows; revisions of the classic 1960s Marilyns, Campbell’s Soups and Mona Lisas; various logos some from advertising, others religious—Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! – is one example; the Easter Eggs; many Last Suppers; and the abstract Camouflages, Rorschachs, and Yarns.

Sometimes you can better understand the art under review by going immediately outside of the exhibition. I saw this show at Fort Worth’s new Tadao Ando building where it was displayed on the second floor on the right at the top of the stairs. This luxurious building provides the most sympathetic possible setting for these paintings, for even the enormous ones fit comfortably within the beautifully proportioned very high galleries. If, however, you turn left, then you enter a room containing eight of Sean Scully’s Catherine paintings. Starting in 1979, until 1996 each year Scully and his then wife Catherine Lee selected his best painting and called it Catherine. Working in the same era as Warhol, Scully’s paintings come from a very different world. Warhol presents one conception, then another, moving relentlessly far forward. You wouldn’t miss anything rollerblading through his show. Scully asks that you stop and reflect, taking time to note how varied are his deployments of a seemingly limited motif, the stripe. His art demands intense close up contemplation. In these paintings he really does find and develop a style. Scully’s Catherines could be installed alongside the old masters across the street at the Kimbell Art Museum; Warhol would be totally out of place there. This exhibition naturally looks quite different at the Brooklyn Museum, where it appears in a very different context.

In offering this contrast, I am not making a comparative judgment about the value of Warhol’s and Scully’s art, but only seeking to get this deeply puzzling exhibition in focus. Warhol’s 1960s pop art was part of an international movement devoted to images of commodities. But in his last decade, Warhol often wasn’t a pop artist. He had new subjects, and ways of treating them. Although he was very famous and famously sociable, his art became oddly difficult to place. Sometimes he looks back to pop themes, but other times he wrestles with the legacy of abstraction or deals with religious concerns in a highly personal way. Always concerned to get ideas from other people, he now collaborated with younger figures, Basquait and Clemente, who have very different styles. His collaborations might have been personally stimulating, but they produced his weakest art. Indeed, when all three artists worked together, they created the least satisfying painting in the show, Origin of Cotton (1984). Even when working on his own, Warhol didn’t find a way to synthesize his diverse interests. It is not clear if he knew where he was going or whether his premature death prevented him from achieving a final synthesis. Warhol remained mysterious to the very end—the last decade of his career is as puzzling as its beginning. What did he want to achieve?

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