“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Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.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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January 27 – March 5, 2005

Paul Vinet, a young French artist currently based in Washington D.C. , first exhibited “Learning From New York” at Jan van der Donk Rare Books in Chelsea in 2000/2001. This series of color photographs depicts the city from a pedestrian’s point of view, with a slight alteration: the artist paints over signs or other text in the image with creamy white paint. Vinet has a background in photography, graphics, and museology, and his interest in issues surrounding visual culture in the public sphere underlies the work. “Learning From New York” was exhibited in Brussels , in Paris , and at other venues in France during 2001 -2004. Critical reception in Europe has been enthusiastic. Fabienne Boulineau raved, in France Amérique (International edition of the Figaro, January 2001), “Forget the City as you know it, and transport yourself into a world without billboards, void of all types of advertising, commercial pollution, or visual aggression – a world where the eye feels free… Maddeningly, deliriously: it’s an excruciating pleasure to behold.”

With only five pieces on view at Senior and Shopmaker, Vinet’s presentation in an intimate, gray-painted alcove of the gallery is just right and just enough. Three selections from “Learning From New York” depict a straight-on view of the Met; a street scene on a block with a rare absence of retail stores; and a building encased in scaffold and construction scrim. The white-painted areas cause the eye to pick up on strong lines in the rest of the scene, be they corinthian columns, crosswalk stripes, or repetitive units of industrial architecture. The paint handling is done in a straightforward way; brushstrokes form regular yet leisurely patterns. Two new works from 2004 feature crowd scenes where the background is entirely white (probably a Kerry rally, but they’re entitled “People” without further ado). White paint around the crowd scenes has an amorphous liquidity, as if the artist had dripped paint onto the image horizontally at close range. All of the works are mounted on aluminum and measure around 4 ft. by 3 ft.

The title “Learning From New York” borrows cleverly from “Learning from Las Vegas,” a book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published by MIT Press in 1972. This entertaining study of the architecture, neon signs, and urban design of the famed casino capital is surely the first scholarly analysis of the Sunset Strip as a multifaceted urban phenomena. The idea was to learn from it what “urban sprawl” is, how it developed, how it works. As a book, it’s is a marvel of maverick design. The architects orchestrate a graphically rich collaboration between themselves, their Yale students, feisty local media and business entities, and several pop artists, notably Edward Ruscha. Here’s a quote that sets the tone and, toward the end, cues into Vinet’s project:

The streetlights function superfluously along many parts of the Strip that are incidentally but abundantly lit by signs, but their consistency of form and position and their arching shapes begin to identify by day a continuous space of the highway, and the constant rhythm contrasts effectively with the uneven rhythms of the signs behind. This counterpoint reinforces the contrast between two types of order on the Strip: the obvious visual order of street elements and the difficult visual order of buildings and signs. The zone of the highway is a shared order. The zone off the highway is an individual order. The elements of the highway are civic. The buildings and signs are private. In combination they embrace continuity and discontinuity, going and stopping, clarity and ambiguity, cooperation and competition, the community and rugged individualism [my emphasis]. (Learning From Las Vegas, MIT Press, MA, 1972, p. 31.)

Vinet’s notion of interrupting the photographic syntax of each color image with white paint is a quite simple idea, but nonetheless striking. Its conceptual bent and homage to “Learning From Las Vegas” link it to Ruscha’s work, recently seen in depth at the Whitney. Whereas Ruscha’s play with billboard signs and advertising text for its own sake eliminates the urban context, Vinet erases the sign and leaves the view on the street intact in “Learning From New York”.

Boulineau’s observation that “the eye feels free” might be applied to both Vinet and Ruscha, but for different reasons. When Boulineau capitalizes “City” in reference to Vinet’s work, he refers not only to the artist’s interventionist cityscapes of New York, but also to a growing acknowledgment that urban places are becoming an Everywhere as a result of globalization’s insidious commercialism. Ruscha’s work, paradoxically, derives from public space but doesn’t reflect on it; graphics float, unmoored, in pictorial space.

An alternate comparison might be made between Vinet and his more senior fellow French artist, Daniel Buren. Buren’s work centers on installations in the public sphere that have questioned the context of art display since the 1970s. Buren is a theorist as well as an artist; his work has achieved international acclaim as well as great prominence in France. Vinet was educated at Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and perhaps his work bears a trace of Buren’s influential social and conceptual approach to artistic practice. The beauty of Vinet’s conceit is that it’s a kind of proposition: a photograph can be less a statement of the obvious than the obvious reconfigured as a question. There are constraints on what can appear in the public sphere, but the public does not have a say about the resulting ensemble. Much to his credit, Vinet doesn’t judge the rightness or wrongness of this arrangement. He simply proposes an alternative, like a novelist. The precise word for what Vinet does is interpolation: he makes an insertion (the white paint) into an existing order (the photograph). It’s superficial, and it’s profound.

The main gallery at Senior and Shopmaker displays exquisite collages and box constructions made by Hannelore Baron, a European emigre who came to New York in the 1930s and died in 1987. Her work’s evocatively worn, tatterdemalion aesthetic has been related to Paul Klee’s surrealist ethos. Stuttering lines of ink and frayed textiles allude to speech and the body moving through the world, vulnerable to world events, yet possessed of a transcendent soul. Baron’s subtle engagement with ancient cultures is a reflection of her sensitivity to social issues. She narrowly escaped from central Europe with her family as an adolescent during WWII, and made a new life for herself in the Bronx. Like her American contemporary Joseph Cornell, she retreated into her own universe of collaging cast off things and marking upon them. With their sense of secrecy about language, they provide a rich counterpoint to Vinet’s work.

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