September 24, 2016 to January 2, 2017
Picadilly Circus
London, +44 020 7300 8000

“Abstract Expressionism” at London’s Royal Academy, the first overview of the American movement since one held at the Tate Gallery in 1959, is a landmark event, a sprawling exhibition featuring painting, sculpture and photography from the 1930s to the ‘70s. The curators appear to have entertained two conflicting goals: to present a comprehensive survey of work from this period and to make a lucid case for its artistic achievement. Their solution has been to embed five solo shows and a two-person show amidst a composite display of work by 26 other artists. The singularly showcased painters are Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt in the two-man room. Other canonical AbEx’ers of the caliber of Philip Guston, Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell are sparsely represented in the six remaining salons.

These mixed-artist galleries are organized chronologically or, alternatively, by stylistic theme (“Color as Gesture,” “The Violent Mark,” and “Darkness Visible.”) One possible explanation for the exhibition’s muddy curatorial direction is that it reflects the accomplishments of the show’s guest chief curator, David Anfam. The author of a recent textbook on Abstract Expressionism, Anfam is also Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado and author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist. This left me wondering whether the decision to feature a strong, cohesive selection of Still’s work in the exhibition’s best gallery was intended to show that artist’s superior aesthetic standing among his peers or if it was merely a byproduct of Anfam’s professional interests.

The term “abstract expressionism” was coined in 1946 by Robert Coates, a critic for The New Yorker. The movement’s fiercest critical champion, Clement Greenberg, preferred “American-Type Painting” in a pivotal essay dated ten years later. The artists themselves did not self-identify as part of an organized endeavor. No manifestos were written for the group as a whole and, as this current exhibition attests, the work ranges in style from highly textured gestural handling to flat, hard-edged monochrome compositions. (David Smith’s steel sculpture and a selection of works on paper and photography are also included in the show). However, statements by the various artists suggest a common commitment to unearthing a subjective interiority as part of their reinvestigation of artistic traditions. As Rothko wrote, in 1945, “We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world…If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” The Abstract Expressionists collectively pioneered introspective territory unfamiliar at the time to most other Americans.

The artists in this show worked in the turbulent times preceding, during and after the Second World War. These seismic political and cultural shifts can be read in the experimental searching evident in their output. The passing of UK’s Brexit vote earlier this year harkens back to isolationist tendencies that set the stage for war.

Likewise, the conversations surrounding the current US presidential elections echo England’s social conservatism and increasing signs of lack of tolerance. The Abstract Expressionist’s work quickly led to an explosively creative era in contemporary art in the US that spread around the world. This period of rich innovation is a reminder of the importance of pushing back against limiting fears and hatred. I think the work in the exhibition still captures the imagination, celebrates the individual, and is a reminder of the need for on-going dialogue.

The first room, “Early Works,” is a sure-footed introduction to the artists and their signature orientations. For example, Rothko’s Self-portrait (1936) presents prophetic qualities such as feathered edges and blocky forms. The composition of Pollock’s Male and Female (1942-43) is rooted in the Jungian symbolism that continued to fuel mature work.  I thus expected the last gallery, “Late Works,” to function as as a cohesive conclusion to the AbEx story. Instead it contains one late-stage work each by Hans Hoffmann and William Baziotes whose only other paintings in the show are in the very first gallery. Are we meant to cast these artists as the mascots for this movement? As a second non sequitur these paintings are abruptly placed together with a monumental work, “Salut Tom” (1979) by Joan Mitchell and one of Philip Guston’s late figurative paintings.

Two-thirds of the way through the exhibition, Still’s gallery refreshingly sidesteps any didacticism the show might have been veering towards. A spacious, generously installed room of ten large, stylistically consistent paintings allows for the digestion of his most mature style. Known as a stubborn outsider, Still’s work dodges the queasiness of Surrealism, while keeping its irrational contours. Passages of hot yellow ochre, oranges and deep reds meet patches of white and black alongside fissures of primary colors that open up like scars. His brushwork is alternately efficient and luxurious. Anfam, in the exhibition catalogue, convincingly connects Still’s work to the realm of skin and sensation, whereas it is typically associated with landscape.

Radiating out from this highpoint of the exhibition are two galleries of color field paintings and a gallery of diverse works on paper and photography. Rothko’s flat floating lozenges are presented in a dimly lit, chapel-like room on one side. The two-person gallery of geometric works in reduced color palettes by Reinhardt and Newman are on another side. Rothko’s gallery leads to de Kooning’s solo room of works from 1945 to 1966. De Kooning and Pollock are arguably the artists most often associated with Abstract Expressionism yet, in contrast to Still’s aesthetically powerful gallery, de Kooning has been selected for breadth over depth. Across 13 works de Kooning shifts from the subject of figure — such as in his iconic “Women” series — to landscape, although as the focus passes there is, in fact, a merging of his subjects.

A large gallery devoted to Pollock’s mature drip paintings, while selected in a way that represents the power of his work, was divided by two temporary walls that diminished its impact. Pollock’s largest painting, Mural (1943), commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim, is placed opposite the iconic Blue Poles (1952), contrasting his all-over compositions at two distinct points. The second largest painting in the Pollock gallery is by his widow, Lee Krasner, the stylistically consistent The Eye is The First Circle (1960).

Presenting over 150 works, many of them masterpieces, this exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to draw new conclusions regarding the stylistic origins and creative power of the phenomenon widely considered the first true American aesthetic achievement in the visual arts. This only makes more painful, however, the institutional bias against women and minorities found in this exhibition, which includes but four women painters and one person of color (Norman Lewis). Mercifully, one painting that is included is by Janet Sobel, whose allover compositions arguably inspired Pollock: she is usually consigned to a catalogue footnote. Ironically, in view of the apotheosis of Clyfford Still in this exhibition, this summer the Denver Art Museum presented the exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen F. Chanzit. Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, who are minimally represented in this exhibition, were featured there extensively with nine other artists. The catalogue for the show in Denver includes biographies for a total of 42 artists whose careers have regrettably been over-looked.

On the plane ride home to New York City, I watched Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977. As with the artists in the show, select characters in the film are subconsciously driven to express themselves as part of a bonding process with creatures from outer space. Unlike the exhibition, however, I noticed the movie wasn’t burdened with an academic voiceover-like narration. The plot climaxes with a successful exchange between aliens and humans: dialogue in place of destruction. In the 1930s and ‘40s, making a commitment to radicalism in the fine arts was an alien endeavor for most American artists compared to their counterparts in Europe, especially Paris. Furthermore, introspection was considered (and in some circles still is) a sign of weakness and a waste of time. During the war, a motley crew of Americans from both coasts achieved a fertile exchange of aesthetic ideas with recent émigrés from Europe that reached across their cultural differences. To acknowledge and act upon the subconscious required heroic leaps of faith for the characters in the movie and for the Abstract Expressionists.

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Six powerful, lyrical, at once absorbing and theatrical canvases, patched together from separate panels and each seven feet tall by a little more than that in width, hang unstretched like baronial tapestries in a raw white cube in Bushwick. We clearly aren’t in the territory of painterly propaganda or nostalgia in this show titled “The Revolution will be Painted”. Anne Sherwood Pundyk entreats us to forget David or Delacroix as surely as television. The revolutions in play could as well be planetary, or indeed stylistic, as social or political. Pundyk’s painterly strategies are well suited to ambiguities of direction and speed. But her paintings sing with creative tension. It feels as if their execution could equally have taken place on floor or wall. The imagery pivots – or, rather, ricochets – between intentionality and provisionalism. Sprawling, amorphous spreads of stain cohabit with meticulous, dexterous graphic markmaking. The eye is lured into deep space even as surface actualities protrude. Grids and drips have learned to live with each other—or else we are witnessing the calm before the storm of their final showdown.

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May 22 to June 21, 2015
147 Roebling Street (between Hope and Metropolitan)
Brooklyn, 718 782 2556

Long guided by a circumspect approach to unfurling his intuition, Peter Fox shows his vulnerability in the suite of paintings on display through June 21^st at the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg. Since December last year, the artist has maintained white spaces on his canvases. The “blank” areas develop between the prodigiously varied effects he produces by extruding bundled stripes of semi-liquid, matte, acrylic paint, which are then left to slide partway down the clean surface. The melting ribbons of clear, bright color-groups represent hypothetical nations or advertise various emotional states. Owing to the addition of more water to thin the texture of the paint in the new works, the striped bands alternately shrink to thin vacillating lines or abruptly spread out like broad waving flags. Overall, the dripping striations look like spooky, alien forms of calligraphy and gestures from a private dance. The resulting erratic negative spaces sing the strange, knotted song of Fox’s new freedom.

These paintings are a far cry from the prior hypnotic, yet rigidly composed color spectrum paintings Fox produced in the same way, though with the use of a thicker gel medium that choked the paint’s flow. For the last decade Fox has centered his work on mastering a form of readymade technique: the drip. According to the artist, he perfected rendering the “world of the drip” after years of experimentation with a large, squeezable, syringe-like tool; Fox succeeded in becoming a virtuoso at controlling the chaos of oozing paint as he formed frozen showers of candy-colored drops. Without completely leaving behind his adherence to hands-off practices such as painting without touching a brush or letting his colors mix automatically inside a plastic tube, Fox takes a breath here and jumps into the open air. Rather than restrict himself to merely employing the physiology of the paint and its relation to gravity, he shows his hand, its gesture and the movement of his body. The results look like he is using a form of automatic application to indicate it’s harder not to acknowledge the range of emotions that come with risking direct, intimate contact.

The transitional nature of the artworks in “Blind Trust” may have left the show susceptible to old installation habits for the gallery and the artist. The density of paint and color in his prior pieces made them more self-contained: the context for each artwork had less impact on it’s viewing. The difference between the way the work is shown in the gallery’s two rooms points to the importance of fully recognizing its current porous identity which bridges beyond the edge of the stretcher. The first room in the show is dominated by a sampling of Fox’s fluid technique across small works presented in a large grid. This dense, regimented arrangement diminishes the thrill of the new responsiveness in Fox’s paintings and works against the hard-won stance of the show. The other structural clutter in the room — a display platform and reception desk — adds to the distraction. The spare installation of four larger paintings in the second, more cloistered room clarifies Fox’s broadened scope. The most gratifying piece in the show is also the largest: HERALDIC (2015), spanning over nine feet. It is the lone anchor of the space’s long far wall and mesmerizes with the possibilities of paint Fox has realized on its surface. The tailored installation in this room allows for a fuller appreciation of the extent to which the artist has revealed himself within the new body of work. In a final twist, however, the inevitable downward pull of the paint’s physical weight that Fox leaves unchecked across all the paintings in “Blind Trust” could be read as trumping his, or anyone’s, self-liberating strivings.

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I’ve been visiting — with artists, writers, curators, dealers, and others in the art world — to look at one artwork of my guest’s choice. We have a one-on-one conversation about the artwork, what they find interesting in it and why it’s important to them. In this edition, painter Anne Sherwood Pundyk and I went to her studio in Mattituck, New York, to look at her ongoing painting project, The Revolution Will Be Painted.

Noah Dillon: So what are we looking at?

Anne Sherwood Pundyk: It’s a painting I made last fall called The Revolution Will Be Painted. It’s 15 feet wide by 11 feet high, on unstretched canvas. It was originally a drop cloth I had used on the floor of several different studios. You can see evidence of this along the unpainted edge. I used latex paint for the large indigo Rorschach shapes and the field of red. The multi-colored chevrons are in acrylic with colored pencil guidelines. Not all of it is visible because it’s folded under to fit the wall in my studio here in Mattituck. Since the piece was finished, it has been installed in four different locations. In all instances the painting has been partially hidden, subject to the constraints of the wall configuration and ceiling height of each space.

What’s the origin of this painting?

In the fall of 2012 I moved my studio to Bushwick and then TriBeCa; I got the tarp for these spaces. Around that time, the focus of my art writing evolved to an examination of a circle of radical feminist performance artists. Bianca Casady invited me to create with her the magazine Girls Against God (GAG), which is published by Capricious. This became an intensely collaborative time for me involving writing, editing and performance events. Consequently, some of what was going on with the work in my studio was being pulled out of its original concerns and constraints and apart from painting, into universes I felt an affinity with, but hadn’t engaged with so directly.

The drop cloth originally intended to protect the floor became the site of gatherings and group projects. (It has pollen, red wine and soy sauce stains to prove it!) By the spring of 2014 I knew I would be moving my studio here to Mattituck permanently. Simultaneously, I began co-curating an exhibition and performance series called “Milk and Night,” at Gallery Sensei on the Lower East Side. I’d wanted to paint one of the gallery’s walls for my own piece in the show, but it wasn’t permitted, so I opted to use my trusted studio tarp to create the monumental effect I wanted for what became The Revolution Will Be Painted.

How does this relate to some of the other art that you like, or what you like about art generally? This spans several disciplines, so in addition to painting in the specific it seems like it also means a lot to you with regard to art more broadly.

It has to do with Painting, with a capital P. I learned a lot from the activist performance artists and joined their ranks, and continue to be there. But there is amongst some members of this tribe, generally speaking, a lack of appreciation — maybe even disdain — for painting as a medium. As a painter, it felt like a significant misunderstanding. I began to realize that I was among people who maybe wouldn’t ever appreciate that about me.

Of course the role of painting — here, now, and historically — is highly contested, but also beloved. It’s a medium that’s simultaneously well understood and mysterious. And it’s who I am; I can’t separate it from how I picture the world. More to the point, I see painting as a revolutionary act that resides within the individual. Both painting and any personal revolution happens first inside one’s own consciousness before its can be expressed in the material world. The title represents how important I think painting is and that it’s as effective and stirring as performance, or any other art form or activist statement for that matter.

There’s also the reference to the performative poetry and jazz of Gil Scott-Heron, which invokes that context of activity and vocality.

Yeah. In the months after making “Milk and Night,” Nicole J. Caruth, at Art21 Magazine, invited me to write “The Revolution Will Be Painted.” I adapted Scott-Heron’s poem to express what I was talking about: that revolutionary acts are part of the process of painting and have to do with seeing, and the changeability and strength of subjectivity. And it’s a textual version of that same urge. I read through all the art books I have, collecting sentences that jumped out at me, describing work by everyone across the ages from Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Cecily Brown and Edouard Manet. There are about 40 footnotes. I fit those lines into Scott-Heron’s cadence, using excerpts where the writer hits on that flame you find in good painting.

And there’s the poetic relationship between the painting and the spell you wrote for GAG, right?

Yes, the chevron pattern in The Revolution Will Be Painted, developed from a piece I wrote for the second issue of GAG, which is all about witches past and present. I had researched spells and created a protective spell that a mother might cast over her children as they make their way in the world. I made a video to go with that piece and shot footage for it here in the countryside, and inside the house. At one point I turned around and saw my own shadow on a rug with a chevron pattern and had a sort of vision of the chevrons radiating out of my body. As a mother, I thought there was an appreciable power in that moment and all the things that go into that connection with your children, and I committed to using that shape as an assertive spiritual symbol in The Revolution Will Be Painted. That the different audiences for the work have been drawn to it based on its visual dynamic tells me it transcends my own personal experience of the forms.

Painting has a relationship to performance just by the fact that there is an action involved in making a mark. So you’re not just talking about the personal, interior performance, but also that you were engaging with these artists and ended up with work that is a palimpsest of the performative aspect of painting — a material manifestation of what transpired.

Right. When I was making this painting in August it was boiling and there was no air conditioning in my TriBeCa studio, only a pitiful fan. I had a sad ballad by Bruce Springsteen, “The Last Carnival,” on repeat while I was crawling on my hands and knees, painting, trying to cover this large red portion as I was running out of paint, and weeping to the song. Incidentally, the song is about the end of a season of a traveling circus and the dispersal of its performers. The line, “Where have you gone my handsome Billy?,” also conjured my father, Dirck Brown, who died in 2002, who like my performance friends was charming and intuitive.

Like literally blood, sweat, and tears, right? And the whole thing might feel like a total disaster until it works.

It subsumed me. But it was incredible. I had a very limited amount of time yet somehow I knew exactly what I needed to do — but as you said, utter failure was potentially lurking in the wings. I was trying to figure out what should go where and how the colors would read, which I think of as painting at its purist. I was also in some form of mourning, knowing that I’d already kind of left the sphere of that particular group of performance artists with whom I’d been enamored. I knew that the era was going to end and I would move out here and there was some new, really big chapter beginning. Consequently, this is a painting that, despite functioning very differently, connects deeply with my ongoing body of painting work.

One thing that I’m curious about is how an artwork’s environment affects someone’s relationship to it. You’ve shown this in different ways at different places. I wonder what you think about the painting’s relationship to the place it’s in right now and maybe in comparison to earlier iterations of it in other spaces.

It was interesting to bring it out to show you today: I had it all folded up and was thinking about how to install it here — whether it could be narrower or taller depending on which wall I chose. The way it reads is consistent throughout the different installations, which I attribute to the color, the scale, and the dynamic of the activity within oceans of neutral. It’s physical malleability feels to me a bit like a protective nomad’s tent with talismanic powers. It’s now on the cover of the London based magazine, HYSTERIA’s fifth issue. I’m hoping that we can find some space to show it at its full capacity related to the issue’s New York launch.

That’s funny, that you have this piece that you, its author, have only ever seen once in its entirety.

Many of the decisions I made in painting it were done just by visualizing it as a whole; and even if I couldn’t see certain portions, I could feel them viscerally.

Can you say, finally, why you wanted to talk about this piece? Why do you find this especially pertinent to your relationship to art and what you find in it?

I think because it’s been with me through this epic process of unearthing and ultimate return to painting. The necessity of the individual authorship of the painting is as subversive as anything else. The whole experience of getting to the point of making it involved many unplanned, unexpected challenges, and I think that’s part of art for me. It may not be a typical piece, but in terms of the aspects of my personality and ambition and commitment to color in a very pure way, it’s very characteristic of things that are important to me.

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