January 17 to February 25, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

The exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian uptown is remarkable both for the quality of the paintings and for the way they embody the transformational moment in which they were made. The 17 paintings filling a single large room are all from 1974-75 and if they are metronomic in their structure and in their presentation, their urgency and excitement are as palpable as when they were first presented. Together with a catalogue by the show’s curators, Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, that delves into the mid-70s context of Reed’s paintings, this show creates a vivid historical context for the works that commence Reed’s distinguished career.

Painting Paintings reunites many paintings that were shown in Reed’s heady debut at Susan Caldwell gallery in 1975. Reviewing it that year for Art in America, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Reed’s paintings have “the strength of modesty, of ambition reduced to a level not further reducible. There is no ‘getting around’ these paintings”.

Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas panels are less than a foot wide and about six feet vertically—wider paintings consist of these regular units bolted together. But it is the process that makes these paintings standout. The paintings are the result of Reed pulling a large loaded brush of red or black paint through a thick wet ground of whitish oil paint. What follows from this premise are viscerally compelling incidents where the brushstrokes have dissolved into viscous skeins of paint. Although the gesture of Reed’s brushstroke is simple and repetitive, pigment and gravity collaborate to form detailed arrays of micro-cosmic composition—each is a unique painterly moment, off hand and delectable at the same time.

There is a specific bodily relation to Reed’s paintings that is crucial and cannot be reproduced.  The bands of brushstrokes can be apprehended through photography but in terms of the physical experience of looking at these paintings, the stripes do only perfunctory duty. Rather than function as the paintings’ compositional goal the alternating bands are the structure that allows paint to hang in an intimate choreography of splashes and blendings.  In the catalogue Siegel and Wool note that the linear compositions are like writing with their left to right pulls of pigment. They also bear a resemblence to a musical score. Additionally, the quality of Reed’s paintings relate to the sumptuous and insistently rhythmic compositions that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were performing in lower Manhattan in the mid-seventies. The vertical panel has an ergonomic architecture tuned for a human body to paint its surface. The clarity of each painting’s facture reminds us that as viewers we take up the same location in front of the canvas as the artist did while painting it. The paintings invite us to step in close to see and soak up lush surface specifics.  It is this pull to intimacy that gives Reed’s paintings their humanity and warmth. And that seems to be where the picture is in these works— not in their imagistic configuration but within the physical process of close looking.

Through contemporaneous documents—magazine and catalogue pages, installation and personal photographs, as well as reproductions of works by other artists—the catalogue presents the personal as well as cultural context for Reed’s emergence as a painter. There is an evocative photograph from 1968, for instance, of Reed in attendance at the New York Studio School with the painters Philip Guston and Leland Bell surrounded by students. Although Reed moved on from the conservative spatialist conventions of that institution, the catalogue presents his development less as a rejection as the taking up of a radical rethinking of art underway at that time in New York. The catalogue includes a chapter based on the exhibition, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, curated by James Monte and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1969 that manifested the concerns of process-oriented artists of the late 1960s. The show included only one painter, Robert Ryman, and as such might have been called “Anti-Painting”. Most of the artists selected were less interested in the history of painting and sculpture than in science, technology, and sociology. Even so, these “Anti-Illusion” artists employ a number of shared pictorial conventions. Foremost is the use of repetition. Partly this is an affection for rhythm, but it is also a control to discover how different effects come from the same action. Additionally repetition is used to present narrative in a manner like film through a sequence of frames. Finally, there is a taste for documentation as representation—either through the technical means of photography, film or video, or through the presentation of material residue as evidence of the action that produced it. As indicated by the use of the word in the 1969 show title, Material, material, raw and unadorned, is savored in the work of artists such as Lynda Benglis and Carl Andre. It was an insightful choice by Siegel and Wool to include these contemporary works in Reed’s catalogue because it demonstrates how he embraced pictorial values of the zeitgeist. It is an achievement, and an unlikely one, that Reed brought what were often thought to be anti-painting values to his painting so naturally.

One flight down at Gagosian, the curators installed a group of works tangentially related to Reed’s paintings, including examples of Joel Shapiro, Wool himself, Joyce Pensato (a classmate at the Studio School) and Andy Warhol. While such efforts at building context work well in the catalogue, in the gallery the group show seemed more convenient than urgent. In comparison to the focus embodied in Reed’s paintings the group show was at best a pleasant distraction to Reed’s prodigious accomplishment.

As the catalogue emphasizes, Reed spent years painting from life, practicing drawing, and listening to accomplished artists speak about painting. Writings by Reed reveal his love for historical painting; his notes about color and the location of shapes within his compositions show a lineage of academic discipline. Cearly, Reed’s education in traditional painting and drawing have been a resource over the years. Although the works in the “Anti-Illusion” catalogue have a great absurdist exhuberence I couldn’t help but think how evanescent are those works that rely on document and trace rather than engaging the more traditional forms of painting and sculpture. The Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock in the midst of painting is iconic but it’s the painting that remains to give the photograph its consequence. Inversely, with Richard Serra casting lead against the corner of a wall and floor (also reproduced in the catalogue) it is the photographs that remain to signify the artist and his gesture. In this case it is Serra’s persona, or you could say stunt, that is the primary artwork. For Reed, the painting itself is the primary document. As the title suggests, Reed’s subject is Painting, not his body’s gestures. It was ambitious for Reed to take on the then contemporary pictorial conventions of repetition, documentation as representation, and material immance. As for the accomplishment of these paintings—there is still no ‘getting around’ that.

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October 14, 2016 to March 26, 2017

It has been clear for some time now that received accounts of art in the decades following World War II are deeply unsatisfying. It is no longer plausible to speak of “the triumph of American painting”. Equally unwilling to accept October magazine’s ultimately conservative retelling of that story, however, we need a radical revisionist history of this period. Entering the first gallery of Haus der Kunst, which is also the first of eight “chapters” telling this story, titled “Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Age,” you face the mammoth Joseph Beuys installation, Monuments to the Stag (1958/82). Other works you see include two of Morris Louis’s early political paintings, of which Charred Journal, Firewritten II (1951),is one; Frank Stella’s black-striped Arbeit Macht Frei (1958); Barnett Newman’s The Beginning (1946); Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration (1951), by Norman Lewis; and Gerhard Richter’s Coffin Bearers (1962). Form Matters,” the next chapter, includes major pieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and a large Lee Krasner picture along with a gargantuan abstract painting by Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, a Turkish artist who worked in Jordan; John Latham’s Untitled (Roller Painting) (1964), which uses a spray painted cloth, hung horizontally to mark the passage of time; and three black, densely gridded paintings by Rasheed Araeen, the Pakistani painter who lives in London. The fourteen high-walled galleries all mix art by well-known figures with strong works by lesser-known artists. Thus “New Images of Man,” for example, included Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951), and sculptures by Giacometti alongside artists who will be discoveries for many westerners, —such as Maqbool Fida Husain, who uses layers of paint to surround his figure in Man (1951) and Alina Szapocznikow, whose Head VII (1961) is a heavily slashed cast lead sculpture. And “Realisms,” which takes you upstairs, includes Vasiliy Jakovlev’s over the top Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union (1946) as well as Chinese and Egyptian social realist paintings; an Alice Neal portrait; and Andrew Wyeth’s Young America (1950).

Curated by Okwui Enwezor (director of the Kunsthalle), Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes, “Postwar” shows artists responding, whether in figurative or abstract works, to subjects as diverse as the beginning of the end of European colonization, the postwar reconstruction of ruined Western Europe, the Holocaust and the American atomic bombings of Japan, the coming to power of communism in China, the birth of a consumer economy in Western Europe, the American Civil Rights demonstrations and the start of US intervention in Vietnam, the cold war rivalry of the USSR and the USA, the history of South America, and the development of cybernetics and novel information processing technologies. All this in a building so fraught with history: formerly The House of German Art, it was opened by Hitler in 1937 as a showcase of Nazi culture. The catalogue states, incidentally, that the exhibition is coming to the Brooklyn Museum, but alas that is not to be.

Sometimes the artists respond simply by virtue of the sheer scale of their art. This would be the case for Lee Ufan’s Pushed-Up Ink (1964), Lygia Clark’s Obra mole (1964) and Alfonso Ossorio’s mixed-media panel Rescue (1951). At other times, however, they present these subjects through the iconographical content of their pictures: Ibrahim El Salahi’s Self-Portrait of Suffering (1961), a harrowing portrait of stress, Ben Enwonwu’s Anyanwu (1954-55), an elegant elongated figure based upon traditional Nigerian sculpture, John Biggers’ The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas (1955) and Boris Taslitzky’s astonishing Riposte (1951), which depicts the violent breakup by the French police of a 1949 dockworkers’ strike against arms shipments for the colonial war in Indochina. But sometimes, the artists employ a synthesis of subject and its form. In a section titled “Concrete Visions” Gyula Kosice’s Variation in Blue (1945), a shaped canvas meant to inspire utopian reflection, or Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) are good examples. And there are examples of a synthesis of formal and inconographical approach in works such as Jasper Johns’ Flags (1965), Yosef Zaritsky’s Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz) (1951), a painting honoring that agricultural utopia, and Ben Enwonwu’s narrative painting, Going (1961) which shows Nigerians celebrating national independence.

Displaying well-known artists alongside lesser-known figures could easily become a pious exercise in political correctness. And dealing with so many, very varied subjects, using artworks, most of them large, by 208 artists, could generate visual cacophony. The show might easily have been a disaster. In fact, however, this oddly harmonious visual feast was, in the three days I visited it and looked closely, entirely visually convincing.In part, this was because you saw how artists from visual cultures everywhere responded to the traumatic events. But it is also because the skillful installation frequently identifies suggestive visual correspondences. Sometimes the catalogue drives a group show of this nature. But although a massive catalogue, with essays by thirty-seven scholars, accompanies “Postwar,” it is the visual evidence that inspires conviction. This powerful exhibition changes permanently your sense of the history of postwar art. It demonstrates that it is now possible to present a world art history in which the American Abstract Expressionists and their immediate successors are legitimately set alongside their peers from not only Europe, but also Africa, Asia and South America. And it shows the power of a social history of art. If “the truth is the whole”, as Hegel famously proposed, then what follows is that in a world where artists from everywhere are in contact, as was the case between 1945 and 1965, no merely partial presentation of art can be entirely satisfying. And sometimes, as “Postwar” shows, more is more.

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Leslie Camhi, Barry Schwabsky, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Tracey Emin, Sterling Ruby, David Hockney and Sharon Horvath.

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Andrea K. Scott and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to discuss Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy, Tim Hawkinson at PaceWildenstein and Nyehaus, Julianne Swartz at Josee Bienvenu, Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer, and Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks.

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Arthur C. Danto, Mario Naves, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone, Christo and Jeanne Claude at the National Academy, Carroll Dunham  at Barbara Gladstone and Tom Otterness on Broadway

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