When “ABC Art,” published in 1965 in Art in America, went the equivalent of viral, it launched the remarkable, decades-long, international career of art critic and art historian Barbara Rose. Rose, who was also a curator and filmmaker, died on December 25, 2020 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 and was active to the end. In that seminal article, she outlined clearly and forcefully the significance of the pared-down work by a coterie of little-known, lower Manhattan artists who would soon become Minimalist icons. Among them were Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Since that debut, Rose helped shape the discourse of some of the major art movements of the late 20th Century through a constant stream of exhibitions, publications and documentaries. While she concentrated on modern and contemporary art, she also explored European art history in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969). Fast forward to 2011, she became the first Morgan-Menil fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, resuming research on a project that linked the medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse with commentaries of Beatus of Liébana with the drawings of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Her first book, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967), highlighted artists who were not fully canonical: John Marin; Joseph Stella; Stanton Macdonald Wright; and she included Irene Rice Pereira among them, at a time when female artists were seldom—if ever—acknowledged in such surveys. Pivoting, Rose began to champion painters and painting in the 1970s, in defiance of Greenbergian formalism and the nearly universal declaration of the medium’s demise, transformed into an impassioned advocate. She curated American Painting: The Eighties, an exhibition of 41 artists at the Grey Art Gallery in 1979, in advance of the decade, the bravura a characteristic trait. It was both applauded and derided, also characteristic. But whatever criticism was lobbed at it, the essential premise, that painting was alive and kicking, was absolutely right. It was followed by a sequel, Abstract Paintings: The 90s at the Andre Emmerich gallery in 1992 as she reprised her commitment to painting many times over.

Other books by Rose included Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2006); and, more recently, Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium-USA-Italy (2016.) The latter accompanied the exhibition of the same name that she curated in Brussels, an exchange between artists from those three countries. In it, Rose laments our extremely unstable and changing times and our “increasingly inhuman, technologically driven, globally-networked world.” She defines the spaces of its reproduced imagery as postmodernist, borrowed from “photography, film and video.” To counter that, she said, we need a “rebirth of a pictorial space” which is “ambiguous and amorphous” created by a “visionary consciousness.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Rose attended Smith College, but completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1957. She studied art history at Columbia University, which was one of the top-ranked departments in the nation, with an illustrious faculty that included Julius Held, Meyer Shapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower. Among the friends she made then were filmmaker Michael Chapman, artists Carl Andre, Larry Rivers, and Stella—whom she married in London in 1961, when in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship to Spain. Her Spanish sojourn was the beginning of a long, requited affair with a country that became a second home to her, awarding her the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2010. Other awards include the College Art Association’s Distinguished Art Criticism Award in 1966 and 1969, as well as a Front Page Award in 1972. She did not complete her doctorate (contemporary art beckoned) but Columbia awarded her a Ph.D. in art history in 1984, in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

Rose wrote regularly for Studio International, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, New York magazine, Partisan Review, and others over the years, and was editor-in-chief at the Journal of Art, which she co-founded, covering a range of subjects that dealt with art, culture, and politics. As well, she wrote monographs on many, if not most, of the artists of the 1960s and 70s, a dazzling line-up that included Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence and Hunter College, among other institutions and was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine and the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC. She was curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—not without controversy—where she curated Miró in America (1982); Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit (1982); and a retrospective presciently, cannily dedicated to Lee Krasner (1983), too long eclipsed by her famous spouse. Rose’s films include the documentaries The New York School and American Art in the 1960s (1972). She collaborated with François de Menil and Philip Glass to make North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977).  Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978) was a solo effort, as was the film about the master printmaker, Tanya Grosman: A life with painters and poets (1979).

Rose was married four times to three husbands: art and music stars Stella and Jerry Leiber, and bookending them, economist Richard Du Boff, her first and last, who survives her, as do her children Rachel and Michael Stella and four grandchildren.

Rose was an art world fixture and provocateur. Criticism did not cramp her style or self-assurance.  She was a character, a force, a diva, quirky or brilliant or both, depending upon your perspective. She had panache, spirit, curiosity, and ambition, and disdained the increasing monetization and corporatization of the art world. She said, with typical pungency, in Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film, The Price of Everything, that she’d only been to one auction, and it was distressing to see “art on the auction block, like a piece of meat.”  Trenchant, outspoken, confounding, she could be formidable but also amiable. She could also be hilariously irreverent—and often salty. Let’s not rehabilitate her. She was bracingly, admirably who she was, and that was much more than enough.

The post A Character, A Force, A Diva: Barbara Rose, 1936 – 2020 appeared first on artcritical.

June 15 to August 12, 2016
487 West 22nd Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 727 8585

Memory rarely resolves itself with the acuity we might wish for. Our past can never neatly unwind and allow us to recall with precision the where, when, and why of things long gone. It is, as William Faulkner famously noted, not even past, but rather an ever-evolving accumulation that grows, both foreshadowing and changing the present. In this way, the act of remembering is more piecemeal, the skeins never quite unfurling gracefully, but growing and evolving, the story changing each time we stop and pause to recollect.

In the work of the Scottish-born painter Steven MacIver, the presence of the past is acknowledged and questioned, often drawing on both the familiar and hazier areas of memory to explore how these inflections continue to inform and alter the present. With a new work on view in the compact space of Dillon Gallery, MacIver employs the physical geography and his own childhood memories of    his native Orkney, to produce a series of complexly realized drawings. MacIver began with studies of the island’s topography, gradually incorporating the forms of World War II lookout posts, which dot the coast of the United Kingdom. Like the hard-edged geometric paintings of Frank Stella, these works create space out of surface; paint and copper leaf is surgically applied to birch panels, shapes forming their own echo, patterns knitting together and forming the compositions.

In Aspect B (all works 2016), the utilitarian form of the lookout post never entirely emerges from the flawless perspectival space rendered in ethereal white against a moiré of birch. MacIver played in and around these posts as a child, and depicted here, the spaces are partial, skeletal, like the memory of a dream. A pair of panels, Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2, at first appear as complementary positive and negative variations of each other, with gold lines intersecting one another at acute angles, but on closer inspection, the patterns formed are themselves subtle inversions, their differences yielding a larger harmony. Previously, MacIver has employed similar radiating forms, frequently using geography as a springboard, allowing patterns to emerge from nature through the act of drawing.

This transition, from the three-dimensional spaces of geography to the flat plane of the drawing, is subtle, and upon first glance, one might be inclined to place this work alongside mid-century breezy geometric abstraction, such as the prints of Anni Albers or the films of Len Lye. MacIver’s works share the tensions, the agile tactility that is latent in much of the high-Modernist output, the anxieties that artists faced in a century that constantly riled and upturned precedent. Apprehensiveness runs through MacIver’s work, and while there is an undeniable Minimalist repetition present, a greater debt could be paid to Robert Smithson and his Gordian non-sites in MacIver’s dislocation of place. Smithson’s relocations of the natural into the gallery setting questioned the very strictures of the space; MacIver’s ruptures are less dramatic, but equally assertive in their examination of space.

At a time when the world appears to be taking an inward turn, MacIver’s spatially questioning drawings seem to propose an alternate, more open view; in his expanded topography, both of memory and place, the blunted edges of the past are formed into precise geometries. The geography of memory is not logical, yet it arises from an accretive process, like the erosion of a coastline. Here both are liminal, evanescent spaces. In Strata B, triangular planes cascade down, or perhaps up, forming a larger construction that appears to disperse, colors fusing into the grain of the wood. Spaces are undone in these works, even as they coalesce. While the frictions in this work are many, between memory and geography, the natural and the manipulated, the physical and the abstract, all exist easily at the convergences of its exceptional lines.

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Before detailing the manifold seductions of Art Basel/Miami Beach as the site of a virtual festival of the arts, it should be noted that the anchor fair was in good form. In fact, we thought that this year’s fair featured better examples and greater diversity than those of the past few years. The highly selected 267 galleries representing 32 countries brought to Miami Beach many of the popular blue-chip artists we read about in well-advertised one-person shows and contemporary art auctions. For those far from the Whitney Museum Frank Stella retrospective, many galleries displayed his paintings, providing a mini-Stella exhibition. There were also outrageous works like a 7-foot tall pair of blue and white polar bears by Paola PIVI made of foam, plastic and feathers at Galerie Perrotin and ingenious works like the wooden stools by John Preus at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery made from materials salvaged from recently closed Chicago Public Schools and selling for $800.00. Disturbingly, this year’s fair even included an actual stabbing event that was misinterpreted by some fair goers as performance art and others as an act of terrorism. We also sampled several of the close to twenty satellite fairs spread throughout Miami and Miami Beach and found the quality generally high.

There was a time just fourteen years ago when Art Basel/Miami Beach was a singular event of excellence that was accompanied by a handful of satellite fairs for those priced out of the main event or in search of emerging artists. While it is still a top-notch fair, its role has changed. Now, for art lovers internationally and for the Miami area, it gradually has taken on the role of a catalyst that sets in motion a veritable festival of the arts—in the spirit of Black Mountain College where many art forms collided and interacted. Indeed, one of the most Black Mountain-like events involved a collaboration between Silas Riener, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, and Martha Friedman, a Brooklyn-based creator of seductive soft sculptures that morphed into dance costumes at the Pore exhibition at Locust Projects.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, provided a powerful dialogue between the great Holocaust poet, Paul Celan and the Holocaust-drenched sculpture and painting of Anselm Kiefer at the top of his angst-filled game. In Geheimnis der Farne, weighing 50,000 lbs and set in a 2,500 square-foot room built especially for it, the common theme shared by the poet and the sculptor was a focus on ferns, a powerful metaphor for time, given their status as the ancestors of all plants. Along with two other major sculptures and several paintings and drawings occupying 18,000 square feet, this group of seven works is the largest exhibition of Kiefer’s work in the United States to date. In a neighboring room at Margulies’ Warehouse is another compelling dialogue — an immersive sound installation by the Turner-prize winner, Susan Phillipsz, dedicated to the Oscar-winning Austrian composer, Hanns Eisler. Using 12 speakers and 12 canvases, she depicts the struggles of this talented composer who went into exile and emigrated to New York in 1938 after the Nazis banned his work. Ten years later, after writing numerous movie scores in Los Angeles, he was investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, blacklisted, and finally deported. Each speaker plays one violin note that collectively combine to form somber tones accompanying the canvases that reveal Eisler’s handwritten and notated archival scores, under the typewritten reports from his FBI file with their own handwriting and deletions. Together with Magulies’ permanent collection of sculpture and photographs, the Warehouse is an essential destination for any serious art lover.

An additional collaboration occurred outside on the terrace of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in a newly commissioned, three hour multimedia extravaganza spread across eight stages. Each featured a dancer choreographed by the popular visual and performance artist Ryan McNamara and an accompanying musician or vocalist performing a new composition written by the British music sensation, Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange). Each duo, bathed in a different colored light, performed a unique routine that encouraged a kind of “movable feast”. Inside PAMM was an outstanding exhibition of nine West Australian Aboriginal artists from the Miami-based collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl. Among the standouts were works by Warlimpirringa Tjapaljarri whose recent exhibition of swirling lines of small dots at Salon 94 in New York City was mesmerizing in its gentle opticality.

Another powerful strand of this festival of the arts was the presence of two well-selected surveys of Los Angeles Light and Space Art.   At the Surf Club in Miami Beach, Joachim Pissarro, in consultation with Terence Riley and John Keenan, curated LAX – MIA: Light + Space, which included both vintage and new sculptures as well as recent paintings by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, John McCracken, Laddie John Dill, Helen Pashgian, and DeWain Valentine. Set in an airy glass-encased building by Richard Meier right off the ocean, it provided an East Coast simulation of the Light and Space that so inspired the West Coast artists represented here. The curators of this show, who used this exhibition to launch their consulting group, Parallel LLC, exemplified another theme of this year’s art week, namely, new attempts to combine art, architecture and design. This was also in evidence at the Design Miami Fair where the interdisciplinary collaborative, Revolution, introduced Volu, (a prefabricated dining pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher), which also included the participation of the designer, Marcel Wanders on a panel held inside the new structure.

The other Light and Space exhibition occurred at Miami’s MANA in Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection. Among the approximately 100 exhibited works chosen from Weisman’s trove of more than 1300 paintings and sculptures made in the Golden State since the 1950s was a dimly lit chapel-like room.   It featured a striking Corner Lamp by Larry Bell and an exquisite white disc by Robert Irwin with its classic four overlapping shadows.

Beyond these two Light and Space surveys was, in effect, a mini-retrospective of Larry Bell, the emperor of chemically-coated glass, a technique that created lyrical and ambiguous qualities in his sculptures. In addition to his iconic cubes on display in at least three different galleries at the fairs, another unusual standout was Bell’s island of thirty-six specially treated six-foot square sheets of standing grey, clear, and partially-coated glass panels.   First exhibited at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, it is now presented at the White Cube’s space in Miami’s Design District. This compelling standing wall installation changes dramatically as one moves through and around the glass panes and as they absorb, reflect and transmit the different amounts of daylight.

Given our recently re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba, it is not surprising that Cuban art was very much in evidence in the fairs, galleries, and museums. A standout was the first U.S. exhibition of Gustavo Pérez Monzón at CIFO. The 70 drawings and installations were completed between 1979 and the late 1980s at the height of his prominence in the Cuban art community. Combining aspects of Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, he used Tarot cards, numerological concepts and a variety of fragile and mixed media on board to represent abstract systems which are simultaneously quasi-logical and emotionally evocative. For this exhibition, he also re-created a complex room-size spider-web-like installation using the elastic threads from socks along with stones and wire.

Our six days in the Miami area left us with our heads spinning. For this year, at least, there is simply nothing on the North American art calendar like the broad array of high-level aesthetic choices available during the week of Art Basel/Miami Beach. We left wanting to see more, but comforted in knowing that we’ll have another chance next December.

Also discussed in this Report 

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings, Sculpture, Installation, and Susan Phillipsz: Innovative Sound Installation, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, October 29, 2015 to April 30, 2016

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at Pérez Art Museum Miami, September 17, 2015 to January 3, 2016

LAX – MIA: Light + Space, Curated by Parallel LLC, The Surf Club’s Richard Meier Pavilion, Miami, December 2 to December 12, 2015

Volu Dining Pavilion: Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher for Revolution at Design Miami, December 2 to December 6, 2015

Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection at MANA, Wynwood, December 3 to December 6, 2015

Larry Bell 6 x 6: An Improvisation at White Cube, 3930 NE Second Avenue, Melin Building, December 2, 2015 to January 9, 2016

Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Tramas, Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection at CIFO Art Space , Miami, December 2, 2015 to May 1, 2016

The post From Fair to Festival: A Report on Art Basel/Miami Beach appeared first on artcritical.

March 18 to April 18, 2015
530 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

The majority of what I know about art is owed to two things. The first is making a lot of paintings and drawings. The second is conversations with Walter Darby Bannard.

Bannard is a third-generation Abstract Expressionist who came to prominence in the mid-1960s along with his friends Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. Clement Greenberg was close with all of them. Though Stella’s reputation held, Bannard’s fell along with Greenberg’s over the course of the 1980s, which concluded with Darby leaving New York and taking over as chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Whatever this meant for Darby’s career, it was immensely good fortune for me, as I was able to work with him as a graduate student.

Darby possesses a rare combination of taste, intellect, and verbal acumen. His writings, an archive of which I have edited, contain some of the most astute observations about art I’ve run across outside of Greenberg’s. Indeed, Darby could and would argue with Greenberg to their mutual pleasure.

Having quietly nurtured talent at UM since then, the silence around his legacy broke on the evening of March 19 of this year, when an exhibition of his reductive paintings from the late 1950s and early ‘60s opened at Berry Campbell. At one point, hardly another body could have fit in the gallery. Darby stood at the front desk, greeting well-wishers (and a few ill-wishers, too) with his customary jocularity. I spoke with him the following morning.

Franklin Einspruch: Did you have an initial “aha” moment about abstraction? How did you know that it was something that you wanted to be involved in?

Walter Darby Bannard: It just seemed more exciting, that’s all. It’s kind of like food, you discover that something tastes good and you want more. At Princeton in the mid-’50s I had an instructor who was an abstract painter, Bill Seitz, who later became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He did the “Responsive Eye” exhibition, which was an Op Art show. The people I was friends with liked abstract painting. Then Frank [Stella] came along, a couple of classes behind me, and he was an abstract painter. Mike Fried was there, and a guy named Dave Comey, who loved autos and killed himself in a car crash unfortunately. We all just loved abstract painting and went to New York and looked at abstract painting.

Abstraction bewilders a lot of people when they first see it. It did me. You didn’t experience that.

I was brought up in an atmosphere with a lot of music in it, which is an analogous interest. When I was seven years old we lived in the country, at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a black church. I was a kid in the country and I would wander around. One Sunday I was next to this black church. I heard this music coming out of it. I was – what’s the cliche? – riveted. I’d never heard anything like it. I actually went during the week and broke into the church to look at the pump organ and stuff they had there and pushed it and wondered at it. I thought these machines were making the music. I was only seven years old.

That’s how it is with abstract painting, it just takes you over. I remember looking at one of these little intellectual magazines when I was sixteen and I saw a de Kooning painting, and thought, wow, that’s really cool.

When I was eleven I saw a picture in the rotogravure, the color section of the Sunday paper. This magazine had a page that said, “which kind of art do you like?” On one side there was a picture of a painting of a clown, and on the other side was a painting by Ben Nicholson. I said to myself, well, I sure know what I like. In fact I’m going to cut it out and put it in my wallet. I loved this Ben Nicholson so much and before I had no idea that there was any such thing as that. It’s like falling in love. I had no idea that there were any social consequences to this. The magazine only did it to get people upset, presuming that everyone is going to like the clown, and I didn’t even know that, I just thought the Nicholson was a beautiful painting. It was in a rotogravure that had all the quality of comic strips, but I just loved it.

Do you remember the frame of mind that you brought to this work in the Berry Campbell exhibition, the impulse to make a painting as simple as possible?

My professor at Princeton told Frank, David, and me that we should go look at Rothko. So we went to look at Rothko, and we thought it was idiotic. It was just a lot of yellow – this show happened to be a bunch of yellow squares. But it affected me mightily and pretty soon I was painting Rothkos in our little studio. I was interested in all kinds of painting. I was very interested in Pop Art, for instance. Rauschenberg in particular turned me on. And I did lots and lots of Pop Art things. I did “event”-type art. We were all anti-de Kooning, who for us represented sensitivity, and we had decided that we were not going to be sensitive. I got the idea that it would be really cool to get a big balloon and shape it as a de Kooning woman, fill it with hydrogen, let it up in the sky right before dawn, and when the sun came up, to fire tracer bullets at it so that the whole thing would explode like the Hindenberg.

The Beat poets, Corso and Kerouac and Ginsberg and a few others, came down to Princeton to give a reading. So I had decided that I was going to make a big hit with these guys by telling them my Blow Up de Kooning idea. They were nice, quiet, polite people. They weren’t wild at all. I told the whole room, which turned utterly silent. LeRoi Jones, who later became Amiri Baraka, turned to me and said, “Man, you really are crazy.” I was so hurt and abashed. They just thought I was nuts.

Before I was making Pop Art stuff and doing drawings of figures floating in the sky. I had an obsession with that for some reason. Then I saw a Clyfford Still in Art News in 1958, and I was fascinated. It was a full-page red painting, a really good one. So I went right to my studio and did Clyfford Stills for a while. I was also interested in centrality and simplicity and this idea of presentation. I had this painting with a red circle and some Clyfford Still-y stuff on top and some Clifford Still-y stuff on the bottom. Frank said, you don’t need the thing on the top, and Mike Fried said, you don’t need the thing on the bottom, so I had a circle. I said, holy shit, that’s really all I need to make a total, in-your-face presentation. I thought that was just wonderful.

Then I went to see the Barnett Newman show at French & Co. I saw that there was another person doing the same thing, only with a line instead of a circle. That told me that I had permission to do what I was doing. Back then if you did a painting like that people wouldn’t even take it as a painting. The closest they could come was to call it Bauhaus, which was not only out of fashion but didn’t interest us at all. That was an absolutely different motivation altogether.

So you made these paintings before you saw Ad Reinhardt.

I did see Reinhardt, but I didn’t like it. I saw one of the black paintings in the Modern, and all the black paintings have this faint, slightly different value and design on them. But this one had wrinkles, and the light from the window was making the wrinkles the strongest component on the painting. All you saw was light wrinkles and blackness. I said, “That sucks, that’s a cop-out, I hate that.” In my journal I wrote, “NO REINHARDT!!!” But Reinhardt was one of the people doing this presentational work.

And by presentation you’re talking about..?

Simplicity that’s not Cubist-derived. Mondrian is Cubist-derived, and Bauhaus is Cubist-derived, and Malevich and all the Russian constructivists all came out of Cubism. It was taking cubism to an extreme. Me and Frank and Frank’s buddies, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, didn’t have any interest in Cubist-derived simplicity. Ellsworth Kelly was doing it and Rauschenberg was doing it in a way with his early, simple stuff. Gottlieb was doing it. There was this impulse to put a simple thing right in the middle of the picture and it wasn’t Cubist simplicity, it was presentational simplicity. Something was staring right back at you like it was another person. That idea just fascinated me. I thought, this is the best way to present color – make it into a painting, but just barely.

Did anyone push back on the idea that that was painting? Did you encounter resistance?

I didn’t encounter resistance because nobody had any idea what I was doing. I was painting in my basement and didn’t have any interest or exposure until ‘64, which is about five years after I started doing it. My first exposure was at Tibor de Nagy in 1965. Of course, there were people who looked at the paintings and said, “This is awful, this is stupid, this is not even painting,” but not the art world, because the art world didn’t know who the hell I was. When I got started with this it was just a matter of developing color combinations so I was happy as a clam for four or five years, painting these things. But nobody really cared except for people like Frank and Mike.

Why did you stop making them?

Boredom. It was laborious to make these paintings. They required layer after layer after layer of paint. Otherwise you wouldn’t get the simplicity and the lack of brushstrokes. It was like Chinese lacquer, you needed the layers to make it work. And then I saw Olitski’s paintings, and I was knocked out. I had a crisis in the mid-Sixties, and I decided I had to do something new. The problem with abstraction is that when you have a crisis in painting you have to start from scratch. Everybody thinks it’s easy but when you begin something new you have to get yourself a whole new set of conventions and methods.

I’ve been telling students for years that being an artist and feeling bored with your work is like being a doctor and killing your patient. You’ve gone into a fundamentally incorrect place with regard to your work.

It’s an element of seriousness about your art. If you’re getting bored with your art and you recognize it, I think you have to pay attention to that. Otherwise you’re just churning out stuff forever. That would make me go nuts.

Clem came out to my house where I had all my circles and squares, and he pulled out some older paintings that were more painterly and said, “This is what you’re going to be doing in ten years, this other stuff is temporary.” I thought, this guy’s full of shit. Those circles and squares, he liked them all right, but he didn’t think there were long-lasting. And he was right.

When did you first meet Greenberg?

At the Gauss lectures at Princeton in 1958. Mike Fried was very interested in these lectures so Frank and I went with him. I didn’t understand a thing that he was saying, which wasn’t his fault, but I got to talk to him later at the after party.

I was working in a gallery that was also a frame shop and a print shop, and my boss was a huge admirer of Clem. My boss was already getting impatient with me because I would paint and I would work as little as I could. This guy was in the front of the gallery, I was in the back, and Clem walked in and this guy was absolutely beside himself with pleasure. And Clem said, “Where’s Darby?” He came in the back because he was interested in talking to me. He liked what I said about Gottlieb at that initial meeting, I remember. He said, “You understand Gottlieb better than anybody I know. That’s great.” He sought me out at the store and that was a huge ego boost for me and the opposite for the guy who owned the gallery. I thought that was really cool. So I kept up that relationship. We used to sit and argue and talk all the time. It was wonderful to have that kind of brain to work with.

We disagreed about a lot but not the fundamentals. He underrated American artists, oddly enough. Winslow Homer, Milton Avery, Edward Hopper he didn’t think much of, and I thought and still think they’re wonderful. I thought he had a little too much appreciation for the newness of the mechanical operations behind Pollock’s drip paintings. A lot of his admiration for Olitski was the same kind of thing. There were a lot of artists he liked that I thought were second-rate. He underrated [Giorgio] Morandi and he overrated [Georges] Matthieu. Horacio Torres was an interesting artist but that whole business of cutting off the head and the legs is such a corny thing. Torres was okay but Clem just went wild about him.

Clem liked the old masters better than the abstract artists. If we were at a museum he’d say, “Let’s go see the old masters.” I’d say, “Oh, come on, Clem, I don’t want to see the old masters, I’m tired of them. They’re all brown. Let’s go see if there’s anything modern.” I always liked modern artists better than the old masters unless we’re talking about someone like Rembrandt, who’s a goddamn jumping genius. Most of them really are just brown and dark and gloomy.

Something I’ve come to appreciate in Clement Greenberg’s writings is that after a while he not only knew that he was going to be misunderstood, he knew the manner in which he was going to be misunderstood. So he started to try to preempt the misunderstanding, then finally gave up on the prospect of ever being correctly read.

Yes, he said several times in his writing something like, “Of course what I’m saying won’t be understood.” Even last night at the opening there were people who wanted to make big points to me about Greenberg. They absolutely detest him and completely misunderstand him. This thing is still going on, even now, with people claiming that he found artists who were cooperative and told them what moves to make, and that they became his little clique. I said to one of these people last night that I used ask Clem all the time what I should do in my studio. I’d say, “Tell me what to do!” And he’d say, “No! I’m not going to do that. All I’m going to tell you is that I like this and don’t like that.” And that’s all he ever did. He never had any suggestions like, “There’s too much red over there.” But nobody wants to believe that.

Why do you think that is?

That’s a very interesting question. What Greenberg did infuriated the art world. It had something to do with the authority and the quality of his writing. I can’t say forcefulness of his writing because it wasn’t forceful writing.

He admitted to its being declarative, as he put it.

It was declarative but that derived from his eye, and his certainty about the rightness of his eye, his ability to see what was good and not so good. He wrote so clearly and so transparently that it just got people enraged.

If you don’t have commitment to good art as such, and you don’t believe the idea that there’s very little good art, you’re on the defense against anyone who does believe it. And if that person has power and influence he becomes the villain. If you’re in the art world, and you’re on the side of crappy art, which 99% of the art world is, it’s an automatically inimical thing to have a voice like that around. Anybody who embodies this is an enemy. That attitude is killing the messenger because that’s basically what Greenberg was. This is the guy who said that Jackson Pollock was one of the strongest painters of our generation back in the 1940s. And lo and behold, it turned out to be true. This pisses people off. I had a friend who went around saying that Jackson Pollock couldn’t be a good painter because he didn’t use a brush. So if Jackson Pollock becomes a million-dollar painter and everyone says he’s great, you were wrong, you’re a jerk. People don’t like that.

Your motives for making art have stayed constant from almost the beginning, it seems.

Following my eye and impulses, that’s all. Everybody’s gone off on other tangents, but to me that’s the most interesting thing. Painting survives because of its restrictions. I like to compare it to games. If you go out and play a football game and people get a bat and say, “let’s use this instead,” you’re going to have an audience that says, “I don’t like this.” They want something that has conventions and supports those conventions.

The first panel I was ever on was “Painting Is Dead” in 1966 at New York University. I was sitting next to Robert Rauschenberg, and the moderator, Barbara Rose, was in between us and Donald Judd and Larry Poons on the other side of the table. Of course, I was all for painting, Poons was all for painting, Judd said that painting was completely abolished, and Rauschenberg didn’t give a damn. We went through the whole thing, the question of whether painting was dead, and of course we didn’t decide anything, but we had a good time.

Everybody was very sincere back then. They asked for questions after the panel discussion and people would get up and make speeches. This one guy got up and began making a statement. Rauschenberg yawned and he started sinking down in his seat. So I started sinking down in my seat too. We were both looking at each other and sinking in our seats until our faces were at the level of the table. The audience was looking at us and howling with laughter, and this guy thought that he was being funny, so he got into it and thought he was a comedian, that everybody was laughing at what he said. It just turned into chaos. The point is that 1966 is fifty years ago and painting isn’t dead. So there you go.

The third-generation abstractionists were not hostile to Pop Art. You yourself were making Pop-inspired paintings for a time. The stereotype is that the circle of Greenberg recoiled at the very sight of Pop, but it wasn’t that way at all.

Even Clem, he thought Robert Indiana was okay, and Jim Dine a little bit. He thought that Lichtenstein was a good designer. He would always give everybody their due. He just didn’t think that Pop Art amounted to very much. Clem was much more generous in his taste than people give him credit for. He used to tell a story about himself that when he juried an exhibition – and he was asked to jury a lot back then – he was always susceptible to giving out too many prizes and being too inclusive, to the point of putting the little old lady flower paintings in the show. He wasn’t black and white about things at all. There was more of that spirit back then, that Pop was just another development, and the same for minimalism when it came along. There were all these happenings, like the ones with [Claes] Oldenberg and Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainier. I thought they were really very interesting.

It hardens up when somebody gets successful. When Pop Art got successful it seemed to be overvalued. Nobody liked that very much. The idea gets around that a few people are getting too much of the pie. It’s human nature. We need a social scientist to write about this dispassionately and give us a real cultural history, somebody who looks at us as specimens, the way Margaret Mead looked at the South Sea Islanders.

These things don’t get worked out in the short term, and the short term is fifty years. Look at Andy Warhol. People are paying millions of dollars for his work. I keep wondering, When are people going to get tired of this guy’s paintings? They’ve turned into the ultra-tchotchke. If you have a Warhol you’re a hotshot collector. The quality of the thing, whether it’s good art or not, is absolutely beside the point. So there’s no selection being made on that basis. Things actually change very slowly now in the art world. People think that it’s very fast, and it is fast in the sense that it’s so big and there’s churning on the edges, but meanwhile most of it stays the way it is.

But things are beginning to separate. There’s a whole underground of abstract painting that doesn’t get any publicity. With everyone going in so many different directions, it’s getting to the point that you can choose your own genre, and the genres will be able to split off into their own tribes. The enlargement of the art world means, I think, that the pie is getting bigger for everyone. The abstract painters ought to recognize that they have their own art world, and should have their own magazines and have their own critics and all that so they don’t have to reconcile what they’re doing with everyone else. If that could come about you could get a Renaissance of abstract painters competing against each other, not giving a damn about the other stuff, and you could start getting abstraction to take advantage of all the things that got cut off back in the early sixties when Pop Art and Minimalism took over the market. There are a lot of people not in the market who understand good painting and can recognize it. They’re all over the place and they just need their own family.

If that tribe of abstractionists comes together, what are the possibilities that were cut off that they could work on?

Well, color is one. Nobody really gets into the mechanics of color. Even very good painters never got into the mechanics of color. Abstract painters shunted it aside because they considered it unimportant. As a consequence they used colors out of the jar. And they used color for area identification rather than coloristic effect.

Even someone like Kenneth Noland?

Oh, Noland would be a supreme example of someone to follow. He was influenced by Paul Klee, another one who did very interesting things with color. Noland was able to do just magical stuff putting colors together. I envy him endlessly. It’s like Matisse, you can’t point at what’s good about it, it just hits you, bam, right in the eye. Why his colors worked, how he used shapes and symmetricality to make his colors effective, all that could be explored further.

There’s also the idea of using open space to make paintings, like in [Mark] Rothko and [Morris] Louis. There are a lot of things that [Hans] Hofmann did that nobody was able to follow up on. It seems like there’s no end to the possibilities of hard edge combinations. Another thing would be the sophisticated use of new mediums, materials that weren’t even around in the Sixties. There are so many things you can do that haven’t been done because it doesn’t have the support.

Innovation has collapsed into weirdness that doesn’t have any lasting quality to it. Innovation in abstraction used to be recognized. That’s what happened in the Forties. Everyone knew how good de Kooning was. We have to build our own art world in which people recognize when something is good and new. The example I always use is Rex Stewart. According to a friend of mine, when Stewart heard Louis Armstrong he said he was never going to play his horn again. He just sat there at the table and cried. It took three seconds for him to recognize how good Louis Armstrong was because of the cultural structure around the conventions. That’s what does it. Without that you have nothing. You need a tribe and a big family and art teachers and writers. Get smart people together who can create something worthwhile.

The post Presentational: Walter Darby Bannard on his early reductive paintings appeared first on artcritical.

Supports/Surfaces
Canada
June 7 to July 20, 2014
333 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie)
New York City, 212 925 4631

Right now there is a great deal of interest within the New York art world in looking backward, seeking visual inspiration in modernism. Two current group shows are exemplary models of this revisionist historical thinking. Starting in the 1960s, many otherwise varied artists in Europe and New York employed shaped canvases. Inspired by the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition “The Shaped Canvas,” Luxembourg & Dayan, housed on three floors of a majestic, very narrow Upper East Side townhouse, has organized an exhibition of 28 paintings employing this device. Starting around 1966, a group of Frenchmen of the Supports/Surfaces movement developed a remarkable synthesis of deconstructive philosophy, the political ideas of Mao and the decorative pure color found in Matisse’s late cutouts. Canada, a downtown gallery, has assembled a show of 22 paintings by these artists, in collaboration with the Parisian Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Harvey Quaytman, Elizabeth Murray and Kenneth Noland painted abstractions on shaped frames; Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann used them to present figurative subjects. Some painters, such as Ron Gorchov, used the shaped canvas as a way to structure their pictures. Richard Prince, whose 1994 Untitled (Protest Painting) contains the outlined shape of a sloganless protest sign, is exemplary of artists who set shaped structures within a pictorial rectangle. In presenting a marvelous variety of shaped canvases, Luxembourg & Dayan generates some surprising, unexpected juxtapositions: Pino Pascali’s Coda di Delfino (1966), a jokey dolphin-shaped painting on wood, is set alongside Creede II (1961), a copper-colored, shaped work by Frank Stella. Jeremy De Prez’s Untitled (2014), which presents a seemingly rumpled plaid design, is hung next to John Armleder’s Lotta di gladiatori — The Best (2014). The exhibition ends with two marvelously funny pictures, Steven Parrino’s very orderly The Chaotic Painting (2006), a triangle shape, and Jacob Kassay’s Partial Credit (2014), a not-quite-rectangular canvas with the title printed on the right edge of the frame.

The Supports/Surfaces painters were a loosely organized movement centered in the South of France, linked together, at least initially, by their fascination with bookish philosophizing. Searching for an alternative to the practice of Clement Greenberg’s color field painters, these artists freely appropriated ideas from Michael Fried’s formalism and the Marxism of Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, writers associated with the Parisian journal Tel Quel. Jean-Michel Meurice created strips of intense color like Vinyle (1976); Claude Viallat presented repeated patterns on dyed fabric or rope lattices hung directly on the wall, as in 1972/F14 (1972); Louis Cane employed repetitive rubber-stamping — Toile tamponnée (1967) is an example.

Artists who otherwise had no connection with one another have employed the shaped canvas. Using a shaped canvas doesn’t require any high-powered theorizing. And so it’s unsurprising that this pictorial format has been adapted by such a motley assortment of figures as Lucio Fontana, Mary Heilmann and Damien Hirst, on view at Luxembourg & Dayan. By contrast, although the Supports/Surfaces works can be seen as deconstructed paintings, what remains of that art form when you remove the stretcher and display the unstretched canvas or, conversely, present just the frame, sans canvas? This style of art making was parasitic upon what now seem like dated critical, cultural, and aesthetic theories. French writers drew an equivalence between what in the catalogue Joe Fyfe calls “the fabric of society” and the structures of bourgeois painting, making a link between the “radical social engagement” of French Maoists and deconstructive visual practice. If you remove the unstable supporting synthesis of formalist interpretation and political analysis, all that remains of Supports/Surfaces art is good looking decorative constructions. That perhaps explains why these artists haven’t had much impact within the American art world. When the New York artists looked to Europe for inspiration, it looked to Germany. As yet these Frenchmen don’t belong in the post-modernist canon. The show at Canada was handsomely hung, but by presenting this art with too little reference to its original context, the catalogue did not adequately support what could have been an important revisionist exhibition.

Note:

My account of Supports/Surfaces borrows from Raphael Rubinstein, “The Painting Undone: Supports/Surfaces” at https://www.artcritical.com/2004/02/01/the-painting-undone-supportssurfaces. The quotation from Joe Fyfe comes from the foreword of Surface/Support (New York and Paris: Canada Gallery with Galerie Bernard Ceysson, 2014).

The post Outside the Box: David Carrier on the Legacy of Shaped Canvases appeared first on artcritical.

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 

The post Starkness and Range: David Rhodes at Hionas Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

May 17 to September 27, 2012
25 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212-249-2040

Ernst Häckel’s famous theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the development of an organism, that is to say, mirrors the evolution of the species – applies to Frank Stella in relation to Western art since the Middle Ages.  His severe but elegant  “pinstripe” paintings of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, together with the gentler aluminum and bronze paintings that succeeded them, can be seen as his Quattrocento period (and, not surprisingly, won much praise when a group of all three series was shown at L & M Arts earlier this year).

The brilliantly colored “Protractor” series, though freer in concept and execution than the paintings preceding them, were  — like them — clearly outlined and defined, just as the high Renaissance paintings of Raphael and early Michelangelo had been.  This was where I came in on Stella, writing about them when they were first exhibited at Leo Castelli in 1967 and I was in my first year of writing about art for Time.

Ever since, it has seemed to me, this artist has been in a prolonged Mannerist phase in which the hallmarks of his wild and wooly creations — increasingly three-dimensional, increasingly composed of many small elements, increasingly variegated in color— are agitation, the off-centered and the nitty-gritty of confusion: a modernistic counterpart of late Michelangelo, Bronzino or Parmigianino.

Now, at long last, I feel Stella has arrived at a new synthesis, just as Caravaggio and the Carracci stabilized mannerism to arrive at the baroque. I see a new serenity and stability in Stella (though I confess that until now I haven’t felt strongly enough about any work by him that I’ve seen since the sixties to examine it in detail). While this show is still endowed with the energy and diagonal thrust we associate with both historical mannerism & the historical baroque, at times there are harmonies of composition and color almost worthy of comparison with Velázquez.

Fittingly, this present show features ten works from Stella’s “Scarlatti” series, and recorded baroque music by this composer plays softly in the gallery. Each piece, which in relation to the wall behind it implies a canny combo of painting and sculpture, bears the Kirkpatrick number of a Scarlatti sonata

Stella has long been known for his advanced technology. I see technology as a better servant than master. The same applies to the armies of human assistants Stella employs (reputedly as many as Bernini). Merely because such resources enable him to achieve effects that shout “2012” doesn’t guarantee their esthetic excellence. Half of creation is knowing when and how to edit one’s creations.

This time the master abstractionist has curbed his excesses. The show’s curly, straight-out and splayed combinations of tubes and flatter shapes have been constructed with the aid of CAD software, often out of a brightly colored material called ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), with further color sometimes applied in the studio. Mechanical and personal elements thus come together into new wholes, with widely-varied effects whose range can be indicated by three of the finest pieces.

One of the smallest greets the viewer upon entering the gallery. This is k.161b (2011), a shiny, sparkling all-green composition that sits on a little plinth of its own. It measures only 20 inches in all directions, but is an intricate composition of open and closed star shapes, with stick-like or sometimes leaf-like components harboring a form within that seems to have been inspired by a dog toy left in the artist’s studio.

Next to it, on the right, is k.37 (ABS Blue) (2012) which sprouts from (or hangs off) the wall to a height of almost nine feet and a width of more than five. At its perimeter are open, curly yellow and red tubes, mostly pretty narrow and leaving lots of space between themselves and a central element, like the paths of electrons circling a nucleus. This nucleus is more compact, and made out of slightly larger, curved but broader flat shapes in red, while and blue.  Graceful and expansive, free yet organized, k.37’s use of color is thus restrained and selective: to the red and yellow of the perimeter’s tubes and the tricoleur nucleus are added only subtle accents of aqua and silver.

At the far end of the gallery  is k. 359 (2012), a majestic monster, larger and denser than the others, which both sprouts off the wall and stand free on its own feet.  Projecting more than  six feet out into the gallery, its composition is incredibly complex. To the center left, in front, is a curved open shape with twisting, turning thin slats inside that make that area resemble a giant flower. An upwardly curved bundle of slats to the right looks like a giant sconce and in turn upholds a mass of curvilinear and twisted shapes somehow suggestive ofa giant chandelier. These effects might have been unbearably overdone if tinctured with Stella’s usual riots of color, but instead restraint shows itself through rendering the entirety of the piece in a mellow gray.  An exception are several narrow horizontal bands of a clear, transparent plastic that circle the entire sculpture tight against its body to achieve a marvelous unity out of dissonance.

The post Frank Stella Evolves: The Scarlatti Series at Freedman Art appeared first on artcritical.

Roma al tempo di Caravaggio 1600-1630 at the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, Rome (November 16, 2011 to March 18, 2012)

Guercino (1591-1666) at Palazzo Barberini, Rome (December 16, 2011 to April 29, 2012)

A generation ago, Frank Stella argued in his brilliant manifesto Working Space (1986) that the situation of modernist abstract painting was best understood with reference to Caravaggio’s role in 1590s Rome. Stella’s account borrowed, at key points, from Sydney Freedberg’s great formalist history Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting. At a time when the capacity of the grand tradition to continue was unclear, what was demanded, Stella claimed, was a seminal new artist. Today no one would accept this view of our recent history or Stella’s attempt to present himself as our Caravaggio, a claim that nowadays not even a formalist could consider seriously.

Since 1986, there has been a great amount of new popular and scholarly discussion of the now widely exhibited Caravaggio.  Indeed, he has become irresistible, the one artist of this period, who speaks to modern audiences.  You see why at the entrance to “Roma al tempo di Caravaggio,” where Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto (1604-5) is juxtaposed with a painting of the same subject also from that date by Annibale Carracci and his studio. Where Caravaggio presents the humble supplicants kneeling before the Madonna, Carracci shows her enthroned on a house supported by three angels that struggle to lift it upwards. Caravaggio comes, one may think, almost from the same world as Courbet, but Carracci is firmly rooted in his time.

This vast exhibition presents no artist whose reputation will rival Caravaggio’s. Guido Reni’s Martyrdom of Saint Caterina (1604-6) is a wonderful picture; Agostino Ciampelli’s Pietà with Angels (1612), very affecting; and Orazio Borgianni’s David decapitating Goliath (1609-10) a remarkable, albeit much less successful variation of Caravaggio’s version of that scene, as also is Battistello Caracciolo’s David with the Head of Goliath (1612). Perhaps the most challenging picture on display is the anonymous follower of Caravaggio’s Saint Anna with Yarn and the Virgin Sewing (1620), a grand genre scene, an Italianate version of George de La Tour’s sacred scenes. And there is a Saint Augustine on display attributed to Caravaggio, a marvelous picture, which doesn’t for me resemble the portraits attributed to our artist. It certainly is astonishing to see how many followers Caravaggio had. None of these artists are remotely as good at him, not even – in this show – Rubens, whose Adoration of the Shepherds (1608), hardly stands out.

There are several Guercinos in this exhibition, and that artist is meanwhile the subject of a retrospective at the Palazzo Barberini. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 – 1666), to give him his proper name, had a career investigated in loving detail by the great connoisseur, Sir Denis Mahon. Here his saints, The Madonna with Child in Glory (1615-6) is a good example; his mythical scenes, Erminia and Tancredi (1619), for instance; and his portraits, like Portrait of Cardinal Bernardino Spada (1631) are displayed. Guercino does not speak to a larger public in the way Caravaggio does or, to choose a more appropriate comparison, as does his near contemporary in Rome, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). Guercino’s Saul against David (1646) perhaps indicates his ultimate limitations. Why in this scene of contention is the body language of the two men so elliptical? His Et in Arcadia ego (1618 according to Mahon) is famous amongst art historians, but only as a precedent for Poussin’s two versions of this conceit. But where Poussin gives philosophical weight to the scene, with his shepherds engaged in discussion about whether even in the ideal kingdom of Arcadia there is death, Guercino merely gives us an anecdotal image of omnipresent decay, his shepherds encountering a skull covered with flies, lizards and a mouse.

Both of these exhibitions are presented with the theatrical style that seems customary right now in Roman exhibitions. They employ brilliant lighting in dark rooms with intensely red walls, and use elaborate temporary displays that must be expensive to construct. The permanent installations at Palazzo Barberini and Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, and also those at such other grand settings as the Palazzo Pamphilj and the Palazzo Colonna, use natural lighting, which is kinder to aging paintings as well as to the eyes of we aging art writers. I understand the felt need for temporary shows to have an impact, but however you display Guercino, he cannot compete with Andy Warhol.  Just as Willem de Kooning inspired very many painters in the 1950s, but no one who was his equal, so with Caravaggio. Perhaps, then, his reputation fell after 1630 in part because none of his many followers were remotely his equal. At any rate, while two generations ago, Caravaggio was merely one of many great baroque artists, now, having outdistanced all of his rivals, he has become the Italian old master who speaks not just to specialist audiences, but also to the general public. Neither Guercino nor any of the followers of Caravaggio can take this role, which is only to note how very distant the visual culture of this period has become.

The post Working Space 1600: Shows in Rome of Guercino, Caravaggio and their Contemporaries appeared first on artcritical.

October 12 to November 30, 2011
18 East 79th Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York City, (212) 734-6300

Every visitor to the great display of Willem de Kooning at MoMA is aware of the extreme difficulty of understanding his development. Acquavella’s magnificent show of Georges Braque, presented on two floors of a grand Upper East Side townhouse, poses the same question about an earlier modernist. How and why, one wants to know, does an artist who develops one style very successfully suddenly abandon it and move on? There are three Braques in this exhibition: the early fauve master (1906-1907); the cubist who was Pablo Picasso’s collaborator (1907- 1914); and the senior figure who, after that relationship was dissolved by the Great War, developed a highly distinctive late style (1917-1956), which openly borrows from but looks surprisingly different from classical cubism.

Change is difficult, as every psychoanalyst will tell you, because most neurotics cling to miserably dysfunctional lives. How much more difficult, then, to understand how Braque, who at each stage of his artistic career was marvelously triumphant, twice abandoned his style to move on. The intense colors of  L’Estaque (1906) are given up in Harbor (1909), which reconstructs a beach scene in  monochromatic brown and gray planes. (Houses at L’Estaque (1907) shows that transition in progress.) The austere Analytic Cubist The Mantlepiece (1912) is very unlike The Pantry (1920), in which Braque opens up his picture space. In the later art we remain indoors, he never returns to the landscape; a distinctive dark palette, not however restricted to blacks, grays and whites emerges. And in The Billiard Table (1944-52) cubist denial of perspective and a post-cubist palette  present a distinctive new motif.

Usually Braque is taken to be a lesser artist than Picasso. Once their collaboration dissolved, while the Spaniard moved rapidly through Neo-classicism, Surrealism and highly personal erotic images, before finding his late style, often based upon appropriations from the old masters, the Frenchman’s career was more modest. If no John Richardson has been inspired to tell Braque’s story that perhaps is because there is less to tell. The ‘flesh-colored’ cock forming part of the woman’s body in Woman with a Mandolin (1937) is as visually daring as Picasso’s erotic inventions, but how different is the studio setting, whose colors might come from early Vuillard. Mostly, however, Braque avoids Picasso’s explicitly autobiographical concerns

This exemplary show, which retells an important part of the now historically distant era of French modernism, speaks eloquently to the present. Not, I hasten to add, with reference to the pictorial concerns of cubism itself: That visual culture is now distant. But what remains of living interest is Braque’s ability to radically develop, in ways that do not simply cancel and preserve his prior manner. When Frank Stella works in series, he works through all of the variations on a motif, which he then abandons. Robert Mangold, by contrast, develops his motifs in a more intuitive way. And after the early Abstract Expressionist abstractions, Richard Diebenkorn turned to figurative painting before embarking on the Ocean Parks. Braque’s very different, arguably more radical development is even harder to rationally reconstruct. In the 1980s, some most distinguished scholars proposed to eliminate ‘style’ from our vocabulary. This exhibition shows that you cannot understand Braque without stylistic analysis. Since Stella’s, Mangold’s, and Diebenkorn’s magnificent ways of developing now reveal their period style, maybe some daring young artist will find her inspiration in this exhibition.

The post Development Issues: Georges Braque at Acquavella Galleries appeared first on artcritical.

As Plato said, “Because we are the playthings of the Gods, playing is our most serious activity.”

Frank Stella and I have certainly had our share of fun and excitement in our many projects together. Our collaborations have spanned 35 years and resulted in nearly 400 editions of prints, multiples, monotypes and monoprints, created in my California and New York workshops. Plus we made original tapestries in France and Australia, editions of silk scarves in Italy and Korea, editions of ceramic plates in Korea, experimental dress designs in Hong Kong, a transfer of his graph paper design to a model for BMW’s 1976 Le Mans race car, a prototype paper pop-up sculpture with a leading paper engineer in Chicago, engraving designs for his “smoke ring” images produced by Tumba Bruk in Sweden, and numerous paper maquettes and honeycomb metal panels for reliefs made in Arizona and Connecticut.

My observation from collaborating with Frank is that he is all about making his art and getting the creative task at hand completed as quickly as possible – his inspiration still in high-gear – and then spending countless hours revising and working on the details. Of course, in a workshop environment this can be difficult, since most processes and techniques are labor intensive and time consuming. Over the years Frank got somewhat used to this and adapted less impetuous behavior, but not entirely without occasional colorful outbursts amid clouds of cigar smoke.

Frank could be keenly interested in new technology at times. Once introduced to new ideas, he could quickly single out what he wanted to use. Then, when he became impatient with the time it would take to select and use the parts of it that he liked, he would reach out for outside expertise. This ability to add new materials and techniques to his art is of great value for Frank, as well as an expensive one. I have always admired him for his willingness to invest—to bet the farm so to speak—on his art making.

Frank has always been a generous collaborator, giving praise whenever a task was well done. He also shared his enthusiasm for techniques with other artists. An example is when Frank invited his friend, Anthony Caro (who at the time was working at my workshop) to the foundry where he was working, to show Tony the sand castings used in his large sculptures.

Frank’s focus is always on the form, not the process that makes it. He delegates the process part to you to engineer while he finds ways to proceed in making his art. Everyone therefore has a vested interest in the outcome. It’s a setup from the beginning and one you don’t want to fail at. The success rate for working with a diverse group of tradesmen in making large-scale sculpture can be slim, especially if you can’t motivate the workers and communicate your ideas. I have always marveled at Frank’s style of collaboration. It runs the gauntlet of saying very little, only some body language and occasional quips of humor, to giving a dissertation on the subject or task at hand.

Joan Mitchell commented to me in 1992, when Tyler Graphics was having a Mitchell/Stella print exhibition at our gallery, that I evidently enjoyed collaborating with Frank because he was a hands-on guy like me, a guy who likes “stuff.” “Stuff” for Joan was technology and machines, the very things she did not indulge in. And here we have part of the answer as to why some collaborations are more complicated than others—involvement with “stuff.”

Observing Frank working in various shops and studios, I saw him embracing new ways to make his sculptural work since the 70s: from aerospace honeycomb panels in metal and fiber, formed metal, poured metal and sand casting, to 3D additive technology for forming shapes from computer designs. He uses his handmade elements such as bent tubing and fiber sheets, along with new materials and techniques, to produce exciting abstract forms, painted and unpainted. The new forms always have the “Stella look,” no matter how many state-of-the-art materials or technologies are used. It is of no surprise that he is adding advanced three-dimensional printing from digital designs to create his new sculptures, since he has been adding new “stuff” to his sculptures for some time.

This is a typical Frank dichotomy: he says he has no interest in technology and yet he seeks out and uses new resources and often times futuristic know-how. He definitely shows a natural affinity for the cutting-edge.

He also has a keen eye and a gift for educating. For example, on the Colbert Report on TV last year, Frank made a brief guest appearance in an art skit involving a photo portrait of Colbert, worked on by his other guest artists. When Colbert asked if he thought the revised portrait was “art,” Frank succinctly said, “If you want to look for art, you can find it.” Then he disappeared, like Houdini.

This is, I think, the serendipitous and open-minded way Frank finds many of his images. With a Melville-like appreciation of high and low, squalid and pristine, silly and serious, it is no wonder why “stuff” from so many sources makes Stella’s studio a place for alchemy. A rusted hulk of steel, the left over armature of a foundry casting, or a touristic Brazilian twisty beach hat can all become sculpture with profound grace and impact.

We can only speculate, given more resources and materials to discover, how much further Frank will push his art. We are fortunate to have this titan, uninterrupted in his lifelong art-making endeavors, always surprising us with his intellect, dynamism and invention.

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