May 6 to July 15, 2017
956 Madison Avenue, between 75th and 76th streets
New York City, ceyssonbenetiere.com

In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, his follower, identified American color field painting as the wave of the future, citing Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland as the inevitable successors of the Abstract Expressionists. And so when Claude Viallat and the other Support/Surface French artists were shown in New York, they offered a serious challenge to this art historical genealogy. In his then renowned treatise on aesthetics, Art and Its Objects (1968), Richard Wollheim argued that “art and its objects come indissolubly linked.” We need, he said, “to understand this envelope in which works of art invariably arrive.”  To borrow his useful language, the painting of Viallat arrived in a very different envelope from the Americans championed by our formalist critics. In a provocative rhetoric redolent of the 1960s Viallat’s French champions argued that he represented a synthesis of Henri Matisse’s decorative impulse and Mao’s political radicalism. This is an obviously paradoxical synthesis, for while Matisse’s pictures of odalisques are often said to be escapist apolitical art, Mao’s favorite style of painting was Socialist Realism. What was at stake, I think, is the old equation between aesthetic and political radicalism. Matisse’s art was aesthetically radical in its day, and so Viallat thought that the next ‘great leap forward’ should be abstraction building upon his achievement, painting that uses his intense color while deconstructing the traditional stretcher.

This varied exhibition offers twenty works over a span of fifty years Using intensely saturated acrylic paints, with reds, yellows, pinks and greens, Viallat works with varied shapes: sometimes rectangles, but as often irregular shapes, including spheres 2016/344, on a striking black background for instance) and the triangular (1991/129). 2016/070 (his titles are consistently numerical, preceded by the year) is painted on a vertically hung mat.  Eliminating the traditional stretcher, Viallat hangs his dyed fabrics loosely on the wall. Taking this structure to an extreme, 2016/050 attaches two horizontal strips, painted in green and blue, to a loosely hanging yellow fabric frame. Occasionally, as in 2016/025, he paints on fabrics. His signature device is a reclined wavy lozenge, a squished trapezoid, which runs across the surface in all of the pictures. Sometimes, as in the rectangular 1993/138, it is relatively large; but usually it’s relatively small. Some of these oddly for  example. Others, however, have richly vibrant color contrasts. In 1077/042, greens and reds vibrate against a pale red background.   

Viallat’s works are decorative in the best sense of that word—viewing them can be compared to looking at a display of Islamic carpets. There is no obvious pattern of development here. For all the talk of Matisse, his art does not display that master’s stringent self-criticality, as evident in the late cutouts.  The exhibition crowds its twenty paintings, some of them large, into two relatively small galleries, a mistake, as such essentially decorative works need room to breathe. And it would be good to have a full catalogue, offering English-language audiences some perspective on the theorizing behind these paintings.  Right now we are much concerned with revising our received picture of 1960s art. MoMA’s large, revisionist exhibition, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” bringing together well known women like Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and to a lesser extent Jo Baer with many relatively obscure names from outside the US and Western Europe, represents a significant shift in the canon. To have also included Support/Surface painters (they all seem to have been men) in a MoMA survey would be an equally dramatic change, though not of course with the same political implications of the women’s show. But Support/Surface painting needs a more sustained educational effort from its gallery support system if it is to secure a place in the late modernist canon. I would be the last person to scorn analysis of an alliance between radical leftist politics and radical art, which was very much a part of its period style. Not, after all, when a quotation from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is the sole epigraph for Michael Fried’s Morris Louis (1971). That said, I would like to understand, in a little more useful detail, the envelope in which these paintings arrived in the American art world. As it stands, the idea that these handsome pictures are aesthetically or politically radical has not been established by this exhibition.

The post From Mao to Matisse: Claude Viallat in New York 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).

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