Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

November 14, 2014 to April 12, 2015
118 North Broad Street (between Race and Arch streets)
Philadelphia, 215 972 7600

A walk through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ exhibition of work by Peter Blume (1906 – 1992) is like a tour through 20^th century art. Precisionism, Surrealism, abstraction, and Pop art all have their moment in the painting and drawing of this lesser-known American artist, who is now getting his due with the Academy’s retrospective “Nature and Metamorphosis.” The accompanying catalogue, with excellent essays by Sarah Vure, Samantha Baskind and curator Robert Cozzolino, offers engaging insights into Blume’s particular brand of Modernism.

The confidence of Blume’s hand is striking. Whether rendering a stark winter farmhouse, a war catastrophe, or a pile of improvised biomorphic forms, the artist always knows exactly where to end one shape end and begin another. In the painting New England Barn (1926), for example, barn, farmhouse, and shed are joined by the up-down rhythm of repeated triangles. In a classic Cubist ploy, the edge of one background building merges with that of a horse cart in the foreground, confounding the expected spatial reading. Not so classically Cubist is a female figure in the hayloft, who has apparently bared her flesh for the cart driver’s pleasure. Unabashed sexual moments like this one recur frequently in Blume’s work, preventing its reading as pure form.

Blume’s take on the industrial subject matter of the Precisionists also involves unexpected insertions. Parade (1928) depicts the same type of ship ventilators as in Charles Sheeler’s familiar painting Upper Deck (1929), but Blume’s extreme dislocations of space and nonsensical additions (including a suit of armor) resemble the Surrealism of Max Ernst. Such insertions are both the strength and the problem of Blume’s work. He brushed aside associations with all movements, including André Breton’s attempt to identify him as a Surrealist: “They wanted me to join the club. I told them that was hopeless.” Yet in striking out on his own, he never quite found his own voice. Color palettes bounced from muted grays and whites to warm earth tones. Levels of detail varied from the minimal to the chock-full — as in The Eternal City (1934-37), an allegory of fascism that seems to contain every stone in Italy.

Like many artists of the era, Blume was deeply affected by the Second World War, and his confrontation with that conflict’s horrors spurred experimentation. In The Eternal City, his insertion of the bright-green head of Mussolini amid piles of equally bright-red bricks announced a willingness to try out-of-the-tube colors. Drawing also took Blume in new directions. A series of untitled ink doodles from 1946 used the automatic drawing technique favored by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, improvising biomorphic forms with pen and brush. Much more diffuse than the paintings, these inventions find their way into later works with compelling results.

A notable example is Flowering Stump (begun in 1945 but completed in 1968). The floral forms that emerge from this stump resemble many things but nothing in particular: fungi, acorn squash, genitals, sting rays. An automatic charcoal study that accompanied this piece clearly helped Blume imbue his work with such free-floating associations. Another pivotal piece, House at Falling Water (begun 1938, completed 1968), is possibly the strangest image ever of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece. The intensely detailed plant forms and tiny, waif-like hounds in the foreground command our attention, rendered as they are with the vibrating tonality of Ivan Albright’s mounds of undulating flesh. Meanwhile, Blume softened the house’s concrete slabs to the consistency of tofu.

The works completed in the 1970s and 1980s bring Blume’s de-familiarized bio-forms to their pinnacle. Piles of rocks in From the Metamorphosis (1979) freely transform themselves to toes, arms, breasts and buttocks. In Autumn (1984), a gaggle of squashes tilt to and fro with more excitement than is customary for vegetables, their ticklish stems resembling the business end of a sex toy. In each of these paintings, full-intensity background hues pop out in front of foreground blacks and grays, flattening the space and adding to the festive delirium of the scene. The elements that began in earlier works — Cubist dislocation of form, Surrealist transformation of scale and substance, the bizarre use of primary and high-contrast colors, and of course sexual innuendo — finally coalesce into a personal statement that, while referring to different types of Modern art, maintain its own integrity.

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Phoebe Hoban, 2014
THE EDITORS, 2011
Franklin Einspruch, 2011
Stephen Maine, 2011
John Goodrich, 2006
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Acquavella Galleries.

Full index entry for “Lucian Freud” at artcritical

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Before you catch Magritte at the Museum of Modern Art this month, take a look at the contemporary version of Surrealist painting: Gladys Nilsson and Julia Benjamin. Gladys Nilsson (born 1940) has long been associated with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, a moniker that belies the utter goofy-strangeness of her work, and that of her husband, Jim Nutt. Her watercolor and gouaches introduce a cast of characters from a pre-modern village, embedded within densely-realized landscapes of preening trees and tottering flowers. The gooey-lyrical abstract oil paintings of Julia Benjamin (born 1984) share Nilsson’s obsession with figures in space. In Benjamin’s case, strokes and dabs of color people the canvas and oddly mirror Nilsson’s skewered compositional style. Installed side-by-side, the paintings speak to each other as two-sides of the same story.

Gladys Nilsson / Julia Benjamin is on view until October 20, 2013 at the National Exemplar. The gallery is located at 381 Broadway at White Street, 2nd Floor, and is open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 7 PM. Contact: thenationalexemplar@gmail.com

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July 21 to October 27, 2013
279 Montauk Highway
Water Mill, NY, 631-283-2118

(Reviewed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 9 to May 12, 2013)

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean Dubuffet (1902-1985) were friends of the privileged collector Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990). Heir to a Philippines sugar fortune, Ossorio lived and worked during his creative life in East Hampton, New York. A gay practicing Catholic, he aspired to synthesize Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut. This exhibition, presenting the three men as peers, aims to reveal the elective affinities of two famous painters, who themselves never met, and, also, to demonstrate what Ossario, who was friends with both men learned from each of them. It includes one large Pollock masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist); some important smaller paintings and art on paper; and a number of works such as Collage and Oil (1951) that reveal him struggling. And, in a marvelous demonstration showing how consistent Jean Dubuffet was in the period 1946 to 1958, it presents both his little drawing Corps de dame (Body of a Lady) (1950) and the majestically large Paysage métapsychique (Metaphysical landscape) (1952). Very different, they both are first-rate pictures.

That Pollock and Dubuffet can happily cohabit as near equals is, of course no surprise. What here is up for grabs is Ossorio’s artistic relationship with these two modernist masters. He tends to place figurative elements or shapes not unlike Dubuffet’s in a Pollockesque all over field. So, for example, Perpetual Sacrifice (1949) floats faces in a field of white lines; Crucifix: Seek & Ye Shall Find (1951) deploys a heavily painted field of lines on a shaped canvas, with a crucifix shape giving form to that field; and Martyrs and Spectators (1951) sets the outlines of a crucifixion scene in a framework of black and white. Advent (1951), the best of Ossorio’s paintings on display runs lines of green, red and yellow around a vertical standing figure. He lacks the single-mindedness of Pollock at his best and, also, the very high level of excellence of Dubuffet in this period. You have the sense, rather, that driven by his awareness of the greatness of his friends’ art, Ossorio was experimenting restlessly without ever achieving real resolution. So, for example, Red Family (1951) uses a figure like some Dubuffets; and Head (1951) employs a drawn field akin to some of Pollock’s weaker pictures. But where Pollock mastered a language of personal abstraction, evidenced in his great little painting on paper Number 22A, 1948; and Dubuffet immersed figures in flatted fields, Ossario, a gifted eclectic always remains uncomfortably suspended between abstraction and the figure.

This Eurasian Catholic must have been a fascinating personality. And it must have been tricky for him to befriend and collect two such different and apparently overwhelming figures. But he isn’t a great artist. In the catalog essay Alicia Longwell says that Clement Greenberg, who admired both Pollock and Dubuffet believed that “an artist had to suppress any hint of representation to achieve a level of distinction in art making.” This statement, which is emphatically not correct, misrepresents Greenberg in an unfortunate, very misleading way. What is the case is that a great artist must be single minded. Connoisseurship is out of fashion—it is commonly said to be politically incorrect. Ossario was a well connected artist; an interesting artist; a skilled artist: but what this misguided exhibition inadvertently shows is that he was minor. Successful curators need to be connoisseurs.

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June 19 to August 4, 2013
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Street
New York City, 212-616-3930

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Reble Dabble Babble

June 20 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
511 West 18th Street
New York City, 212-790-3900

Life Cast

May 10 to July 26, 2013
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212-794-4970

Stepping into Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, currently hosting Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation WS, feels a little like falling headfirst into a terrarium. That is, if the terrarium has vaguely pornographic, quasi-violent, and definitely not-safe-for-the-kids videos projected on its sides.  WS, which stands for “White Snow,” is loosely based on the story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Actually, it might be more accurate to say that WS takes liberties with that story. McCarthy’s version, for example, expands the cast to include nine dwarves (some of whom appear to top six feet), three Prince Charmings (compulsive masturbators, one and all, if the video evidence is to be believed), and three Snow Whites. And then there is Walt Paul, a paternal(istic) figure, obviously evoking Walt Disney and subtly suggesting Hitler (it’s the mustache), who either presides over or is subject to the mayhem unleashed during what appears to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Oh, and then there is you. Whatever else the show is about, one of its most accessible pleasures is the chance to watch other visitors observing the spectacle. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, people ringed the cavernous space, positioned around a platform holding up the half-magical, half-infernal forest that is simultaneously the show’s physical centerpiece and the set used for filming much of the screened footage. These spectators’ attention was split between the screens on either side of the forest and the faces of the other spectators. (Were cameras permitted inside, WS would likely produce some compelling YouTube reaction videos.)

A less stationary delight of the show is the chance to look around its many nooks and crannies. That forest, with its nuclear-neon foliage and flora, its scatological trees, and the three-quarters scale house concealed in its middle—a replica of McCarthy’s childhood home—demands exploration. Within the house, you will find a Christmas tree, birthday streamers, bottles of liquor in various stages of consumption, a spent container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and a nearly-exhausted Heinz ketchup squeeze-bottle. (The last two of these have been frequently deployed as material in McCarthy’s work.) There are also various recognizable Disney figurines scattered around the house—a Snow White with a dwarf, a Bambi, and a Prince Charming riding his horse.

The feel-good Americana of all that Disney detritus is juxtaposed with two disconcertingly accurate bodies: The artist himself and White Snow, stripped naked, apparently dead, and covered in what at first glance seems to be blood and excrement, but is actually the aforementioned ketchup and chocolate. (A series of life casts, four of Elyse Poppers, the actress playing the main White Snow in WS, and one of the artist, are currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space.) What it all means is well nigh impossible to say. And, at seven hours, it would be difficult to absorb WS in a single seating. It is generally agreed that McCarthy confronts the falsely feel-good pieties of American myths, that he takes on viscerally recognizable symbols and upends them by splattering them with a variety of (bodily) fluids. WS, his largest installation and most ambitious project to date, unfolds with the madcap logic of dreams, and every little bit of content is overdetermined. This is a convulsive form of Surrealism, which, of course, has a certain kind of beauty. That’s the thing about McCarthy. No matter how gross his work—and this is an artist who has never shied away from the grotesque—no matter how disconcerting, how disorienting, there is nonetheless something appealing about his aesthetic, with its visual pungency and sense of humor.

McCarthy’s fairy-tale world is tethered to reality by its references to history: The artist’s childhood, with the inclusion of the house in which he was raised; art history, particularly the rise of performance art, of which McCarthy has been both a student and a teacher; American history and its embrace of kitsch and myth. Striking an odd but effective balance between authentic and contrived, WS has more in common with a reality show than lived reality. Which is to say, if “Snow White” is the partial basis of so many looking-for-love shows, then WS is the looking-for-love show amped up to absurdity.

WS confines its most pornographic bits to the periphery, with the most sexually explicit material playing in rooms off to the sides of Drill Hall. (One of these rooms is also the site of some eerily beautiful footage, tracking White Snow and Walt Paul as they wander, Adam-and-Eve-like, through their polluted Eden.) But it is the most prominent feature of McCarthy’s Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration with his son Damon (who also co-directed, co-produced, and cast WS) on view at Hauser & Wirth’s mammoth Chelsea gallery. The exhibit consists of a full-scale two-story house, which visitors may enter, and a facsimile of the living-room staircase from the home of Jim Stark, aka the “Rebel Without a Cause,” from the eponymous 1955 film.  Around these are several video projections, most of which are quite pornographic. Disorienting and unnerving, the show is a reimagining of the psychosexual drama that was said to unfold between the film’s director Nicholas Ray and his young stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood. Like WS, Rebel Dabble Babble relies on our recognition of the building blocks of familiar American narratives. Both exhibitions undo the familiarity of those narratives, folding them over and over on themselves, until they become hallucinatory, at once a joke and something deadly serious, demanding that we tell the story ourselves.

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