Art Dealers Association of America The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory

February 27 to March 4, 2018

Don’t wait until next week to get into fair mood: This year, for venue scheduling reasons, The Art Show, the ADAA’s annual outing at the Park Avenue Armory, precedes the onslaught on the piers—the other Armory. And, like years past, it’s proving to be the place for aesthetic delectation.

I simply don’t know where to begin, there are so many fabulous exhibitions packed under this drill hall, so I may as well begin at the beginning: Cheim and Read’s solo display of new sculpture by the redoubtable Lynda Benglis that greets you at the entrance. Turn left, as supermarkets have discovered most of us do, and you get a revelatory display of landscape sketches by Myron Stout at Washburn Gallery, along with one of his trademark black and white painted iconic shapes: the nervously breezy, feather-stroked perceptual landscapes done in Provincetown, Mass. in black Conté send you back to the hard-edged abstraction with renewed intensity.

Brian Washburn told me they discovered a box of these drawings when they moved downtown recently hidden in plain sight in a painting rack. A metaphor, in a way, for The Art Show experience, where in one box after another (the booths) treasures from the past reveal themselves. Just over the aisle, Peter Freeman, Inc. have Mel Bochner paintings from the early 1980s that, if you are more familiar with his word pieces, will come as a surprise: Shaped canvases bursting with geometric forms dispatched with neo-expressionist gusto. Bochner first painted these images on regular shaped canvas, the sales assistant told me, and then determined the right irregular shape from the resulting form. Their surfaces reminded me of his contemporary, Terry Winters, represented elsewhere at the fair in a group show at Matthew Marks.

Hirschl and Adler, nestled in the corner, are in an appropriately intimate, almost closeted space for their show, Americans 1943: Realism and Magic Realism. This marks the 75th anniversary of a show of that title at MoMA. Sunday communist Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi delivers an allegory of corruption and resistance in The American Dream, 1935, that suggests that only the settings have changed in the interim. All the same issues are in place: horny CEOs, marginalized minorities, put upon protesters and an unloved statue.

Speaking of minorities, African American artists feature prominently amongst stand out solo booths in this year’s fair, including some historic rediscoveries. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery celebrates the achievements of abstract painter William T. Williams, while Galerie Lelong & Co showcase the lyrical gestalts of southern painter Mildred Thompson with Magnetic Fields, a series from her last decade. “Years ago, I had a dream about an event in space” she wrote in a 1992 statement. “Feeling fortunate to see this event, I stayed to look at it in detail.”

Detail is the essence of the experience of Harmony Hammond’s riveting textured grids in the Weave Paintings at Alexander Gray Associates. Not that one is seeking to survey the fair in identity categories, but another openly queer artist, Nicole Eisenman, makes play with a two-person display with Andy Warhol at Anton Kern Gallery. Their brochure quotes Andy Warhol as saying “If only one day my work could be shown in an art fair booth alongside the work of a radical lesbian”, which ambition Eisenman has obliged in a display where master and acolyte are not always easy to tell apart.

Intensity of detail and exquisiteness in finish are also determining factors in appreciation of Lynn Herhmann Leeson’s early work at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Dotty Attie’s works at P.P.O.W. and new drawings by Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow. The balance of aesthetic and mechanical precision in Thomas Chimes 1970s metal box constructions are aptly contextualized at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery display with Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell. But the last and abiding delectations in the final aisle were of a more rough-hewn nature: Milton Avery at Yares Art, sumptuous and fulsome collages by Biala at Pavel Zoubok, and the take home dream of this visitor, the ravishing quietude of James Bishop with San Antonio, Tx. gallerist Lawrence Markey, where color and space seem to be breathed onto the page.

ADDENDUM: Posted as a featured item from THE LIST on Sunday, March 4

So natural is the tendency of commercial galleries to hedge bets and pack their stands with variety that many art fairs have color coded sections put aside for solo spots. Not so ADAA’s The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, now in its 30th year, which through natural selection, it would seem, affords a hearty mix of group and solo presentations. Two standout stands that eluded my round up earlier this week exemplify these respective models. Jill Newhouse, whose gallery specializes in historic works on paper as well as contemporary works in different mediums, showcased a fine selection of drawings by Pierre Bonnard along with a tightly hung, intriguingly diverse group of living artists working in the Bonnardian spirit. The six living painters – curated by Karen Wilkin – included Larry Poons, Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert. Danese Corey, meanwhile, opted for audacious singularity in presenting just one massive eight-foot high bronze sculpture by William Tucker, Meru, 2015-2017. The intricacies and folds of Tucker’s massed modeling and the demands of this complex form to be seen, fully, in the round could detain the discerning visitor as long as the salon hung massed ranks of intimate works at other stands. It is just not quite so easy to take it home.

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Two books by the sculptors Herbert George and Garth Evans have been published recently. Both men have had long and distinguished careers as artists, and reputations as inspiring teachers. Neither book is devoted to the practical, to the actual making of sculpture, as has often been the case in books by sculptors. Rather both authors, after a lifetime of making, teaching and exhibiting sculpture, deal with larger questions of how sculpture is perceived and understood, or misunderstood, by the public at large.

Herbert George in The Elements of Sculpture, takes as his premiss that sculpture is a thing, a physical object, which can be identified by 13 physical qualities — material, location, mass, color, center of gravity, surface, edge etc. There is also a final and non-physical category, “Memory” in which he places one actual memorial — Charles Sargent Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial in London — with works by Cornell, Kienholz and others.

Each “element” is illustrated by a group of images of sculpture from different times and places. Thus the first Element Material is represented with works by Goldsworthy, di Suvero, Brancusi’s “Torso of a Young Man” in wood and in polished bronze, Bernini’s marble “Apollo and Daphne”, Degas’ “Little Dancer” and two contemporary pieces in found materials by Felix Gonzalez Torres and Shinique Smith. This selection gives an idea of the distribution of the 214 illustrations between contemporary, modern, historic European sculpture and pieces from Asia, Africa and the Americas — about half being in the first (contemporary) category and progressively fewer in each succeeding category. The images themselves make an eloquent visual argument in this thoughtfully designed book. Each is accompanied by a short description, and there are longer introductory and concluding chapters, but the images of sculpture dominate.

In contrast, Garth Evans’ The Cardiff Tapes is a modestly sized paperback, with few but telling illustrations, and a text of compelling interest — a transcription of several hours of audiotaped comments by unnamed citizens of Cardiff, Wales, in response to a sculpture installed there in 1972 by Evans himself. There are also introductory and concluding essays by Evans, and one giving the historical context by the historian and curator Jonathan Wood.

The Elements of Sculpture is based on a class for non-art majors Herbert George invented and taught at the University of Chicago, where he noticed that his students “though skilled writers in other realms, lacked the vocabulary and experience to understand and write about works of sculpture”. The class was unusual in that individual sculptures including contemporary works were treated as objects, rather than images, without regard to their subject or social function, their historical or cultural context. The book, described on the cover as “A Viewer’s Guide,” extends that project to a wider audience faced with contemporary work usually presented in one person exhibitions or monographs on individual artists.

The context for The Cardiff Tapes, “The City Sculpture Project” had a similar educational ambition. Funded by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, some 17 artists were invited to design and build works for public spaces in eight British cities; the sculptures to remain on view for six months, in the hope that the cities would agree to permanently siting them thereafter. None did, so far as I know. (My own work was rejected by the cities of Newcastle and Liverpool before it could be installed in either city in the allowed period — a Liverpool city councilor described it as “looking like the collapsed lungs of a lung cancer patient” — the result of smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes.) One has the impression that artists and public alike emerged frustrated, bewildered and often angry from the experience. But not Garth Evans, whose commitment to the project was profound and personal. and who saw himself as both participant and observer.

Jon Wood’s essay, entitled “Spectators, Speculations, Specters” describes the scene in Cardiff — “a large, twelve-meter-long geometric steel sculpture […] its middle, raised section bookended by triangular and rectangular forms […] is placed at an angle on a paved pedestrian area, cutting across a popular thoroughfare” in the Hayes district of the city. Evans explains “I did not want a location that would signify importance by isolating the work from people and making it inaccessible. I wanted a situation where people would come upon the sculpture naturally and interact with it.”

He was at a point in his career where his abstract work had brought some recognition and success in the art world, yet he felt uneasy about the vast psychic distance between the objects made in his London studio and the lives and culture of the working people of South Wales, where he had grown up. Generations of his family had worked in the coal mines and he knew at first hand of the hardship and danger of that life.The horizontal character of the sculpture, its suggestions of some tool or machine, its matt black finish, could all imply an association with coal mining and its grim history: the thousands of miners who had died in accidents, and notably in the Senghenydd disaster of 1913, in which 440 died in a single day in a mine close by Cardiff — these factors could all have suggested the work be a memorial, and at least guaranteed some recognition, some respect, on the part of the public. After much self-questioning Evans refused that option: the sculpture was dropped into place one day without warning or explanation, and the artist was at hand to record what people thought about it. The transcription of what he heard in the next few hours — comments by and conversations among perhaps a hundred men, women and children — makes for remarkable reading.

7th CHILD: “What is this thing?”

8th CHILD: “What is it?”

7th CHILD: “I don’t know: it looks like nothing”.

8th CHILD: “What is it?”

7th CHILD: “It’s better than anything else anyway”

8th CHILD: “You can’t climb on anything else”.

7th CHILD: “I wish there were a hundred more like it.”

None of the adults were as open or accepting. A few immediately responded in terms like “ugly,” “dreadful,” “a stupid thing,” “an abomination,” “a waste of metal.” For most the question was “What is it for?” or “What is it intended to mean or represent?” and speculated sometimes at length on possible answers. Only one person, the “41st Man,” and the last of the day, came up with a response that went beyond an attempt to place this object in a familiar category — “What I think is that different people will read different things into this — and make you speculate — and you may come to the right conclusion and you may come to the wrong conclusion, but you [will] have speculated, you see, thought. And it’s tantalizing and mysterious and (uh) provocative. But — I like it, and yet — I wouldn’t say I don’t like it — but , I like it …”

Some 40 years later Evans writes: “I had wanted to confront viewers with something unavoidable and yet unknowable, and I had succeeded in both those aims….The work, when it enters a public world, must make a place for itself within that world, and in doing so change that world. It does this by not allowing itself to become known easily… Sculpture needs to be difficult, not for the sake of being difficult, but because if it is to be worthwhile, it needs to be able to disturb, confuse and disorient.”

Such questions about sculpture’s identity and purpose were being debated more than a decade earlier in London. In the 1950s the sculpture getting the most critical attention was figurative, the so-called (by Herbert Read) “Geometry of Fear” sculptors, younger followers of Henry Moore and probably in turn influencing him, such as Bernard Meadows, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Elizabeth Frink. It seemed that the figure had come back with a vengeance, reflecting a turn against the utopian optimism of early European Modernism, as featured in the first (!937) edition of Carola Geidion Welcker’s classic “Modern Plastic Art” — Brancusi, Picasso, the Futurists, the Constructivists, de Stijl, and in Britain, Unit One. In the 1957 London County Council exhibition in Holland Park, my own first experience of contemporary sculpture, Barbara Hepworth was present with one or two other abstract artists, but expressionist figures by Moore and the younger sculptors were clearly the dominant trend.

At this time Garth Evans was modeling portrait heads and life size figures in clay from the model at the Slade School; and Herbert George was just beginning a six year quest to acquire the traditional skills of sculpture, including of course figure modeling, at various schools, including the Pennsylvania Academy.

I remember discussions with Phillip King around 1960 — if sculpture were not figure, and not an example of idealized abstraction, what was it to be? If it was an object, a thing, how would it be different from other things? How would it declare its identity? Phillip came up with the phrase “a familiarity which resists recognition”. to describe what he thought I was after, a new object which would suggest an existing object, or incorporate it, or be a variant of it. For King himself the sculpture was to be a phenomenon rather than an object — it would amaze the onlooker, be unlike anything seen before, a completely new experience. Each sculpture was to be a whole, a single gestalt (Gestalt psychology was an important influence), unlike the multipart horizontal steel constructions which Tony Caro was starting to make. Taken together with the sculpture of Bolus, Annesley, Scott, and the minimal artists in the US, it seemed as though sculpture was being completely re-invented as object rather than figure. But why stop there? Why need sculpture be made, or physically exist at all? In the next few years “sculpture” was created in the form of every every kind of temporary and dispersed material and location, photography, performance, video — in effect “the de-materialization of the art object.” Evans’ self-questioning, his uneasiness about the social role of sculpture, even of sculpture’s right to exist, have to be understood in the light of such developments of the late 1960s.

Herbert George was a witness to these debates when he was in London in 1967 on a Fulbright Scholarship studying Romanesque and Gothic sculpture. In the 1970s in New York he founded and edited Tracks, a magazine of artists’ writings, which often featured pieces from artists whose work transgressed the conventional boundaries of sculpture. But he himself has no doubts about sculpture’s existence, or its right to exist in our time. It is there, a fact, part of human culture since prehistory, and practiced as an art today perhaps in greater volume than ever before. George is a maker of sculpture and a teacher, but above all he is a lifelong student of sculpture, knowledgeable and infinitely curious about every aspect of it, and eager to share his passion with a wider public.

He writes from personal experience of all the works illustrated in his book, including Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania; the Spiral Jetty, the Lightning Field and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, in the desert South West; Christo’s Running Fence on the California coast in the early ’70s, and David Mach’s Polaris, built of 5,000 tires on the South Bank, London, for a few months in 1983. The only sculptures illustrated I imagine he has not seen are the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan, pictured before and after its destruction by the Taliban; the “Burghers of Calais” installed under Rodin’s direction on an 18 feet pedestal next the Houses of Parliament in London, and which remained at that height until 1956: and the Pacific coastal village of the Haida people pictured in 1878 with its spectacular array of totem poles carved from trees of the surrounding forest (and now long since destroyed or dispersed).

By far the greater number of illustrations are of works accessible in museums, galleries or public spaces so that the image and the author’s descriptive commentary can be tested and expanded by the onlooker’s own actual experience. The author presents the reader with images grouped around sculpture’s physical characteristics in order to focus the viewer’s attention on a major aspect of the sculpture, but leaves the viewer to experience the object individually and subjectively. The selection of sculpture presented seems catholic and open, and not designed to promote one school or tendency, even as George writes “I am very aware that this book excludes installation, sound art, video, body art, which could be considered sculpture.” The very limitation of sculpture to a physical object that can (mostly) be walked around, will exclude the large number of woman artists whose work falls into these categories (especially installation); and inevitably there will be questions as to which works, especially by contemporary sculptors are or are not included to illustrate the “Elements “.

The sequence of images throughout the book, the pairing and contrasting of contemporary work with sculpture from past time and other cultures makes for a rich and effective visual narrative parallel to the text, reinforced by the clarity and simplicity of the book’s layout and use of space on the page. The quality of design plainly demanded an equally high quality of images; and the availability of such good images must also have been a consideration in the author’s selection of sculpture. Probably also the inclusion of some highly publicized contemporary sculpture, as opposed to works of more substance by less well known artists, may have been a factor in engaging the general reader.

Even so, in consideration of the vast number of sculptures and images of sculpture that could have been chosen to illustrate George’s thesis, certain principles or preferences emerge beyond the precondition that sculpture is “material form in real space” (from the Introduction, “Experiencing the Third Dimension”) The first principle is that the photographic image is a means of identifying the sculpture only, and that a person has to spend time in the presence of the sculpture itself to even begin to understand it. And so the works chosen are necessarily limited by the author’s experience of the actual objects. But within that limitation it is clear that that George has sympathies with certain works as a sculptor. From graduate school until the 1990s he himself made elegant and inventive constructions combining various materials — wood, canvas, glass, steel, aluminum, plaster, stone. Since the 1990s he has turned increasingly to carving sculpture in stone with equal precision and craftsmanship. It is hardly surprising, then, that if one sculptor gets more attention in this book, in terms of the amount of text and number of illustrations, it is Brancusi. And rightly so, given the fundamental premiss of the book that a piece of sculpture, whatever its perceived image or function, is before all else an object. Brancusi’s marble Sleeping Muse of 1910 is surely the modern prototype of the sculpture as object, preceding by a few years Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe and Duchamp’s Readymades.

George’s sympathy with and understanding of the process of stone carving are evident in the many examples from the history of Western art, and notably in his sensitive observations on portrait heads by Francesco Laurana, and Houdon. Besides Brancusi himself, George has included a surprising number of modern and contemporary examples of stone carving, from the Mount Rushmore monument to works by Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois and Wolfgang Laib, Wood carving in the modern period is represented by Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth alone — one wonders that he might have found a place for a more recent work in wood, by Gabriel Kohn for example, or Raoul Hague or Martin Puryear?

But in whichever material carved works are the exception in the context of most recent sculpture which is constructed either by the artist or executed by others at the artist’s direction; and even carving can now be executed digitally without the artist’s intervention.

Whether carved or modeled the making of sculpture from the earliest times has been a thought process at the same time as a manual and perceptual process. It was only when production and distribution of sculpture on a large scale have become the norm, that mechanical copying and casting, enlargement and reduction, in response to orders and commissions, in effect crowded out individual vision and invention. It was Rodin’s achievement in the late 19th Century to return sculpture to the action of the human hand whether in clay or plaster, and to see what would happen. It’s unfortunate that Rodin is represented here by two finished monuments, the Burghers of Calais and the Balzac, rather than one of the partial figures, such as the Iris or the Flying Figure, which prefigure Brancusi and might themselves be considered the first object sculptures.

That sense of the hand as active in the work is most conspicuous in the two Giacometti sculptures reproduced in the book — The Forest (under Scale) and the MOMA 1948 Standing Woman (under Space). Each sculpture is an excellent example of the Element it illustrates; but their presence on the page seems to me to vibrate with an energy unlike any other sculptures in the book. Giacometti’s post-war work is almost unique (with Medardo Rosso) in the history of sculpture, in that their form derives solely from the artist’s perception of the subject rather than conventions of the subject’s representation. For Giacometti himself they were explicitly not objects, as in his earlier Surrealist pieces. The term object surely connotes something finished, complete, a product, rather than a process. Thus Michelangelo’s unfinished St Matthew seems strangely out of place in the section on Texture, where the variety of surface treatments is a byproduct of the carving process, rather than a conscious feature of the finished sculpture — as in Donatello’s Mary Magdelene, for example, or in The Mandoline by Germaine Richier or Eva Hesse’s Accession.

Giacometti’s sculpture is also distinct here among modern works, because it is so powerfully and uniquely figure. There are only three recent examples of contemporary figurative work in the book — by Pistoletto (Center of Gravity), Yves Klein and Katerina Frisch (Color). These figures, variously carved from marble, life-cast or modeled, are without interest in themselves, neutral, literally and perversely objects. They function both to reinforce the intention of the book — that sculpture is to be seen as object, before it is figure.; and also to represent the actual situation in contemporary sculpture where thoughtful figurative work is notably in the minority.

Yet Herbert George the artist seems to part company here with Herbert George the teacher. His own work, shown opposite Bernini’s Ecstacy of St Teresa (under the element Light), is a carving in onyx titled Composite Likeness #2; though hard to read in the illustration and not mentioned in the text, it is in fact a study for a memorial for victims of Agent Orange, based on an image from a Vietnam hospital. It’s interesting also in this context that a concluding chapter of the book, titled “Using the Elements of Sculpture,” is devoted to a description of Robert Gober’s Untitled (2005-2006) a sculpture consisting of a chair, a paint can, a pair of legs modeled from a single tubular length of beeswax, shoes and socks: each commercially available element actually recreated by the artist in glass, ceramic, etc. George describes each object separately and in combination in terms of his Elements — Color, Scale and Memory —to construct what is in effect a figural presence, even if the literal figure is absent. The author’s speculations as to the meaning of this work are extended and seem deeply felt, revealing a personal identification with this sculpture not evident in his objective descriptions of other works.

Sculpture after all is made by individual people; any work of sculpture. whatever its form or subject, must to some extent embody an individual consciousness. Fortunately we get a glimpse of this from the quotations George includes as he introduces each of his Elements;  the fresh and direct voices of the sculptors themselves often complicate or contradict rather than advance a logical analysis. Thus, in the section on Material:

“We must not make materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others understand their language.” -Constantin Brancusi

“…challenging the material, looking at the shape and learning from things, and having the opportunity to touch all of these things, to feel their difference…Material is everything to me.” -Tony Cragg

“What matters for me in art is to make one forget material — art is invisible.” -Medardo Rosso

George himself in the final paragraph of his essay on Robert Gober’s Untitled writes: ”I began with the elements that were of primary and secondary importance, then asked why the artist made these formal decisions, being careful to search for answers within the sculpture itself… But this is a beginning, a reasoned first step. My interpretation may not be correct. Furthermore I am not sure what being ‘correct’ might mean in the context of a work I immediately perceived to be an enigma, a mystery. To see more clearly is a deeply satisfying process, but lodged within the core of any sculpture is a question. And that is as it should be.”

It seems we are not so far from the last paragraphs of the Cardiff Tapes:

40th MAN: Is it supposed to represent anything at all?

41st MAN: It’ll dawn on me some day. But then, at that point, I’ll have different interpretations according to my moods, you see, and, uh, I’ll work at this— because it’s provocative. It provokes thought and lots of different things, teaching me about thought. You know what I can tell you about —

40th MAN: So, where do I go from there?

Some 50 years later the publication of The Elements of Sculpture goes some way, if not to answer the questions raised in The Cardiff Tapes, at least to open to a wider public the possibility that the experience of sculpture can be a conversation, rather than a mutual confrontation on the part of both viewer and object.

Herbert George. The Elements of Sculpture: A Viewer’s Guide. (London: Phaidon, 2014). 192 pp, ISBN 9780714867410, $39.95

Garth Evans (with Jon Wood). The Cardiff Tapes. (Chicago: The Soberscove Press, 2015). 90 pp, ISBN 978-1-940190-08-2, $16

Herbert George will lecture on sculpture at the New York Studio School on March 2nd at 6:30PM

The post A Broader View of Sculpture: Two Books by Artists on the Perception of their Medium appeared first on artcritical.

artcritical.com doesn’t aspire to be the journal of record when it comes to obituaries: we respond as any serious art magazine does when a giant leaves the field, but as in much of our coverage, the choice of artists and art world personalities to whom we pay tribute is determined less by editorial policy than by the passions of individual writers.  A case in point: two memorials posted today, May 7, honoring artists who fall short of a newspaper headline for reason of living quieter lives, chasing quirky visions, working at an obstinate scale or sheer consistent poor luck.  Longtime artcritical contributor David Brody offers a spirited reading of a painter of mythic, oddly iconic personages and a bestiary of their four-legged companions, Selina Trieff, who passed in January at the age of 81.  William Tucker, the legendary British-born sculptor, offers a fulsome, warm introduction, as it is for most of us, to his friend, James Adley, who also died recently at 83.  Besides the privilege of offering a platform to quality writing on subjects that matter to their authors, however, there is good journalistic sense in giving space to these overlooked individuals for the critical and historical insights their examined lives afford.  Mr. Tucker’s  quite detailed biographical sketch is riveting, for instance, on the subject of how American abstract painting galvanized certain British artists of his generation.   Like all good tributes, these offerings  impart a sense of relish at the persistence of the creative spirit.

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James Adley, who died last month at 83, was one of a generation of British artists who came of age when what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism was first shown on a large scale in London. The impact especially of “The New American Painting” at the Tate in 1959 was huge, not only on art students but in inspiring a commitment to art for someone like myself who had not yet made a career choice; or for Jim, at that time working as an accountant, but who dreamed of a life in music. Our idea of modern painting were the works of Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian – generally available in reproduction as well as the occasional Tate show – and of younger artists like Nicolas de Stael and Pierre Soulages whose work could sometimes be seen in the Bond Street galleries. None of these pictures could have prepared us for the impact of the 1958 Tate show.

The exhibition included works by 17 artists — Pollock, Still, Kline, de Kooning, Motherwell — all the big names, and some lesser ones, but not Reinhardt and I think Hofmann. These paintings were vast, completely occupied one’s field of vision, yet seemed to address themselves to the individual viewer: public in scale but personal, even intimate in address. The surfaces, the paint handling, seemed raw, physical, not cooked up, challenging the eyes, even the body. There was no distance in this work, its drama and immediacy seemed unlike anything in art since Caravaggio. No doubt I exaggerate the radical nature of these paintings because of their effect on me and other young artists such as Bert Irvin (who also died recently) and Basil Beattie. And on Jim Adley, who I didn’t meet until I came to the US in the late ‘70s. Every young artist has to be excited by the heroes of a previous generation. But there was something about the Tate exhibition, reinforced by individual shows at the Whitechapel Gallery of Pollock, Rothko, and others, that had an immediate and dramatic effect on British art. By contrast Abstract Expressionism had already been absorbed in New York; its influence was dominating the more progressive American art schools. American students I knew, like Ron Kitaj and Phillip Morsburger, chose to use their GI Bill benefits to study at the very traditional Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford to get away from it

As a child Jim experienced the worst of the Blitz in London, and an almost as traumatic evacuation to the country, while his parents stayed on amid the destruction. He found refuge in music, took violin lessons and immersed himself in the study of classical music, which remained a lifelong passion and about which he was extremely knowledgeable. After leaving school he did his compulsory National Service in the RAF, where his skill with numbers earned him a posting to an experimental rocket program in North Wales. Later in life, he would describe the excitement of seeing the night lit up by the explosions and vapor trails of the weapons being tested, and how, looking back, that was the first intimation of an art that could fill the sky (or at least the visual field). After the Royal Air Force, he enrolled in an accountancy program and was soon earning a living that way. He may already have been doing some painting on the side, but music was his main preoccupation (And both music and numbers, in the suggestion of horizontal musical scores, or of mathematical grids or matrices, continued to haunt his painting throughout his career). So, after a few years making a living in the real world, he happened on the exhibition at the Tate. Of all the work there, the strongest, starkest, most dramatic impact was that of Clyfford Still. That was Jim’s experience, and it was mine, too. Not only the paintings themselves, but the memorable rhetoric of the words in his catalog statement proclaiming a new era in art, free of “outworn myths and contemporary alibis.”

At the first opportunity Jim resigned his job as an accountant for the Nestlé corporation, and enrolled first at City and Guilds for the year 1959, then at the Chelsea School of Art from 1960-63. However high his ambition, he seems to have been determined to start from the ground up. Images of paintings he did as a student at Chelsea, abstracted still-lives in a painterly Cubist idiom, seem thoroughly competent if not inspired. Certainly not the work of a beginner. Perhaps one can see the influence of the young Australian painter and fellow-student, Alison McMaugh, who had several years experience behind her already. They were married in 1961. Alison was deeply interested in color, in both a practical and theoretical way, and established a solid and consistent career as an abstract painter. They were very different as people, and as artists, but each strongly supported the other over the years, and in what became a difficult and isolated situation in Michigan, and in Arizona where they moved for her health after his retirement from teaching. Her death from cancer in 2005 was, as the saying goes, “a mortal blow” for Jim, from which he never really recovered.

To get back to 1963, Jim’s promise as a painter was recognized by a scholarship to the MFA program at The University of Pennsylvania. Piero Dorazio who was teaching there at the time, had persuaded several of the Abstract Expressionists, among them Motherwell, David Smith, and notably for Jim, Clyfford Still, to visit the program and advise the students. The meeting with Still, and their subsequent conversations (more likely monologues) were for Jim among the most critical events in his life. Still’s example as an artist confirmed Jim in his almost religious devotion to painting (a friend recently described Jim as “the most devoted artist he knew”); but then Still’s bitter and angry denunciations of his fellow artists and the art world in general may not have been so useful for Jim, encouraging him to believe that it was the serious artist’s lot to be misunderstood and rejected anyway, so there was little point to organizing your career in a professional way. Moreover, Jim was completely unlike Still: friendly and open, he had a self-deprecating sense of humor. In his teaching job at Michigan State, which he landed after a single year at Penn and where he taught for the next 30 years, he was loved by generations of students, which earned him the university’s Distinguished Faculty award in 1990. Often in the summers he would bring groups of students to London, and with them visit friends’ studios, both contemporaries and younger artists. In this way he kept open a connection with the London art world that was in many ways closer than that of New York. But he had friends everywhere among artists, critics and museum people — his long letters to friends and even slight acquaintances were prized for their thoughtful observation and knowledge of art and music, with only occasional complaints about the art world’s rejection of abstract painting.

In 1970 he first exhibited in New York, in a group show at the adventurous but short-lived Reese Paley Gallery, one of the first big Soho spaces. Unfortunately it closed before Jim could have his first one person show there — the space would have been ideal for the scale at which he was now working. In the next three decades Jim had one person shows at galleries in Michigan and several university galleries around the US, but New York proved more difficult. During the ‘70s Jim would make an annual trip from Michigan, his van loaded with the previous year’s production of huge canvases on rolls which he would drag into pristine gallery spaces and proceed to unroll on the floor, to the dealer’s evident dismay. By temperament Jim was not the best advocate for his kind of painting, he just assumed that the artists of Still’s generation had established norms for painting in terms of its subject, scale and ambition that would be permanent, not just a phase, a passing fashion. For whatever reason Jim was unwilling or unable to put the time into making adequate images of his paintings. You could not get back far enough in his studio to get a picture without distortion, and even in a large public space the actual visual experience of a 50-foot canvas like Transition (1988-98) was impossible to capture in a slide. Size was a necessary component of his symphonic ambition for painting. He favored a horizontal format with an implied grid or web of vertical and horizontal bars, which could be more or less dominant or transparent, but never rigid or dogmatic and always carried out with delicacy and sensitivity. He worked thin acrylic paint with a variety of implements, including brooms, squeegees and sticks.

In 1977 Jim’s persistence finally paid off, with a one-person show in New York at the Neill Gallery, but that too closed a few years later. A big museum space would have been perfect but was equally elusive: the nearest he came to that was inclusion in a show at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, in 2001, titled “Imagine: Abstract Paintings from the 1970s.” The only place outside his studio where his work could be seen, and still can be seen, were public buildings for which a painting was commissioned, like Helios in the 1980s, by Michigan State University. Jim had the respect, even the admiration, of some quite well known fellow artists, critics, and museum people, but somehow it never translated into wider recognition. He did win unusually high praise for his work from the Pollock-Krasner foundation, when he won a substantial award in 2005.

Jim’s career recalls that of one of his heroes, the composer Havergal Brian, who after achieving early recognition in the first years of the last century, went on to write 32 symphonies and much other music in complete neglect and obscurity; only three had been performed by the end of his life, when there was a revival of interest in his work. Jim himself flew to England to hear the first performance of Brian’s 7th Symphony in Liverpool in 1987. Like Brian, Jim never stopped working, regardless of the prospects for exhibition, let alone sale, of his grand symphonic paintings. Even in his final years, bedridden and so crippled that he could no longer write, he somehow managed to produce small panels of astonishing freshness and beauty; he was painting until the last week of his life.

A memorial for Jim will be held May 31st at the Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University, Lansing.

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Thanks to the late Edward Broida, the second floor of the new MoMA looks better than ever. The items on view in “Against the Grain: Contemporary Art From the Edward R. Broida Collection” fill the museum’s imposing Contemporary Galleries and the adjacent Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron atrium, where Jennifer Bartlett’s “Rhapsody” (1975–76) is displayed to stunning effect.

Even enthusiasts of Yoshio Taniguchi’s MoMA redesign must admit that the soaring atrium has tended to dwarf and diminish whatever has hung there — even Monet’s “Waterlillies” looked like a tapestry in a medieval castle. But “Rhapsody,” afrieze of over 900 12-inch square enamel-painted steel plates installed around three sides of this forbidding, impersonal space, holds its own.

Ms. Bartlett’s sprawling, oddball creation seems constantly to test boundaries between signified and signifier, meaning and form. There are repeating, schematic pictures of a house in a field; pure monochromes, painted in a nonchalantly agitated hand; picture-book illustrations of mountain ranges; maps; geometric patterns of varying degrees of complexity and simplicity; and images painted in pointillist dots. Think of it as an abstraction-representation dictionary.

“Rhapsody,” a seminal piece in avant-garde artists’ transition away from the reductive rigor of the minimalist and conceptual art of the late 1960s, is talismanic of Broida’s taste, — or, at least, MoMA’s take on it. Broida loved pared-down forms tentatively reinvested with poetry and feeling, and Ms. Bartlett’s work remains coolly conceptual while edging toward observation, sensuality, and personality.

Broida, who died of cancer last month, took up collecting in the late 1970s at the instigation of an uncle who introduced him to the dealers David and Renee McKee. On their first day together, Broida walked away with two major Philip Guston canvases. Over the next quarter-century, he amassed some 700 works, of which he bequeathed 175 to MoMA.

Of the 38 artists currently on view, nine are,were or would be from the McKee stable, making some of the MoMA galleries seem like a secret passageway connected to a McKee Gallery group exhibition. When Broida shopped elsewhere, it was generally with a few dealers to whom Mr. McKee introduced him — Paula Cooper, Miani Johnson, and Richard Bellamy. But despite taking the advice of such a tight roster of dealers, Broida managed to amass a collection with an acute sense of historic moment.

That Guston marked Broida’s first foray into collecting was significant on a number of counts. Most new collectors in the late-’70s would have dipped their toes into modernism with a Milton Avery or a Henry Moore, but Broida jumped into the deep end with Guston, who at the time was making a controversial return to figuration. Whereas few collectors are defined by their first acquisitions, Broida continued to collect Guston (whom he also befriended), amassing such monumental canvases as “Edge of Town” (1969), with its smoking Klansmen, and “Painter in Bed” (1973), a goofy, cartoon-like head with its oversized eye dreaming of nebulous rock formation rendered in sickly pinks and reds. In the next decade, his judgment proved prescient: Guston, once a finessed pioneer of abstraction, became the poster-boy “bad painter” for the neo-Expressionist generation.

Broida’s affinity for Guston, who groped in a primitive style towards a personal language, helps make sense of his other choices. Most of the artists he collected made something personal out of the universal, putting idiosyncrasy back into pared-down forms. And many of the works at MoMA exhibit an uneasy admiration for minimal art while undermining its strictures with humor or poetry.

For example, Joel Shapiro’s untitled 1980 stick figure shares with minimal art an attraction to shop-bought processed materials, but it cheekily looks over Minimalism’s shoulder at its Russian Constructivist forebears. Broida collected Shapiro in depth, and a room of Shapiros at MoMA includes five drawings and three sculptures. One of the latter, “Untitled” (1979), is a three-part piece of reclining and crouching block figures in bronze, each only three or four inches high, yet subversively imbued with individuality and character.

Another McKee artist Broida collected is Vija Celmins. Like Guston, Ms. Bartlett, and Susan Rothenberg — one of whose early horse paintings, “Triphammer Bridge” (1974), opens the exhibition — Ms. Celmins made enigmatic works that occupy an uneasy space between abstraction and representation. But her technique is one of mind-numbing, painstaking precision of the kind usually associated with banknote engravers. Typically, she reproduces photographic images culled from the press in such graphic mediums as graphite, charcoal, and mezzotint. While her patience and rectitude stand out amidst the Broida collection, her high-minded austerity and chromophobia are typical of the period in which he collected, and to which he responded.

Other artists here manage to mix the gutsy agitation of Guston with the crafted exactitude of Ms. Celmins. A typical surface in this exhibition of remarkably consistent mood is worried, distressed, and antsy. In Jake Berthot’s “Room” (1979), the almost Cubist faceting of the muted, tonal space surrounds the central red rectangle. A similarly nagging, fidgety mark-making defines John Walker’s “Green Alba-Kingston” (1979–80), and there is a comparably pummeled expressivity to William Tucker’s megalithic “Demeter” (1991), a 7 1/2-foot abstracted, Rodin-like bronze figure.

While calling their exhibition “Against the Grain,” the curators have generally sought to integrate the Broida gift with their institution’s take on the art of the 1970s. In a few instances, however, these are MoMA’s first works by artists Broida championed: John Lees, whose “Stream” (1993–98) is a quirky, Chinese scroll-like abstracted landscape whose obsessive yet delicate surface attests to its protracted date; Jeanne Silverthorne, whose “Shattered” (2003) is a hybrid painting-cum-sculpture that recalls Elizabeth Murray and Guisepe Penone, both represented in the Broida gift; and Bob Kane, an old friend of the collector’s whose Matisse-inspired interior is truly a fish out of water.

As these final pieces attest, the exhibition offers a welcome contrast in its personal focus to the corporate, shopping-list style UBS collection with which MoMA inaugurated its new building. The Broida gift recalls that the museum started out as a club of impassioned private collectors, its foundational holdings bolstered by the likes of Lillie Bliss and sundry Rockefellers. Whatever the tastes and ambitions of curators and however global and comprehensive a museum aspires to be, a museum can still be critically shaped by its collector friends.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 4, 2006

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 28, 2005

They say inside every fat man a thin one is trying to escape: Might the same be true of sculpture? William Tucker’s career traces a trajectory from the skeletal to the gargantuan. The work that brought him to the fore of advanced British sculpture in the 1960s was resolutely precise, linear, constructivist. No one would say his work was ever thin, intellectually, but it was lean in the sense of being emotionally contained and cerebral.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Tucker moved to America, and soon thereafter his work underwent a profound transformation. What he has become best known for today are expressive, densely modeled sculptural lumps. Monumentally slow to register, these have an awkward corporeality that is the extreme opposite of the deft, almost balletic structures of his early years. Yet, for all their weight, Mr. Tucker’s sculpture continues to be as much about the defiance of gravity as capitulation to it.

McKee has five substantial new works in bronze and plaster, a group of maquette studies for these, and a drawing. One piece is immediately recognizable as a horse’s head, recalling classical statuary. But some degree of ambiguity, a studied resistance to literal interpretation, remains the order of the day. Mr. Tucker’s work is more properly “figural” than figurative: His work makes reference to the body, but does so in terms of sensation rather than anatomy, feel not look.

Hefty though the form language remains, his bodily forms convey a sense of muscle, not flab. Without writhing Laocoön-like, or even implying directional movement, like many of Rodin’s figures, Mr. Tucker’s forms have a taut, contained, pent-up energy. They make us aware how much subtle, unconscious muscular engagement is required to keep a body erect. Rather like Henry Moore’s reclining women, a Tucker conveys that, properly understood, stasis entails its own kind of vitality and is by no means passive.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Tucker was well known for his scholarly, polemical writings about sculpture and his curatorial endeavors. His “Language of Sculpture,” based on a series of lectures delivered in Leeds in the 1970s, remains a classic among sculptors of a Modernist bent. In part this is due to the drubbing it received from postmodern theorists like Rosalind Krauss. Yet his insights remain enduringly fresh.

Mr. Tucker has moved in more traditionalist directions since then. But despite the seemingly radical shift in his own conception of sculpture — back toward an almost primordial sense of volume and mass — much of what he is doing now recalls the insights and curiosity of his earlier thoughts. This comes across in his attitudes towards two precursors of sculptural modernism: Rodin and Degas.

Mr. Tucker’s own work, like Rodin’s, makes striking use of the fragment. This isn’t a romantic appeal to the archaeological, nor is it about lobbing off extraneous limbs to make the remaining figure more streamlined and centered (as in Maillol or, for that matter, early Brancusi.) Rather, there is an organic sense that the fragment contains the essence of the whole, and that the whole, in turn, has the characteristics of one of its own parts.

Several of the works at McKee, including the sole drawing, depict or take their cue from the human fist. In an almost cartoony way — which defies Mr. Tucker’s ponderous, deliberative pace — this motif conveys a sense of “packing a punch.” Yet the fist is stationary and contained, a thing in itself that contains its own power, rather than an extension of the energy of an entire body. The shape of the disengaged fragment has its own figural implications.

In Mr. Tucker’s work of the last few years, there is a slight but discernible movement toward renewed clarity — the thin sculpture escaping from its corpulent jailer. None of the new pieces have the inscrutable, turdlike quality of his most enigmatic work of the 1980s and 1990s. Whatever is happening to the forms, however, the surfaces continue to bristle with ambiguity.

The pummeling is about more than mere texture. The elusive surfaces that result don’t seem contrived to generate intentionally multiple readings like the faceting in a cubist work, for instance. Instead, the surface agitation seems to come about as a result of nervous energy required to create the work and hold it up. There is a tense relationship in Mr. Tucker between depiction and being.

Degas is directly referenced in the most ambitious work in the exhibition, “Dancer,” (2002–04), a plaster work made in preparation for a bronze edition. A vast object — barely shy of 8 feet in any direction — it takes its inspiration from Degas’s dancer looking at the sole of her right foot. This is the work with which Mr. Tucker provocatively concluded “The Language of Sculpture,” extolling a pathos and heroism in this supposedly unemotional artist that outdoes all the “histrionics of romantic art, Rodin included.”

The Degas might recall the classical statue of the boy removing a thorn from his foot, but really it was an unprecedented sculptural form. The dancer is awkwardly twisted out of shape to perform an unnatural task that defies gravity. In order to freeze time and stand up, the sculpture, like the movement it depicts, must find its inner center. The energy of the Degas, as Mr. Tucker observed, isn’t from the ground up “but from the pelvis outward, in every direction, thrusting and probing with volumes and axes until a balance is achieved.” Because of the primitivism of Degas’s working method, actual balance was as essential as the illusion of balance.

The form is, whether consciously or not, a perfect metaphor of Mr. Tucker’s own sculptural aesthetic, with its struggle between the haptic and the optic, what is felt and what is seen. The dancer defies her body, out of bodily need, to see what’s beyond sight (some itch in her foot, perhaps). She wants to observe her own groundedness.

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