May 6 – June 20, 2009
Alice Neel: Nudes of the 1930s at Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues,
New York City, 212 517 8677 (Zwirner & Wirth now closed)

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is widely considered one of the most important American painters of the twentieth century, but it took critics decades to come to terms with her oeuvre. Independent from any art movement – despite many friendships with artists and art professionals of her generation – Neel was a force all her own. In the context of American art, which in particular in the 1940s and 1950s was almost exclusively associated with Abstract Expressionism, Neel’s work seemed to contain an unusual nod to a past aesthetic. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Neel also had her roots in European art. But rather than Surrealism, her principal inspiration was German Neuesachlichkeit painters like George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. Her many still lifes and portraits of friends, family members, lovers, and strangers, reveal a similar fusion of expressionist color and line with a keen eye for inherent psychological and emotional complexities. The individuals she depicted were often deeply intertwined with her personal life and addressed subject matters close to her heart, ranging from gender and racial inequality to politics. In Neel’s work it is evident that to her, people and their stories mattered most. It was her particular skill, as well as passionate mission, to paint them with honesty and sincerity. Thinking of herself as a “collector of souls,” Neel created an oeuvre that not only reveals different facets of humanity, but also sums up the diversity of American urban society.

In May of this, after taking over the Alice Neel Estate from Robert Miller Gallery, David Zwirner opened two concurrent exhibitions of her work.  At Zwirner & Wirth, there was an intimate installation of Neel’s nudes from the 1930s. Some of the works show Neel in autobiographical scenarios – in others she has portrayed friends and acquaintances. It is work that followed probably the most traumatic years of her life – the late 1920s – and was made during a period, when she regained emotional strength and confidence. Neel’s biography of the preceding years read like an emotional rollercoaster ride. In 1924, Neel had met the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), son of a prominent family in Havana at the Chester Springs summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The couple married the following year and in 1926 they traveled to Cuba together, where Neel gave birth to her first daughter Santillana in December. In 1927, the family moved to New York City, but just before her first birthday, Santillana died of diphtheria. Shortly after the baby’s death, Neel became pregnant again with her second child, Isabetta, who was born in 1928. In 1930, Carlos returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him, before continuing on to Paris by himself, leaving the child with his family. In the year that followed, Neel lived through a massive nervous breakdown, several suicide attempts, hospitalization, and a prolonged stay in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital. She was released from the sanatorium in 1931 and returned to her parents’ home in Colwyn, Pennsylvania. Not until the end of that year, after visiting her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, did Neel move to New York City.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that the 1930s show Neel as a matured soul. Her subjects reveal a new sense of vulnerability that leaves one more intensely guessing about their darker sides and the experiences they have had. One of the most compelling works in this particular installation is Nadya and Nona (1933). The painting shows two nude women lying side-by-side; one of them being Olyanova. Some of their physical features have been exaggerated, such as the white, almost ashen skin tones, the dark shadows that accentuate each body curve and bone, or the long eye lashes. The atmosphere is sensual, erotic, and mysterious. Though it remains unclear if the women are lovers, an unquestionable bond exists between them. Be it by gender, history or feeling – they are confidantes in a world solely their own.

In several of the watercolors and drawings, Neel has depicted herself alongside her longtime friend and lover at the time, John Rothschild. A Harvard graduate from a wealthy family who ran a travel business, Rothchild met Neel in 1932. In these drawings, which are some of Neel’s most intimate works, she is in her thirties, beautiful and curvy, with her long red hair sprawling liberally. In Alice and John in the Bathroom (1935), Neel can be seen sitting on a toilet seat while urinating. John stands at the sink, urinating with an erect penis in his hand. Various shades of red accentuate details, such as Alice’s pubic hair, the toilet seat, John’s slippers and the head of his penis. Alice’s legs are turned outward, her arms crossed over her head, almost taking on the posture of an Indian deity. The scene could not be more humbling in its honesty and lack of glorification. Leaving the viewer in the role of a voyeur, Alice and John in the Bathroom is an ode to the pure sense of trust and privacy that two individuals, despite all imperfections, can experience when truly caring for each other.

At David Zwirner, Neel is only revealed through the individuals she portrayed. Gone are the self-portraits. The paintings here range in date from the late 1940s to early 1980s. Several of her subjects, like her son Hartley, for example, Neel would paint repeatedly over time. Throughout her life, Neel was attracted to strong individuals, in particular women, who were confident in their sexuality. The most provocative work along these lines is a portrait of Annie Sprinkle from 1982. Neel depicts the former prostitute and porn star turned performance artist, facing the viewer frontally, eye-to-eye. The boldness and dignity of Manet’s Olympia comes to mind, which in its time was not less shocking. Even more than twenty-five years after it was conceived, Sprinkle’s portrait does not fail to make an impact. This might partially be due to the stark contrast between Sprinkle’s half-smile and the dominatrix outfit she wears that leaves her genitals exposed. But it probably is mostly due to the company she finds herself in – the various children, young adults, men, and women both dressed and nude. Overall, she is just one of many colorful individuals in the room. While Sprinkle’s make up suggests her profession, just as a fur stole around another’s sitter’s shoulders might suggest her financial background, we do not know her intimately. What Neel does give us, however, is her view on how she perceived the person before her. It is a character assessment of sorts and a testament to the fact that Neel was able to access something deeply within herself, to be able to reveal something meaningful about somebody else.

Though Neel only showed sporadically in the beginning, by the 1960s, she was exhibiting regularly and in 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized their first retrospective (another one was held in 2000). In 1984, she appeared on the Johnny Carson show. Despite all the recognition during her lifetime, it was not until more recently that the impact of Neel’s oeuvre on younger generation painters has become more evident. The exhibition at Zwirner, as well as a major survey of her work, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and scheduled for spring 2010, will provide ample opportunity to convince oneself of exactly that.

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September 17 to October 25, 2008
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, between Park and Madison avenues
New York City, 212 517 8677

The New Museum (reopened December 2007) still feels new in its vanguard boxy Bowery reincarnation—the lobby all steel and concrete and plate glass—crowded with industrially-clad  European tourists and waifish art students.  This ground-floor space is employed to intentionally discordant effect to introduce curator Richard Flood’s Mary Heilmann survey, as the first grouping of paintings is hung in the terrarium-like narrow glassed-in enclosure that comprises a small gallery behind the snack bar.

Here, a number of works ranging from 1970 to 1994 share a palette of blue, white and black. All feature loosely-painted geometric motifs, ranging from constructivist-leaning floating rectangles, Blue and White Squares (1997) to straight bands of hard-edged horizontal color,Capistrano (1994). Some are on shaped canvas, Miramar (1994). In the earliest of these works, Malibu (1970), the canvas isn’t even stretched: it hangs freely. All evoke seascape, perhaps in homage to Heilmann’s California past (born in San Francisco, 1940, she studied literature and poetry at UC Santa Barbara before taking an MFA in ceramics and sculpture at UC Berkeley). This biographical thread is also picked up on in a series of recent ceramic sculptural objects juxtaposed, made in collaboration with Steve Keister and Rachel Bleiweiss-Sande, poised around the paintings on floor and wall.

That is all a teaser for the full impact of the show, which comes across visceral and forceful as soon as the elevator doors open to the large, second-floor galleries. Garishly colorful canvases—representing nearly 40 years of free-thinking and playful experimentation—vie for attention in a non-linear hopscotch chronology. Artist-designed rolling “Clubchairs” allow for contemplative viewing—but with an implied restless velocity (think: adult kindergarten).

Early experiments with ad-hoc sculptural materials, Starry Night (Night Sky) (1967) and The Big Dipper (1969), show the young artist already moving toward the painterly, with modeled celestial black and silver clumps played off each other to imagistic effect.

Soon after, by the 1970s, Heilmann is seen grappling with the minimalist ethos of the time, responding to that era’s mostly male color/geometry paradigm of Ellsworth Kelly, David Novros, Blinky Palermo and others. In L.A. Pair (1976), a horizontal diptych employs scraped-off paint to reveal two alternating primary-colored grounds beneath. This strategy—using overpainting to obscure or scraping away paint to reveal—is central to Heilmann’s ongoing practice. It’s a willfully perverse methodology, being assertive by negating the traditional role of the artist and his mark.

The show reaches a sense of triumph in the large nocturnes Neo Noir (1998) and The Third Man (1999), in which retinal chromatic rectangles of atmospheric space float, framed into window-like squares by surrounding strokes of dark sweeping brushwork. Delicate internal illumination is weighed against malevolent obliteration.

Heilmann’s most recent canvases are among her most assured. She often seems be daring herself to do something truly “awful”—only to find beauty in it. In Jack of Hearts (2005), for example, an undulating stain of blood red paint is laid transparent over a simple black-and-white checkerboard. The accumulated brushmarks and open drips make her act of painting transliterate into a kind of crime of passion.

Downtown, under the New Museum’s harsh fluorescent lighting, the paintings have a matte, plastic-like quality, pushing them towards confrontational “ugliness.” Uptown, by contrast, at Zwirner & Wirth’s elegant space, a spare historical hanging has the opposite effect. Here, Heilmann’s works look refined and considered, passing as masterworks of late neoplastic awareness. In this location, there’s no denying it: Mary Heilmann now is “someone.”

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Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered
The Jewish Museum

1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, 212 423 3200
March 16 to August 03, 2008

Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York City, 212 517 8677
March 6 to May 3, 2008

There is a new genre of art exhibition, I’ve noticed recently.  And while the genre is novel, the actual exhibitions I’m referring to are not.   The crux of this new genre –  which has found a cozy place in contemporary art history – is, basically, to re-stage a previous exhibition (though not necessarily at the original venue) several years, even decades later, and see how its effect has evolved over time.

Two examples of “recycled exhibitions,” one at a museum and one at a gallery, are up in New York right now:  Andy Warhol’s controversial show from 1980, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, has been recast in 2008 as Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered, currently on view at The Jewish Museum, the last stop of a three-city tour; and dan flavin: fluorescent light, which exhibited at the now defunct Green Gallery in the fall of 1964, has been resurrected today as Dan Flavin: the 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition, presently at the Zwirner and Wirth Gallery.

Back in 1980, Andy Warhol, in collaboration with New York gallerist, Ronald Feldman, chose ten prominent Jewish figures – including writers, actors, composers, philosophers and political figures – as the subjects for his controversial show.  Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Sarah Bernhardt, Golda Meir and Gertrude Stein are among those who made the cut.  In an effort to retain the spirit of the original exhibition design, Warhol’s Jews is located today in a small room in the museum, which grants it both a casual and intimate feel.  The works are set against a series of panels painted brown so that the architectural elements would recede into the background, bringing the vibrant and characteristically Warholian silk-screens, replete with overlays of drawing and blocks of color, into relief.

Unlike the subjects of his many of his famous portraits from the 1960’s and 1970’s, Warhol had never met a single one of his Jewish “sitters.”  All the images were taken from random sources ranging from passport photos to film stills, which are on display next to the portraits. The portraits are also accompanied by preparatory drawings and preparatory collages.  The source photographs and drawings have not been previously exhibited alongside the portraits until now, which is one of the major differences between the previous exhibition and the “recycled exhibition.” 

dan flavin: fluorescent light marked a critical period in that artist’s career.  Flavin’s ideas and experiments with hand-made lighting elements culminated in 1964 in the usage of commercially-available fluorescent lighting.  The original show was meticulously curated by the artist himself and included seven works in total.  The new show, equally well-curated with all seven works in a historically accurate recreation (in a space that bears a striking likeness to the original Green Gallery space), also offers diagrams – not previously exhibited – drawn up by Flavin of the original installation.  These diagrams – much like Warhol’s source photographs that reveal a physical and emotional distance from his subjects – are where the deferred learning comes into play.

The study of art history aside, the idea that art cannot exist (or invoke meaning) outside of the context in which it was created is not always the case.  Regarding the Warhol show – which was conceived by a Catholic artist who had never before appeared sympathetic to Jews or the Jewish cause –  many perceived it as anti-Semitic.  The colorful and kitschy silk-screens of (some of them) serious intellectual and political figures came across back then as overtly tongue-and-cheek—especially when thought of in the context of the artist’s iconic Marlyns and Jackie Os.  

It was important, therefore, to see how religious and political indignation has changed or, in this case, subsided almost thirty years later.  To highlight Jewish controversy now seems more like a badge of honor and a learning tool (for those studying the history of anti-Semitism and/or Holocaust studies) than a modern-day promotion of anti-Jewish sentiment.  And furthermore, when taking into account the controversy surrounding The Brooklyn Museum’s 1999’s Sensation exhibition and Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary,” which bore the brunt of Mayor Giulinai’s indefatigable crusade, Warhol’s Jews looks as harmless as a Renoir exhibition.

In contrast to Warhol’s Jews, the re-examination of Flavin’s show has less to do with religion and politics and more to do with the progression of art in the latter part of the twentieth century.  dan flavin: fluorescent light was the first exhibition comprised solely of fluorescent lighting and was integral in the development of the artist’s minimalist rhetoric.  Further, the newly-exhibited diagrams help the viewer better understand the artist’s ideas and intentions regarding the exhibition.

These shows are just two of many examples of this new genre, which is being practiced by curators and gallerists, who see the progression of history as a yet another tool for teaching.  To revisit older exhibitions and try and gage their aftershocks years later is a worthy exercise, speaking to social/political change as well as the progression of artistic styles.  If “recycled exhibitions” can teach us anything, it’s that there’s always more to learn.

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June 27 to August 31

Zwirner & Wirth’s “Old School” explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and our postmodernist counterparts. Nearly thirty landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them.

The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a wedding procession by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son of the great painter) depicts self-absorbed throngs with the same busyness of detail as Hilary Harkness’s “Flipwreck” (2004)—though the latter’s shipwrecked women, in sexually masochistic poses and clothes, set an entirely different tone. Anj Smith’s small canvas from 2007 boasts much thicker textures than the adjacent painting of Saint Anthony by Jacob van Swanenburgh (c. 1571-1638), but both feature fanciful monsters in compositions of torn, turbulent forms. Michael Borremans’ conventionally skillful likeness of a young man from 2006 hangs next to an impressive, if facile, portrait from c. 1664 by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen.

It should be said that most of the old master paintings demonstrate fine technique, but not the inventive brilliance of the greatest artists of their times. The Brueghel is a pale echo of his father’s extraordinary “Harvesters” at the Metropolitan Museum, and the van Everdingen shows an artist who clearly valued technical cleverness over a gravity of form; no part of the body—sleeves, hands, torso—rhythmically supports the flourish of the face. The masters of “Old School,” consequently, largely come off as quaintly dated foils for the postmodernists; it’s their quirks of style and subject matter that spark across the centuries.

Many of the contemporary artists appropriate these quirks with gusto. Richard Wathen’s “Once Removed” (2006) amplifies the vulgarity of the van Everdingen with eerie primness, depicting a mother and children—dressed as if sitting for a Gainsborough—with an almost amphibian coldness of color and detail. A still life attributed to the school of Caravaggio contains, along with fruit and melons, a grasshopper as fiercely detailed as an armored vehicle; next to it, Glenn Brown’s painting of a stringy mass amounts to a collection of such obsessive, unsettling details—in his case orifices, shriveled blossoms, and human and animal faces.

The exhibition does include a true masterpiece, a madonna and child by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). In this panel, the angle of Mary’s head and hair exquisitely counterbalance the infant’s compact verticals. Colors and contours continuously press upon one another, so that points of detail—like the grapes clutched by mother and infant, or the child’s intricate foot—appear at the end of poignantly unwinding limbs and garments. A second panel attributed to this master’s studio is hardly less remarkable.

The Cranach tends to make the other old masters look dawdling, and the aims of most of the postmodernists…well, enigmatic. Figure paintings by Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, from 2001 and 2003 respectively, provoke thoughts about social perceptions, but both are so weak in their arrangements of color next to the Cranach that it’s unclear whether they are consciously parodying a genre or simply unaware of painting’s potentials. The DayGlo colors of Djordje Ozbolt’s 2007 landscape jangle nonsensically, reducing his panel to a kind of flip commentary. Mr. Brown’s previously mentioned work, somewhat tedious in its subject, becomes utterly so in its scaleless, measureless design.

John Currin, on the other hand, is represented by one of his stronger works; a certain discipline of rhythm animates the forms of his indulgently surreal still life from 2001, giving weight to the gestures of a violin and lobster. Notable, too, is Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary” (2006), which, despite some indiscriminate amassing of detail, sturdily locates a figure in a strange scene.

Overall, though, “Old School” most consistently gives an impression of postmodernism’s peculiar love/hate relationship with the masters. While the presentation of these venerable painters—in ornate frames, on stately red walls—suggests reverence, neither the contemporary work nor the installation itself shows much inclination to discriminate between their greater and lesser efforts.

The cure for this ambivalence should be simple enough. Our huge expectations of art derive from the achievements of Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt, not their lesser peers. Getting to know these artists—as individuals rather than makers of quirky, generic artifacts—eliminates any doubt about the possibilities and demands of painting. Or so one might think, though it’s a challenge too seldom engaged by the young painters in “Old School.”

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Yes Bruce Nauman

Of all the avantgarde artists to emerge in the 1960s, Bruce Nauman is the most deserving of the epithet “counter-cultural.”  Be it high or popular culture you are talking about, Mr. Nauman’s emotionally difficult, intellectually forbidding, visually ungenerous art has a masterful ability to alienate.  Sometimes dull, sometimes pretentious, his art is remorseless.

He has not merely been consistently disdainful of traditional, expressive mediums and of conventional expectations. He has also been relentlessly dismissive of anything that smacks of aeshetic experience, whether capturing beauty or intimating the sublime.  As bewildering to this critic as is Mr. Nauman’s status with museum professionals (he is widely considered a genius), even more strange is that so anti-art an artist is also, one has to concede, an artist’s artist.

This point is proved in a sprawling, menacingly dull show of Mr. Nauman in the company of nineteen acolytes and imitators. “Yes Bruce Nauman” is titled after a 1989 painting by Jessica Diamond consisting of these three words, written placard style in black acrylic on a ground of metallic silver paint.  There is added irony in so affirmative an expression for an artist of unremitting nihilism.

The first work to greet the visitor is a car sticker-type slogan in letters cut in holographic vinyl applied to the gallery window.  Mungo Thomson’s “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” takes this high falutin quote from one of Mr. Nauman’s first neon works, from 1967, which presented this phrase in blue letters along a red spiral in emulation of a beer logo, and which was displayed in the window of his former grocery store studio in San Francisco.  The stated aim of the original work was to communicate an esoteric notion to a broad public while not initially looking like art.

If Mr. Thomson shies away from neon because Mr. Nauman has made this non-art medium ubiquitous in the artworld, choosing instead a tacky, downmarket communication product in emulation of the spirit of the 1967 work, then plenty of others in the show pay homage to Mr. Nauman in his trademark neon.  Glenn Ligon, whose most familiar and accomplished work uses text in black and white to explore racial and linguistic issues, acknowledges Mr. Nauman in “Warm Broad Glow,” one of a series of neon pieces that quotes a pregnant, enigmatic phrase from Gertrude Stein: “negro sunshine.”

Peter Coffin’s “Untitled (Line after B. Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths)” (2004) posits a sprawling mangle of neon in an illegible line that—until you discover the title, and with it the conceptualist credentials of the work—looks like a dutiful, uneventful abstract sculpture.  Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Paul writing my name, No. 3)” is also a scrawl, this time wall-bound, based, we are told, on the artist’s young nephew’s mimicry of language.  Stefan Bruggeman’s “No No No No” (2005) presents it eponymous line in neon capitals, the first three words in white, the fourth in red.  This is a quote from the soundtrack of Mr. Nauman’s performance video, “No, No, New Museum (Clown torture series)” (1987) a continuous loop of the artist dressed as a medieval knave, with red leggings and cap, and green bodice, jumping up and down furiously, stamping both feet at once, and screaming—you guessed it—“No, no, no, no,” with the emphasis, as in Mr. Bruggeman’s color coding, on the last negative.  All these “no”s put Ms. Diamond’s “yes” in context.

The neo-neon imitators keep company with two Nauman neon pieces, “Eat/Death” (1972) and “Suite/Substitute” (1968).  In these, the shorter word alternates with the longer, from which it takes its letters, flashing in different colors. Mr. Nauman’s preoccupations—the mystic truth he reveals—will, by now, be clear: life is a bore, art is no different from life, look at me.

Besides neon, Mr. Nauman’s favored processes include filmed performance, entailing banal repetitions of activities centered on the artist’s body, and deliberately uneventful, unexpressive castings in wax of body parts, often his own.  Mr. Nauman was of the same generation as the minimalists, and while his own art is often reductive, he eschews any of the spiritual or aesthetic connotations of minimal art, often actively mocking such pretentions.  This iconoclasm in taken up, in turn, by Charles Ray in “Plank Piece I-II” in which the artist has himself pinioned against a wall by a plank, a performance documented in dingy black and white photos to give it a period look.

“Bouncing Balls” (1969) a 9 minute, 16 mm film (since transferred to DVD) of Mr. Nauman fiddling with his private parts is the inspiration for Francesco Vezzoli’s video of the same title which, true to neo-conceptual form, adds new meaning to a vintage conceptual gesture through slicker production values: the artist commissioned a porn-star, with well toned muscles and shaved legs, to swing his genitals back and forth with balletic grace.

Mr. Nauman’s penchant for buffoonery clearly marked him as a precedent for the Californian artists and sometime collaborators Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, whose works explore abjection and abasement.  Mr. McCarthy is represented by a selection of short black and white films from the early 1970s, including “Face Painting—Floor, White Line” (1972) in which he paints a line with his own face, crawling through the paint; “Ma Bell” (1971) in which he vehemently feather-and-tars each page of the phone book, creating a mucky, visceral accumulation in the process; and various schatalogical and genital titles that revel viscerally in futile, absurdist actions.  Mr. Kelley has a relatively tame though no less forlorn installation of stuffed animals on a blanket.

Futility, negation and self-regard, the Nauman standbys, are the order of the day in the remaining exhibits: Jan Mancuska has a stencil of negative words like “no,” “nowhere,” “nobody,” “never,” register on his self-portrait face via light shining through a stencil; Aaron Young circles black and white reproductions of a Goya firing squad painting in marker pen, identifying one prisoner awaiting execution as Bruce Nauman; the late Jason Rhoades’ “Black Hole, Poontain” (2005) constructs a figure out of detritus and neon; Martin Creed’s “Work No. 312: A lamp going on and off” is and does what its title proclaims.

The evidence suggests that Mr. Nauman has spawned a veritable academy of denigratory pranksters whose antics consist in repeating his own enervating gestures.  It is ironic how close they are to the master not just in spirit, but formally—despite the anti-formal premise of Mr. Nauman’s enterprise.  The counter-culture has actually produced a system of emulation that recalls Byzantium or ancient Egypt in its formal strictness.  Do positive repetetions of negative gestures amount to something affirmative?  No Bruce Nauman.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, August 24, 2006

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Marlene Dumas at Zwirner & Wirth until April 23 (32 E. 69th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-8677)

MAKING MOVIES IN THE BEDROOM

In March 2002 Eric Fischl was let loose in Mies van der Rohe’s Ester’s Haus in Krefeld, Germany. After decorating the 1928 villa, which belongs to the city’s art museum in contemporary style, he had a pair of actors play out domestic scenarios that he photographed. From the thousands of shots that ensued Mr. Fischl culled a book, “The Krefeld Project,” (2002) and used others as his source material for two painting exhibitions, the second of which is at Mary Boone.

This turn to directing, albeit to produce still rather than moving images, conforms to the cinematic impulse of Mr. Fischl’s generation: Artist-moviemakers among his peers include Robert Longo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and of course Julian Schnabel. Mr. Fischl crept behind the camera later than these 1980s artists, amongst whom he was always the most Old Masterly, committed in earnest to traditional practices and technique. But it could be argued that he was also the most cinematic, all along.

Mr. Fischl’s images implied narrative in a linear, temporal way. When a boy steals from the pocketbook of a mother, sprawled in drunken revelry on her bed, a story lies behind and consequences ahead. Such images worked to the extent that they could orchestrate past, present and future. Indeed, it was this storytelling capacity as much as the slippery paintwork and suburban sexuality that confirmed Mr. Fischl’s credentials as a “Bad” artist.

The six new “Bedroom Scenes” from 2004 at Mary Boone imply rather than impose narrative, leaving the viewer to determine a sequence of events — to decide, even, if they represent a single scenario. They might, after all, be scenes from a marriage. (They can claim Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode engravings, 1745, and Degas’s “The Interior,” 1869, as forebears alike.) How happy, or otherwise, are relations between this couple is up for grabs, though the titles are more directed than the images themselves.

The protagonists are a portly though sturdy man of middle age and an althletic, somewhat masculine and slightly younger woman; their domestic situation implies that they are people of substance. We catch them in various states of dress and undress, communication and distance. When dolled up in evening dress they could be on their way in from or out to a social gathering. He is not the kind of painter who ensures that you know which.

Generally, their intercourse seems fraught, connections frayed. One canvas, subtitled “The Earth Rolls Over You,” depicts sex, but we sense a fumbling moment of non-penetration. In another, “After the Tantrum, Unholy News,” with a broken vase and other props strewn around as witness, the woman, kneeling, points up to the seated man in a Renaissance pose, while he nonchalantly sniffs his sock (though he could be dabbing a cut or wiping away a tear — it isn’t clear.)

The figures are realized, in other words, in languages out of sorts within a single picture. She is classically composed, all rhetoric and gesture, while he is arbitrarily caught, the way a camera slices into a moment to give us an ambiguous transitional smudge. It is as if these disparate painterly strategies signify marital incompatibility.

In the early paintings with which he secured his reputation, Mr. Fischl can be said to have “art directed” within the medium itself. He has confirmed in interview what seems to be the case from the paintings themselves, that scenarios worked themselves out upon the canvas. Now that he works from his own stage managed photographs and has separated out the processes of image-formation and facture, the paintings are increasingly, and inevitably, slick, polished, cold machines.

That could just be what he is after. The photographic source is compelling for an artist intent on those terrible twins of modern realism, alienation and instantaneity. But the ambiguities that arise are surface ambiguities that have to do with the dislocation of different modes of representation (celluloid and paint) rather than psychological ones. They have more to do with lack of clarity than double entendre.

Certainly the one has the potential to be a metaphor for the other. The problem for Mr. Fischl is that ambiguity becomes a mere device that can be dropped in at will — like “painterliness” itself, warmed up just where you expect it, for streaks of light on muscley flesh. In the Old Master tradition he wants to tap, ambiguity in all its richness arose from observational crises. For them, awkwardness was a sign of vitality.  For Mr. Fischl, ambiguity on demand is a symptom of enervatednes.  But then, as a true realist chronicler of bourgeois ennui, this might be his point.

***

Like Mr. Fischl, Marlene Dumas knows how to make herself at home in other people’s bedrooms. Born in 1953, this South-African artist who has made her career in Holland, is five years younger than Mr. Fischl.  A selection of her raunchy, winsome work dating back to the mid-1980s at Zwirner & Wirth makes a fine case for her as a contemporary master of louche nostalgia. She depicts bodies with an angst-free urgency at once perfunctory and precise, bolshy and endearing. She recalls moderns like Münch and the less known but quite marvelous Nordic expressionist, Helene Schjerfbeck, as well as more contemporary figures like Beuys (his watercolors) and Ms. Dumas’ junior, the Belgian Luc Tuymans.

Her nonchalant yet gestural style — at once washed out and voluptuous,— actually resembles Mr. Fischl’s work in the late 1980s when, working out of Emil Nolde, he turned to monotype printmaking. The slick, squidgy eroticism of those sequential images, arguably his most likeable if intellectually his least ambitious works, coupled with their “blaxploitation,” and knowingly subversive appropriation of primitivism made him a kind of painterly cousin to Ms. Dumas.

Her work has an altogether more innocent rapport with both racial and representational otherness than his. In images like “Couples” (1994) — a frieze of the same voluptuous redhead embracing her black lover — the private desire and social stance aren’t too difficult to decode. In a funny way, the old-fashionedness of her expressionist style and liberal sentiment alike gives her work a period edge not unakin to her fellow South African, William Kentridge, another master of the wistful collision of the personal and the political.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 10, 2005

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