(An Appropriate Distance)FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP
by Piri Halasz
NO. 75: 1 JUNE 2007..... HAPPY HOLIDAYS..... This issue is being written somewhat earlier than its official date, as I prepare to go into the hospital for a spot of surgery on my back. My webmaster is also taking his first vacation in decades; it won’t be convenient for him to post anything more from Italy than just this notice. Since the color supplement to the DeLuxe edition is prepared & printed up in his New York office, I am foregoing that, too. Writing weeks before publication means that I shall have to omit political commentary: whatever I might say would be outdated by the time the column goes online. My reviews are limited to three exhibitions that I really had to see, plus two others in galleries so close to those must-sees that I could easily get to them. I don’t know yet what will happen with my July 15 issue; stay tuned for further developments....
One show that I felt I had to see was “Picasso, Braque & Early Film in Cubism” at PaceWildenstein (57th Street, until June 23). As I’ve said, I perceive the topography of Montmartre as one visual source for Analytic Cubism, but as I’ve also said, abstract art may synthesize many visual impressions, so I welcomed the idea of another possible source to early cubism. This show was the brain child of Arne Glimcher, director of PaceWildenstein and of a handful of major motion pictures, with a scholarly catalogue by Bernice Rose, former senior curator of drawings at MoMA. Glimcher & Rose argue that early film was a major source for Picasso and Braque between 1907 and 1914; to document this, the gallery offers many magnificent oils, drawings, collages and exquisite etchings, juxtaposing them with film clips from early movies like those that the two painters might have seen. I don’t dispute the concept, but was somewhat dismayed by the execution. Facing the entrance to the gallery is a huge screen playing a garishly colored film strip of a dancer imitating Loie Fuller’s dance with big, very pink veils. This was supposed to correlate with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” but I couldn’t see it. Even if the “Demoiselles” had been there in person (instead of as a small reproduction) the dance of the veils was all curvilinear, very Art Nouveau, whereas the ‘’Demoiselles” is distinctively angular (and in far subtler shades of pink).
The rear wall of the gallery space facing the entry (but shunted off to the right by the Fuller screen and into the background by the receptionist’s desk) displays seven wickedly complex but peerlessly graceful gray-and-gold Picassos from the period of Analytic Cubism, plus two from the same period done in a slightly wider range of colors by Braque. I was particularly moved by the haunting Picasso “Nude” (1910), and the rest of this group was almost equally superb, but I guess I just don’t have the “tunnel vision” that Clement Greenberg was famous for, because I was distracted by a huge, completely open doorway yawning to the right of these paintings, and giving onto a sizeable little theater with benches for perhaps 30 viewers. There a big screen was playing very dramatic old black-and-white film clips, to the loud accompaniment of a fully orchestral (or brass band) sound track of ta-rah-rah-boom-de-ay music that could be heard all over the gallery; it sounded more like the Moulin Rouge than the tinkling pianos which accompanied flickering silent films in the U.S. in the1920s. I had a glimpse of possibilities when the screen momentarily showed a standing woman bending slightly over, and I could compare it with Picasso’s “Woman with a Book” (1909), right by the movie’s entrance and depicting a bent-over standing woman, but that moment was soon gone, while the row of paintings next to the theater looked somehow to me as though they were cringing at all the noise and motion, even if somehow they still retained their dignity. I wondered how many visitors, especially younger ones, were looking at both the movies & the art: the conduct of the visitors I observed, while I was there, was not encouraging.
The next area made it even more difficult to see the paintings without distraction, for a movie screen, playing more clips, fronted directly on the gallery space: its movements were visible out of the corner of one’s eye from most vantage points. The art in the last, smallest area had the best exhibition space, since the only movie reference was a small vitrine in the middle, housing a stationary & silent “lumière camera.” The show also has old phonographs and projectors, which being also silent, stationary and moreover angular offer more direct analogies with the paintings than some of the movies. I’m sure the catalogue also presents its ideas much better, though I haven’t had a chance to do more than browse it, and the installation of the show reminded me of recent Whitney Biennials, with their numerous little curtained-off areas to show the latest videos. The message coming across was that Analytic Cubism was only a way station on the road to Matthew Barney (if not indeed a dead end leading off from that holy road laid out by Marcel Duchamp). I don’t think that this was the message that Glimcher & Rose intended to convey. I think they were after something much more sophisticated, and with reference to the style of cubism in addition to, and even more than, its subject matter (though the underlying concept of cubism as an object seen–necessarily in time–from different angles is as old as the first book on cubism, published in 1912 by Duchamp’s fellow Puteaux Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger).
There is much fantastic art to be seen at Pace, if you can focus on it and ignore its setting, but the dada implications here are clear in Glimcher’s Preface. There he says that his original interest in the relationship between film and painting was encouraged back in the 50s by the notion of “action painting,” with the images of Pollock “dancing over his canvases,” and de Kooning’s “paintings as gymnastics on canvas.” But the idea of “action painting” was an effort to win over people who couldn’t see anything in abstraction at all, and it comes out of Harold Rosenberg’s definition of a canvas as “an arena in which to act,” which is itself an outgrowth of dada, and Duchamp’s emphasis on the act as being more important than the result (this linkage is not original with me; Motherwell and Barbara Rose have already said it). Glimcher and Bernice Rose may also have wanted to show that Picasso and Braque were just regular guys, who dug the movies and all that pop-cultural jazz, but trying to drag them down off their high-art pedestals in such a crude and obvious fashion isn’t doing them any favors. Having myself devoted a lot of time and effort to clarifying some of the manifold sources for abstraction, I’ve learned that if the process is to enhance, not denigrate the paintings, it’s got to be done with more tact and delicacy than are employed here. Instead of white-washing a fence, think Chinese calligraphy.
By contrast, Jacobson Howard was quiet and peaceful when I visited it to see “Darby Bannard: Minimal Paintings 1959-1965" (through June 10, maybe longer). Thus I could contemplate the seven major canvases and three smaller works at my leisure, all fruits of a remarkably young, sensitive & fertile mind (Bannard was in his twenties when they were painted). Two of the smaller pieces reminded me of Noland, since they had circles with short rough scratchy strokes radiating from their perimeters, but in the larger paintings, Bannard struck out on his own. True, the dominant image is still a large circle on a squarish field, but so simply drawn and flatly colored that it becomes a universal icon, common to a host of painters (ranging from Barnett Newman in his youth to Olitski in his old age). Nor are all the paintings of circles. “Yellow Rose #4" has a quadrant of a warm clay-color in its lower right-hand corner, embellished with arcs of grayish yellow and set upon a yellow field, the color of the flower. “Blue Parlor (also Ivory Parlor)” has a pale sky blue field with a subtly warmer blue horizontal rectangle in the middle, the modulation at once hard to perceive yet delicious. Hanging next to it is ”The Marriage #3," with a slate blue circle on a pale, pale greenish yellow field. I was reminded of the chartreuse & sky blue color combination that I’ve seen in a number of works of art. I love that combination because it reminds me of the half-grown leaves one sees in springtime against the blue of the sky, but with “The Marriage #3,” the colors are so refined that only by looking closely can you figure out what they are.
I don’t have space to describe all the paintings in the show, but the larger ones are of an equally high quality, except perhaps for “Pine #1,” where the forest green of the circle is a bit heavy and familiar. All these paintings are called “minimal.” Their simplicity justifies the term, but only if it’s understood that this is modernist minimalism, not postmodernist minimalism of the in-your-face variety of Robert Morris and even Frank Stella of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Bannard’s paintings differ completely in feeling: firm but gentle and not shrill, elegant, elevating, not making their claims to attention through the giving of offense. The gallery was mobbed at the opening; on my visit, I ran into a younger abstract painter, Gary Tenenbaum, whose work I’ve reviewed in the past, and who’ll be having another show at Repetti in Long Island City from June 2 to July 9. Tenenbaum was reminded of Bonnard by the contrasting blues in “Blue Parlor,” and called Bannard “a painter’s painter.” He commented that Bannard had “a palette that only a real colorist could come up with–not canned,” and added that the paintings were “intimate. They draw you in.” I’m not too happy with the phrase, “a painter’s painter,” though it was obviously intended as a compliment and Bannard himself might like it. To me it implies that the work has no wider appeal than to fellow practitioners, whereas I can see it giving pleasure to people whose frame of reference is broader, but who would still prize its serenity as a call to meditation, a way of helping one to calm the bustle of this workaday world, an aid to or perhaps even a substitute for the repetition of “Om.”
Not waiting for Arne Glimcher to make them into regular guys, Lauren Olitski and Jim Walsh did it themselves in the catalogue for their show at Sideshow (it had not only birth dates, birthplaces and favorite paintings at the Met, but also opinions on best pizza, “your Ice Station Zebra” and “most memorable visit to Canada”). Still, fun’s fun and art is joy of a different order: this could be seen from the show itself. It had 9 paintings by Olitski and 17 by Walsh (since Walsh’s paintings are mostly smaller and Olitski’s, mostly larger, the difference in square footage was not that great). The two painters made for illuminating contrast, as Walsh prefers rich, mellow colors, while Olitski’s palette is brighter and sprightlier. Her paintings look as though she’d made them with quick, decisive motions, especially in the whiplash pours of paint and spatters of glitter that lie atop mostly paler, stained and/or swabbed fields of color. Walsh appears to work with more measured, judicious motions. His thick sculptural curves of acrylic combined with molding paste rise abruptly from a totally flat field, pour down it or swoop across it with often contrasting but nevertheless almost always harmonious combinations of hues. In terms of the four medieval elements, he is earth while she is air; both are also fire and water. If you prefer musical metaphors, he might be a viola or clarinet, deeper-toned but intense, while she is more like a flute or piccolo, effervescently light. In any event, If you wanted movement and noise, however, you didn’t have to go to an old time movie to find them: they – or rather, their visual equivalents – were apparent here.
Since both artists are still relatively young, neither yet have their techniques down pat. This affords the excitement of discovery but also heightens the percentage of bloopers, particularly since there were too many paintings in this show (particularly by Walsh), and the effect (especially in the back room of the gallery) was diminished by repetition. Walsh sometimes uses too many colors in a single picture, winding up with a cluttered effect (as in ”Talking Blue”); Olitski sometimes leaves surfaces too bare (as in “Break an Egg”). Still, there were at least nine excellent individual paintings. Among the standout Olitskis I’d include “Party Dress,” “Be With Me,” and especially (oh especially) “Bang” and “Ooh, Twenty-Two,” the last-named being the largest painting in the show, a towering achievement in more ways than one. Among the finest Walshes, I’d list “Jimmie James and the Blue Flames,” “Thrum,” “Further,” “Scurve,” and the extraordinary “Iron and Steel.” The last-named was a dark grey picture covered with a mesh of little semi-transparent grey balls, suggesting plated armor. A reddish stain across the bottom and two framing flame-like shapes at the top (one off-white, one another shade of grey) added to the overall somber but powerful effect. Rich Timperio, proprietor of Sideshow, drove into Manhattan to transport me & my aching back to and from this show; for this, I am particularly grateful, because it was one that I considered it most important to show and see (together with that of Paula DeLuccia in another two-person Sideshow exhibition that I couldn’t get to, and the work by younger painters in last autumn’s “Greenberg-Syracuse- 5 Artists”). I mean, we’ve seen a good deal of other admirable art in New York this season, but by artists we already know are top-quality. With younger artists, one never knows, so the satisfaction in seeing truly talented art is doubled.
BRIEFLY NOTED: Across 57th Street from Pace is Katharina Rich Perlow, where I saw “John Ferren: Journey of an American Modernist” (through June 6). This lively mini-retrospective takes the artist from an early Rodinesque sculpture of the 1920s on through the daring abstracts of the 30s to the blazing geometric paintings of the 1960s.....Near Sideshow is Holland Tunnel, where Paulien Lethen, a native of the Netherlands, staged “Art Club Jazz,” a group show inspired by the music of her sister, Heleen Schuttevaer. Many artworks here bore jazz names, like “Night and Day,” by Jan Mulder. Mulder, a fellow Netherlander, has just joined the links page of this column, so you can see what his bold, gestural abstractions look like for yourselves. At Holland Tunnel, I also liked “Take Five” by Fran Kornfeld, appealing small flower-like paper-pulp pieces; “Around Midnight,” a neat, small dark vertical abstract by Sideshow’s Timperio; “Cool Blues,” a small, light semi-cubist picture by Tony Martin, and “Along Came Betty,” a small pink, white and black abstract sculpture by Bix Lye.....Interesting announcements: 1) from Kathleen Staples, whose “like a festival” was at Edge Zones Contemporary in Miami; 2) for “Occulted,” a film based on British surveillance cameras by William Noland & screened at the 45th Annual An Arbor Film Festival; and 3) “David Evison: Sculpture and Relief,” a glorious little catalogue for this spring’s shows in China and the UK ...(© Copyright 2007 by Piri Halasz)