(An Appropriate Distance)
FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP
by Piri Halasz

 

 

NO. 83: 1 MARCH & 15 APRIL 2009... SPRING FEVER..... Sorry about that, folks, but the economy continues to look rotten. The unemployment rate in February surged to 8.1 percent, its highest level in a quarter of a century. Economists (according to Peter S. Goodman and Jack Healy, in the March 7 New York Times) predicted that many of these jobs would not be returning, and Americans would have to get used to living with a new normal. Although the stock market (cross your fingers) appears to be up from its lows for the year, the life savings of millions of Americans invested in 501 (k)s are still dozens of percentage points off their peaks. As David Leonhardt pointed out in the Times on March 25, banks now have money to lend, but there’s a shortage of borrowers: too many people and businesses are postponing plans for buying or building and instead saving whatever they take in – which does the economy no good. The $787 billion emergency spending plan enacted by the government in February isn’t expected to materially affect the situation until the end of 2009 or later, and the trillions being pumped into the money supply by the Federal Reserve may help banks redeem their toxic assets, but by lowering interest rates still further make life still more difficult for the millions of people (especially the elderly) who depend upon interest income for living expenses. True, there have recently been a few minor up ticks in government statistics (sales of previously owned homes & factory orders for durable goods), but one or two swallows, as the saying has it, don’t make a spring. Practically nobody (except maybe President Obama) is yet prepared to predict a sustained recovery, at any rate for a long time.

One result is that unsophisticated people who in the past paid little attention to finance, beyond their own home mortgages, car loans and credit cards, are now venting their anger on wrongdoers who can easily be isolated and targeted: Bernie Madoff and AIG. This, as Paul Krugman regularly points out on the Op-Ed page of the Times, doesn’t begin to address the widespread misconduct in banking and the securities markets that led us to this pass, and, though there is talk of legislation to police these miscreants, I will believe it when I see it. Beside the power of the lobbies lined up to emasculate any such proposals, the U.S. public is still far more conservative than it was in the 1930s, the last time such legislation was enacted, and both Obama & the Congress are well aware of this. This means that proposals to police the powerful and/or tax the rich don’t get much beyond occasional outbursts of rhetoric.

Added to this, the situation overseas is unsatisfactory. It’s certainly true that Iraq is much more peaceful than it was – so peaceful that even a few tourists have recently begun to visit it – but bombings and military skirmishes are still regularly reported, and the outlook for quelling the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan is even darker. Two front-page articles in the Times, on March 27, told how the two sides in this conflict are readying new strategies. Peter Baker and Thom Shanker reported that Obama was preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan and try to prod the governments of both it and Pakistan into taking more responsibility for quelling the insurgency, while Carlotta Gall (with the aid of on-the-spot information from Ismail Khan, Pir Zubair Shah and Tiamoor Shah) told how Taliban leaders in Pakistan and in Afghanistan are closing ranks to prepare a new offensive. Meanwhile, as Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt reported in the Times on March 25, elements in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency continue to offer money, supplies and guidance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to ensure that once the Americans leave, the new Afghanistan government will favor Pakistan, and not Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India.

VALENTIN TATRANSKY

First, the bad news. It saddens me to report the death of Valentin Tatransky on February 23, of a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage, at his home in Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo. He was 56. Tatransky was for me – as for many others – more than just an insightful art critic, more than just an entertaining party animal, more even than a sometime painter himself: he was a friend. Every critic needs a fellow critic for support, so I sent him a copy of every issue of this column (with cover letter telling him everything too private to publish in the column). Almost invariably, I got a warm, supportive letter back, even when he was feeling terrible (as alas, all too frequently happened in his later years). Since he lived so far from New York City, I didn’t see how he could be as au courant as he was, but time and again, he’d comment on younger and lesser-known artists I dealt with in the color supplements to my DeLuxe print edition. He’d known them all, and as a member of their generation, was closer to most than I could ever be. All this is only hinted at in the HW Wilson database that documents his publications in periodicals. It lists 70 reviews and articles starting in April 1978 and continuing on through October1985. This seems to be the last issue before Alvin Demick, publisher of Arts, died, and his successors lost interest in Clement Greenberg or anybody associated with him (Tatransky’s other principal outlet, Art International, had ceased publication under the leadership of James Fitzsimmons, another open-minded editor, the year before). But Tatransky didn’t write exclusively about Greenbergian artists. His interests ranged from Malcolm Morley and Terence La Noue to Richard Hamilton and even further afield. He wrote about the greats of the elder generation, from Noland and Olitski to Poons and Frankenthaler, but among readers of this column, will be especially remembered for writing on his contemporaries and near contemporaries: James Walsh, Paula DeLuccia, Francine Tint, Susan Roth, Roy Lerner, Michael Steiner, Jill Nathanson and others.

Tatransky’s mother died nearly two years ago; his father, at 87, is in assisted living. The critic’s estate has been left to three first cousins on his mother’s side: Natalie Korytnyk, Christine Korytnyk Dulaney, and Peter Korytnyk. They are caring for his possessions, artwork, etc., and Natalie has graciously given me permission to post her e-mail address, should anybody have further questions. It is nxkorytnyk@yahoo.com. She supplied me with Tatransky’s CV, which fills many lacunae in my knowledge of him. He took his BA from the Pratt Institute in 1975 (with a specialty in sculpture), and his MA from Hunter College in 1980 (with a specialty in contemporary art). Under “publications” are listed ten books and exhibition catalogues, with monographic writing on Irene Neal and Cora Kelley and contributions to anthologies edited by Peter Frank and Richard Milazzo. “Teaching experience” includes surveys in the 80s at Hunter and Staten Island College, plus lecturing in English during 1998-99 at a university in Slovakia, but it is under the category of “guest lecturer” that Tatransky really shines, for here are listed not only lectures but also participation in workshops from Triangle and Emma Lake to Hardingham and Allentown. This is where he came to a more intimate understanding of the art and artists he loved best, and shows how much more he accomplished in his relatively brief life than many other men who lived longer.

SALANDER INDICTED

The other piece of art-world news that I take no pleasure in sharing was reported in the NYTimes on March 27 by James Barron under the headline “Art Dealer Accused of Cheating Clients and Artists. “ If you want grimy details, as retailed to a doubtless salivating audience at a press conference by Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, access the NYTimes website. I have no heart to go into it at length here, nor do I have any inside dope to add to Barron’s story. I’ll merely report that Lawrence B. Salander, whose Salander-O’Reilly gallery played host to so many high-quality exhibitions of both historical and modern art before closing in the fall of 2007, was arrested upon charges that he stole $88 million from investors, collectors and artists through transactions regarding paintings and sculpture consigned to the gallery. The 100-count indictment accuses Salander of grand larceny, falsifying business records, scheming to defraud investors, forging documents and perjury. Salander’s lawyer, Charles A. Ross, said that he’d plead not guilty to all charges. At the arraignment bail was set at $1 million, with added conditions that Salander hand over his passport and restrict his travel to within New York State. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison on each of 13 counts of first-degree grand larceny, and up to 15 years on each of 10 counts of second-degree grand larceny, along with more time for other charges. A sad situation.

FROM GRIM REALITY TO MYTHOLOGY

Pomonia (my name for postmodernist Artland) thrives on myths. One is that it stands for revolution and newness. The fact of the matter, of course, is that almost all of the objets d’art you’ll find enshrined in Chelsea galleries trace their ideology back to the early twentieth century, when St. Marcel first set a bicycle wheel upon a stool, in a counter-revolutionary gesture against the truly radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism. Most Chelsea sights today are closer even in spirit & form to the japes of neo-dada in the ‘50s and especially pop art in the ‘60s, when environments and happenings and other fun and games enchanted the Great American Public. Having never understood or appreciated the true radicality of abstract expressionism; this public was delighted to find artists whose anger with it exceeded even their own, and who were therefore undertaking another counter-revolutionary wave.

To maintain the myth of revolution, Pomonia must demonstrate that every few years, something genuinely “new” has come along. In the ‘60s, it did so with op and kinetic art, two vogues that mostly led to quantities of art today stored in museum basements. In the ‘70s, “pattern-and-decoration,” and in the ‘80s, Neo-Geo suffered much the same fate. More recently, the “new” seems to be art of different nationalities. A year or so ago, when I visited the Armory Show at its piers on the Hudson River, every other booth seemed to have art by a contemporary Chinese artist, and the NYTimes was running stories on the high auction prices that such art was bringing. This year it is apparently Iranians benefitting from the same mindset. The art of one, Kamrooz Aram, this month has simultaneously landed on the cover of Art in America & in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Another, Siah Armajani, rates a show at Max Protech, one of those “hot” galleries in Chelsea, while a third, Ali Banisadr, landed a favorable review in the Friday Times last fall – no mean accomplishment when you note that the Times publishes maybe 6 reviews of gallery shows every Friday, and there are like 600 galleries in Chelsea alone. Banisadr is not bad. I wrote him up myself, but he isn’t that radical, either. All that was really “new” about him was the resemblance of his paintings to Persian miniatures and rugs, but he was the best of the handful of mostly miserable shows that I’d seen in Chelsea that day, and I didn’t want to appear too much like the Grinch who stole Christmas.

In addition to rating one of those needle-in-a-haystack reviews in the Times, Banisadr was included in a group show of new Persian art that just closed at the Queens Museum. Moreover, there was a story in the Times last November about the high auction prices that contemporary Iranian art is bringing. Still, only certain ethnicities seem to be candidates for canonization as this year’s novelty. It helps if they come from poorer and/or more exotic countries, preferably those whose natives have suffered persecution or discrimination. Best of all is if their governments are currently in the news on the front pages of newspapers (or websites) and at odds with our government in Washington. This last enables Pomonians to feel that they are in opposition to “The Establishment,” and of course that’s part of Pomonian myth–that it isn’t, indeed can’t possibly be, The Establishment itself (even though it is ). Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m all for ending discrimination and persecution of minorities in politics and society, but when esthetics enters the picture, I think of the story told me by my Hungarian father. It takes place back in the 1930s, when Hungarians were still a minority viewed with suspicion & even derision by middle America. More sophisticated people in Manhattan and Hollywood merely considered them glamorous (if slightly crazy). A number of Hungarians worked in show business, but my father’s story concerns a notice on a bulletin board in a Hollywood movie studio. “Writers wanted,” it said. “Talent necessary. Being Hungarian is not enough.”

JACK BUSH REDUX

Though Canadians are certainly a minority in Manhattan, I suspect they will never rate as Pomonia’s new art form. As matters currently stand, they are too civilized, similar to white-bread Americans and prosperous to qualify as persecuted or downtrodden (even to the extent that they may be). Nor does the Canadian government in Ottawa ever seem to advertise its differences with Washington (even when those differences exist). Canada is years ahead of the U.S. on issues like the environment and state-sponsored universal health care, so the price they may have to pay for this is the absence of stories in the Times on how Canadian art is cleaning up at auction. Undeterred, the New York Studio School is playing host to “Jack Bush: Works on Paper,” a modest but sparkling exhibition of one largish watercolor and 21 medium-sized gouaches by Canada’s most outstanding painter (through April 25). The show was curated by Karen Wilkin, who also authored the catalogue, and much of what you’ll read below is the write-up I did of the show for artcritical.com, which very kindly allows me to reprint what I’ve already written for them (and gotten paid for, too!). Those familiar with Bush’s large oils and acrylics on canvas, exhibited in New York from the ‘60s to the ‘80s at the Elkon and Emmerich galleries, may find this exhibition only an imperfect indication of what he was capable of achieving. Still, we haven’t had a Bush exhibition of any kind in the Big Apple since 1997 (and even the last, at DC Moore, was only of early work), so for the present generation of gallery-goers, this show should serve as a welcome introduction.

A lifelong resident of Toronto, Bush (1909-1977) educated himself at traditional art schools there in the ‘20s and ‘30s, supporting himself and his family as a commercial artist while exhibiting representational paintings until the late ‘40s. In the ‘50s, he evolved into abstraction, initially taking his cues from the heavily-brushed, “gestural” style favored by de Kooning and so popular in New York during that decade. Then, in 1957, Greenberg visited Toronto, at the invitation of the Painters Eleven, a local artists’ group to which Bush belonged. Even then, Greenberg was controversial: two of the eleven refused to let him in their studios, but Bush was among the nine who did. Greenberg was unimpressed with Bush’s gestural work, but very impressed with some watercolors that the artist had made and laid aside – so impressed, in fact, that he suggested Bush apply this thinner watercolor technique to his larger work on canvas. Bush took this advice as a point of departure, and revolutionized his style. In a sense, then, the present exhibition thus becomes a primer on the foundation of Bush’s later accomplishments, and shows what Greenberg admired about this artist first.

The exhibition, hung chronologically, displays work from the ‘60s in the first, entry gallery, and from the early ‘70s in the second, back gallery. This is the right way to show them, for viewers meeting Bush for the first time will probably find the ‘60s work most accessible, composed as it is of bright, cheerful colors and simple, almost bouncy figures mostly on grounds of white – in other words, not unlike much other color-field painting of the ‘60s, or all that different from what Frankenthaler, Noland, Dzubas and even painters like Jack Youngerman or Gene Davis were doing. In that decade, color-field painting enjoyed a sizeable (if still very much a minority) following. It was well enough known so that art-world people assimilated it, and even today can fall back upon that experience to respond to what they see here. Moreover, this gallery includes plenty of dynamic, satisfying images, especially the brilliant trio of “sash” paintings directly across from the entrance, “Nice Pink,” (1965), “Bitter Pink,” (1965) and “Untitled” (1966). According to Wilkin, this image of a stack of colored blocks was inspired, during a visit to New York, by a Madison Avenue shop window display of a woman’s shirt and voluminous skirt, cinched with a wide belt. As this is a true abstraction, however, and results count for more than intentions, the image also suggests a necktie, tree, skyscraper, and numerous other associations – as well as packing a punch not to be explained by any associations at all. Even more of a punch is packed by “Red Sash with Black” (1962). This Ur-sash picture was done while Bush was still in New York, had just seen the shop window, and was formulating his winning motif for the first time. It has the thrill of discovery.

The second gallery may challenge the taste of viewers new to Bush, for by the ‘70s, he’d found his mature style, moving into a realm where he had no artistic kin. In other words, these images are a lot less familiar, and familiarity is – in art as in human relations – sometimes necessary to breed content (accent on the second syllable). Instead of a white field, all but one of the gouaches in this gallery present their figures on a colored ground, mostly a matte but sometimes a mottled gray (in one case, a softer brown). The figures themselves aren’t simple geometric ones, but with subtle touches that I can’t recall having seen elsewhere – smooth, opaque streaks or bars of color with one end blunt and the other ragged, as though a giant brush had swept them with a single stroke. Large loops or squiggles, also creating the illusion that a giant brush has been at work. The wall of the gallery directly across from the entry offers the most dramatic display of this idiom, with three beautifully simple yet elegant images on gray grounds: “Forsythia” (1971) on the left, “Falling Blossoms” (1971) on the right, and in the center, the elemental gray-and-white “Apple Blossom Burst” (1971), the most perfect picture in the show. Still, because of those tough gray fields, and because one first views the pictures from a greater distance, even these three wonderful images may perhaps appear a little smaller and more distant than the work in the first gallery – more remote physically and therefore perhaps figuratively as well.

What Bush achieved in his mature work is a seriousness, even a gravitas that led to an almost Olympian detachment. Even looking at reproductions of the large acrylics from this period in “Jack Bush,” the excellent collection of essays edited by Wilkin and published in this country by Hudson Hills Press, one can thrill to the dignity and magnificence of this late work. But, because of when Bush achieved it, he has never – in the U.S., anyway – received the recognition he deserves. In the ‘70s, it became more and more fashionable to dump on Greenberg than to try and see why he admired what he did, more and more acceptable to go with the postmodernist flow of conceptual and neo-expressionist work, and ignore or even attack modernism. Olitski and Dzubas, both of whom similarly achieved their most independent styles in the ‘70s, suffered from same neglect that Bush did. All three painters continued to enjoy the support of a circle of dealers, critics, collectors, fellow artists and other admirers, but it wasn’t nearly as large a circle as Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler and Olitski had enjoyed in the ‘60s. Moreover, instead of growing, it continued to dwindle – to such an extent that to speak well of Greenberg today is almost to label oneself a pariah in Artland. This has become such a fact of life that some Greenbergians behave as though they belong to a secret society, and won’t admit they are members to anybody except other members.

It is, perhaps, worth noting that in Wilkin’s otherwise excellent catalogue for the works on paper show, she mentions Greenberg only once, in connection with his 1964 exhibition of “Post-Painterly Abstraction” – and, besides saying that it included Bush, Louis, Noland and Olitski, she adds the names of Frank Stella and Sam Francis, painters in whom Greenberg had only a minimal interest, thereby suggesting that perhaps he had only a minimal interest in Bush as well. This isn’t so, but it is true that Bush and Dzubas suffered from the dwindling of support for modernist painting more than did Olitski, since Greenberg had little to say about either of them in public, while again and again insisting that Olitski was “our best painter,” and encouraging legions of younger artists to model themselves on him. It is to be hoped that the New York Studio School show of Bush, limited though it is, will help to bring him to a new prominence, both within Greenbergian circles and among the wider public of Manhattan.

POONS IN CHELSEA

Ever since his first solo exhibition at Manhattan’s Green Gallery in 1963, Larry Poons has been in the public eye. Initially, fame came from his “coin-dot” paintings: their brightly-colored, hard-edged little circles were associated with op, but he wasn’t satisfied with such celebrity. Gradually, he’d evolved by the 70s into setting his canvases upright and throwing many different shades of paint onto them, so that the paint coursed down the canvas in a many-splendored rain of color. These remarkable exercises in pour, spill and splat exuded a raw nervous energy that only expanded as the 70s gave way to the 80s, and Poons began to thicken up his surfaces with accretions of gel and foam rubber that quite literally lent an added dimension to his paintings. Exhibitions of work from this whole period, most recently last year at Jacobson Howard, have demonstrated the staying power of these paintings. Decades after their creation, they still exude extraordinary freshness and explosive vigor, while the brilliance and subtlety of the artist’s palette during these years, with its silvery grays and creams and whites and pinks and other pale colors, combine to create a tapestry of hues. Nor am I alone in this admiration. Robert C. Morgan, in the Brooklyn Rail, was among those hailing this exhibition, and Roberta Smith, in her March ‘08 review of “Color as Field,” the group show organized by Karen Wilkin in Washington, suggested that it was time for someone, Ms. Wilkin perhaps, to organize a Poons retrospective.

Poons’s latest show, at Danese, was of new paintings. I understand that artists always feel that the most recent work they’ve done is their best, and I would like to be able to say that this was Poons’s best show – but I can’t. On the other hand, it was also a long way from his worst. That dubious honor seemingly belongs to his 2001 exhibition at Salander-O’Reilly, which was so bad that Ken Johnson, in the NY Times, elected to praise it as “more personal than polemical” – this being post-modernist code for saying that Poons was no longer creating paintings that Greenberg might have liked. Perhaps it is symptomatic that Johnson didn’t review this latest show, which, despite its flaws, had good things to recommend it. Poons is a sensitive colorist, and his palette in this show is deeper and richer than anything in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Although he now limits his paint application to detailed brushwork instead of the carefree pour, spill, splat of old, it still results in paintings with that middle range of facture that to me is more meaningful than either the mechanical of Ellsworth Kelly or the messy-gestural of de Kooning’s epigones – careful but lively little dabs and whorls that merge squiggly with curvilinear. Of the eight paintings in Danese show, weakest were “Babe” (2007), where the colors were too high & bright; “Duetto” (2007), where the paint was too heavy, and the composition busy-busy; “20-20 and Blue” (2008), where the colors were better in hue but still heavy and uneven, with an acid green in the upper right-hand side of the canvas, and muddy grays at the left; and “Neptuno” (2008), with rope-like forms trying in vain to tie the composition together, and a bright orange area in the upper right-hand corner attempting nervously to create interest, but not balancing with the blues and greens in the lower left-hand area (this blue-green area was the best part of the picture, and by itself quite lovely). Fourth best was “Molly Handsome” (2008), which was not at all bad, with paint less heavily applied and consistency maintained, though the left and center left parts of the painting worked better than the right. Third best, facing the elevator, was “Monkey Liner” (2008), with consistency again maintained, restful landscape colors, and paint application neither too heavy nor too light. Two paintings tied for the best in show. One was “F and F” (2008), facing the reception desk, with colors warm not hot (lime, alizarin, icy blues and purples), evenness of touch, and interest and quality maintained throughout. The other was “Calling You” (2009), in the adjoining alcove, with a deep rich blue base and spines and tendrils in contrasting hues – pink, orange, lime and gold. Even though there was a weaker area about 3/5 of the way to the left, the painting was still lively, in some ways suggesting a dance. The deeper colors were restful and fresher, and the whole painting more satisfying.

“BETTER HISTORY” (IN A WAREHOUSE)?

Not all of the many critics who praise Poons do so out of the goodness of their hearts. A year or so ago, when he was exhibiting in London, a British critic raved about his work, but suggested that he was the last of his line, a lonely cowboy riding off into the sunset. This critic had an agenda: in truth, he was coming not to praise modernism, but to bury it, for the fact is that there are younger modernist painters carrying on, even if few of them get exhibited in decent Manhattan gallery surroundings. Case in point: Paula DeLuccia, who has three small, untitled paintings currently on view in a group show of about 50 artists called “Better History,” at 169 Tenth Avenue (northwest corner of 20th Street & Tenth Avenue, through April 11). This “gallery” is only a huge, dark, cavernous warehouse open to the street, a grungy setting. If there’s anything else above the level of Amateur Night in this show, I missed it, noting only a plethora on the walls of latter-day pop and/or imitation Kirchner, as well as free-standing mixed-media artworks best described as 6th generation Kienholz. I hate to sound negative again, but two of these three DeLuccias are in my opinion not the artist’s best work. Though they are all rich in a multitude of colors and endowed with that same blessed middle ground of paint application, they are a little too disorganized for my taste. The one in the center is the most chaotic, and the one on the left is better, but the only one I can praise unqualifiedly is the one on the right, where white blobs on a mostly green field hold the composition together. Sad to say, these three paintings – all of them still better than anything else in the show – are way, way at the back of the gallery, and the lighting on them is awful.

What kind of abstract painting makes the grade in Chelsea these days? Well, I also took in three exhibitions at regular galleries: “Angelina Nasso: Miwis” at Winston Wächter (through April 11), “Melissa Meyer: New Works” at Lennon, Weinberg, and “Josh Smith: Currents” at Luhring Augustine. Both Nasso and Meyer showed very nice, but perhaps somewhat lightweight pictures, strongly suggestive of watercolors, though actually both exhibitions were of oils. Meyer’s oils on canvas are of a loose grid of wiggly squares, while Nasso’s oils on paper suggest waterfalls, geysers or fountains, spewing up and then cascading down – reminiscent, at some very distant remove, of Poons’s pourings of the ‘70s, but also different. Nasso’s palette is cooler & more limited, with an emphasis on blues, aquas and whites, while Meyer favors warmer colors, with yellows and rusts more apt to be in there somewhere, complemented by black, green, dark blue, purple or red. With Meyer, I liked best two of the smallest paintings, “Black Crow Blues” and “Not Dark Yet” (both 22 x 22). With Nasso, I felt the works that emphasized blues and whites were most effective, including “Frozen Waterfall” and “Geyser.” It’s worth noting that these pretty pictures were being exhibited in galleries on West 25th Street, while Josh Smith was holding forth on 24th, and that 24th Street is Chelsea’s Golden Mile, getting on Saturdays, from what I’ve observed, considerably more foot traffic than 25th. Smith, I therefore deduce, is producing abstraction more in tune with Chelsea today – apparently because it’s cluttered, garish, messy and gestural – evidently designed to be ugly instead of pretty. I liked one entry in the guest book: “The show’s beautiful!” (Signed) “Mom.”

AT THE ARMORY SHOW

Messy-gestural abstraction was prominent at this year’s Armory Show as well, both on Pier 94, officially devoted to “contemporary” art, and Pier 92, officially devoted to “modern.” In fact, I haven’t seen so many paintings by Joan Mitchell since her retrospective at the Whitney a few years ago: many, many different galleries were offering them. The other hot property, apparently, is Tom Wesselman, represented hither and yon, mostly with small, late pictures of the trademark hard, bright lipstick mouth and/or baby-bottle-nipple-shaped, hard erect nipples. The charm of Wesselman is easier to figure: after all, he’s vintage ‘60s pop, as full of drollery as ever, and maybe the one souvenir of that madcap era that hasn’t been priced to the stratosphere. As for Mitchell, I’m still puzzling over her mystique, but think it may have to do with the same phenomenon that I first observed in the heyday of neo-expressionism, back in 1983. At that time, Pomonia’s culture heroes were Eric Fischl, David Salle, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Enzo Cucchi & Francesco Clemente, all of whom – to one degree or another – engaged in similarly flashy brushwork, as did a host of lesser lights, John Walker among them. These painters, it was said in Greenbergian circles, had a little something, not much but a little something. After all, they were painters & not assemblagistes. But their paint application was borrowed from de Kooning of the ‘50s, and all his imitators – so slick and facile, so deliciously soft & gooey that one could get a feeling of sinking, sinking restfully down into it. That made them familiar and oh so easy, so enchantingly easy to relate to – even (or rather because) they also used a lot of little tricks & gimmicks borrowed from neo-dada of the ‘50s and pop art of the ‘60s – the divided canvases of Johns, the assemblage of Rauschenberg, the comic-strip imagery of Lichtenstein and so forth. Mitchell, of course, precedes neo-dada, but that’s not to say her popularity isn’t enhanced in the eyes of dealers by the prevalence of sloppy, messy gestural brushwork among contemporary painters today. Mitchell has the same easy brushwork of neo-expressionism, nor was she alone in this quality at the Armory Show. At Cheim & Read (in the “contemporary”) section, we had Louise Fishman, Pat Steir and Milton Resnick in addition to Mitchell (by comparison with Steir & Fishman, Resnick looked like Michelangelo). At Robert Miller (in the “modern” section), we had a couple of large, messy later Lee Krasners, as well as a messy Cecily Brown (semi-abstract, with a child with its pants down lapping pussy in the center of the composition).

What, you may ask, was Cecily Brown doing in the “modern” section? If ever there was a “contemporary” (i.e. Pomonian) sensibility, she’s it, and the painting itself was typical of those I saw in her show at Gagosian last fall. With Resnick, one might argue the reverse: he was a modernist, not a postmodernist (however much one might like or dislike his style). The distinction between “modern” and “contemporary” puzzled Holland Cotter of the NY Times no end, when he came to review the show. Most people might assume that the two terms refer to time frames, since “postmodernist” by its very nature argues that “modernism” belongs in the past, but Cotter revealed what “contemporary” means to him when he suggested that a 1920s dadaist watercolor by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had all the qualities one associated with contemporary art, so what was she doing in the “modern” section? In other words, to Cotter – and who knows how many others – “contemporary” is more nearly a synonym for postmodernist or dada-descended, while “modern” refers to an outlook on art that so far has stubbornly refused to die. Cotter couldn’t find a too many good things to say about the modern art in the Armory Show, but evidently (to judge from the pieces he discussed in his review) wandered through both piers looking high and low for postmodernist art. Evidently, he didn’t find as much of it as he wanted to find.

In fact, his review was so negative that when I read it, prior to seeing the show myself, I said to myself, Jesus, if Cotter thinks it’s that bad, it must be wretched. Then I got there and realized that Cotter is another one of those critics whose tastes (like those of Ken Johnson) are often diametrically opposed to mine. With all critics, I’ve found over the years (and whether we’re talking art, books, movies or theater), you have to figure out how the critic’s taste relates to yours. Pauline Kael used to review movies for The New Yorker back in the ‘60s; I learned that if she recommended a movie, I probably wasn’t interested in seeing it, whereas when she panned it, I might very well enjoy it. Same story with Holland Cotter. I’m not saying that I liked the Armory Show a whole lot, but what he seems to have disliked about it was what I liked: somehow there were more things hanging on the walls of the booths – paintings, drawings, photographs – and fewer “interesting” objects sitting on the floor & other pomo novelties than I remember from the last Armory Show. That to me is a plus.

I found a sprinkling of works I enjoyed looking at. On Pier 94, the “contemporary” area, I saw two quite appealing figurative paintings in interesting grayed-out colors of a young girl in old-fashioned clothes, by Jenny Scobel in the Zeno X Gallery from Antwerp. I was amused by the large photograph by Shilpa Gupta showing a long row of teenaged boys lined up ankle-deep in the surf (on a beach), seen in profile, each with his hands over the ears of boy in front, from Continua in San Gimignano. On Pier 92, the “modern” area, Ameringer Yohe had three of those delectable small studies by Dzubas, and a smallish Pollock from 1946, as well as a couple of abstracts by new younger painters that appear to have been right in style with the rest of the show, but didn’t do it for me. There was a splendid Poons from the 70s – so aristocratic & dignified – hanging outside the booth of David Klein from Birmingham MI (even though the inside of that booth was messy-gestural second-generation ab-ex by Norman Bluhm, Michael Goldberg and (sigh!) Joan Mitchell). Armand Bartos, a dealer who goes back to the ‘60s, but only opened his current gallery at 25 East 73^rd Street last May, had a stunning display outside his booth of four small pictures by Frankenthaler (1970), Krasner (1969), Noland (1969) and Olitski (1968). The rest of his exhibit (inside the booth) included Grade A small works by Gottlieb, Motherwell, Alice Neel, plus more predictable contributions from Warhol, Stella, Christo, Arman, Robert Mangold and Johns. Peter Findlay had a large and good-looking (though a tad lopsided) 1983 Dzubas hanging outside his booth, and a smaller and even better Dzubas inside. Finally, if you persisted all the way to the restaurant, at the far end of the pier, you got to an oasis of clean, pure painting. This was the booth of Gary Snyder, with 1960s school of color-field paintings by Thomas Downing, Tadaaki Kuwayama and Vivian Springford, a sculpture by Paul Feeley, and – the best recent painting on either pier – a golden yellow 2006 untitled abstract by John Griefen.

BONNARD AT THE MET

Although authors too numerous to mention have propounded the myth that Greenberg was only interested in abstract painting, he dealt with France’s premier late Impressionist, Pierre Bonnard, at some length, marveling at his “sensuousness, paint quality, color, and an original approach to composition,” as well as “taste and erudition,” even though he felt that Bonnard (1867-1947) lacked the “final intensity” of Picasso or Matisse. And art-lovers who savor sensuousness, color and so forth will be delighted by “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through April 19). Organized by Dita Amory, this show includes some 80 works executed between 1923 and 1947, though nearly half are works on paper, and the show as a whole therefore somewhat less ambitious than the full-scale Bonnard retrospective organized by the Tate in1998 and appearing in the U.S. at MoMA. This exhibition eschews Bonnard’s early career as a Nabi, his landscapes, the late paintings of female nudes in bathtubs, and all but two of the late self-portraits, dramatizing instead the almost incredibly variegated ways that the artist depicted furniture, clothes, china, baskets, foods, and all the other attributes of gracious living among the bourgeoisie in that other-other land of provincial France between the two world wars. I found almost endlessly inventive compositions, with a masterful range from the ultra-simple small basket of cherries (1923), to the elaborate “Work Table” (1926/37), hanging next to it – a desk with papers and books on it, a rug below and chairs, plus a cat and a dog in the background – the top of this picture distinguished by the odd, flattened-out perspective that the artist so often adopted. All the colors are delectable, of course, and the loose (but not offensively loose) brushwork similar to the softness of Renoir. In truth, it’s a schematic version of Renoir, just as stylized early Christian sarcophagi are schematic versions of rippling classical Greco-Roman sculpture, an idiom narrowed down to a caricature or outline of impressionist still-life elements. Greenberg called this “painting abstractly,” and one can certainly see what he meant with paintings like “The Yellow Shawl” (1915-18 or ca. 1926), where the tabletop, with its yellow-and-white checked tablecloth, is so flattened out that it occupies nearly the entire bottom half of the canvas. Roberta Smith, in the Times, preferred the larger and more elaborate canvases; I by contrast went especially for the smaller, more perfect ones, like “Plate, Orange Jug and Casserole” (1933), with the shiny orange jug so persuasively located at the very top of the canvas. This was all highly pleasurable painting, or at any rate, was meant to be. Why did it somehow seem so cold, remote and distant to me? Maybe it was my memory of the haunted self-portraits and corpse-like nudes from the MoMA retrospective. Maybe it was the occasional human figures in the paintings at the Met, which that museum prefers to refer to as “spectral” but which to me didn’t look human, but rather like plump, motionless stuffed dolls. Such paintings (especially) made me think of the existential angst of Wyeth and Hopper, two other painters attempting to paint representational in an era when abstraction was surging to the fore. Maybe in the current counter-revolutionary climate, it’s easier to paint the figure, but the subtle undercurrent of angst must make Bonnard doubly appealing to Pomonians, who like doubt and dystopia in their contemporary canvases as well.

ASIA AT THE GUGGENHEIM

Two people have tied my ears back for failing to accord proper enthusiasm to “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History,” held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2006, so I’ve tried hard not to let another paragon of museology staged by the Guggenheim slip through my radar again. Particularly when the Guggenheim is advertising a show combining older and newer art, there I am, panting to see it, and one show that appeared to fulfill this criterion is “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" (through April 19) Conceived and organized by Alexandra Monroe, the exhibition fills all seven levels of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, plus a medium-sized gallery in its annex. It has approximately 250 works by more than 100 artists working in many media (painting, sculpture, video art, installations, works on paper, film, live performance, and literary works), and draws from over 100 major museum and private collections in North America, Europe, and Japan. According to the museum’s press release, ”The Third Mind” proposes a new art-historical construct – one that challenges the widely accepted view that American modern art developed simply as a dialogue with Europe – by focusing on the myriad ways in which vanguard American artists’ engagement with Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts inspired them to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age and the modern mind.”

Since I’m a critic of the visual arts, not a literary critic nor a critic of any of the performing arts, I can’t evaluate the video, film, live performance or literary work in this exhibition, but, given the dates advertised, plus the fact that the poster reproduces a Whistler, and the invite for the media preview reproduces a Motherwell and another Whistler, I felt sure that the show would include at least as much art from before 1960 as since then. This meant (I thought) that I should have a generous amount of painting, sculpture and even works on paper of high esthetic quality to admire and evaluate. I wasn’t even deterred by the presence of “human carriage,” a site specific installation by Ann Hamilton that cluttered up the little platform on the ground floor of the rotunda (once reserved, I believe, for a quiet pool of water) with a pile of savagely torn-up books. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a jingling little gizmo consisting of a pair of Tibetan temple cymbals veiled in white silk tooted merrily around and around, on a little rail down the outside of the ramp’s inside wall from the top level on down to the ground one, where it banged against yet another torn-up book hanging over the pile, causing that book to fall onto the top of the rest. These merry little performances were greeted with a scattered round of applause from spectators seated around the ground floor of the rotunda & resting their aching museum feet. According to the wall label, this piece concerns the artist’s “deep interest in language, architecture, materiality and the body.” The mangled books represent “the vast bibliography serving as the intellectual foundation for the exhibition....Hamilton investigates the processes of circulation, transmission, interpretation, appropriation, and misunderstanding of these texts....” To me, these shredded books have much more to do with John Latham, the British artist whose many sets of mangled books were displayed in 2006 at P.S. 1, and who in turn has more to do with Duchamp than with any Asian. Like both these very European progenitors, Hamilton’s savage destruction of these books to me expresses not Zen-like tranquility, but hostility and anger.

Undeterred, I took the elevator (as is my wont) to the top of the ramp, and started working my way down it. With chronologically hung shows, the Guggenheim in recent years always starts with its earlier work at the bottom and tells museum-goers to walk up the ramp and not down. This arrangement penalizes older museum-goers, and may well discourage some of them from coming to the museum at all, which is probably okay with the Guggenheim, since it likes to project an image of youthful trendiness. As my tastes and those of the Guggenheim, in terms of recent art, tend to have less in common than our tastes in older art, starting at the end of shows, instead of the beginning, enables me to get the brickbats out of the way in the earlier part of my review and end on a sweet instead of a sour note. With this show, however, it was hard for me to work up too much enthusiasm. Except for one so-so sculpture by Anne Truitt, a small, interesting literary alcove dealing with early 20^th century poets like Eliot and Ezra Pound, and a modest, mostly undistinguished selection of abstract expressionist paintings & sculpture, the entirety of the rotunda was occupied with work by other devotees of neo-dada and a not-unrelated literary movement, The Beats. Wall texts and labels spoke of heavy Asian philosophical and religious sources, but in practice (if you can believe this show) most American artists since about 1960 seem to have used such sources mainly to rationalize and justify their need to react against and satirize mainstream European modernism, in keeping (yet again) with the sacred tenets of dada. Thus, in addition to a lot of lesser devotees of this philosophy, we get many familiar names, from the cross-hatching of Johns and a combine by Rauschenberg to the minimalism of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden, the constructions of Robert Irwin, the conceptualism of Walter de Maria, and more recent show-biz art.

The entirety of the painting, sculpture and works on paper from between 1860 and 1945 is jammed into that single annex gallery, where on the whole it looks crowded and uncomfortable. Much of it, including work by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Augustus Vincent Tack, Morris Graves, John Henry Twachtman and even Arthur B. Dove suggests that to Americans of that era (or perhaps Guggenheim curators), “Asian” equated to “pale” and “vague.” Still, a good deal of the remainder has worn well, especially the 11 Mary Cassatt prints, showing an incisive use of drypoint and etching or drypoint and aquatint to adapt the perspectives & compositional devices of Japanese woodblock prints. Also looking good are two small wood block prints by Arthur Wesley Dow, several of the Whistlers, and a topnotch Marsden Hartley that is much more modernist European than Asian. The only real surprises, though, are two fresh, vivid and exciting watercolors by John La Farge showing “The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura” (ca. 1887), and a plaster cast of the gruesome and decadent but haunting life-sized seated human figure which forms the memorial to Marion Hooper Adams created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1886-1891). Commissioned by Marion’s grieving husband, Henry Adams, the bronze version is in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Adams had traveled to Asia with La Farge, and seen the Kamakura Buddha and other Asian statues with him, but when it came to telling Saint-Gaudens what he wanted, he not only sent him photos of statues of Buddha but also advised him to study the Sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. Thus the memorial becomes a synthesis of East and West, as well as male and female – no less fascinating because Saint-Gaudens’ means of synthesis is his own (very Western) Art Nouveau style.

GOUDSTIKKER AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM

An ingratiating exhibition of nearly 50 “Old Master” paintings is “Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” on view at the Jewish Museum (through August 2; thereafter at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (October 7 – January 10, 2010); the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (February 13 – May 2, 2010), and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco (October 30 – March 8, 2011). This show was organized by Peter C. Sutton, executive director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, and in a slightly smaller form, premiered at the Bruce Museum last summer, where it was greeted by Ken Johnson of the Times with passionate enthusiasm. The story of how the show came to be is truly enthralling. The 50 paintings in the show are a quarter of 200 paintings that were in 1940 owned by Jacques Goudstikker, a much respected & highly successful Jewish art dealer focusing on Renaissance and baroque paintings from the Low Countries, as well as some Italian and French art of the 15^th through 19^th centuries. He and his wife Dési were prominent members of Amsterdam society, but they and their infant son Eduard (nicknamed Edo) had to flee the Netherlands when the Nazis invaded, leaving behind an inventory of 1,400 works in the gallery. They were appropriated by Herman Göring, Hitler’s second in command and a rapacious art collector. He shipped most of Goudstikker’s art to Germany, and turned the gallery itself over to one of his sidekicks, who ran it throughout the war under the Goudstikker name, selling remaining art & keeping the proceeds.

Jacques was killed in a shipboard accident while crossing the Atlantic, but Dési and Edo made it to the U.S., where Dési remarried. Her second husband was A. E. D. von Saher, who subsequently adopted Edo (oddly enough, Edo and I attended the same little boarding school in the Adirondacks, though I knew him only by sight, as he was four years younger than I). After the war, the Allies located over 200 Goudstikker paintings in Germany, and returned them to the Netherlands, but the Dutch government kept them in its national collections, even though Dési tried to reclaim them. She died in1996, and Edo survived her by only a few months, but after his death, his widow, Marei von Saher, re-initiated the claims process, and this time, after nearly a decade of battle, the Dutch government agreed to return 200 of the paintings looted by the Nazis. A crucial piece of evidence was the little black notebook Jacques had with him at the time of his death, and in which he had meticulously listed his entire inventory. The current exhibition includes a touch-screen computer version of this notebook that allows visitors to view each page.

As for the show itself, I gathered from the subdued reception it was receiving at the media preview that the critics were maybe a tad disappointed – not because the show itself isn’t charming, but maybe because so many of the paintings are on the small side, practically none are by well-known painters, and because Ken Johnson oversold it. There are lots of very nice paintings here, but the only big name showing characteristic work that I spotted was a small “Sailing Vessels in a Thunderstorm,” (mid- to late 17th century), with powerful deep clouds, and roiling waters with white caps. It’s by Jacob van Ruisdael, the famous member of his family & subject of a great retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2005. His uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael, is less well known, but Goudstikker appears to have been particularly fond of his work. Salomon is represented here by two more substantial paintings, including a large, very traditional “River Landscape with Ferry” (1649), now owned by the National Gallery in Washington, and a smaller, more offbeat “View of the Dunes near Zandvoort” (1662), which in my eccentric way I preferred Another moderately well known 17^th century Dutch painter is Jan van Goyen, and there are two fine paintings by him here. Again, I preferred the smaller one, “Winter Landscape with Skaters (and an Inn)” (1641), a sweet picture done in shades of cream and brown. There is a Jan Steen, but instead of the comic genre scenes for which he’s celebrated, this one is a serious & somewhat wooden “history” painting, “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia” (1671).

The gallery with earlier art, both Italian and Northern European, also has some memorable work, including a large tondo in tempera attributed to Filippino Lippi and depicting Mary adoring the Christ Child (ca. 1490-1500), a wiry, ebullient Christ leaping up out of his coffin in a dramatic resurrection scene by the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines (active ca. 1483-98), and a delicious small “Landscape with the Banishment of Hagar,” by Herri Met de Bles (second quarter of the 16th century). The last gallery, with 17th, 18th, and 19th century portraits, still lifes and genre scenes, also had much to recommend it, including highly personable pendant portraits of Philips Ram and his wife, Anna Strick van Linschoten, by Paulus Moreelse (1625), an interesting 18th century portrait of a grotesque “Oriental,” attributed to Lorenzo Tiepolo, son of the great Giambattista, and a trio of very likeable still lifes, especially a hypnotic one of a small tree with a dozen stuffed birds on it by Gabriel Germain Joncherie (1826). It may be that a missing Rembrandt or Rubens will be found among the 1,200 works in Goudstickker’s little black book still being sought. Or maybe not: nowadays scholars are a lot pickier about their attributions to well-known artists than was the custom seventy years ago. Nevertheless, the 17th century in Holland was, like the 15th century in Florence, and the 5th century BC in Athens, one of those rare periods when even little-known artists created art worth contemplation today, so the rest of the Goudstikker heritage is still worth pursuing.

NORTON SIMON AT THE FRICK

The Frick Collection has a small but imposing show of five 16th and 17th century paintings on loan from Pasadena, CA, “Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum” (through May 10). All good-sized works by recognized masters, they hang in the Oval Room at the end of the Frick’s courtyard, with four ranged around the walls. They are “The Flight into Egypt,” by Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1544-45); “The Holy Women at the Sepulchre,” by Peter Paul Rubens (ca. 1611-14); “Aldrovandi Dog,” by Guercino (ca. 1625), and “Birth of St. John the Baptist,” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (ca. 1660). On a partition in the center of the gallery is “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” by Francisco de Zurbarán (1633). This presentation was organized by the Frick’s Colin B. Bailey and the Simon Museum’s Carol Togneri, with the aid of the Frick’s Margaret Iacono. In the fall of 2010, the Frick will reciprocate with a loan to Pasadena of its “Comtesse d’Haussonville,” by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1845) and two related drawings. The iconographic significance of all five paintings in the Frick’s current show are explicated at length on their labels, but I shall omit the explications for the Murillo and the Bassano, as both are maybe just a teeny tiny bit too fruity for my taste. The Guercino is odd but intriguing, with one huge white and brindle mastiff occupying almost its entirety & looming over the viewer. It seems to have been a portrait of a favorite canine of a member of the Aldrovandi family, since the dog’s elaborate leather collar bears the Aldrovandi coat of arms, and it reminds me of the many animal portraits in the Frick’s exhibition of George Stubbs, two years ago. The Rubens is a joy, showing two angels telling the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and three other women that Christ is risen (Luke 24:1-12). Its colors are luscious, its composition is relatively simple, the angels have such fair, fresh faces, and the whole is marked by the softness and gentleness that greatness brings. Still, the best picture in the show is the Zurbarán. Its yellow fruits are citrons, not lemons, and the painting as a whole is an homage to the Virgin Mary, with the citrons symbolizing faithfulness, the oranges, virginity, the orange blossoms, fecundity, the water in the little silver vessel, purity, and the rose, divine love These equivalents are 17th century art history, while the style is what’s timeless – precise, tough, pure (with its black field and dark brown table top), marked by stateliness and Spanish melancholy - classic simplicity amidst the baroque extravaganza surrounding it.

SURPRISES AT SIDESHOW

Over on Bedford Avenue, Rich Timperio, proprietor of Sideshow, is full of surprises. In my last issue, I reviewed “It’s a Wonderful Life,” his mammoth annual group show, which piled artwork atop artwork all the way from the floors to the ceilings of his gallery, and included just about everything from photographs and paintings to sculpture and assemblage. More recently, when I dropped by, my eyes were greeted by vast open spaces on the walls, with merely a single row of mostly very small pictures lined up along them with severe simplicity, like so many miniature monks in a monastery. This show was “Refractions: Jon Bird, Samm Kunce,” and I liked it, too, especially the littlest works on paper. Bird, a British artist and sometime sculptor, showed a series of abstractions in the front gallery, but I preferred his “Small Seas” series in the back gallery: detailed grisaille renderings of choppy waters in gouache-and-ink on paper, measuring only 3" x 3" or 3" x 4" (though framed and matted to 11.5 “ x 11"). Although I was reminded of the work of Vija Celmins by these images, I nonetheless found them engaging. Even better were the only slightly larger watercolors entitled (as a group) “Sky Diary” by Kunce, an American artist better known for her site specific installations (mounds of dirt, grass, etc.). Measuring only 9" x 12", these studies of clouds and sky were often inspired by the views out of airplane windows. Light, airy and surprisingly muscular, they brought John Constable up to date.... Incidentally, in my coverage of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I described the sculpture in the center of the front gallery inaccurately. I said there were four sculptures there, by Ann Walsh, Peter Reginato, Tony Moore and Bruce Gagnier. Actually, there were five. The sculpture that I described as “a towering, slender, curvaceous ceramic tree with a head atop its topmost branch” was by Jerelyn Hanrahan, not Gagnier. Gagnier’s less noticeable bronzed plaster portrait bust was displayed closer to the reception desk. I regret the error. .... Sideshow’s next exhibition is entitled “Robert C. Morgan: Metaphysical Paintings/ Performance/ Conceptual Art, 1970-2009.” Morgan, of course, is far better known as a critic than he is as an artist, and (to readers of this column, at any rate) as the editor of Greenberg’s “Late Writings” (2003). The show will be on from April 4 to May 3, with the opening from 6 - 8 on April 4th from 6 to 8, and a performance/lecture on May 3rd at 3 p.m. This last event should be something to see, if the photograph on the announcement is any indication. It shows the artist/critic fully clad in traditional gent’s suiting, complete with jacket & tie, but also doffing a large, flower-bedecked Edwardian ladies’ straw hat that looks like something out of “Upstairs, Downstairs” (the fine print explains that it’s a relic from a performance entitled “Carmen Miranda in Tehran,” staged in Tehran in 2007, though Miranda was better known for fruit on her hats, not flowers). A concurrent show of work by Morgan will be held at Bjorn Ressle, in Manhattan (April 18 – May 23).

2 BOOK PROJECTS: PEACOCK & O’CONNOR

Two deserving book projects have been called to my attention. The first comes from Graham Peacock, the Edmonton painter who has had many solo exhibitions in Canada and participated in group shows throughout the world with the “New New Painters.” His large and extremely handsome book is titled “Graham Peacock: A Retrospective.” It has been published with the aid of Field Law Edmonton, the Art Gallery of Alberta, The Government of Alberta’s Foundation for the Arts; and the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts Support for the Advancement of Scholarship and President’s Fund for the Creative and Performing Arts. An extensive (400-page) documentation of the artist’s life and work, the book contains a full CV and the artist’s writings, as well as more than 400 top-quality color reproductions of his work, and extended quotations from critics and art historians who have written about him, among them Ken Carpenter and Kenworth W. Moffett. Although the suggested list price (for this 9½” x 13" hardcover edition) is $225, and shipping charges begin at $125 (for delivery in Canada), the book’s introductory promotional price of $100 per copy may still be in effect by the time you read this. For more information, email the artist at peacock@shawbiz.ca.

The second book project comes from Francis V. O’Connor, the distinguished independent art historian best known for co-editing the four-volume “Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works” (1978), and editing (single-handedly) “Jackson Pollock: Supplement Number One” (1995). In all probability, O’Connor knows more about Pollock than anybody else now alive; certainly, he knows more about how to tell a real Pollock from a fake, but he has for the last 25 years also been working on a book now completed and called “The Mural in America: Wall Painting in the United States from Prehistory to the Present.” This book is about 800 pages long, with over 300 illustrations and 100 schematic diagrams of mural environments. It runs from Native American tipi decorations right on up to the community mural movement of the 1960s and since (there is also a chapter on Pollock and Rothko as muralists, entitled “The Mural as Private Act”). O’Connor has decided to publish this book online: this would ensure far wider distribution to scholars, students and artists, as well as allowing instant correction, augmentation and elaboration, but $25,000 will be needed to realize and maintain the website. He has found a non-profit (501 ( c ) ( 3 )) academic organization to help him with collecting contributions, so if any of my readers would like to assist him in this highly worthy undertaking, their gifts would be tax-deductible. For more information, email O’Connor at FVOC@aol.com.

ALL OVER THE PLACE

seems to describe the art of Frank Bowling just now. In Manhattan, his “Mooring” (2008) graces the front cover of the announcement for “The Mark of the Hand,” a group show at Spanierman Modern (through April 4). In person, this painting is smaller and stronger than it is in reproduction, in fact the best piece in the show. In London, Clifford Chance LLP is displaying a series of large Bowlings from the 1980s in its Canary Wharf offices (through April 3). Finally, three paintings by Bowling from the 1960s are in a catalogue published by the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, entitled (in Polish) “Swinging London – Collection Grabowski.” The catalogue documents a collection given to the museum by Matteusz Grabowski, a native Pole who ran an art gallery in London during the Swinging Sixties.....

in London, Ontario, Michael Gibson hosted “Power Play: Recent Work by Jonathan Forrest”.... and Fab, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was the site for “Facets of Form: The Sculpture of Peter Hide and his Contemporaries.” Curated by Hide and Betsy Boone, the show included 7 sculptures by Hide made between 1974 and 1985, as well as 6 sculptures from the same period by Anthony Caro, Alan Reynolds, Tim Scott and Michael Steiner. As Hide explained at the opening, this show was intended to demonstrate that modernist sculpture, when confronted by minimalism in the ‘60s, rose to the challenge and subverted minimalism to form a new era of development which continues to this day.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Besides Robert Morgan, two other new exhibitions and one event may be of interest to my readers. Just opened is “Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea,” at the Brooklyn Museum (through July 5). This show of about thirty paintings combines some of Caillebotte’s better-known Parisian cityscapes with lesser-known scenes of outdoor life on the coast of Normandy, and in the rural villages of Yerres and Petit Gennevilliers, where he and his family maintained estates. A painter of undoubted talent, Caillebotte wasn’t an archetypal impressionist, but as a patron, he saw to it that works by his impressionist friends were collected by the state..... “Extreme Possibilities: New Modernist Paradigms,” curated by Karen Wilkin, will be at the Painting Center in SoHo from March 31 to April 25. The artists in it are Frances Barth, Clay Ellis, John Gibson, Joseph Marioni, Marjorie Minkin, Jill Nathanson, Thomas Nozkowski, and Susan Roth, and the opening reception is on Thursday, April 2, from 6 to 8....... On April 3 and 4, a symposium entitled “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art” will be held at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. Although it is sponsored by Harvard’s department of history of art and architecture, it has been organized by two Harvard graduate students, Miguel de Baca and Prudence Peiffer, and many speakers will be graduate students, too. Admission is free and open to all; no registration is required;  the sessions begin at 9 am.

In the DeLuxe edition: Helen Frankenthaler ......(© Copyright 2009 by Piri Halasz)

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