E Y E W I T N E S S
A L S O BY J E D P E R 1
Paris "Iriritbc3trtIt~nJ
Gallery Cioing
E Y E W
T N E S S
R E P O R T S
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WORLD
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BASIC B O O K S A N i - W IZt PLJHL I C B O O K
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C O N T E N T S
ARTISTS A N D AUDIENCES
C O N T E M P O R A W DEVELOPMENTS
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A R O U N D THE M U S E U M S
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Impressionist exhihitions
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T H E A R T OF S E E I N G
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33 1
Index
33.3
E Y E W I T N E S S
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A R T I S T S
A N D
AUDIENCES
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About a ciecacie ago, \\-hen Cindy Sherman started she\\-ing her big <:ibiichrome self-portraits and it seemed as if rver\- hot artist in New York \\-as into photographic imagery. an editor from a general interest \\-eekly magazine called me to n k if I'd be interested in doing a story about Sherman. Actually, the piece he had in mind m-ould look at much more than Cindy Sherman. This editor m-anted a \\-rim to survey the m-hole phenclmenon of artists who appopriate photography; Sherrie i.evine had been rephotographing classic images for a couple of years, and I)oug and Mike Starn \\ere beginning to cause a stir \\-ith their collages made of stained and ripped photcrgraphs. The editor knen- that I didn't haye an!; patience for Sherman's l\-ork. In fact. he was interested in me in part hecause I'd already \\-ritten n thumbs-~iokvnpiece. My opinions, he assured me. kveren't a problem: I could sav anything I wanted in the article. He \\-asn't interested in \\-hether the work was gr30d or bad. He \\-as interested in all the exciten~entthat Cindy Sherrnan and these other artists m-ere generating.
In the m-eek or so het\%-eenhis call and the lunch date that l\-e arranged.
I found myself regarding the project =with increasing trepidation. I didn't think I could cio the piece, and \\-hen \ve got together I explained \\-h?. I iiislikecl Sheman" svork passic~natelv;h t ~ m\. t ctecision \\-as based cm sclntething more than my reaction to the lvork. My feeling \\;is that Sherman's notoriety \\-as ba\ically a public relation5 gambit. and I ciidn't \\-ant to hecome a part of the PR. At that point m\- lunch companion began to act rather uneasy. He haci meant the assignment as an opportunity for me, and he found m\- qualms more than a little t3izarrc. The more we talkeci, the
more hostile he becan~e.He accused rile cif carecrisn~;and an odd kind of reverse careerism it \\-as that \voulci have me turning cio\vn \\hat \\-as clearly a major a\rignment. He was so upset that he sugge\ted that I pay for m\- half
of otrr meal, Things calmeel dcxvn a little by the time \ve got to the espresso. He asked if there \\-as another story that I wanted to do. Therc \\;is. I suggesteel that in hict therc is a \;\-holecitl~erart worlcl ciut there-kvhat
a lot of rrs have conle
to call, shortlland style, the real art n-orltf. Therc are artists \I-ho arc wi~rking consistentb, evolving in boom tirue\ and in bust time\, and I pri>po\ed that they deserve a hell of
3
lot more attention than they receive. I ex-
plained that I didn't m-ant to add fuel to the Sherman boom preci\ely because booms like this one are sucking life ancl energy out of the other art \I-orld. Art stars like Sheurnan-and
David Salle and Julian Schnahel-have
distorteel the art scene. Their exhibitions cion't give public expression to private feelings so much as they offer canny responses to market pressures. The mass appeal of an arti\t like Schnabel has everything to cio with his indifference to \\-hat ought to he an artist's most urgent concern. \\-hich is the internal logic of a work of art. 4 s for the arti\ts who do care ahout \\hat goes on i n d e art, they arc being left with fewer and fewer outjets for their work.
R\- no\;\-the serious nrti\ts are desperate: they're gasping for air. As it happeneel, I \\;is able to name at lea\t one member of this other, private art \\-orld that the eclitor knem-. "Oh her." he said. "Is she important?" I tolci him that to many people she is one of the best sculptors alive, but he seemed nonplussed l,\- the thought. and also l,\- m\- idea for an alternative story. He'd calleel me up to commission an article ahout an art star. not to
find o u t that there is a r o m p l e t e h different, unglamorous, half-buried scene out there. You don't have to knon- anything ahout art to know tha.t thc art \\-orlcl is surcfire cultural entertainment, and that was the one thing this editor
knem- for sure. .4 hit of Sherman hashing would he okay: n little outrageciuhness on the part of artists and critics alike helps to give the art world its appeal. People like to hear that the art stars are overinflated. That's part of the titillation. But n-hen ytju tell an editor thzt something more is at stake, that the hype around the public art \\-orld may actually hurt somehod\-. that is too much. Nobody \v;ints to believe that the art stars are ciestroying the visual arts. If that's the case. things could begin to get depressing. Yau might even end up feeling guilt\- for having treated the art \\-orld as a playground. as little more than high-end medin gossip. Rut of course the editor found somehod\- \vho \vould do the job he \\antecl done. A couple of months later, I openeii up that magazine and there \\-a\ Cinciy Sherman, larger than life.
Taken at kicc value, that lunch ciate, though a less than perfectly amizihle mcounter, \\;isn't really worth kvorrying about. Rut I think something fundanlental \\as at stake. The eciitor I \\-as talking \\-ith is a serious fellow, and he ol?viously felt that by looking at some murh-talked-about n e n art. and ho&-it's being pron~otedand d i s ~ ~ ~ s and s e ~\vho's i, selling and \vho's buying. \\-e coulci learn something not only about the \\-ork of these photo artists but also ahout ourselves. I can appreciate this line of thinking, but onlv up to a point. People h;tve always been kiscinated l,\- the relationship het\\-een the contest in which art is experieawd and the sontent of art itself. K'hv shotrlcln? they l-te?But\;\-henan editor tells a critic that it doesn't really matter if you like the work or not, just so long as you report on \\hat everybody is saj-ingahout it. my alarm bells start going off. Ke are at a point where context is in danger of sxviimping contmt. 'I'he itssumpticlns I brought to that lunch date are the sitme ones I bring to a gallery or a museum shm-. I believe that a \vork of art must have a free-
standing value. Formal value, are one element in the equation: I take it for granteci that a \%-ork\%-eexperience visually must he visual1~-resolved. Rut the arti\t \vho gives this \%-orkits value is pulling together all kinc1s of experiences. Narrative mai- be as important as color; the startling character of the imagery mai- be \I-hat fuels the vigor of the line. Vi'i~atcclunts is that \%-hateverthe artist is thinking or feeling is absorbed into the look. the rharacter. the intricacies of the \\-ork. The painting, the sculpture, the collage, the assenlblage makes its own terms, and n-e judge what we see. Notv I'm sure that that editor believes in the freestanding value of
3
'i%-ork of art, But I h l atso kiirlv certain that he believes that stlch value is colclred, mt~tated,rvvalued by the context in \%-hichtve see the
\%-G&.
it paint-
ing or sculpture that he might agree is not especially engaging gains interest-which
for him may be equivalent to value--hecause
there's a lot
of buzz around it. because it's expensive, or heciiuse it's being promoted by the right celllector, dealer, curator, or critic. (If cclurse people h c e altvays been interested in some version c~f~ v l ~11-e a t now think c~fa\ market fcjrces and fashion shifts, hut never hefcjre have sc, manv intelligent people been so \%-illingto believe that art is at the mercy of life. that art is less a thing unto itself than a habit of mind, a sort of accent or highlight that can adhere to anything. .4nd so l\-e are urged to regard fashion as art. career as art, money a, art, The ever-iieepening ciividc between \%-hatI think of as the put3lic and private art \%-orldsis less the product of market forces than the result of this funditmental disagreement about the nature of art. The freestanding value of art is e,sentiall\- an insider's idea. born of the experience of the studio. m-here emoac~ns,sensibilities, and experiences are given a form that can carry meaning. That the \\-hole tvorld should revere the stan~l-alonemagic of such \%-orks---ofa Rembrandt self-portrait, for example. or of Mon~lrian'sBmililwirj) oes not make this any le,s a private ideal. The \\-orid gcxs to
the Rembrandt or the Mondrian for the explosively, expansively private expmiences that they afford. ( )r so I believe. The contextualists see it differently. For them, Remhran~lt'sself-portraits are mostly of interest as reflections of a seventeenth-century idea of the individuaI: they're about marketing in~lividualism. And Mon~lrian'sRnriiiiwir) Boogiu B7,iytr is n sort of seismographic record atomization and alienation. &%rt, in short, ~loesnot so of twentieth-cent~~ry much shape the m-orld as it is shaped by the world. Pikintin85 ancl sculptures are tokens ancl artifacts: they're regarded as the sloughed-off shells of cultural or social experiences. This vie- may originate in a nineteenth-century reaction agiinst the bourgeois sentimentaliration of art. But \\hat begin as an anticq3italist critiy rrc has tilrned out to be a markter" dream. The Marxist \vho saj-Sthat no artist's imagination is free has provided a comfortable context for the corporate executive who \\-ants tci fund only the museum retrospctive of the artist \vhci\e \vork has the lvidest appeal. ( If
course I'm dra\\-ing the lines a little more clearly than they are gener-
ally drawn in life. Many people m-ho concern themselves with the visual arts k n m - that a painting or sculpture ought to stand alone; they are contextualists only to a certain degree. But the drift of current thinking is invariably in the contextualist direction, and cc~ntemporar~ artists who don't tilt that jq-ay are bound to have a hard time. Take the painter roan Snyder, whose - .emotions ought to jq-onderfully extravagant presentations of high-flving
give her work a \vide appeal. In large, panoramic pitintings such as .? .bil . $ t t ~ ~ ~
riliil iy irri Opttmii, Siiyiler gives almost operatic rolorings to theme, of death and hope; she does this kind of thing Inore convincing1y than any other artist of our day. Yet Snyiler, who \\-as horn in 1940, has not yet had a significant Nrm- York muheurn show, a fact that I beheye is linked to the emphatically private, freestanding nature of the work she cloe,. Her pitintinps don't appeal to the contextualists, and t h y pretty much contrtst the upper ecfielons of the art e\tal->listiment,
C i n d ~Sherman, by contrast, is a phenomenal success precisely because her \;\-arkis atl at-tcirrt the c-ultrrral context. 111her early IJtgftled iC~lniStzZ/s, Sherman managed to give these contextualist theme* some visual musicality. I don't think thzt the lintrtiirld Film Jtrlls are a galvrmic achievernmt, but Sherman's small-sized self-portraits, in which she enacts dozens of movie ancl TV scenarios, ciffer such delicate variations on c-incn~aticconventiclns that the camp sensihi1it:- achieves n certain detached. dream-like unity. In the m-ork that Sherman has done since the hint Stills, however-and
this incluiies ever!--
thing from her stage\- impersonations of figures in ()Id Master portraits to a recent series focusiq on battered (2Joe and Ken dolls-the
dramatics are lit-
tle more than talking points and polemical ilouri,he,. Sherman's costumes and disguises are custom-made for the contextualists; her lnutating imagery is just right for an audience that twlieves th;tt art has no substance, no e\sence. Sherman's defenders m-ill n q u e that her house-of-mirrors images are part of a long tradition. and there is no denying that the assault on the stand-alone integrity of art has come from u-ithin art itself and has been aimed l;\-itha ~ieathlyprecision that only insiders could muste.;, As early as the 1880s. a group of Parisian artists \vho called themselves the Incohkrents highlighted the preposterousness of official art l,\- creating \\hat amounted to the first anti-art, The Incohkrents turned arti\tic c-onventions into hovc-ling ahsuriiities when they carried lyric elusiveness into mind-numbing emptine,~ancl twisted expressive dramas into cartoonish confusions. There is certainly some intellectual allure to the games that the Inioh4rents played. .4nd no one can deny that Marcel Duchamp's steel-trap enigmas have had a vast appeal. Yet \\hen a skepticism about the essential value of art is buift into art, jq-C are in for bad tirtle*. \Xihether you call this approach Iladaist. contextualist, situationist, or some other name, the assun~ptionis that art idbtrrn, lives, and dies in the public sphere. Such an art can have no free5tanding value; the very idea of
value is regarded a\ a social construct. It's ciifbcult to defend art against this contextualist assault, especially if we are hone\t enough to admit that although art has a freestanding value it stands in different places at ciifferent timer. ( Ince we have acknon-ledged that art is ah-ays on the move, the contextualists will saj- that we have given a%-aythe game. Rut to argue that a stained-gla\s \\-indo%-in (:hartrcs (:;tthedral or a painting of lovers in a park l,\- R t t e a u achieves its stand-alone authority in relation to a particular time and place is not to deny that each 11-orkhas n life of its 011-n. And fcx those of us m-ho still crave the thrilling experiences that only art can offer, understanding exactly where the contntu;tlist a\sault came from may he far less important than figuring out \\here \\-e go from here. I kno%-that there are still plenty of artists and gallerygoers and museumgvwuvho \\ant that stand-alone experienle. Rut in a \\-orld \\-here the art market seems to have n ~ o r intellectual c cachet than art itselt; there may be nothing more difficult than finding a \\-a!- for artists ancl audiences to come together ancl artu;tlly, ,imply, look at art.
The glanlour factor in the art world is nothing new. r t chat has been keeping people amused. annoyed, sedurcci, irate for a very long time. In m e r ica. the modern puhlicitv mills began to crank up \\-ith the Armory She\\- of 1913, hut the)- nnlv really got gc,ing in 1949, when L!fi magazine gave its
reaclers a good laugh l,\- supge\ting that Tackson Follock. a moody Green\\-ich Village legend \vho likeci to drip paint, just might be the greatest artist alive. (Ince the public had kvondered at and h<)%-ledover Pcillock, the pattern \\-as set and people were screaming for more. Pop Art \\-as hog heaven. and everybody hopped on the art merry-go-round. If you couldn't afford n Tasper Johns F l ~ g at , least you cc~uldafford the &%merican flag canisters that
\\-ere sold at hip shops like z u m a . B\- the 1080s it \\-as taken for granted that R l l Street money fueled the carnival, and everybody \\-as talking about the \\-aiting list to t3u-y pitintings at the Marv Boone Gallery and ahou t the size of the latest art star" loft iin SclHo. Looking back on all of this, there are those \\-h0 \\-ill say that my talk \I-ith that maprtzine editor \\-as just bt~sinersas t ~ s ~ l aThe l , media, after all, have their share of fairly sophisticateci st;ltus quo t!pes. and if you begin to say that the hype has gone out of control, they'll pml7;tbly tell you that it \I-as just as b d back in the nineteenth century, \I-hen Bat~dela.ireand Daumier m-ere complaining about the philihtines at the Salons. Rut of course knov\-ing that things were h d once ilpc-m a time does not mean that they are necessarily okay today. I11 any event. t h i n g are not all had. Far from it. I11 the galleries there is go0~1\vork to be seen. In the studios of Nen Yorkand, for all I knovl; across the country-artists
in their 30%and 40s and 50s
and 60s are lnaking the incremental developments and the leaps that take art to a ne'iq- place. But even as the headlines have shifted from julian Schnabel's plate smashing, to Terse Helms's NE.% hashings-and
now, in the
late '90s. to the architects \\-h<)design the museums where all the overscaled art of the past quarter century is going on perinanent display-the
most
important story in the art \vorld remains untold. The support system of galleries, grants. collectors, curators, and puhlications that makes it possible for artists to h;tve slow-~1evelopi11g,seriou:. carecrs is in a s t s e of near total collapse. Mo:.t of the people \vho believe in the frees e n ~ l i n gvalue of art have twen s i l e n c e d l f not s ~ - e pa\va\-. t This is \vh;tt you hear if vou talk to the artists. I*ivingin the midst of an overinilated art \vorld. an art \\-orId m-here context is all, painters and sculptors no longer know \\-here to turn. Fe\\-er and few-er sho\vs get reviewed t3ecause the work has some inherent qualiw: fern-er and fewer galleries are \villing to make the rommitlnent to an artist's gradual drvelopmmt. The art 11-orld,to the extent that
it s u p p x t s a vital evolutionary process, is on the verge of extinction. The artists---let me emphasizt.*are
still at \\-ark. Rut they are in drspitir. and their
despair is ttlrninf: into a masochistic malaise that threatens them horn within, even as career options ~lisiippear.\%%at f
big part-lf
its signihcance.
Wlho exactly are these artists who are not receiving the support that the\- need and cieserve! I could name many, each a different case. each unable to receive a proper hearing. Th begin. I m-ant to point briefly to two: Barbara C;oodstein and Stanley Lewis. Rtlth are in their 50s, both have
shorn-n at snlall cooperative galleries in New York (:it\- for years. ( h o d stein is probahlv the most original sculptor of her generation. The landscapes in her show at the Bo\\-er\-Gallery in the spring of 1999 announced a ne\\- pastoral mode, a p a t o r a l in m-hich serenity seems to he kvrenched from the jangling upheavals of modern life. 4 s for i.enis, some of the landscape paintings and &a\\-ings that he has produced in the past q u u t e r century are as beautiful as any that have been created anywhere in the \\-orld ciuring this period. n d the large. denselv \\-orked drawings of studio interiors that he ertfiibited in 1995 are among the most eioqurnt imp w s i o n s of the space m-here an artist creates t h a t I have ever seen. C;oo~isteinand Len-is come out of an t~ndergroundart \\-orfd where tradition and innovation are still believed to be reconcilable. Yen- k r k e r s may pay lip service to this vie\\-point, hut if you're looking for a clever career move, you'd be advised to look else\\-here. 11-hich hasically means you'd he advised to join fcjrses 11-ith the contextu it l'1st~. C;oci~istein'ssculpture is in 10%- relief, and her technique is nhsolutelv her
m-n. She \\-arks in plaster on plywood hoards, building up this 11-ondrrfully fluid material into fi~rmsthat are a sculptor's reconsideration of the traditions of pitinter!? painting. Her subjects are the figure and the landscape, hut every-
thing in her \\-orks is simplified. reduced. so that \\-hat meets the eye is a sequence of iconic, telegraphic signs. A panoramic lanclscape is transfcirmeii into a couple of undulating arabesques. A house next to a tree is evc~kedwith the deliberate brevity of (:hinew calligraph7-.Some of C;oodstein's fillest figure pieces are variations on ciailsical themes-the'l'lrw~
I;lac-ni,
the Plrtlvand here
she seems to feel the pressure of the \\-hole tradition pushing her for\\-ard. ( Iften she paints the boards black or clark green, so that the pats and lines and jabs of plaster stand out like stars in a night sky. Her figures are summations. abbreviations. The cycle of Ihrrr [;rdrri is her memory of Raphael rememhering Pompeii. (;oodstein's \\-ork, \vith its passionate mix of c o n v e h c ~ n a l sorrrces and uniomentional methods?is astcmishi~lglyconcise, Stank\- idem-is'srcpre\entational paintings arc also informed by a taste for abstraction. I_e\\-ishas a gift f63r ripe. painterly surfaces and for plangent, gray-purple-green tonalities. His landscapes may renlind people of the work of contemporary English Expressionists, of Leon Kossoff and especialiy Frank huerbarh. The jagged fc3rms in idem-is'slandscapes could even strike some gallerygoers as t,orro\vings from huerbarh. hut I find Le~visat his best to be an infinitely more satisfying and original artist than huerbarh ever is. In Lem-is's smalli\h paintings. the angles and elisions that suggea a kiscinatingly- lab\-rinthine . smse of spare really add up: they give us a complete view. And no one else has rendered the odd, edgj- spares in suburban nlericathe sides of roads, the gas stations-\\ith
quite the lyric delicacy that Le~vis
achieves. His .4merica. shamhly ancl appealing, is not unlike Kossoff's I.ondon. In recent years. some of Le%-is'smost complex and t3eguiling inventions have been his clra~q-ings.The big, heavily \\-orked \ie%-s of his 0%-n jam-parkeci stuciio. with pencil lines jablung into and even tearing at the paper. have a thrillingly overeliiborate~Mannerist power. Terrific \\-ark--by artists \vho range in age from their late 30s to their earl\- 70s-isn't
alxx-ays ignorecl entirely, but it rarely receives the conien-
trated, serious attention that it cleserves. Khy isn't there more focus on the abstract sculpture of Geoffrey Meyxvorth and the figure sculpture of Robert Taplin and Natalie <:harko\\-; on the abstract paintings of Spencer C;regory. Rill Rarrell. Pat .&darns, Shirley laffe. Thornton \Krillis, and Trevor Kinkfield; on the geometrized realities that \\-e encounter in the \\-ork of iacqueline Uma, Richard <:hiriani, and .%IfredRussell; and on the various kinds of representational painting that are clone by Rita Raragona. Richarcl La Prcsti, Carl Plansky. Temma Bell, Mari I.yons, I.ouis;t Matthiiisdottir, Cial-triel 1,adernlan. 1,ennart ,%nderson,Hefen Miranda Kilson, I,isa 2%-erling,and Ned Small! I could mention more artists \vho are equally gifted. equally deserving of ;ldditional attention. Even \\-hen painters \\-h0 are doing major m-ork have reasonahl>; big follol\-ings---I'm thinking, again, of loan Sn\-der, and also of Rill Tensen-they
seem to remain co-
terie tastes, admired in art departments, collected to some degree, hut not reall\- part of the American art establishment that is known around the world. As for Barhitra (;ooilstein3s and Stanley Lekvis's work, it's rarely seen by an\-hod\- he\-oncl , n small circle of admirers. .%nd despite the extraordinary ability these artists have demonstrated to go it alone, to sta\- focused on the freertanding value of art, the long-term effects of ruch a restricted atldienze cannot he healthy. The absence of significant financial rewards is one prohlem, and by no means a mincir one. I_rwis,e*peciiilly, has had a significant teaching career, lvhich ran fill the financial void. Rut even if W-easbume that comlnitted arti\t\ do fincl a \\-ay to survive financially, there remains a larger question. Khat happens to an artist \vhc)re clevelopment receives so little public recognition! I am not speaking here about unfulfilled promise. I am referring to artists \vho have done an immense amount ancl no%-,at rnid-career. arc at the point where the\- have to find it \\-ithin themselves to do even more. Can artists keep on doing their ~lamnecle\t\\-hen the \\-ide \\-orld
doesn't give a ciarnni The que\tion needs to be addressed right no\\. h generation thttt is coming into its 0 % - n t h a treally has already come into its o\vn-is
having a terrible time nlaking contact \\-ith the audience it de-
serves. Both <;oodstein and Lewis 0%-ea debt to the painter Ideland Bell. \\-h0 died in 1091 at the age of 69. Bell's grandly scalecl tigurc compositions have a hard-edgecl yet free-flokving exuberance. and there's an astonishing!\- elegant vehemence to many of his self-portraits and portraits. These pitintinps, \\-ith their from-the-ground-up structural concision. supge\t a number of ~ - 9 ins n-hich a representational artist can learn horn abstraction. Certainly
both C;oodstein and I,ewis h c e built on some of Bell's idea\. But a comparison between his career and theirs makes it clear how much more clangerilus it is to be an independent artist trlrlay than it was a generation
ilr
two
ago, \\-hen Bell \\-as lnaking his \\-ay. Bell \\-as often described as the archetypal art world outsider. Emerging in the years \\-hen Pop r t ' s clever Zeitgeist reaclings were dominating the news, Bell insisted that art has its 0%-nlogic, its 0%-npo%-er.True. he hardly ever sold a painting. But he had a distinguished dealer in Robert Schoelkc~pf,and over the \-ears he \\-as the subject of feiiture articles in .?ris.
j l r i lYeu, (h\- John .4shhery), A r t rn jlmrrzr-tr (by rohn Hollancier). anci the ~YPW
York Iitrz~c,and in 1987 he tinally received a retrospective at the Fhillips Collection in Kashington. I).<:. Barhara C;oodstein, although her sculpture doesn't look anything like Bell's painting, is the artist \\-h<)I expect will carry Bell's brand of radically simplified representation into the nest century, yet she has never had a dealer committed to her n-ork, has never been the subject of
3
feature article in an art magazine. has never even had a
\\-ork in a museum shm-. The ciifference in their careers tells you something \-er\- scary about the ever-ciiminishing opportunities for serious art since Bell arrived in Nevc- York in the 1940s.
In order to see \\h!
it is so much harder for authentic in~iepen~lent \\-ork to
pn)rper no\\- than it was a generation ago, l\-e have to look beyond career specifics to the overall structure of the art scene. The art world that \\-as tmrn in New York after n r l d War II is mo\ing into its sixth decade, and \\-hat \\-e've been seeing in the past fen- years is a svstemic crisis. Matters have reached the point \\here nothing in the art \\-orld really seems to kvork any l o n g e ~ n oin t a \\-ay that encomages n-hat I m-ould call major art, anym-ay, Kcrrc living in a dysfunctional art \\-orld. And to understand this disoriier, \I-e must tlnderstand u-fiat made the scene ftlnction (although often haltingly and half-fieartedly) in the first place. The Nem- York art world has all\-ay\ had t\\-o ciimmsions: one public, one private. To the extent that there \\-as ever n meaningful relationship bet ~ - e e there n realms, the public art world n-as an outgrokvth-and reflection-of
at best a
the private art world, of the autistshrt world. It is al%-ay\in
the artistshrt n-orki that forms are reimagined and rcinvented, and that new expressive possibilities r-omr into their on-n. (If course this split het\\-een a public ancl n private art m-orld is nothing new. The Salons and academier of eighteenth- ancl nineteenth-century liurope, lvhich generally operated under government auspices. arteci as clearinghouses, making career defining decisions about which artists would gain access to commisions, patrons, and the public that visited major exhihitions. Neeci I point out that these premodern and early modern inrtitutions had more than their share of bt~rcauzratiirigidities? The every-man-fcjrhimself free-for-all that began to take shape in the late nineteenth century, as artists fcjund themselves competing for representiition by an ever-grokving number of commercial galleries, \\-as a \\-elcorne change. In many respects the commercial dealers succeeded in giving individu;tl arti\ts a more
direct access to the public. The relativel~rapid acceptance of as radical a devejopment as abstract art \\-outd have been inconceiv;tblr n-itl~outthe more fluid relationship betm-een artist and audience that was fostered bj- a new generation of activist clealers. In the )-ears after \*rErorld WLr 11, when the Ne\v York art would its u-e knonit \\;is first coming into focu:,, the private ancl public spheres were in a hirlv health\- balance. ;i\-ant-garde Paris was a huge in\piration. n d an all-American clistaste for official patronage and the rigiditie:, of tradition helpeci to give the Nen York situation a livelv, improvisational chararter. Many people t3elieved that a new kind of audience \\-as coming into being-an
audience
t h t was more ad.\-cntureson~e, more independent. This was true, at least up to a point. There \\-as an eciuiated public that took an interest in deselopments at the Museum of Modern Art and the Khitney, in art coverage in
lirnr and L$>, in the lineup at international shows such as the Venice Riennale. and in exhibiaons at a f e blue-chip ~ commercial galleries, such as those of Sidne\- lanis and, later, Leo Castelli. Rut if avant-gardism \\-as in certain respect\ in sync l\-ith an older American feeling for the importance of the individual, there \\ere also danger signs. In the egalitarian atmosphere of Ye\\- York, even rawal gallerygoers could begin all too e a d v to imagine that they un~lerstoodmore about the avant-garde imagination than the\: reidly did. <:ontext \\-as beginning to c>\-ertakecontent. The sophisticated public's go\sip~familiaritv m-ith the life and time, of lackson Pollock or Killem de Kooning set the stage for a new kind of ultra-hip philistinism. .4nd artists who m-anted to be better knoll-n \\-ere sometimes glad to confuse the put7lic imagination =with their o\\-n. "Let your monstrous subconscious make n quick buck for yoursrlf." the painter .4d Reinhardt announced in one of his ciirtoon collages. published in the magazine trun,[i;irteuirari in 1952. "Hollar 'Hang the museums!"' he urged. "until the\- hang you, then clam up and collect."
The curators, dealers, and editors who \\-ere shaping this kist-gro\\-ing public art m-orld had been 11-eanedon the legendary doings of early-tkx-entieth-century figures such as m b r o i s e \rc,llard. I);lniel-Henry Kahnkveiler. and Gertr~ldeand l,eo Stein. The tastemakers at New York's museums, ,galleries, and magazine, saw that their predecessc~rshad looked to iirtists fcjr guidane, and the\- n1e;lnt to do the same in %\v York. Thev cared, elpecially after the m-ar, about \\-hat the ?lunger painters and sculptors m-ere doing, and they agreed \\-ith the artists \\-h0 sal\ the blue-chip galleries as fitting into a \\-ider constellation of galleries and exhibitions, \\hi& included developments at some important artist-run cooperatives and artist-organired exhibitions (the Tenth Street annuals are an example). The artists \\-ere certainly a%-arcof the expitnding coverage in the more popular magazines, hut the\- n-ere also deeply absorbed h)- the &"rr.lrssitrnsthat m-ent cm at the r t i s t s ' Club. and l,\- the hundrecis of short revie&-*of exhil3itions that appeared in the art magazines each and every month and added u p to n t,lo\v-by-blo~-account of %-hatartists \\-ere doing. 'I'he line betxeen the publjc art \\-orld and the private art world n-as ntrt alxx-ays clear. and that porousness could be n good thing, at l e a t m-hen it \\-orked to give private expressions a public dimension. The art magazines them,elves had both a public and a private side. You might say that the feature articles in the art magazine, \\ere public, \\-hereas the short revie&-*of crne-person she\\-s m-ere a piirt of the private kvorld. Art coverage in literary and political magilzine, such as the
lydtitrtr
and P L I T ~ ~RV~IPM. S ~ F I despite their
small readerships, coulci spitn the tkx-o realm,, as did certain galleries. such as Betty Parsons' and Mrtrrha Tackson's. ,%nti when Alfred H. Barr Tr., the fc3unding director of the Museum of Modern Art. took a part in arasts' gatherings downto%-n.he \\-as shokving ho\\ involved he \\;is \\-ith that more private art kvorld. In 1960, in a letter to the 1Yi.w York Tlrirnrs, Rarr said, "The artists l e d : the museum follows, exhil?iting, collecting and publishing their
\\-ork. In so cioing it tries to act with both \visdorn and courage, hut also \vith akvareness of its 011-n &illihility."Surely this \\-as the truth, but the very fact that it neecieci to be stated so t3luntly suggeaed that by 1960 there was reason to \\-oncler if things \\-ere really still \\-orking this \\-ay. The essential point is that through most of the '501, ancl to a lesser degree even into the '60s and 'TO%, the value, and reputations that don~inntedthe public art 11-orldm-ere often fc>rrnedin the artists' private art world. The &ime that dc Kooning and Follock achieved in those years \\;is an outgrowth of their downto%-nreputaticrns. 1do not mean ttr suggest that there \\-as ever a time \vhm everything \vent right. Far from it. The gonrr, careerism that \\-e think of as characteri,tic of the '80s had its origins in the '501, ancl there were all\-ays reputations that were largely shapeii by the public art \\-orid. Rut the fact is that, e,pecially in the '50s and '601, a great deal of the art that made its \\-a\-uptonn had its origins 40%-ntonn,in a culture in lvhich public reno%-n, although desirable, \\-as not a formative value, not the litrntlh test it n-ould he once iontextualism was king. lPhtls in the '51)s, and to a lebser extent all the \\-a\-into the '70s, the public art \\-orlci could he said to be an imperfect but still pretty reliable mirror of the artists' art world. \\-here \\-hat really mattered u-as tlie freestanding value of a \\-ark of art. hforc tha.n that, there \\-as a sense among artists, and among those v\-tlo fc,ilo\\-eciart clo,ely, that a public reputation was of value only to the extent that it \\-as seconded by artists. Many of the painters and sculptors \\-h0 crowdeci into the Cedar Ta-ern, the Cireenwkh Village hangout that the Abstract 1:xpressionists made famous in the 19Sf)s,took it for granted that even those \\-h0 had succcedeii upto%-n\\-ould ultimately be jucigeci dolvntown. Some of this was lip service, but rnt~shof it was not. There n-as a story that circulated about how cieliphtell Tackson Follork \\as \\hen Earl Kerkam, a marvelouh painter of figures and still lifes who had an archetypal artists' art world reputation, let him tinon- that some recent \\-ork n-as "'not
t3itci." The point of the anecdote is that Follock. cie\pite his public ktrne. hungereci for a kincl of appmval that only the arti\tsSart \vorlci could provide. In the criticism that the pitinter Fairfield Porter \\;is \\-riting in the early
'hOs, the ktrnous ancl the not-$0-kmous and the barely knolvn are discussed next to one another, and they are judged bitsicallt- not in term, of their success in the big public m-csrltf but in terms of the value thrtt their n-ork has for their peers. No matter how \\-ell-kno\vn an artist became, the jucignlents of fellow arti\ts continued to be extremelt- important, Mark Rothko's depression in the 1060s cannot he separated from his alvareness that many artists and m-riters believed--and
this belief %-asreflected in e5sa)-s in little maga-
zines such as Scrup and E\.ergmi.rr Rerrart.
that he hrtd fallen into a formula,
\\-hich his spectacular success, including a retrospective at the Museum of hfodern Art, son~ehovconly uncierscored. Rothko conlmitted suicide in 1970, dying in a pool of blood in his stuciio. and there is probably more than n kernel of truth to the luridly elaborate hngiograph\- that has gro\\-n up around that terrible event. There \\ere surely many kctors that fueled his nlassive depression. But \\-h0 can deny that Rothko \\-as at lea\t in part unclone t3j- a ktme thttt, ho\ve\-er much he haci hungered for it, dissolveci the very values that had once sustained him? In Rothko's later years, the public art \vorlci and the private art \\-orld \\ere less and less able to i'unctii~neffectively as two sides of a single, relatively \\-ell-integrated organism. n d if this tkx-o-part organism has continucci to operate at all since the '701, it is only heciiuse it's no\\- operating in reverse, \\-ith the public art \\-orld ciictating the term, of the private one. The growing prestige of .%meriran art gave the freestanding value of art a new context. Artists of Rothko's generation t3enefiteci. Then the c o n t n t devoured the art, If 1%-econsider I3uchamp's gnomic observation. made in 1957, to the effect that the spectator "a~iiishis contribution to the rreathe act." \ve may
begin t o sce that this reversal has a kind of I3adaist logic. Certainly, the Dariaists have done their ciamnecie\t to undermine the stand-alone integwty of art. Rut their authority probably originateh in their hilving been the first people to see the m-riting on the \\-all and to how to m-hat they \\-ere not sorry to believe \\as an inevitability. Ry now, in any event. \\-e are all, Datfaists and anti-Dadaists alike, at the mercy of developments that we are at hest ill-equipped to control. And although l\-e can dexribe these develc,pment =with a gciod deal of accuracy, we may never come up l\-ith a theory that explain5 them entirely to our satiskiction. \%%at m-e do knoll- is that in the nineteenth century the collapse of the old system of Salons and academies set the stage for an increasingly improvi3;ltional interaction between artist and atxdience-and
h r the incandescent excitement of the avant-
garde. Rut apparently a creatWe relationship het\\-een the artist ancl the audience coulci also turn into a collusive relationship t3etiveen avant-gardism and populism. liltimately, t h i increasingly compromised alliance endangercci the arti\t's hard-\\-on modern st;ltuh a\ the person \\-h0 makes private expe"ienr-es public. The t3eginning of the end came \\-ith the explosion of Pop r t in the early 1060s. Rut if I am rorrcc t in t3elieving that the hostilitv to art's standalone poll-er has a long history, then Pop Art \\-as less a catiilyzing force than a neat conclusion. Pop Art's subject lnatter dramatized the shift from a private to a public avant-garde because so many of those Fop image$ and motifs \\ere drawn from material that had no private nleaning for the artists. hndy W~rhol.who came out of the \vorld of adverti\ing, defi~leda nem- kind of art world career-the e .t
career that \\-as conciucteci entirely in the public
that point the public art \\-orld became self-perpetuittinp; or at least
it \\-as then tha.t want-garde art came to be tied to market values rather than to arti\tic valtre\.
A whole culture has g r o ~ - nup in Karhol" 11-ake,a L-nlturethat h!- now include\ its c,\;\-neducational institutions, such ar the <:alifc,rnia Ir~stituteof the Arts, where students are taught little, it seems to me, beyond hou- to have public art world careers. At such institutions, the keestanding value of art is an arcane idea-ar
o d ~ iancl , maybe as oddly charming, ar not \\-raring
\\-hite shoes before Memorial Ilay. The public art \vorlci has hecome self-perpetuating. (:ontextualists are, of course, masters of self-perpetuation. As for the private art world, it has twcorne inrrearingly isolatecl, fracturecl, frozen.
K h e n I talk =with literary people about \\-hat's going on in the art \vorlci, they often see parallels het\\-een art hype and hook hype, and to some extent
I suppo\e these analogies make sense. As a parallel to the artists' arti\ts. to figures like Rarbara Goodstein and Stanle\- Lewis. literary friends \\-ill think of writers' writers and poets' poets. The literary 11-orld,especially in the midst of the conglomeration of publishing in the '90s. offers plenty of analogies. Rut I think that there is reason to t,elie\-e that the art \vorlil is even n ~ o r evulmrable to media forces than the literary m-csrld. Kcxks csf art, \\-hich can be taken in \vith a single glance, create an illusion of instant capture, in\tant expertise. hlthcjugh even a vaguely crcclihle opinion about a novel will involve putting in the number of hours it takes to get through at leart n p u t of the hook, all it takes to have a vaguely credible opinion about of \-our head around a gallery. Visual art a painting by David Salle is n ~1%-erve provides people =with the promise of instant access. Ancl the art that gets the attention satisfies that neecl f m quick satisfaction-it's
all up front, there are
no nuances or mysteries to unravel. It never takes you out of this 11-orld. hfuseums have become the pLrlces where the contemporay art hype reaches the boiling point. The museum, expect to cira\\- audiences of a size
that they never clreanled of before, and they uncierstandrtbly feel that this mlargeci public needs to be given a carefully shaped and predigesteci view of contemporary art. In order to create this neatly tailored picture, curators \\-illfully deny the variety of the contemporary scene; they can't be bothered =with stand-alone. private experiences. liven as the number of arti\ts at \\-ork has expanded geometrically, the number of artists inilucieci in major survevs has p l t ~ n ~ ~ n e tAe dgeneraticrn . ago, the important contemporary ilverviea-s held at the W'hitney in New Ut3rk and
thc I:arnegie in Pittsburgh
contiiined 100 or more artists: today they oftm include n half, or n quarter,
of that ntrmber. The truth is that the old surveys were ciften criticized for their eclecticism and their aimlessnecrs, but in retrclspect u-e can sec that at l e a t they gave a large number of artists some access to a muheurn audie n c e a n c i vice versa. At the same time. they kept curators out of the godlike ptssitiiin they have achieved in recent years. Those older surveys \I-eren't summaries of trends, they were designed fcjr an audience ll-ith some sophistication. an audience that could deal with the varietv of contemporary developments. Today's surveys aren't really surveys at all, they're more like quickie summaries. Museumgoers may feel less overlhelmed, but from the artist's point of vie&-the result is that there are far more artists jockeying for kir fen-er plarcs. n d this means that there's less chance of an artist's m-ork getting to the public. The new surveys are a big lie. snoN- j o h that clistanre the auciience from \\-hat's really going on. The changes in survey she\\-s are only one sign of the increasingly restricted opportunities open to those artists \I-ho are determined to follontheir o\vn lights and create work that does not fit ea\ily with the art \\-orld's formulaic expectations. Another problem is the art magazine,. lvhich have in the p;t\t tkx-enty years largely ahitndoned their old job of reporting what
gee, on in the galleries and instead have become publicitv machines for art stars anci art star \v;innabes. In the '50s and '60s any artist \vho managed to
have a s h o in ~ New York (:it\- was virtually guitranteed at least a brief revieu-. Mo\t revie\\-*at that time were really substantial: the\- really clelved into the 11-ork.They n-ere kvritten by amazingly astute critics, such as the artists Donald j'ud~i.Siciney Tillim. and Fairfield Porter, and the poet lames Schuyler. The importance of short revie\\-$for the art cornmunit\- ciinnot be c,\-erestimated. They nmclunt to n kind of kvritten conversation about art, n reflection of the dialogue that's going on among the artists. Yet now, even \I-ith hundreds more vlleries, fewer s h m - \ are revieu-ed than ever before. The art market, like any area of life in \\-hich large sum, of money arc at stake. has exerted a hszination practically forever. yet there has p r o h a b l ~ never been a time \\-hen the writers and curators and gallery 0%-ners\\-h0 present art to the public have been so 11-illing to all011 content to dissolve into the marketing context. In the pitrt deca~le,an extraordinar\- anlount of attention. both in the art press ancl the main\tream media, has fr~cusedon the crazy prices pitid for contemporary art at auctions and on the 1v;liting lists at the blue-chip pllleries. In the spring of 1999.11-arksby contemporary artists, among them Robert (Goher, 11-ent at auction fcjr a nulnber of price5 in the h~rndredsof tli~ousancisofdollars. This nevc-s har a fascination; but it also leaves a lot of people feeling distanced from contemporary art. Thirty years ago, iollecting iontempcxay art \\-as somrthing that many eciuc;lted people clid, at least in a small \\-a\-.If you c o u l h ' t affc~rdthe paintings, you might buy trriginal graptlics by Picasso and X/lati\se-not
to men-
tion lvorks on pitper l,\- contemporary m e r i c a n s . In fact, it is still possible to collect u-orks of yt~alityfor a feu- thousand dollars. Rut the new4 of the immense prices that are being paid for works by Schnahel and Rasquiatand, now, Shermnn and (Goher-makes
people believe that all art that's
\\-orth having is expensive. And that ties right into the deeper feeling that art no longer has a stand-alone impact, an impact that people can re\pond to irrespective of prices, labels. reputations. n d so lve're losing the old au-
dience of sc~metirneart c-ollectors-the
collectors cif moderate means. The
hype makes people feel that art is out of reach. flverywhere I look there arc signs of diminishing opportunities for seri<,usl\-ork to he seen and discussed. In an article in the A r t lounrui---puhlisk~ed
l,\- the College Art Association. \\-hich is the professional organization for artists and art historims----the painter Philip Pearlstein has discussed n kind of censorship that is not often even recognized. Pearlstein tells of sitting on art panels at the YEA and other institutions where the basic asstlmption is that certain stvles in =which the public art \\-orld isn't interesteci can simply be excluded from cc~nsideration.Among the styles Pearlstein cites arc various kinds of representiitional pitinting ancl \\-hat he calls traditional ahstraction: types of v,-ork, in short. that arc grounded in a belief in the stand-alone value of art. (;rants, even snlail ones, have st~stainedmany unionventional artists. But in recent years, moit grant-giving processes have become t~cspeIessly tied to the market va1~e)of the public art m-orld. K e live in a trickle-cio\\-n art \\orid. Khatever attention and support doesn't go to the art stars seem, to go to their clone,. Art teaching is ciominated by the kvannabes; and all they cio is teach stucients to mimic art-star vait~e\,\\-hich is aI1 they, the teachers, kntrkv h w to do. Kba.t's gcling m in the art schools may be the most ciisa\trous development of all. In the past forty years, the teaching of art in structured academic settings has helpeii sustain pitinting and sculpture in Ye\\-York and the rest of the country. Far from being hiding places for failed artists. art departments have been places \\-here artists \\-h0 \\ere too unconventional or independent to prosper in the marketplace have been able to sustain an art culture of their own. After the 11-ar,arti,ts, among them Ad Reinhardt and Mark liothko, made BrookIyn College one of the country's great art departments. In the early '705,
\\-hen I \\-;is planning to be a painter. some schools still had that kincl of generative power, notably the pitinting depitrtment of the Kansa, City Art In-
stitu te, under the direction of T i l b ~ l rNie\vald, and the (Graduate Program of (2ueens College. \\-here Louis Finkelstein, Rosemarie Beck, and Gahriel Laclerman. among others. \\-ere all teaching. As late as the '70%.the academic net\%-ork,the grant-giving network. and the gallery network \\ere functioning much as thev had in the 'SOS, and in some cases functioning better than they ever haci before. In the '80s. however, every a\pect of the art \vorld began to feel the pressure of the market. for there seemed to he feb-er and fener people who t3elieved that \vh;tt commantled high prices might not he more or less synonymous with \\-hat m-as good. liniversjty administrators became all too conscious of the public art \\-orld, and they began to expect their departments to reflect putdic art \\-orld value,. Something in the inefhhle mix of art and glamour that had attracted Khll Street to SciHo in the first place had an equally stnjng impact on ncadelnics and other intellectuals \\-h0 hilve little. financi~tllyspeaking, to gain. The academics. \\-h0 are more oftm than not inclined to think rontextually, didn't \\ant to he excluded from the party. The party \\-as in full sb-ing in SoMo in the early '80s. Then K'arholism and Keapanomics fell into t3eci together. Then their love child, Robert Mapplethorpe. \\its transformed from a clever aesthete into a martyr at the altar of political art. n d once all this had happened, nol7ody coulci tell any longer \\-here market pressures left off and the pressures of political correctness began. The Left might have been expected to approach a t3ooming art market \\-ith a certain degree of skepticism, hut in recent years this does not seem. l>\-and large, to have been the case. For those \vho arc inclined to see arti\tic vision as essentially grounded in economic or social hctors. the ever-gro\ving pcnver of the market is so perfectly logical a cievelopment that it can inl he regarded by Leftist scholars as a spire glee a\ ea\ily as ~lisrnay.W ~ r h omay kind of demc~nicfigure, hut they can hardly help feeling that he's just the demon the story needed. In the early "Qs, \\-hen 1Varhol fitled canvases with
nothing but dollar signs, he gave these art historians the perfect finish to all their studies of the rise of the market. And the market itself ran begin to look like a radical force-a
force that explodes \\-hat many are inclined to
believe is an antiquated idea of the arti\t as an individual. In the '70s and early '80s an artist pitinting small landscapes or ahstractions \\-ould have been tolci by ciralers that \\-hat the money people \\-anted \I-asn't "just another" landscape or abstraction, no matter ~ O M goad. B\- the late '80s that same a r t i s t l f that artist happened to he a 11-oman-1-ould be tolci by many critics that she haci no right to paint in a traditional genre because those genres m-ere male-dominated. For intellectuals \vho m-ere hasicaljy fdmiliar m-ith nothing hut public art \\-orid value\. the economic rationale ancl the political rationale began to converge. It cioesn't seem to matter that we are living in a period when, for the first time in history, \\-omen are making the high-art trariitions absolutely their 0%-nand proving in the pmcess that trariition is gender blind. The bottom line is that the \\-hole strtlcture that has st~stainedart in this country has come to be clorninated by public art \\-orld values-that
is, l,\- market-iiriven art. The artists
\I-ho are committed remain, but the\- are frighteningly isolated.
The Deal A4akpr.s As the '90s got t~ndrr\\-ay,the VVal1 Street money that had fueleJ the art orgy csf the '80s evapc~rated.I k r n all sides thew were announcements that the unholy marriage of Khrholism and Reaganomics that had set the art \\-orld spinning haci collapsed. Art hjpe, many imagined. \\-as a thing of the part. h i t i c l n prices plummeted, and gItl1et.ie.t that had only recentlv clpened their doors \\-ere clohing. This. at least, is the story that is generally told. It is accurate in
S I I I L I ~of
its specifics: the t ~ n s ~ auction ld loth, the col-
liipsing real estate values. Rut those m-ho imagined that the insane expecta-
tions of the '80s-art
as a fix, as an ever-changing ciecor-\voulci
ciie along
\%-ithI)rexel Burn ham 1,amhert \%-eretotally mistaken. It was simply impossible that reputations on which so much attention had been lavished v\-ould t-te allo\veii to disappear. The people who hjpe art still believe that the hype makes sense. ( )ne of the most depressing de~elopmentsof the '90s has been the inristence with =which reputations that not even the trenclies care about are paindessiy mhtained. Who any longer gives a d a m n al?out Haim Steint-tach's shelves lined \%-ithbtlvablesi Yet the work is still reviewed in the iYozv
firk Tltrti's. Ti, do otherwise would be to reveal that the emperors of the 38f)s never had an!; dothes. In the '80%a lot of people \vould have said that \ve \%-ereliving in the Age of the Art Stars. As fcx the '90,. I think kve'cl probably hilve to call this the Age of the Ileal Makers. This is the apotheoris of context, the final annihilation of cc~ntent.Of course the deals are often tfeligned to keep the art stars' reputations alive. The deal makers inclucie some commercial dealers, along \%-ithsome c-trrators, s o n ~ emuseum direc-tors, and some collectcirs--7ho not inirequentlv double ai, museunl trusteer. But the individuals-a is the kev to unclerstancling the g e of the Ileal Makers-are
this
less significant
t h n the svnergy I-tetm-een the players. The deal maker isn't in the business of making judgment about art. There people may represent the ultimate triumph of the public art n-orld in that they coultfn? care less what artists think or feel or do in the privacy of their studios. Deal makers approitch artists and art in the same spirit that thev approach museums. galleries. collectors, ctlrators, and critics. For the deal maker, noholty and no thing has a freertancling value; there is no such thing as an artist's imagination. If you're u it a deal maker, you m-ill find an nrtirt's work interesting became y ~ think \%-illlook goad in a """in
spare: you \\ant to fill the space so you can get
attention a d k i n g in the cram-JI; and you want t o bring in the
cro\\-ds so that donors will decide that yours is the hot institution and give money for a building expansion. The mo\t spectacular representative of the Age of the Deal Makers is T h o m s Krens, the director of the Ckggenheim Museum for the past decade. From the t3eginning. Krens lookeci at the (;uggmheim in term, of its assets. He had a legenclary building ciesipned by Frank Llo)-ii Kright: he had a 11-orldclars cclllection of classic modern art; he had name recognition. Doe, Krens like rno~iernart! Iloes he like Kright's t3uilriing! K h o knows? K h o cares! At first Krens's plan to turn the Gugpenheim into an international operation came up against a considerable amount of hometokvn res e n t m n t : Nem- Yorkers felt that the Cirrggenheim was a Manhattan institution and ought to remain that \\-ay. Rut the ineluctable logic of the deal makers is &l\\-a\-,centrifugal movement. and \\-hat Krens sit\\- in the (Guggenheim m-ere marketable arrets. Krens has a sensibility, hut it has nothing to d o \\-ith art. This is a marketer's sensibility, a feel for international deals that involve po&-erfulpeople plqing ball \\-ith other pc,\verful people. The (Guggenheim collection and the (;uggenheim name coulci be offered to foreign governments. Those governmmts \\-ould pay to t3uild new satellite (Guggenheims, such as Frank (Gehry's museum in Bilbao, Spain. Ancl the expanding empire would attrat-t new money. "'The ,%rtof the Motorcycle," the exhiisition of more than a hundred big bikes that filled Frank Llo)-ii Kright's (;uggenheim Museum in the summer of 1998 and broke all the museum's previous attendance records, n-as the apotheosis of the art of the deal. As n museum concept, "The Art of the Motorcycle" \\-as bottom feeding for the f;l,hion conscious. Krens, a bike aficionado himselt; who could not hilve done the she\\- m-ithciut the corporate support of BMNI, \\-as rcasburing anybody \\-h0 has ever had a guiltily amt3ir;ilent feeling about the mvsterious othernehs of modern art that the dream \\-as der~dancl the\; \\-ere ciff the hook. He acted ar if "The Art of the
Motorc\cle" \\-as a public service-a "very serious project." If he \\;is serious about anything, it was about fulfiiling some ultimate macho kintiisy. Rasicall,, \\hat y ~ had u here \\-as an exhibit that was tailor-made to delight the
m11 Street Masters of the Univerrc \vho helped Krens transfc3rm the Guggenl~ein~ into an international entertainment ci>nortium.Writh lirens, the public art \vorlci twcornes the multinational art \\-orld. Dennis Hopper. \vho \\-as motorcycle crazy long before he directeci
Rz~itar,ot,serveci in the exhibition catalog that \\-hat had first attracted him to bikers \\;is their not being "corporate tie-\\-ielciing execs from R l l Street." Rut of course a great many of the hikes at the (;uggenheim m-ere nlway, rich men's toys, and there is no way this show ever m-ould have played the (Guggenheim if n lot of the "corporate tie-11-ielding execr" \\-h0 support Krens had not likcci the 13ike-as-art equittion. Krens is telling the new museum tvcoons that they don't have to like pitintings and sculptures much in ilrder to get into this erctusive club. ".Zn art museum's special est~ibitions programming should fit into n strategic plan." Krens expliiined of "The .4rt of the Motorcycle." And \\-hat better strategic plan could Krens have offered his pittrons than one that began by gi\ing them the opportunity to trade in their rep ties for black leather jackets! Perhaps the deepest irony of Krens's tenure at the (Guggenheim is th;tt he has raised this mega-public institution on the foundations of a museum that \\-as originally iiedicated to some of the least popular of all modern art. In its first incarnation, as the Museum of Non-Objective Fainting, the (Guggenheim opened on East 54th Street in 19.19 and fcatureci abstract paintings by Kandinsky and others that \\-ere still less than beloveci at the Museunl of Modern Art, \\here the audience haci only recently made its peace \vith the Fc)\timpressionists. The Museum of Non-Objective Fainting \\;is meant to bring the put,lic up to speed \vith what the mo\t aloofly experimental artists \\-ere doing; non-objective pitinting still remain\ a reach for many museum-
goers. Yet the very idea of cultural aspiration, lvhich once fueleci the public's strtlgple tii grasp an artiilt's nmcist private expressions, is nom- regaded as fuddv-iiuddy stuff, at least by Thorn%\Krens. Krens has become the cheerfully clark prophet of museological pragmatism. Small-as
the Guggenheiru once m-as-is
not o d y no longer consid-
ercci beautiful; it's seen a\ stupid. Krens claims to face hard facts that other museum directors avoid. m-hen he argue* that he need, glnmc~rousinternational partnerships to pa\- the bills and that he must turn the nluseum into an art lnultiplex in order to bring in the crokvds. Rut \\hat some call h o ~ - ing to the inevitable mai- in fact be a tragic lark of imagination that turn5 our \\-orst-ca\e sc-cnariointo our o d y option.
In the '805. criticism5 of the art lvorld status quo had a certain cachet. Rut in their 0%-n\\-a\-the brilliant critiques--7hich
reached a peak of comic mis-
chevotlsness in "The Sohoiad,'Yffobert Hughes's "Satire in Heroic <:(>uplets Drawn from Life," published in the ~YPW York Rniint t j f B i l i l k ~in 1984----co~lclhe a* destructive as the hype. li'hen n m-itty 11-ritcr turns the art 11-orld into n grotesque carnival, we have another, cleverer form of contextualiration. and the result may he that people give up on contemporary art entirely. And \\-hen that happens, brilliant. dedicated artists arc in clanger of being ignorcci along \\-ith the hype artists. In the '80s. it was all too easy to mock the big money and the glamour; anti-hjpe could become another kind of hype. In the '90s, though. a nlilder tone of bemused acceptance has come into kivor, mai-he because critics are &\\;ire that nothing the\- say makes much of a difference. When the 1995 li'hitnev Biennial opened, three major critics \\-horn one \\-ould not have expecteci to agree about much of an)thing came out m-ith the phrases "I like thi, one" or "I like it." This was said 11-ithn cer-
tain archness, with a sort of sigh. "Like" is s t ~ c ha bland word, and it \I-as used for its blandne,~.I think that critics \\-ere struggling to find a \\-ay to re\pond to the Age of the Deal Makers. They knew that if they tried to argue with the art. or with the curator's underlying assumptions, they \\-ould get no\\-here. The deal had been cut. The case m-as clo\ed, But of course the case is not closed. The artists are still working, and there is an eciurated auciience that \\-ants to understand why things have gone so \\-rang. The only experience I find more depressing than \\-alking thmugh the \XrhitneyBiennials is reading the critics \\-h0 say. "Yes, it's had. but this is \\hat there is." Khen I go thmugh those Biennials, m!- reaction is different. "Yes, this is bad," I ttt~ink,"and it's bad bemuse it excludes everything vital and exciting in m t e r n p o r a r v art." I'm wondering \\-h? Rafbara (Goodstein and Strtnle~Le\;\-isand tlozens of other artists haven't E-teen included--and
among the artists m-e haven't seen in these she\\-s in recent
years are pitinters as \\ell-kno\vn a, Rill lensen and loitn Snvder. Ti.,iia)- the mo\t radical thing an artist can do is paint a tightly structured and internally coherent painting, yet e v m if there is a single major curator in this c o r n a y who ha.s the brains to recisgnize such \\-ork, there is not a single one
\\-h0 has the guts to give that \vork institutional support. The real artists are still \\-orking. The tragedy is that they have no \\;I!-
of making contact with
the audience that really cares. K h a t is to E-te done? The only solution is for people to E-tegin to put E-titck together the structures that have histt~ricallysuppc~rtedthe artists' art 'i\-orld in the ITnited State\. lye need dealers, c-ollectors, critics, and curators
\\-h0 \\-ill stand up for the freestanding value of art-day
by dav. case by raw.
(Given h m - far matters have gone. I am not sure this renekved support is any longer fea,ihle, but there is nothing to do hut give it n try. I can understand
\\-h\ the big museum, are unable to respond to all the cliss;ttisfidction out therc: they're basically in thrall to the money interests. to the deal makers.
Rut I do \\-oncler 11-hywe aren't seeing more innovative programming in the smaller museums. where there may still be some independent curators and trustees left. And \\-h3t about the college\ and t~niversities,u-hich have their own net\%-orkof galleries and small collections? People \\-h0 still t,elie\-e in a private art \vorld must pool their resources. The effort has txgun. One example is the small retrospective of work by Louisa Matthiasdottir. the grandest still life painter of recent cleca~le\.\\-hich tourcc1 roughly a dozen colleges and unkersities in the mid-'90s. \Ye need n ~ o r cshon-s like this, I am also looking for a new gemration of art ~lealers \\-ho, beginning slo\vl\- and building on that tremendous stock of gifted artists no\\ in their 30s and 40s and 505, create galleries m-here, as Clement C;reenberp once m-rote of the Retty Pi~rsonsGallery. "art gee, on and is not just s h i i ~ - n and sold." To he sure, it's harder to operate such a gallery tha.n it \\;is for Retty Farsons or j'ulien I.ev\-: it costs so n ~ u c hmore to run a dignified operation th;tn it did forty or fifty years ago. But our hest hope may still rest \\-ith the rise of a n e n gmeration of gallery 0%-ners\\-h0 are independent and committed--\\-h0
carry on in the great tradition of early-
twentieth-century Paris and mid-century S e w York, n-hen dealers knell\\-hat it nleant to cast their lot with a community of artists. The greate" danger is the sense of hopelessness among the artists. They desprately need a ne\\ \\aye of dedicated cle;tlrrs; more eager, infcjrmed collectors: n determination on the part of smaller museums to exhibit. document. and preserve uncompromisingly independent contemporary art: an upsurge of serious critical kvritinp; ad~iitionalforums m-here nrti\t\ can get together and talk. The public art world has t~ecomesuch an over%-helmingl\- oppressive force in arti\ts9lives that many painters and sculptors have already given up hope that the reveliitions that sustain them in the studio \\-ill ever again have a public presence. Once upon a time a major arti\t \\;is a person like \Yillem de Kooning, who came up through the ranks and
never forgot that he \\;is a part of a community of artists. Ti.,iia\- a major artist is a person like Jeff Koons, who has oversized knickknacks manuhctured by hired hands and doesn't knoll- that there is a cornmunit\- of artists and is proud of his ignorance. So kir as Knons is concerned, the deal nxiliers are the only artists left standing. Koons is one of them. K h a t y ) u see \\hen
you compare de Kclnning and Koons is not a difference in quality or degree. It's a difference in kind. The art \\-orld has become the most glamomus \vilderness imaginable, be\\-itdling and nurnl-ting at the samr time. it ma?. he overstating the case to say that the future of art is in the t3;tlanrc. But most of the artists to \\horn I talk believe that \ve are Lising in \er>-ciark time,. If arti\ts and audiences can confront the full extent of their alienation, ma\-be then people can hegin to shake off that smse of hopelessness and things can start to turn around. If this is going to happen, it \\-ill involve a lot of small arts of courage, all of them animatecl t3j- a \\-illingness to reject r o n v e h o n a l taste and ronventional 11-isdom all along the Line. The artists \I-ho are most deeply cc~mmitteci to \\hat they're cioing in the studio have to reestablish contact with the audience that hates the hype.
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CONTEMPORARY
DEVELOPMENTS
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TWOMBLV TIME
The idea that art began \\hen somehodv impulsively scratched something on a \\-all \\-ill do just fine as a creation myth for painters, Why that first artiit made thrtt first mark, however, is subject to as many different interpretatic~nsa* there are time* \\hen artists have thought about the origins of art. In the late 1700s. \\hen European painters were on the verge of a century of realist revolutions, some artists were attracted to a Greek legend that stated that the inventor of painting \I-asa woman, a (:orinthian maiden \I-ho decided to trace the profile of her soon-to-be-departed lover on a \I-all, This storv, U-fiiclicombined a clrt\siial setting, a romantic sentiment, and a realist impulse, suited an age that occasionally could \velci such apparently divergent sensibilities into bold historical drama. But in more recent t i m e , \\-hen abstraction rather than imitation has been the artiit's ciefini~lgexperience, the origin m!-ths that have interesteci people have had a less clearcat narrative. Henri Focillon, the French writer \\-hose 1936 e,say "In Praise of Hands" came out of the Expressionist impulses of early-tm-entieth-century European art. pudied the beginning hack from Corinth to the Age of the Titans. He suggesteel that \\-hat was essential \\-as not han~i-eyecoordination, hut the tiand's inherent capacities-its
delicate yet forceful musculauitv and its
tactile sensitivity. Focillon imagined a centaur in a forest, ancl how, while moving along on his four hooves. the mythological heaht would be "inhaling the \\-orld thmugh his hands, stretching his fingers into a web to catch the imponderable." "The hand's trial,. experiments and divinations." I'orilIon believed. were still going on in artists' studio\ in the twentieth century. And \\-hen I'orillon's essay appeareci in Nen York in 1948, under the imprint
of the art book pt~hlistterKittenborn, there \\-as a
Korld atldience that
\\-asprimed to receive the melsitge thzt the magic is in the making. It has been just at-tout fift!- years since Focillon's essay appeared here. That is both a very long time and a very short time so far as art is concerned. And even though the idea of the artist as a magician has been attacked fi-om every imaginable angle in the past severat years, this remains the only- m\-th t-tj- =which anybody who gee, into a studio and gets clown to work on a regu-
lar basis can seem tts live. Artists stiII bef~evethat the inlplrlse t o make marks predates the impulse to represent, nncl the\- have made painterliness the hfanhattan version of naturalness-a naturalness that can E-te turned to contradictory ends and that often seems, even \\-hen it iignorecl or attacked, to be honored in the breach. In the pit\t fen- years we have seen a number of museum retrospecthes in lvhich contemporary artists are illtent on demonstrating that in the beginning and in the end there is nothing hut the mark. The5e shc3\vs-devotecl and, no%-,
Tkl-omhly-have
to Rohert Ryman. Killem d r Kooning.
underlined both the potency of a great ori-
gin myth and the clangers in store for any artist \vho expects a limited definition of painting t o he relevant t~ the Fir-from-limited number of situittions that present themselves over a lifetime of v.-ork.
Cy Tm~ornhly,\\-hose retrospective is at the Museum of Modern Art this fall, likes a classical a\sociation, ancl he probably \voulLln't mind our imagining that in nlore than a few- of his canva\es a centaur has clone some ti11ger painting. That Tuomhly has often made his painterly marks m-ith pencil or crayon doesn't s ~ g g e \at rejection of the painterly gesture so much as the relevance of that mark to a range of unconventional situittions. T\\-omhly is saying that he's painting even \\-hen he's not pitinting. There are classical titles and inscriptions clerived from Greek and Roman lvriters scattered through the \\-ork of this artist \\-h0 has made his home in Italy since the late 1950s (he's 65). These antique allusions give his late modern improvisa-
tional manner, \\-ith its big expanses of emptv lvhite canvas. a feeling of heing groundeci in the lvhite marble lan~lscapeof classical legend. T\%-o~-r,mbl\gives the impression that he's a contemporary artist with fi11e premodem credentials. The T\\-omhly sho\v. \\-hich \\-as organized bj- I
-presmts a careful, chronological vie&-of the career. the show sugge\t"that
the \\-a\- to understan~iTm~omhlyis in terms
of a cyclical, rather than a linear, development.
rZ small repertoire of
themes and motih, almost all of them in place very near the t3eginning. have been reappearing for more than forty years. T\~ombly'smost ardent fans may leave the retrospective feeling that they \vould like to see more. \\-hich is not the \\-orst feeling to have at the end of a big sho\v. Those \vho don? care fcjr the jq-ork \\-ill find that thei-ke reactled the end cif the show t3efore they've reached the end of their mpe. T~x~ornbly knm-s hen- to maximize his gift for deft, elegant effects, or at lea\t he used to know hm-, in the first piirt of his career. up until the mid1960s. Looking at these sand- and $no%--and ivory- ancl slate-colored paintings, a mtlsetlmgoer takes in one incident and then another incident, and there's plea\urc to he derived from the smsiti\itv with lvhich T\\-omhly engraves a pencil line into thick pitint or tkx-irls together little puffs of pigment. His work can he interpreted as n textbook e x m p l e of late modern Expressionism; the living painters v\-hoend up \\-it11 rctrclspectives at the hfuse~rrn of Modern Art are often the ones whose work appears to have an educational purpose. T\~omblypresmts self-conscious a\vku;irdne,s as virtuosity. He uses substructures a\ surfaces. He asks the part to stand in for the m-hole.
All of thew arc familiar, and in some cases do\.\-nright venerable, modern
techniques. Especially in the paintings of the mid-1950s. T\%-omblymakes good use of an image that is cleriveci from de Kooning: the stroke that turns abruptly at a ninety-degree angle. and in the act of "bending over" creates n hairpin t u r n in space. In space-malijng terms, this is the m i s t that T\t~omblyever manage\ to do. The pitintings are full of small, t3eguiling effccts. T\\-omhly sees a canvas a\ an idic~s)-ncraticalkornamented surface. This sort of surEace. somewhere t,etv,-een a notel3ook page and a graffiti-scarreci \\-all, \\-as already in clanger of becoming overlv self-conscious \\-hen Miri, \\-as doing h i emptied-out picture poem\ in the 1920s. T\vomhly's rectangle of canvah, with the m-eave of the fabric either she\\-ing or covered over by n thick layer of kihite or gray paint, in bulletin hoard on =which the artist posts lots of messages. (The gray paintings with white lines from the 1960s have been referred to as chalkhoards or blackboards, for ohvic~usreasons.) Although T~\~ombl\may insl-ribe more \\-ords in his hrd-to-past;" klancfkx7riting tha.n most people are going to \\-ant to take the time to reacl, these bits of poetry and verbid graffiti do add another dimension to his \crawled and siratshed abstract images.
Among the cryptic and not-so-cryptic messages that T\vombly includes are clnsicitl place names ancl pornogriiphic squiggles. A11 announcements, he seems to suggest, are equal. There's taste and intelligence and wit to these canva\es, but there is no heedlessness. T\\-ombl\-knows h o ~to- scatter bits across a big surkize, he understands ho\\ to rnxvd things for an effect. and he knm-s how to adjust the rhythms. Yet the experience of the pitintings remains additive-that's
the
t3ipgeg ppml?lem \vith the \\-ork. The pitinters \vho give us an experience of magical amplitude find \\-a=,-, to make their effccts expiincl almost geometricall\-; they convince us that the world they've created is some\\-hat beyond their rontn,l, that two plus t\\-o equals a lot more than fi~ur.T\\-ombly never manages to make that happen. His painting are designed, not composed.
It doesn't help that T\\-omhly is no colorist. There is some varietv to his palette. and he's certiiinly attuned to the individualitv of the patches of pigment that he arrange* on n canva*, hut he doem't knoll- how to orchestrate colors. For most of the show, he makes a virtue of this liability; only in the last few room, doe, he attempt some color coml-tinatic~nsthat are really beyond him. In the recent Four
Suilsi~ricycle.
T\%-omblyseem, to be trying to
learn n thing or two from the late Toan Mitchell, hut his juxtapositions of yello\v and blue and purple and green have no impact. The work doe\n3t take off. The key to T\\-omhly's small poetic originality rests in the \\-a\-that he isolates each element. 13-en\\hen he overlaps things---a crahl-t~scra\vl, a doodle of paint-eac
h l-tit retains its cool. stand-alone personality. The self-
consciousness of this m-csrk rnakes a museumgoer feel self-conscious. rZ day or two after y s u see the Tm~omhlyshci&-,\\-hat you mai- recall is all the careful looking that you clid, rather than an)thing that you artu:tlly saw.
l r i s i t ~ r sto the Tw/-t>n~hlv ehihititrn at the Modern-and been reaJifig al-tout Tlrc-ornbly in the press-\\-ill
anyhoJ!. v\-ho's
quite n a t u r a v \\-oncler
\I%\- it ib that so much attention is focused on a partiiulau arti\t at a partii-
ular time. The retrospective provide, an occasion, but of course some retrocase, the aviditv spective~garner more attentian t h n others. In T\"r-omb1~'s \\-ith \\-hich he ancl his \\-ork are being examineif suggests something about the m!-sterious movements of artistic sensil-tility.Transformations in taste may appear to be shaf-ted by the peiipie in the museilrns and the auction houses and the t3lue-chip galleries. Rut as often as not, taste percolates up\\-ard, \vith ideas and apprehensions that first take hold in the stuciios of a considerable nulnber of artists someho\v finding their way into the wider \\-orld. Although hshion can be a crucir but useful barometer of evolutionary trends and gecilogicitl shifts in the thinking of arti\ts, there are transfr~rmaticjns that occur over periods of years and even decades jq-ith
3
sIo%--movingforce that the audience, if it's overly concerned with \\hat's happening this m o n t t ~or this season, \\-ill be ha.rd put to compreknd.
In T\x7omhly, Kirk Iiarnedoe ha4 surely found a big-name artist kvhose ability to he both unabashedly lyricid and dryly ironic about his 0%-nlyrici\m defines, thmugh its very paradox. haute taste in 19%; you might say that T\~ombly'scharm rests in his not resolving a paradc~xso much as he enshrines it. Historically speaking. T\vombly's brand of painterline\* comes a g e n ~ a t i o nor two after de Kooning's (\vhose retrospective icurrently plzii-ing opposite T\\-ombl~'sat the Metropolitan Museum of .4rt) and perhaps half
3
generation before Rolxrt Ryman's (whose retmspective \\;is at
the Mc>derna year ago). T\vombly certainly offers a muheurngoer a lot more than that painterlv M i n i m a l i ~Robert Ryman. whose lvhite brushstrokes are so evenly inflected that every mark is canceled out by every other oneand a viewer is left feeling hi-almed. An artist who marshals his slim painterly resources as rigidly as R\-man must have some inkling of the numbing effect that his j\-ork is going to have on many museumgoers. Rut the off-p~lttingregularity of some of the later galleries in the de Kooning retmspective suggests that even an arti\t of infinitely greater gifts than Rynlan. when his essential subject is the individualism of the hushstroke j\-ithin the pluralism of the painang. cannot expect the most t3eautiful pasxsof the brush to sustain our interest over the course of a long career.
De Kooning, \vho at 90 is no longer painting. used to handle a paint-saturated hruhh with more wit and elegance than anybody else in .4mericit. No lifeu7ork based on the cult cif the brushstroke rivals the l->rilIianceand fkscination of iie Kooning's. Still. by the late '50s, the preoccupation lvith passagework over bro;.tJ cor7tlpositionai movelnents led to a diminishment in de Kooning's work, and at that point T~x~ornbly kicked in \I-ith his 0%-ntake on de Kooningecyue diminishment. T\\-ombly didn't study 11-ith de Kooning, hut cie Kc~nninghad taught at Black Mc>untainCollege in North Car-
olina before Tkx7ombly got there, a d the 1)utchman's \\-ark m-as,cif ccsurse, a nlajisr inflt~enceat the school. T\x-omblv join\ a studied severity that is not unlike Ryman's to a giddy painterliness that is not unlike de Kooning's, and brings o u t a strain of coolly nihilisac painterliness that runs straight thmugh hit\- years of the Sihool of Ne\v York. Kc cfidn't neeci a T\\-omhly retrospective or a dc Kclnning retmspective to demonstrate that these veteran artists arc on a lot of \-cjunger artists' minds. liven kvithout the shm-S,it's abundantly apparent that '50s--style painterliness is resurgent. often \vith an ironic edge. In part this is a generational thing. Arti\ts in their 40s arc kiscinated by the mid-century years; they feel an almo\t lnagnetic pull hack to the world as it \\-as\\hen they \\-ere young. There have been rncinths in New York \"Y-hen-between the shcikvs at the Fainting Center. Andre Zarre. 55 Mercer. and a number of other LION-ntokvn gallrries-it's
been clear that the impact of de Kooning's bravura brush-
\\-ork on Twomhlv and countless artists \vho were exhibiting along 10th Street in the 1950s has reappeared, phoenixlfke, in the SoHo of the ttr)c)l)s. Solne of this may he cop\-cat stuff; a lot of it is much more than that. Fainthanclling has t3ecorne such an issue among the artists that for the first time in anybody's memory Ne\\- York has a hometo%-nbrand of pigments that rivals the hest produced in Fun~pe.And make no mistake about it: \\-hen artists arc going bark to t3;tsics in the stuciio. the repercussions are going to be felt \\ay t3eyond the studio. Materials matter. and even nonartists knov\-it. itt the de Kclcining retrospective at tbc X/letropcilitan, museurngoers arc tiiking a long, hard look at a color phcitogrilph of dr Kncining's paint tiible that has been installed in the galleries: they m-ant to see ho\\ it's done. Today a lot of artists are cioing it \vith \XrilliamsburgFaint. the brand that's h o r c c i l>\-Bill rensen and Rrice Marden ancl that is no\\- solci from a street-level store on Eliral3eth just t>elo\vHouston. This is the kind of spare, unprepossessing retail shop-1%-ith artists' exhibition announcements
pmted all nrouncl on the m-alls-that
people don't believe can make a go of
it anvnlore. The entreprenrur behind Wif liarnsburg Pi~intis a painter n a m d Carl Plansky, n-hose first show at 55 Mercer in 1992 contained some tttiskly \\-orked landscape-t33sed abstractions of
2
\I-ho'd seen Plansky's debut shokv-together
fairly high ralibcr.
gallerygoer
with a number of other distin-
guisheci exhil?itions, most recently Temma Bell's at the Ro&-er\-Gallery and Faul ReGka's at Salander-( I'Reilly-could
\\-ell ask \\-h\- anybody imagines
that virtuoso painthandling is not alive and \\-ell. Fainthandling has al\v;i!-s defined the Ne\v York School. much a\ rolor \\-as the defining experience for Venice and composition was for Paris. Rut for artists the que\tion isn't how pitinterly pitinting looks in the gallery; it's \\-hat they can do with it in the stuciio. T\~ombl\.'s\\-a\-of treating the ran\-a., as
a page in an aesthete's journal is something that artists can pi":
up
on. His version of ilatne*s gain* unexpected implicatic~nsin the l\-ork of loan Sn\-der, jq-fio gives diaristic pzinting a rncire exyloiive, heart-on-the-sleeve character. .4ncl Carroll L3unham.s paintings-in
which comic-hook-bright
color and psychedelic imagery achieve some elegance and 11-eight-are rather like TR-omhl\-'s Delphic pronouncements translated into NeuYt~rkese.Terrific painthandling is a l i ~ eand \\-ell. But there is reason for concem. For every painter \\-h0 handles a brush eloquently there is no\\- another painter \\-h0 is glad to make a joke of that kincl of virtuosity. There is a new kincl of painterlv painting that's sci arch and jejune that it de\erves to he taken no more seriously than the beatnik stvles thzt are st~rfacingin the tfo\vnton-n c-lubs. In some cases ttte mishievousness is right out in the open. a\ is the case \vith the cartoonish stvles of Karen Kilirt~nikor Sue lVitlian~\,In other cares-hfarv Kinters come to mincl-the
Heiln~annand Terrv
po\e is subtler, so that you may not even be
sure if the artists themselves understand that they're slyly clistanring themselves from the past. I suspect that some of today's T\\-omhl\--\\-atcherr~l?ly-kviitcliers
aren't all that different from today's archeologists of the Beat mtivement: some mai- even regard T\\-omhly as the Paul Bo&-lesof the visual arts. Today's painters have one fundanlental choice: their brush\\-ork can be hiinrlt or their brusliwork Gin be ironic. Yct \\-hen Tc\-mbly,m-ho is being granted old modern master status, creates paintings that seem to sweep aGde the concept of choice in kivor of the possihilitv of being all things to all people, he's hailed for giving do\vntom-n plurali,m an aristocratic sheen. The hip auiiience regards painting \vith such aml3ivalent skepticism that it can hardly tell the difference between the ambiguities and in~niesthat are built into a painting and the one, that they project onto a painting. Gatlerygoers mav read the ebullient passage5 in the canvases of Toan Mitchell as ironic high spirits. and perhaps there is something to this interpretation of the \\-ork of the Abstract Expressionist \\-h0 died in 1092 \\-ith her reputation soaring. It's also possible to discern an elenlent of ironv in middle-perioii de Kooning, where he occasionally appears to be gently satirizing the heaviness of his own earlier m-ork. Rut \\hen 11-e talk about Mitchell and de Kncining \\-e're talking about the gambles of arti\ts kvho. whatever their limitation\. can construct a p i n t i n g in \\-hich iron\. is cine element in an emotjonal equation. T\vombly, unlike many of the Young Turk, \vho take him for their old master. knom-s how to expresh di\passic>n with a little painterlv pahion. Khen he evokes Mitchell in some of his p;t\sages of f~lllcolor. he ma!- not make the allusion work fcjr him, hut he is ackno&-ledgingthat a painter has some options, iis an accompaniment to tlie Modern shorn-, the (Gagoian G d e r y , in its elegmt made-over garage csn 1Yooster Street, is presenting an enormous three-part painting by TR-c~mhly.He lvorkeri on this untitlrii fifty-tkx-o-foot-\&
painting for fifteen years and finished la\t spring. It's an
mgaging composition-a
sort of guide to T\vombl\.'s predilection\. Moving
from left to right \ve pas5 through a landscape of choice$. There's the land of
no color: there's a broad plain crossed by thickets of lines and in\cribed lvith the \voriis "The Anatomy of Melancholy": and there's a grand burst of fire\\-orks in orange and \iolet and vello\v. This painting embrace$ several different moods, yet it's so large and spare a \\-ork that each mood is \\-rapped in its o\vn aureole of skepticism. T\vombly's triptych reminds us that the use of a painterly mark to shatter the illusions kvithout =which painting cannot live isn't something that \\-as cireamed up by toclay's juht-out-of-artschool skeptics. There are olci skeptics. too.
Much of =what is best and worst in this old skegtic-'Smature aihievement can he traced hack to Tu-omhlv's Black Mountain College experience. I shoulci say that \\hen I speak of Black Mountain, I am not necessitrily thinking of the experimental North Carolina college as it flourished in the '40s and 300s and is descril-ted t-ty historians, but as it lives on in the after all, \\-as there for not more than a imaginations of artists. T\%-c~-ombly, year. Black Mountain, no matter ho\\- long ago it rloseci its doors. endures as a tradition-a
myth, if you will-h\-
=which artists live. .4t Black Moun-
tain, painting had less to d o \\-ith an immersion in the stuciio than with a painter's effcrts to synthesize all kinds of avant-garde activity and in general open up the studio to the world: some people still t-telieve that's \\-hat a painter eioes. There's another, alternative tradition that also contint~ei, to have a kind of ~nt-thicstatus; it's the one that held S&-ayin the 20s and '50s at the Hofmann School in Nen- York m d Pro\-incetokvn. Klhen you stuiiied lvith Hans Hofmann. you were on a completely ciifferent \\-ave length than you \\-ere at Black Mountain. Hofmann shcikved young artists h o n to go into the studio and express anything and everything that they knell- about the 11-orld through the dynamism of the composition, the \\-eight of the rolor, the livelinei,~of the hruhh. Some people still believe in that, too.
T\vombly3sattitucie to\v;ird the rla\sical past----his creation rn\th. if you \I-ill-has
everything to do n-ith Black Mountain relativism. Me is st~relyca-
pable of uncierstanciing antiquity as n hirly solid arrangement of literarj- and artistic monunlents, but wh;tt attracts him about those montrments is the extent to lvhich time has \\-reakeci change\ on them rather than the extent to 'iq-hich they have rernained the same. There are no absoltrtes in this view of history. The mo\t beautiful line of poetry can he a f r a g m e n t q r p h a n e d \\-ords. The most beautifully painted passage on the \\;ills of Pompeii is hscinnting because it has been ravaged bj- time. 'lh he interested in the patness of the pa\t is a perfectly natural attitude fcjr an artist. hut it is by no means the oniv viable m-?- to apprtjach the pa\t, and it is certainly a view that's irreconcilable \\-ith Mofinann's belief in the immediac\- of painterly expresis alive for other kinds of arti\ts as u-ell, Six sitrn. Pompeii, alive for T\x-ombl~, months ago, a fen- steps from \\-here T ~ ~ - o m hi l yno\\- shokving his mural painting at <;agosi;tn, Temma Bell, in her exhibition at the Roll- er^ Gallery, seemed to simply pick up \\here the Fomprian pitinters had left off. Bell is a painter \.ifits has no interest in historicat ret~itivism;she's involved -\l-itha completely different tradition than T117omblv. If he" Black Mountain, she's E l o h a n n School. The key to Bell's off-handed lucidity is her immersion in an idea of calligraphic realism that she firlds equally alive in the art of ancient Pompeii, Renaissitnce Venice, ( h r o t . Dufy. and (;iacometti. T\\-omhly has his on-n calligraphic method, hut it is n critique (and not alxx-ays a persuasive critique) of olci ciralving styles. For Bell, painterliness isn't a paradoxical mod~ \\;ills \\ere ern position; it's just the thing that pitinters do. In Bell's s h o the packed, almost 11-allpaper-like.11-ith painting of upstate Ne\n York. and the artist took in everything: rolling hills, field,, trees, fences, barns, houses. animals, figures. She presmted it all \\-ith a ilo\ving, comic-elegant speeci that \\-e knoll- from some of the great Fompeian \\-all paintings. Not every paint-
ing reached the high level of the fiftv-eight-inch-long From ? i e ~fc Trws, but the attack of Bell" brush all\-avs hatl a tlefiniteness that E-iohann ~ o t ~ l d have appmved. Although Bell is too young to have actually studied with Hofinann. I imagine that he m-ould also approve of the \\-ay she strengthens her grip on the present by assimilating the experience of the past. T\vombly, ever the son of Black Mcjuntain Ctlllege, pocritions himself in the present giving a riveting late modern auhteritv to each thought that he has about the p a t . K h a t an artist makes of painting is not so much a matter of freely choosing among a varietv of options as it is a matter of making the most of a fe\v intuitions that are absolutely one's OR-n.Every time a painter paints, m-e \I-ant to see \I-hat those intuitions arc, To paint is to sllon- your hand. It is left to the audience to decide \\-hether the \\-a\- the artist handles pitint reveals unselfconscious virtu~aity,a canny ilnitation of virtu
~ P C O I I I Pso
o h c u r e that the
quecrtion of ?%-hether\\-illed inauthenticity can be a new kind of authenticitv can scarcely he addressed. The audience has a hard enough time recognizing the old kind of authenticity. Tkvornbly rather plqh into all thecre confusions. There is a tlehate going on that is t3;tsically about the status of painting in a time \\-hen phcitographv is dominant. This debate is as old as photograph\: itself, hut it does seem to he heating up right no\\. Tc~day'smuseumgoer frequentl? learns about painting. and keeps ahrea\t of developmmts in the visual arts,
looking at photographic reproductions. This makes it tlifbcult
to evaluate a pitinter's lvork. The actual surface of a pitinting, of any painting, \\-it17 its uneven texture, can seem like a bad parody of the real thing. if the real thing is the seamlessnecrs of a photograpl~icprint. Painting has been looking prohlelnatical for so long that it has come to the point where every time a painter paints. somehod\- thinks that painting is on trial. Artists may
reject the pmsecutorial spirit. but in recent sea\ons there has been a \\-hole slew of highly regarcled theme shons that amount to art-\\-orlii triitls in \\-hich the real painterliness faces off against the mock. And \\-hat better place to seek a verdict than New York, the city that gave
uh
the la\t unam-
bivalent clefinition of painting fiftv years ago? Tm~ornhlyis the tvpe of painter that the Museum of Modern .4rt has Liked for a long time: a Iladaist in C:lassiiistk clothing, Both the t3adaists and the <:la\sicists anlong Ye\\- York arti\ts. ho&-ever.may find that T\vombly9s victories arc, for the mo\t part, too ea\\-. In the plleries of Nen York (:it\-, the m-ars bet-++-een the Iladi-iistsand the Classicists, \\-h0 are also the Black Mountain people and the Mans Hofinann people. rage on. Market forces may be kvith Tm~omhly,hut market forces are not the he-all and the end-all. That elegantly scribt3led \vorlcl of T\\-omhly's is one opinion ahout \\-hat 1994 thinks that 1950 thought ahout 50 13.1 . Arti\ts. often clo\e-mouthed in public, are vehement \\-hen thev get down to kvork in their studio\. They have their o\vn opinions ahout \\-hat the recent past is telling them ahout the distant past. And \\-h\- not! \%%at is at stake is nothing less than the creation m>-tbsthat a r t i t s are living h)-.
You hear the Brtlie liauman show almost before you see it, became the cries and commands that provide the audio component for some of the artist's videos are so loud that thev cut straight through the gllleries to the entrance of the exhibition. (:t?ming off the escalator onto the second floor of
the Hirshhorn Museum in W ~ h i n g t o n \%-here . the retrospective of this 53year-idd artist is up over the v\-inter,unsuspecting museilmgoers may \%-onder if something awful is going on in the galleries. but for visitors who knollthe N a u n ~ a nrotrtinc, this is just l->usincssa, usual. The \;\-orks\%-ithsoundtracks include
"No."and
C:lijtvm
'Ibrtrrr~, in v\-hid1it man in a clown L-ostumekeeps saying
Sliii In Your I I Q ~ IIvil~iotr ir Chuir, in =which an off-camera voice puts
repetitive movethe mime on the video through a series of hard-to-fc~llol~ ments. Noise in a milsetBm is by no m a n s N a u m n ' s imentinn, but tike silence on n concert stage. that other rather shop\\-orn experimental ploj-, it's a break n-ith somention that's still tjirlv certain to put the audience on tenterhooks. That, no doubt about it, is where N a u n ~ a nm-ants t ~ s . Nauman has dealt with all the big t o p i r m e x , polver. vic~lenrc-hut he has ciealt with them impersonally, a, media-grabbers, a, contemporar~flash paint$. If y j u compare a large-scale Nauman with n large-scale Donald iudd ilr
Mark di Suverr) or Narn fllne Pi~ik-;ill these arti\ts m-ere very much on
the scene in the late f c)hi)-you
see that Naurnan's over\%-helmingstate-
. h e w ' m n ppersonal f e r w r to his ments are anti-grand grand g f i t u ~ s T megalomania. The retrospective is wildly heterogeneous: there are mc~vieh. hologram,. videos. and pieces ranging from bantam \\-eight to behemothsize, made of wax, neon, cast iron. aluminurn. \\-allhoard. tn-o-by-fours.
f lexiglas, steel, anti foam. Yet the net effect is ct~riouslytamped doll-n-a muffled shriek. This is me,sage art. but the message, don't quite get across. \%-hichis (of course) the me\sage. Nauman has been \\ell k n m - n for a quarter century. In the p;t\t half decade he's become a living legen~1.This work has a queasy aml->iguit\-that a lot of art lvorlci movers anti shakers seem to love. The Nauman retrosper-tive, m-llich was organized by the Kalker ,d\rt <:enter in Minneapolis and \\-asseen there last spring, makes its next stop at the Museum of McIdern Art in Ne\v York this spring. During the thirty-year
period that is surveyed. Nauman has made use of lots of new or nem-ish media. but he's al\\;$!-~ used them ofthitndedly. as if they were all old hat. It's pa\"ihe to un~ierstanciNaulnan a* one of the first avant-garde artists m-ho has been indifferent to style. He \\-ants to prove that the next style is not the better style, and he wants to make that paint while he" sdong the latest thing. Most of Nsuman's work looks reheated, intmtionally so. He regards Minimalism. Body Art. and Environmental r t as the same stuff in ciifferent package*. And he's right. This is zivant-gardism for the micro\va\-e generation. Nauman has become a renegade superstar hero for younger artists. such as Cadv Noland, Kiki Smith, hlatthem- Barney, and j'essiia Stockholder,
\\-h0 see the art of the '60%and '70s as their image hank, their junk pile. Rruce Nauman gets us nervous and t\x-itchy and ill at ea*e-that's
the
nlain thing. In some of tlte earliest works inclucled in this shm-, he films himself putting on theatrical makeup and photographs himself playing \I-ith his toes, and 11-e're left wit11 the feeling that weke invaded his privacy, In a lot of the later kvork-the
torture videos, the neon drawings of erect
penises, the neon signs that tell us that \\-e're going to "PUCK AND DIEwit's ea\y to feel that Nauman has invaded our privacy. The environmental \\-orks consisting of oddly shapecl passage\\;$!-S and rooms arc meant to disc3rirnt us. I presume that the recent assemblages made of anirnal ca*ts that Nauman purchases from a taxiderm~.supply house are supposecl to put us
off. And vet a lot of the time N a u n ~ a ncloer not, so far as I arn concerned, exactlv succeed in unnerving us. Maybe he doesn't c u e about that. either. <:ertainly, it's impo\sihle to sink into Nauman's work or feel overtaken by it. In the course of the sllon; mtlseumgiirrs have to adjust to so many different media, and to so many oddly mixed media, that they may never get to the paint \\-here they're having anything hut first impressions. Nauman gave himself the starring role in the photographic \\-ork that he \\-as doing in the late 1060s, and only here, at the beginning of the shmv, does
he manage to make us feel a bit emoaonally involved. At 26 or 27, the age at
\I-hiih he did the l f l ~.9,4ak~-F@ t movies and the f1t~li:yrumSrrres, Nauman had the slender build, pleasing1\-shapecl shoulders, ancl slightly masklike face of an Ancient Greek kc~urosfigure. He \\-as not kvildl! good-looking, hut it is a time in life \\-hen moderate!\- attractive people can look \vilcllv good-looking. and Nauman's imperturbable. unto-myself manner----that youthfill self-absorption-u~as part of his college-t-tohemian charm. In 11ri Mirku-lill, Nauman, barechested. slo\\-ly plasters thick opaque makeup on his kice in four tones-\-hite.
pink. green. and black. .4lthough
I can't imagine kvatching this quartet of films for more than a feb- minute\, Nliuman is an interesang ciimera subject. nc~bnclvis forced to stay any longefihan tltev care to,and his narcissism does have some humor and appeal. The same goes for the flt~lirijrums.m-ith their outer-space red depths in jq-hich N;luman, 11-earhg it striped shirt and jeans, slrtlnches up his body, tjq-eaks his nose, ticides his toes. He" enjocng hil, ovc-n body-this
is inno-
I can see the appeal of these kooky in-
cent, nongenital masturbation-ancl tinlate scenes.
In thew first 11-orks,Naunlan is the kouros as I-tohen~ianclovc-n. In a few other videos, althciugh h i peregrinations rouncl his empty studio are alreaclv too deep into neo-Beckettland for my taste. I can appreciate his flat demeanor and the no-style stylishness of his standard-issue T-shirts. I clo not think it is amiss to see a hint of sexiness in his bare feet in l>aniu
Ewr-
iise (m the Pvrirlietvr ofu \qsurr: Nauman probably imagined that he could turn
on half the m-orld by taking off his shoes, nncl perhaps he wasn't kir from
y
jq-fi~ng.1Y~iltzibrtll~/~tvs of t b L~~ f Hu i of .
W
M) - Hnily - lkkrn ill 7bn-lsrh ilrtunuls makes
me stop and look and think. When Nauman distills his 011-n body into icy green neon curves, one ran grant him the ingenuity of u\ing Minimalism as the stealth weapon of an erotic sneak. Rut this isn't anything that deserves a six-citv museum tour. and after the first group of works the show col-
lapses. The youthful quiet egotist who \\-ants to grab our attention becomes a middle-aged ritving egotist. \Kkr.'reon the receiving end of a mixed-medin mugging. The show is a spra\vling, chilly experience. It's easy just to \\;ilk by Nauman's nothingizh dra\\-ings. hut there are other m-orks that. by \irtue of their sire alone. ran hardly be avoidecl, even \\-hen you're mo\tly looking for the \\-a\- out. Si~riih.Inz~rrivTrrirr!yii.is one of a number of pieces that hang from the ceiling: a cast iron chair hovers in the center of ;l Minimalist triangle of steel beam,.
0 1 1 Ilrairud ~ Llri. irriil D i e
is a \\;ill of neon lettering. \\-ith messages
flashing on and flashing off, among them "PISS AND I)IE/I'ISS AND LIVIi." Neon color. lvhich can be magic in the ciarkne\s of a city. looks like nothing in a \\ell-lit gallery, hut then for Nauman no-thing is a metaphor. There's a series of silhouettecl figures done in neon that recall the sleekly anonymous ones that made Ernest Trova famous in the 'GO\, onlv in place of Trova's spare-age androgyny Nauman gives us jumbo-size penises that flash erect and then ilnrh limp and then erect and then limp. Nauman is alrno\t ar attached to repetition as he is to inconsistency. If inconsistencv represents the self-indulgentlv experimental side of his personalitv. repetition is apparently the only \\-a\- he thinks he can get anything through trur tliick skulls. The musenm is a lab. The artwork., are the lab equipment. Nauman experiments on us, and in case \\-e aren't quite sure that this is \\hat he has in mind, he inclucler a rat t3umbling through a maze. ( In
a video projection, the rat makes itr -\l-a\-ttlroilgh its c l r a g e Plexiglah
l&)-rinth whik a ytsung man thuntps on a ifrum set; the work, called Luidrrrril
flplplessrspss
in Rirt3
(Rllik lrrril
Rill1 Drurram~r),also includes the maze (\%-itboutthe
rat). In installations such ar C:t?rridor Irr5tirlllrtritn (Mirk W!dpr
Irr5tirll~tlon/and
Yi1-
iou Ria~mcli.lillrgslirr;). Nauman is testing our reactions to unFdmiliar spitces. so
\\-e become the rats \\-h0 are put through the maze. Ancl then, like a lot of h b a n i m l s , we end t ~ in p the morgue, which Natlman suggests \\-ith his
heaps of cast animal rarrahses and his casts of decapitated h~lmanheadsmany of t l t e m i n a variety of <:rayol;i colors.
There is nothing that can be said against Nauman that ham? talready been said in his k o r . Peter Schjeldahl, \\-hose elegantly lvrittm columns in the
I.llilnijr livie arc our most reliable guide to \\.hiit tlte art m-orld fast set is thinking. says that Nauman's gift "consists in ohrerj-ing and being true to a 'hilure to communicate' twilt into every language, every style." This may be a savvy n-ay of dercrihing the sense of drift that a Nauman
S ~ O M induces, -
but isn't it something like the ultimate cop-out to say that an arti\t's failure to communicate is actually his \\-a\-of communicating? Lers is more may be one of the great high modern revelations, but it does not cc~ntravenetile fait that what vou see is what YOU get and that %\-hatYOU get in Nauman is nothing much. Schjeldahl says that N;luman creates art that ""c.annotbe handed do\\-n ar a tradition." It seenlr to me that Naunlan's real achievemmt is to have persu;trieci the public that he operates in a universe where neither the high art trariitions nor the most rudimentar). standareis of popular entertainment ever come into play. Nauman's ocitily shapeci \\;ilk-in environments provt~kea mild, rather metaphorical smse of clnustrophcihia. m-hich m-ill not impress anvhody \\-h0 has encountered the Mannerist gardens and interiors that were being construrteci in Europe 450 years ago. hncl \\hat can the average museumgoer, \\-h0 takes the technical \\-irardry of MTV for granted, possibly make of the shodiiv production values in Nauman's \-ideos! Somehodv is sure to explain that Nauman's homevideo ineptne5s is his 1060s version of old-modern primitivism. It seems that \I-henever historical precedents are invoked in support of Iate-tx-entiethcentury experimentatic~n,it is in order to intimidate the audience, to shut people up. (Ince upon n time, artists challenged corn-entionai beliefs. No\\some of them just \\-ant the auciiencc to suspend judgmmt.
This is Nauman's first major museum shon- in the [Jnitcd States since
1972, and although he has never been out of the public eye, the timing is impeccable for a Inan \\-h<)is now seen as the middle-aged dad of a new nmixedmedia generation. Nsuman's zinti-;leghetic i"tt;iilght in the art sc-hools. SO are his lnarketing strategies. .41thc)ugh this has never been the kind of work that most upscale collectors \\ere going to put in their home,. the marketproof look of a lot of Nauman's pieces can he a selling point nmc,ng the museum and fc3unciation people and the blue-chip collectors \\-ho pride themselves on going where the husineis-as-usual art world fears to go. In the 1980s. \\hen collectors were betting serious money on new painting, expertunipht have dismissed the whole mixed-mediii bag ai n leftover from the self-righteous '60s. Bllt since the early 199i)s, the market has been in the doldrums. and galleries that can't sell pitintings anyway have been more inclined to give precious show s l o t to \\-ork that is practically unsaleable. At leait the dealers can feel virtuous l\-hile they're surveying the red ink. Nauman's marketing skills are relevant to our experience of his n-ork. Khen the pieces that arc on ciisplai- are ai no-dimensional as moit of Nauman's, the yueition that ends up sticking in our minds is \\-h? people allow fijm to bore them on this trujy staggering scale. Our aging youth culture
likes artists who survive their youth l\-ithout ever gro&-ingup, ancl in middle age Nsuman ha\ a knack for making his helter-skelter productions look Like a consistent development, even if it's sometimes only in a consistently inconsistent u-ay, He understands that the chamber-scale sexual sensationalism in his early m-ork. =which included a video of his 011-n genitals smeared \\-ith black pigmmt, looks visionarv a quarter century later, \\-hen law- enforcement officials in (:;tliforni;t arc allolved to photograph a pop star's private parts, ancl a Nen York City tabloid prints a photograph of the knife that a l\-oman used to cut off her husband's penis. The hard-edged vie&-of sex and violence that m-e get in Nauman's mixe recent n-ork is ai enti,tianailq-
dissociateci as \\hat \\-e're seeing on the talk sholvs and the celel3ritv trials on televisicln. ,d\ Nauman s h m - is just arts). pay-per-view TV. Irisitors will most likely leave the retrospective thinking atmut Nauman" videos csf a tortured clown and a torn~entedn~inle.Nartn~anhas been Jressinp
LIP
actors in these generic L-ostilmessince the late 1980s-they're
the most recent rats to he run through the maze. In an intervie%-in the nlagazine P~rbrtt,he refkrreci t o such costumes as masks hehinti 11-hiih "there's something you don't ]\no\\- and you're never going to find out." Rut Nauman's theatricitl fcdk are so much the passive hgures-even
\\hen
they're hokvling at u e t h a t their co\tumes register less as masks than as I~TIIIIP. lvhich Schjelciahl has iiescribcci as a "masterpiece" straitjackets. C:~F~L.II that "p"euopen a big, scary mtemporrtrv sublime," is a six-screen video shovc-in which lve see an actor in a clown costume sitting on a toilet. getting t3onkeci on the head by a pail of \vater, reciting a tongue twister that twgins "Pete and Repeat m-ere sitting on a fence," and saying "Xo" over and over again. There's no my,tery to this clown; he's just Nauman's vision of the \\-retcheci of the earth as a robotic kitsch puppet. In .$hit irri Yorrr Miri ir
I-luird
Cirilrr, the puppet is a female mime and the oppressor is heard but not seen.
The pitthetic minle goes through her paces-a movements-in
series of tortuous bends and
response tcs the droning off-screen iomnlands of a male
vcrice that orders her t i ~" P t ~your t hat m the table. Put your head on your hat. Put your hand on your head with your head on your hat. . . . " Nartn~an\\-ants us to knoll- that his vicieos csf conhnen~entand torture are n response to recent politicill events. In 1981 he read Jacoho Timerman's
P ~ Z S ~ IWlfhllat ~ I P I ii ~YQFW. C ~ l Wlfhllat i ii fYfltn/j~r and it made a big impression. Yet Nartn~an'storture videos are such a kishion-consciotrs mix csf hilininlalisrn and kitsch that it seems n little sill\- to imagine that they're going to help us ccsnnect \\-itit the nightmare of life under a totalitarian regime. Nauman shovc-s no interest in the victirtls in his videos. There are no nuances to his
represemations of the oppressor or the oppressed. and he doesn't get at \\-hat goes on between them. These videos are startling. but they are e\sentially inert. Nauman tloem't create a lvork of art that has complex internal dvnamics. Perhaps he tloem't intend to. But he tloe, expect us to have all kinds of complicitted reactions. Kc're suppo\ed to takr his shiick treatlnent and transform it into an artistic experience. No 11-ondercritics like to dig in. that rageuhrough NauI have no idea jq-t.rett1c.r the ps~chopatt~ologv man's recent m-ork is a put-on, a mid-career strategy. or straight from the heart, Frankly, I don't care. Kbat's extraordinary isn't that Kaumnan shrieks, but that people listen. His relationship with the museum world is pure
S&M, The musetlms invite him in, and he lets them have it. He's a control freak-he
hurts neon thtxntlerbolts, l->uildstletention ct~an~l->ers, shouts
command,. Since the museums keep coming hack for more, one has to ns,unIe that the people whii make the decisions are gettinp e x x tly jq-hat the\jq-ant. 117 the get-ttrugh Ic)W()s,N;luman is the Now hfan. JIX~-ARY
2 3 , 1995
SOLITARY I N THE CITY OF ART
T\\-o contempc,rary figure painters have for all intents and purposes chucked their surnames ancl their given name* in kivor of singular, rather exotic appellations. Ralthus is a childhood nickname that the young artist \\-as urged to use professionally l->yncr less an authoritv than his mother's friend Itilkr. Ritaj is the name of the man whom the artist's mother married \\-hen the t 3 0 ~\\iis 8 or 9. and although it is prekiceti by the initials R. B., the Itonald that the "K" stands fcjr is t~secl.so little as to be almost a secret. These
are artists of different generationr--Ralthu, is Xh, Kitaj is 62-n-ho
m-ere
born and have lived in different places and \\-hose \vork is in many respects as difkrent as night and day. Rut I think there is a link between these two figure painters \vho have made big. singular reputations for themselves in a contemporarv scene in which ahstraction comes first, a d their stand-alom nanles are not irrelevant to that link. At least this is h o ~it- seemed to rne last sumrner in Lon~ion,\\-hen the Kitaj retrospective that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art \\-as at the Tate Gallery at the same time that the Lefevre Gallery \\-as hosting a Balthus sholv. lvhich consisted of n single ne\\- painting, an almost six-and-a-half-fcmt-high canvas of n t3lond-haired girl plai-ing \\-ith a rat. Ralthus is painting sl~\\-lythese days. so the appearance of 7 % Cat ~ with
ikftrrt~r111, the first m-ork to come out of his studio in five years, is an event. And \\hat a pitinting it is. with its rainho\\- luxuriance of color harmonized and rnelted together by means of a magicill chi;lroscun,. There's n density to this pitinting that you \\-ill not find in an\thing in the Kitaj retrospective. In their intentions and ambitions, however, Baitbus and Kitaj are interestingly comp1ement;~rvfigures. The realist-in-an-age-t1f-a13straction equation doess s their situittions. True. these n't even begin to describe the ~ n ~ l s u a l n eof artists often appeal to people m-110 are dissatisfied m-ith the Inore reduced fcjrn~scif classic abstract art. But there's a nonconti>rnlism and an art-forart's-sake feverishness about BaIthus and Kitaj that pauadouically links them all the \\a\- hack to the nc~nconformirtt3epinnings of the modern movement against 11-hichthey're often said to be in revolt. The painters and \I-riters n-ho revere Aalthus as a (:lassicist in spite of his sometimes incendiary erotic subject matter may ncit cotlntemnce Kitaj, who is an idicrsyrtcratic Expressionht in spite of his obvious reverence for the modern canon. Rut for those \vhci keep close tabs on \\-hat both painters are up to, Balthus and Ritaj can look like the true inheritors of earlv-twentiettt-century revo-
lution. The tm-o artists paint paintings that pokr holes in the modern pieties. and m-herever and m-henever the\- exhibit, polemics fly. These artists are not easy to place: that9\kej- to their appeal. They paint appitrendy p c ~ ~ dsubject ar matter-a
hiond girl in Itattht~s'sI & f Cat mrlr ,Mrrri?r
LII, a street scene in Kitnj's Cued C~urt(198.%84), the dazzling melange of figures that \\-as platered all over Lon~lon'sUndergnjun~llast summer on the posters ~ Ralthus ancl Kitnj have such insistently personal advertising the Tate s h o Yet ought to be put together that the\- transform the ideas about how a pai~~ting
' t~r bare realist hcts into enveloping formal puzzle\, so that realit!. itself L K" ~Fins seem son~ehowal->strac t. Their l;\-orkleaves the cild debates alxru t abstraction versus representation where they ought to he, m-kch is in tatters. With the trit evolution of Krstem art to\\-ard ever umph of abstraction, =which h n ~ u g hthe greitter verisimilitude to such a startling conclusion. the possil?ilit>-opmeii up of beginning all over again, with realism as just n choice among choices. Looking at the \\-orl, of Balthus and Ktaj, \vho have made that choice, you
mq be-
gin ttr have tbr impression that the eilsentid polarity in twentieth-L-entuqat-t isn? between realism and abatractian, but bet=-een the public and the private-I>et\\-ecn the extent to l;\-hichan artist makes use of farms and struttures that are already \\-idely understood and the extent to \\-hich an artist invents a language th;tt is entirely his own.
Kitaj, \\-h0 \\-rote much of the text for the catalog of his retrospective, has been extremely forthcoming about how it feels to live at a time when, a\ far a\ art is concerned, a ~ t h i n goer. g He has a conversational prose style that's slangv. erudite, and hold, and that sometime\ recalls the lvriting of an earlier idiosyncratic .4merican mvthmakrr. Ed\\-ard L3ahlherg. Kitaj \\-rites of "the cram drama of painting," and of being "a painter \\-h0 snips offa length of picture from the flaw-ed scroll l\-hich is ever depicting the train of his interest." Although Kitaj's insistmce on explaining himself to his audience is
rather unusuai fcir an artist, 1 don? think that he" smistaken in believing that an artist \\-h0 goes his ojq-n \v;$)- \\ill cio \\ell to t3lon- his own horn. "Some people." he observes, "live out their lives in places they don't come from, assigning themselves to a strange race and an alien sense of land and city. K h o is to $a)-\\-h\- they do what they do with their lives, or for that matter. \\-h? painters do m-hat they do 11-ith their painting lives?" Rv no\\tjq-entieth-century art is such a maze of iiepersonalized "isms" that an artist has to insist on esac tlt. how he does or doer not fit in. Could it he that even Balthus, \\-h0 h a for most of his sixty-odd-year career taken the position that the work should speak for itself, is t3eginning to suspect that those \vho remain silent are condemned to being misunderstood! In recent years Balthus has exouraged his literary friends, u-ho u-ere once instructett not even to n~entionthe date of his birth, to examine the ills and out, of his hiopaphy. And he has himself been doing something he never diii-granting
interview-S.The most extensive of these. put>lishetiin the lin-
glish quarterlv .Mi~di.rnP d t j l t r n this past fall, is a conversation that Balthus had over the course of an afternoon with the rcsck strtt. David Bowie (1%-hois a serious collector of contemporary English art and has lately hegun to s h o ~his C N - ~
pai~lti~lgs), This interview is an essential addition to the Balthus archives,
a great old pitinter's most sustzuned effort to tell us \\-hat he helin-es. Kben Baftlius and lCitaj speak out, they present contemporary .;aria.ticln on a theme that got.\ aiI the way hack to Rat~deiaire.'They I-relieve that in order to k n m - himrelf, the artist must know his public. And they t3elieve th;tt if the artist's imagination is powerful mough it can goad, skekver. refute. ignore. correct. and in rare instances even transform public perception. Balthus a d Kitrtj take this cisrnplex relationship n-ith the pul-rlii in .;er)- different tiirections. In the , L I d ~ r ePd1t11e1.sinterview; Balthus observes that "pmbably . . . \.;hiit people hate so much in m!- \\-ark is harmony. Everything is so contrary to harmony today." If you examine this statement for n moment,
you realize that here \ve have our preenlinent figure painter asserting that the reality he presents in his paintings is a reality that rontrariicts the Edits of Life. Ktrtj, on the other hand, can sound like an eccentric populist when he sets out his ideas. He has kvwttrn that his paintings are "picture\ of an imperileci \\-0rlc1 YOU may knoll- only as imperfectly as I iio, if at all." In Kitaj's lvriting, the line bet\\-ren \\hat's within the studio and \\-h;tt's heyon~1the studio is never clraj\-n very clearly. He argues against the ivtjry t m - r r by suggesting that public experience is a magnification of private experience. Yet in his o\vn rounditbout \\-ay he arrives at an attituiie that is, a\ much as Balthus's magi\terial isolaticln, a version of the Bat~defrtireanstance-the
artist is tiirever ru-
minating on his troubled relationship =with the public. The tvpical Balthus pitinting is of a person alone-the
solitary girl in the
t3;trcly furnished room. The t y i c a l Kitaj is a crowd scene. But Ktaj has also painted retreats: there are some canvases of deserted interiors, especiallv bedrooms, that he has described as his recollections of time spent with friends and lovers. And Balthus ha\ paintrci street scene, full of strangers
\\-ho, unbekno\vnst to trne another, are taking their places in what amount to surreal urh;tn pantomime,. In fact one of the grande\t images of modern public life comes from Balthus, 11-ho completed his final salute t o the
f arisian streets, T ~ Pilssagii P dtl Colntrt~ri~ Sar~t-~4lz(lrP, in f 994, just before he moved his studio from the city that fcxrned him a* an artist. Kitaj saw the Pd\sirge----in =which Balthus appears as the figure carrying n baguette-at
the
Baithus retrospectke in 1983 in Paris, and it inspired \\-hat is certainly Kitaj's best painting so h r . the phantasmagoria on the subject of i*,n~lonstreet life.
~ Lc'tl~lilti B7C2 jlkv Rtyigp~s) \\-ith the meandering title: C P ICt~tlri, Cecil Court is a real place-a c,ff<:hnring Cross Roitd-but
teens)- street of antiquarian bookshops just the theme of Kitaj's painting, =which is the citv
a* a theater in =which m-e act out our lives, will he himiliar to anybody 11-ho has lived in a great metropolis. Kitaj (who \\;is born in (:leveland, ( Ihio. and
grem- up there and in Troy. N e n York) has become a connoisseur of cities: N ~ MYt~rk, Paris, &%rnsterdam, Los Angeles, and, of course, London, which
has been home t3itse for more than thirty years.
Cri-ll Corirt
is about the Lon-
don phase of Kitaj's life, hut it is also about the inside-outside status of an artist \\-h() keeps his own counsel amid the crazy iirCtlsof the world. The schematic perspective and bright coloring th;tt E t a j uses in
Cri-ll Ct9srt
recall
a Victorian toy theater, and through this mad-cap setting---all hillhoard bright colors m d acid-etched line\-rush
a cast of characters that define
London's heterogeneity. They include a bald old man gra\ping a nosegai-, a doll-like pitir of kids, a young \\Oman \\-ho, legs ajar, throws herself ;tt the \\-orld. These m m and \\-omen are memorable in the \\-ay that people \\-e catch sight of in the street can he memc~rahle:we comprehend a personality in a glance, or at least \\-e think \ve do. Yet each of Ktaj's figures is absorbed in some private reverie, and they are all appitrcntly ot,li\ic~usto the artist, l;\-horecline5 in the midst of the urban maelstrom on a cbron~eLe <:orbusier lounge chair, a book at his side and another object. m-hich may \\-ell be a book, in his hand, So far as I knoll; Kitaj's Cuiti Coriri and Ralthus's Pauirg~hitvr never hung
in the same room, but the\- \\-ould make an interesting pair. Kitaj is bitsically developing it vxiatian trn Ratthus3 absorbha theme, except that the street life that is depressive in the Paris painting become, lnanic in the I.ondon painting. Where the m0od of 1 7 P~ssirge ~ iir~Commrrir Sirrnt-/l,iiirr' is mibty and grayed-do\vn and quietly discreet. Cut-ri Ct9urr, paintecl thirty years later. is hard-edged and almost brash. Balthus see, himself from the t3itck. kvalking a\;\-ayfrom us; you might say that he's forever retreating from the tm-ilit scene he has imaginecl. Kitaj, reclining in the rnidht of everything in Cecil Court, is the lead player \vhci does not---or prefers not to-fit
in. Kitaj, an
American living in Lonclon, paints pitintings that give the idondonstreets an American vehemence. Balthus, altt~oughborn in Paris, has spent more of
his life in Italy and S\\-itzerland (where he lived as a child, pitsseci some of n r l d War II. and hiis non- settled dom-n). and his imagination is perhaps n ~ o r at e home in the Rcxne or Siena or Kyoto of art history than in the Paris of fact. Roth artists have gone in their 0%-ndirections-they're
sc~litariesin
the crc)wCZ~dcity of art,
Cut-ii Ctoart comes near the midpoint of Kitaj's retrospective. T h i ithe painting to m-hich everything m-e have seen before seems to lead. and it is the meilure agiinst 11-hichevery work that comes after, including such interestas Ili rbu 51.11 and TIPW~rliirt!y.must be juiiged. The period of ing recent pai~~tings
Cued Cnlrri and of another first-rate piiinting, the recollection of an .4merican t3oyhooJ that is called Bus~hiril.is Kitaj's most fertile phase; thew kvorks are 130th ciateti 1983--84. Rut I'm not sure how- much people \\-ill be able to fi~cus on them within the context of the show because. like most retn~spectivesthat are mounted these days, the Kitnj s h o ~is- \\-ay too big. -4 dozen paintings and three dozen cirawings \\-ould have given a far better sense of \\-hat Kitaj can do than the more than one hundrecl. items that are includett here. se As it is, the drawings get a little bit l0\t, and that's a shame, b e c a ~ ~ they are among Kitaj's finest achievements. Kitaj's way \\-it11 a pencil or n stick of charconl or pastel is absolutely intuitive: dr;i\\-ings that catch the eye this easily can't be lvilled into existence. Kitaj draws in a naturalistic and at times even journalisac vein that 0%-essomething to L)egas and something t o Lautrcc: he uses elegant knife-edge linear effects to create claw-up views of the people he kniw-\ and loves, and the end prcjduct is a casually encyc-lopedic contemporary portrait gallery. The studies of public figures \\-h0 also happen to be good friends, such as Isaiah Berlin and Philip Roth. shom- an easy, idiomatic grasp of the \;I!-
that a &iceunlocks a personality. E t a j draws
(Juentin Crisp using a mix of charcoal and muted pa*tel that is one of his mo\t successful chromatic conceptions; the result is a stunning Expressionistic image. terrifying and appealing. The studio nudes, t3ntl1 female and
male, exude a physicd self-confidence that gives us Kitnj's definitic,n of gK,&-n-up erotic experience. \Vho else has done male nudes that ronvev a man's sense of sexual power2 There are also extraordinarv Lira\\-ings of Kitaj's family-his
mother, ciaughter. and son. The drakving of his son i.em
reacling a hook is among the very best-xact
yet meltingly mmantic.
Khen an artist cirms from life, he kvmts to give an imaginative dimmsion to actual things. Kitaj is by no\\- an old hand at this kind of transfcirmation. yet \\-hen he turns frt~rndra\\-ing to pAnting he often seems to httve no compass to guide him. As a ciraftsman. Ktaj uses nature to ciiszipline his imagination. As a painter, he hiis an imagination that is larger than life. so much so thttt there are rooms in the retrospecthe \\-here nothing tliat he imagines is plain!?, simply alive as art. He turns his intellectual gifts into hyperbolic effects. He \\ants ever!-thing from his tigures: he means them to hold together complicated allegories involving themes such n memory and obsession, \\-hich I can't help concluding n ~ u s he t paihng-proof. In .Igilrn,i Slirrrii~r ( 1 9 ( 3 H t ) , he paints a city ftdl of gossips; in
B717fttt"liU ~ I L /ikf~ltt(19%-43) a battle is
breu-ing behveen the sexes; I ; l v ~ n n ~ l il'rllrltjr h (L 94G4.3) is a landscape of memor!-. The ideas are thriilingly serious, hut n lot of these paintings are just sillyputty "aces. Foreground and biickgrouncl, left and right, up ancl down slide into one another lvith a casu;tl \\-illfi~lne\sthttt forecloses any possilaliw that the canvas can cohere. Gcrl C;otirt and Uu5pb~11are tlt~iddream spaces thttt someh o simultaneou\ly ~ respect an idea of spatial ancl temporal unity.
(;wipnirzch
IYtildgu may follon-a dream logic. hut it does not make pictorial sense, and that is the onlv kind of sense thttt ever really matters in pai~~ting.
Kitaj's fascination as an artist has to cio lvith his \\-ay of pulling clisparate idea., and inspi'ations together into an insouciant si:rapboi>kstyle. He certainly gives nem- panache to a collage-soaked smsihilitv that runs through classic modern art and literature ancl is exemplified by Err;%Pound's Cusii~s
and Max Beckmann's tripychs. I salute Kitaj's intellectual nen-iness. Who else kvould even imagine that it \\as possible to paint \Valter Benjamin's idea\, the experiences of Khlter Lippmann. Tixlmudic concepts. a scene from the details of one's earliest sexu;ti encounters? Kitaj the life of Henry &%dams, has ciarcci to go where no one with his sophistication has gone before. Yet there are just too many paintings in =which Kitaj is letting the pieces fall as the\- may and then plugging up the compositional cracks =with blocks of t3rigl't. flat color. He tolerate\ far too many grating. stop-and-start effects. Disjuncture. \\-hich is kej- to Kitaj's work. is a method he has aditpted from the copybook of abstraction. 1)isjuncture once t3rought fresh drama into art l>\-rhallmging the idea that a painting represents a single slice of time and space. But tociav abstraction is all too often a virtually acadenlic mterpri,e. dedicated to preserving some small trove of painting's possilalities, and Kitaj's \er!- crarine\s has a strong ~10seof the formulaic. Still. it is Kitaj's \\ay of ilsi~lg the (:uhist-derived idea of disjuncture to rehabilitate older form\ of storytelli~lgthat has en~learedhim to many of today's unconventional reitlists, \vho say that they \\-ant to bring narrative hitck into art. If you like Kitaj-<)r
the
idea of Ritaj----it is going to be because he has so many stories to tell. Yet last summer in London, \\-hen the only p a i ~ ~ t i nthat g Balthus has tinished in the past five years was hanging across to\\-n from the Kitaj retmspective, each exhil3ition \\a\ in its own \\ay a s t z k reminder of ho%-pnjhlematic narrative is today. Ralthus had rejected exactly the kind of comple.; narratives that his 1 \vith 1,001 stories to tell fans desperately lvanted him to pn~duce.n ~ Kitaj. about our overpopulated 11-orld.was in the midst of a project that no living artist could possibly bring to completion.
P ~ f n t r fintervievc; i Baltk~ussotrnds both cheerful and austere, In the .qiq~d~rt~ a latter-dav pirrlmi?p[~rensconced in a Sm-iss "'retirement" from n-hich he's pleased to contemplate his turbulent pa\t in Paris ancl Rome. Balthus is perfectly &\\;ire of W-hatis going on around him and of the contemporary ap-
peal of Kitaj's overload of images. Yet he has no complaint. Sometimes he simply turns aside a line of questioning, and a fen of those silences tell us everything that \%-eneed to knm-. Listen carefully to Balthuh on the subject of subject matter; after all, his sexually explicit imagery \\-as iontroversiai long before Rohert Mapplethc3rpe \\-as horn. "The subject has no importance." Ralthus saj-S."The subject for me is al\\-a\-sa pretext to make a painting.'T!~is is not an eva.,ion but it L-onsideredhigfi modern position. Balthus \%-a.ntsboth the provocateurs and the prudes to knon- that they're mixsing the point, Khat, then, is the point! I think th;tt according to Balthus it is that the red storv is the storJ-of the making of the pai~~ting. Balthus is, after his 0%-nhshion, a formalist, but he hastens to distance hirnself Ifrcmi \%-hathe secs as the solipsistic situation of the artist \vho is "obsessed l>\-pai~~ting." \Xrh;ttBalthus t3rlie~esis missing in much rnociern pAnting is "tension . . . a sort of no repose." .%S far as his own practice is concernr~i.he finds the needed tension not in his subject matter but in the \cry pnlcess of Iooking-"looking
at a ch;tir.
looking at a cup of tea, or any object at all." The looking out is also n looking in, for the truth is that much of the apparently naturalistic- material in Ralthus's paintings has been dreamed up in the studio. There's an almost metaphj-sical dimension to perception. As Ralthus explains it, even "whm I paint ,[)mething after nature. I'm al\\-a\-srecognizing something in mvself." Ralthus's rejection of the questic~nof suhjec t matter-althc3ugh
proha-
bly to some degree strategic, a jibe at the people \%-h0imagine themselves to be his disciples and \%-h0t3elieve that subject matter is the engine ciriving p a i n t i n ~ c u n t r a ' t s dramatically 11-ith Kitaj's manic cultivation of a dozen subjects at once. And \-et even Ritaj ciinnot exape the elsentiai fact of modern art, =which is that the \%-aythat a painting is made. once a matter of hehind-the-scenes magic. is no\\- the key t~ a viewer's heart and mind. It doesn't matter m-hether the painting is more or less abstract, mtrre trr less
realistic. Since reality is no longer a given. everything is a gamble. If Kitaj is an extrclne case of the tendency of modern art to mirror a l\-orld that many people believe has gone all to pieces. Ralthus is our most triumphant current e x m p l e of an artist \\-ho knows how to put it all back together. In the
Madpm Parnrvrr intervie&-he says that he is "nl\\-ay\ tapping on the same nail. I think \\hat I have kept in a certain \\-ay, is rnv vision a\ a child. That sort of surprise in front of things." Kith this parable of a child banging a first nail into a first piece of \\-ood \vho turns into an old man \vho's doing exactly the same thing. Balthus take\ his rightful place among the great simplificrs.
"I'm considering myself n a craftsman." he says. "I don't m-ant t o be an artist. I have a horror of the \\-orCf,'' Since completin g the melancholy P~sslrguiitr Cnnini~n-uSirlni-~ltrdri;in 1954, Balthus has become an increaiingly inn-ad-turning painter, He has put ncr more than two figures in a painting in the past twenty-eight years; mostlv he paints one figure at a time. The raw materials that go into his paintings don't vary that much. There are the juxtaposed plane, of floor and \\a11 and furniture, the curves of the model's body, the angle of the light. But thmugh subtle shifts in the \\-ay that he carpenters together these e\sential elements, he no%-seems to be able tci make just ahtrut anytfiing ha.ppen. He's a ma\ter craftsman m-ho l\-arks unhurriedly, deliberately: the authenticity of the pmiluct is guaranteeci by the austerity of the process. Balthus has l->ec-omeas lnuch cif a E-tack-to-basics artist as Mondrian. I think it is Ralthus's in*istence on simplicit\- that frequently dismai-s those who look to his work for \\-hat Mondrian cioe, not give them. n d those \\-h0 find something \\-anting in the figu rc paintings of Bal thus may \\ell end up being happier l\-ith the work of Kitaj. \\-h0 keeps knocking together memorably crazy 'iq-hatnotsout cif all kinds ofhtrnd n~aterials. In London I heard it said that Ralthus's n e n canvas \\-as perfect hut sornehow not satisfying. Balthus has anslvereci this complaint in the ,Wod~re
Pdiniris interview, in =which he observes that if people look to his paintings
for the disharmony that they knoll- in life they will he disappointeci. He saFs that people are "shrinking tuck from t3ea~tv.. . . I i v o ~ speak of beautv, you are at cince suspected o f . . . kitsch.'" Khen I);ivid liolvie asks Ralthus \\-hich of his pitintings he like\ the best, he am%-ers,as many artists do, by tafking ahtrut his recent work. I agree \\-ith Ralthus \\-hen he saFs that the nem- CA ivrih ,Llrm?r is one of the finest things he has ever done. It's a painting that t~nitesthe Biedermeier soliditv
of the iompo\itions that first made Balthus h m o u s in the 1931)s m-ith the overripe color that was enchanting him in the 1950s: that is it\ particular k n d of harmon!. Here the old lialthusian erotic charge has cooled to an androgynous tingle. The young girl, ciresseci in a contemporary tunic-and-leggings combination th;tt looks a lot like a meciieval costume. might e a d v be mitaken for an extremely han~isomeyoung prince. The painting offers a distant. philosophical view of beau t\-.The key to everything is the \\-ork's extraordinary scale. ?be Ckr wtth ,Llzr~?rI I I is at cince intiltlate and rnonun~ental, and that union of oppo\ites leaves us 11-itha feeling of alrno\t preternatural calm. There is a story to he read in this densely worked yet utterly spontaneous canvas. and it is a very simple one. Balthus began to pitint a hiry-tale princess: he 11-orkeci for five long years; and m-hen he \\-as finished the princehs had been granted eternal life.
WAR STORIES
Deep into the second decade of the culture \\-ars. \vith the assaults and countera*saults unfolding 11-ith undiminhhed ferocity, the contemporary art that generally receives the most attention is jingoistic, one-dimensiona1. a placard raised in a dehate. This sloganeering that masquerades n art come* from all side* and is seen every\\-here. (In an average day in SoHo. n gallerygoer \\-ill be unable to avt~idthe canned chaos of retro-'60s assemcartoon styles. and a prefkb tradiblage, the if-you-ran't-lick-'e1n-jc)inn'en~ tionalism that range* from i.o\ n g e l e s Minimal to Mediterranean Classic. Some artists cornl?iinre classics ancl cartoons. They
mq,at least temporar-
ily. be hailed as sax*\-\-politicians. As for the best pAnters and sculptors, they have h;tsically derided not to take positions. Excellent artists are \\-orking and nhil,iting, hut \vhm the\- dc-~exhilit \\-hat mq first strike a galler>-goeris the i~~warifne\s of the u-ork, a self-ahsorpticin that can bt. mistaken frtr irrelevance, This quality is not necessarily linked to the size of an artist's reputatk'n: a resolute self-containment is as essential a factor in the enigmatic ahstracti~insof Rill Jensen,m-ho is the moht original painter to have nchin-ed a top-flight reputiition in recent years, as it is in the \\-ark of many less \veil-knoll-n artists. The strongest \\-ork that9\k i n g clone today suggests no dominant shle, tx..~t it all hiis scimething of the fierce clarity and complicate~iinn-ardne\s that one expects from private journal entries made in kvartime. to the SoL-Io vileries 1.rcdd This is niit a moment when casml ex-llrsic~ns much appeal, and I ciinnot blame the sophisticated public that has ,v,-orn c,ffcontemporarv art, preferring to return to the ( )ld Ma*ters in the Metropolitan and the Frick. Even the critics are in denial. The muffled, npologeticall\. evenhancled reviews of the \i'hitne\- Biennial that have appeared since
the she\\- openeci in March suggest that the very people who make contemporary art their business don't expect much and are in a make-~ioframe of mind. Klaus Kertess. kvhci organized this year', Biennial, is passing the peace pipe around m-hen he \\-rites in the catalog that he supports "not a return to formalism hut an art in which meaning is embedded in formal value." Like so many late-t3reaking devclopmmts in the culture lviirs, the 199.5 Biennial is horn of reaction, in this case a reaction to the li'hitney's la*t Bimnial. The theme of the 1093 she\\- \\-as announced in a catalog preface in \I-hich the museum's director, I)a.i.iJ lioss, praised the artists for their rejection of "cynical formalism" in &\or of "the geopolitical, the psychosocial," and \\-hat he c a l l e d i n an attempt at hyperliteracv that sc~undedmore like illiterat-\--"the
hodv's politic." This \\-as a s h m - in which an artist with de-
grees from Brown and Stanforil reflected on man's inhumanity to man Jressinp up in kitsch ethnic garb a d spending several hours a d~ locked in a metal cage m-atching old \vesterns on TV .4 m-hole museum full of that kind of poststructurillist radical chic turned out to be too much even for the people \\-h0 live for politicill art, and Ross and his curator. Elisabeth S ~ ~ s s m afound n, themselves \\-ith what became regarded as The Bienaial That Had (;one Too Far. Ross haci plaj-eci the art-and-politics card and lost, and t~avinghit bottilm he h e m - that there was niwhere to go but up. Since then the K'hitney hasn't e,che.;i-ed politicd gestures, it's just become better at packaging them and distributing them. This seaon's political she\\-. "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in (:ontemporar\- .4merican Art." got the generally \\-hite male critics into exactly the \\\-eat of guilt and remorse and arcommo~lationthat the li'hitney had hoped to trigger in
1093. And no\\-, just a n ~ o n t hafter ""Back Male" m-cnt tlown, we have the payhat-k, a Biennial that the \\-hite hews can say is nice to look at. Klaus Rerte\s has mounted the ultimate nonthreatming Biennial. Krht~. after going thmugh this show that fills every floor and nook and cranny of
the Brhitney, believes that Kertess stands for anything at all! Kertess has been spoken about as a man \vho cares ahout painting, but these clays caring about painting is often nothing but a debating point, ancl the Biennial that Kertess has come up with is little more than a truce among rival kctions. There are no high points: the loll- points are kimiliar one,: the me\sage is that \;\-hatis is \;\-hatis.. The scariest thing ahout the mid-'90&mood is that people are so \\-ithdra%-nthat they're missing the point of, or even missing entirely, a lot of the new work that has a c-oncentrated fcjrce. Trcvor \Virtkfielct\ first shciw cif paintings in six years, which \\-as at E, M. Donahrre, presented a complicatecily allegorical view of po\tmodern chaos that if taken to heart could prohahlv cure a case of the Biennial hlahs. But given that nohod); any longer believes that miracles can happen in art galleries. I \l-on't he surprised if even the people \\-h0 \a;\\-\Vinhfield's \\ark have difficult\- disting~lishingit fro111 the overfull eccentric abstractions of Lari Pittman. =which are pitrt of the Biennial blahs. Kinkfield's u-as one of the two stlows in recent n-eeks that have given a gallerygoer something to take out of the gillery and play ar0~1nc1 with in the n~inJ'seve. The other n-as S t a n l e ~Lewis's first completelv coherent show in eight years. \\-hich \\-as at the Bo\\-ery Gallery. I.e\\-is's jitgged yet delicate painterly realism is in every obvious \;\-ayunlike Brinkfield's zany Surrealist c,nslaught--they're
pn~hahl\-totidly unaware of each other's l;\-ork-hut
this
time around both artists \\-ere cleali~lgwith the same suhject. The best \\ark in \Vinkfield3ssho&-\\-as a painting called 17iu Strrdtij, and the stnjngeht group of \\-orks in Lem-is's \\-as a series of dra;\\ings of his stuciio. The studio is alkvays \\-here the action is, and Kinkfield and I.e\vis. by putti~lgthe action in italics. are telling us that they're hanging in there fcjr the duration. Kba.t happens when an artist gets do&-nto jq-ork is aln-vs essentiatly the same. It has to clo \vith p~lshingfor1115 as kir as they will go. \vith allokving
the logic of the forms to unfold as you g<,along. There must he logic, but the mFstery is that the logic is always changing, and an artist neecis an extraordinary combination of open-mindcilne,~and precision to be able to go
\\-hen the going gets good. (;oing deeper into the studio is literally the subject of Lewis's big. romantically Expressionist pencil clra\\ings, and he makes the theme \\-ork for him because he n~ltkesa gallerygoer believe that each plunge into real space is an emotional adventure. There were several startlingly lovely paintings in the Rower\- shon. \\-ith unforieci yet precise passage5 of autumn foliage set against hard blue sky, but the stuclio &a\\-inps v\-ere the main event. Len-is has a gorgeous \\-a\-kvith his jitbl3ing pencil lines: he erases so much that the paper starts t o give out; and then he collages on more paper and starts ag;tin. He makes me h e l dizzy as I go tltrouph this jumbled lab\-rinth of easel& tables, shelves, sculptures. paintings, paint cans, and miscellaneous junk. These convoluted Mnnnrrist spaces are full of contradictory vistas and alarming leaps in scale. Le\\-is gives h i dra\\-ings some of the space-fmtasv element t h a t we know from Piranesi's Cilrcerl. and this makes perfect sense, because the artist's studio ran fcel like a prison (in spite of all the potential escape routes). Le\\-is uses abstract velocities for realist effect, and he's right to bring this kincl of dissc~nanceinto his work, because m-e're living at a time \\hen homogeneity strikes us a* an impossibility-a
dream that failed. Purism looks
illogical: more than that, it looks ~lishone5t.The lvork that seems to he rating ahead admits of the simultaneous presence of opposing fc3rces---abstract and realist. Classic ancl Romantic---ancl revels in the unexpected affinities. Modern art began h\- taking the nineteenth century's encyclopedic rataloging of the past for granted. The artists admired that pa*t, plzii-ed with it. leaped fcjrward from it. (:reatic~nwas a reacti~n.Rut in the hest 11-orkthat's coming out of the studios today, there's less of an us-and-them feeling
about the reliltionship of the old and the new, the sophisticated and the vernacular. The artists \\-h0 are no%-in their 40s and 50s took in everything at once-pop
culture, Ild Masters. modern art---and the result is that mix-
ups don't surprise them, and they are able to think of certiiin kinds of mixups as suggesting nem- kind, of unity.
KIatls Kertess has included all kinds of styles in his Khitney Biennial, but this does not mean that the artists he is spotlighting k n o n what t o d o \\-ith their freedom to choose. Kertess has an eve for arresting images. t ~ t he doesn't k m % -how structures bring imagery to life. S o \\-hat's the point? The shcm- preaches open-mindedness, hut at heart it's produit-oriented, ends-oriented. Kertess's idea of a gooci painting is an elegant surface that does n o t k n g (as in Brice Marden) or nest t o notfiing (as in the Agnes Martins). His choice of a painterlv realist is the likable but limited Iane I'reilicher, lvhc) knons ho%-to nurse her nayvet(. so that it registers as a curious poetic mannerism. Vi'hen he digs up a younpcr abstract artit-Sam Reveles is a rase in point-the
lvork is so flaccid and inept that it leaves
one m-ondering if Kcrtess has an): idea of hum- a brushstroke achieves d);namic poner. n c i Kertess cioesn't do much better lvith photography, althcjugh leff Witll's photographic variation on a Hokusai print-in
=which a
gust of n-ind lifts a huncile of papers into the air and men clutch their headgear-cioes
uncover pleasing poetic ciouble entencires \\-ithin t h e
pearlv light of ;in unexceptional day. In his catalog e,say Kertess looks to Borges's Fdmous story "The Library of Bahrl" for an analogy to the art scene. m-hich he speaks of as the Museum of Babe!. Kertess doesn't press the analogy, hut he does, in an eight-page picture e,say that precedes the title page, justapose photographs of the Tcnver of Babe! and the Virhitne.r-Museum, and he obviously believes that contemporary arti\ts are caught in the rnidbt of a Rabel of meaning. Kertess rea*c,ns
that the artists \vho are confronted \\-ith this overload must reach beyond meaning h\- turning
''3
mental concept into completely sensory experi-
mce." n d he goei on to saj- that "this transference that takes place in time and space is metapllor.'" Rertess isn't much of a \I-riter, but the ideas he's alluding to are ai o h i clus ai they are arnorptlous, m d contentptsrai~artists won't have any troutde knolving \\hat he has in mind. You can count on the fingers of your hands, however. the artists in this Biennial who ran present metaphor as a process, not an a ~ i t u d e.4 . room-size assemblage. such ai the j'ason Rhc3adrs piece with the heaps of donu ts, is, like the rest of the neo-A11an Raprokv and neo-Brure Nauman stuff in the sho\v, ideologicallv metaphorical, nothing more. So is moit of X\-hatwe see here of ciirtoon-inspired art. although Carroll Ilunham and Philip Taaffe, \vho t3oth adapt some of the surface effects of popular illustration and design. do prove that pop color and pop form have metaphorical possibilities. Taaffe's abstractions. with their Midiile Eastern patterning and retro-chic l?iomorphism, ma!- add up to little more than great graphic cie\ign, hut the artist's \\-a\-of stmciling and printing his c010rs gives irnpm~malitya piquant visual character that can heat up a work. The problem for artists \\-h<,see real picture-making possibilities in pop imagery is that it's almost impossibly hard to fc)llo\\- an intuitive visual logic \\-hen one is using fr~rmsthat have heen devised to make everybody see and feel the same thing. No artist has heen caught in this dilemma more oftm than Dunham. a psvchedelic sophisticate who can he hard ancl calculating in his paintings (see the Biennial selection) and generally loosens up in a good \\-ay in his diaristic cira\vings, \\here he remembers \\-here R. Crumb ends a nni. and C. Dunharn btk'
As for Trcvor VYinkfield, whose show at fl, M. Donahue opened in the same \\-rek as the Bienniitl, he gets going at exactlv the point \\here the Kertess show" cartoon side runs out of steant. W'inkfield's work is cartoonis11 in
that the mass-market people couldn't imagine in their \\-ildcst dreams. Kinkfield make\ a metaphor out of Kertess's Babel, but I cloubt that Kertess really \\-ants to have his conflicts resolved. 1,rC'inkficld'sa13strat-tions are the products of a delightfully split sensihilitv-ha1f lid\\-ardian pack rat-ancl
orthodox (:onstructivist, half
that split gives him intuitive access to the high-vcr-
sus-lon confusions. Kinkfield presents a construction-paper-13right lvorld in thingamajigs and even inanimate objects \\-hich people are amalg;ms of -,%-\-rid , going to happen next in ily off the handle. Although one never k n o ~ -\\hat's Kinkfield's hard-edged Surrealist spaces, he does understand that it is his responsibility to demonstrate th;tt the center ultimately holds. He's an anthologist of kitsch dra\\-ing shies, each considered thnjugh his eyes, his smsilaliw. He's also a connt~is,eurof the shifts in emphasis that turn s ~ l into e neo-st>-le and then into n e n st>-le.( If the t m paintings in the Donahue show, five or six are of an Art t3eco intricacy that's almost too clever, three or four are first rate. ancl 11ru Stfrihil,an audacious treatise on the art of piunting, is pnjhablv the best thing that Kinkfield has ever done,
In I%P S I I I J E ~\*Y;rinkfic.ld ?, presents both the creator and the sueation-to the right is t h e I3adaist marionette of an artist. t o the left is \\-hat he's \I-rot~pht-and Vi'inkfiel~ishows them to be both distinct and intertm-ined.
The artist is a harum-sciirum comic hero \\-h0 aclvertises his lofty aspirations with a sort of medieval headgeau and a bit of sihoolbov" scornanhero drag, but basically he's so busy trying to hold the line in the studio that he can't give us the time of day. His easel, composed of Suprematist angled lines and a couple of pipes that recall Magritte's Cut-i a'est piis unr prpu, is in a state of near-collapse. n d the paihng-within-a-painting-22
harcl-
to-parse creation that includes, maybe, a hit of Grand (:anyon kitsch-is dangerousk aske\\-. lllr Stfrdzir. \\-ith its inspiriting orchestrations of deep recls and blues. is the self-portrait of an artist \\-h0 km\\-s the world is going crazy and \vho just presses on. The mess;tge is altogether upbeat. If you
have your feet firmly planted on the ground-as shou-n frijrn aho-\-e,clearly are-then
this artist's sandled ones.
everything else can float and flv m d
spin, K h a t I love atmut this painting is the carefully kveiphted details that Kinkfield gives to his \vilde*t kncies. A treatise on painting must have its color theory, and Kinkfield presents his in the form of a shelf with glass beakers full of paint that appears in t3oth a six-color and a seven-color version; it's reminiscent of the
I O ~ Sof
l a h ~ r a t ~ r y - p r e c ijars e of pigments in
p h o t o g ~ i p l xof Kandinsky's Paris studio. On the right side of
nlu Stuiilo the
cache of colors is in good order, as neat as in Kandinsky's atelier. On the other side of the painting, h<>\\-ever, something is amiss. The shelf is slipping, and the beaker of purple paint is no\\-here to he found. I m-ondered \\-hat haci twcome of that royal purple. and then I found it clu tcheci in the marionette-like artist's ha.nd. With the brush in his r,ther hand, he's bt~sy giving his painting a fen- purple pit\sage\. ( If course the shelf is at an angle: inspiration has struck. n d thmugh a process of transfc~rmation.\\-hereby the pitint within the pitinting is picked up l,\- the painter in order to create the painting, Kinkfield, for perhaps the first time in his career, pushes beyond ~iazrlingdesign to the freeciom of composition. Kinkfirlci's eclecticism can be called postmodern. But postmodern implies reaction, a\ in the new ttate for the old reacting against the old ta\te for the new, and Brinkfield is too much the unronflicted antipurist to he an ideologue of any stripe. The best artists of lyinkfield's generation-he's 51-are
all committed to an idealistic eclecticism. Such an open-ended aes-
thetic could never gain wide acceptance amid the perpetually r e d r a ~ - nbattle lines of the art scene, and h\- no?%-its origins are lost forever in the pwhistory of the culture \\-ars. but artists are dreamers ancl they just keep on dreaming. ,%pparentlvthei-krcnot the only ones. 1)amneci if KLauss Kerte\s, 11-ho's34, doesn? tbelieve in that openness, too. And he's pone right out
and sold the ifream to the devil by turning ideatistic eclecticism into a Khitney Museum product. K h e n it i.on1es tir contemporary art, ntjbody can make a difference at the 1i'hitne)-: the place is too far gone for that. Rut doesn't it ever occur to itqbody ttr just sq. no?
Leon Ki?ssoff paints a gritty, untouristy London, and he does it \\-ith such \\-onderful miling pitint surEaccs ancl pearly opitlescent gm!-s that even people \vho k n m - the citv fairly m-ell may feel some regret at the things they have rnisseci. Kossoff is representing lingland at the ITeniceBiennale this summer, and in the couple of dozen paintings that hang in the beautiful galleries of the British Pavilion-they
include portraits, nudes, and land-
scape" as \\-ell as city vie\\-*--he gives this shambl\-, rumpled, h u m ~ l r u m London of his an exhilarating. ilolving grace. Kossc~ffis a city cineller to his fingertips. He knolvs that ordinary sights can have n tillismanic PO\\-er preciselv because m-e're seeing them all the time. In some recent paintings of people rushing to and fro in front of a ilolver stall at the limbankmmt Station of the [Tnderground, he uncovers a
grayeci-tio\vn-yet-cc3ruscated 1990s version of the poetry of the everyday. Another series of paintings, which he's been \\orking on for ciecades. features the boldly piled-high facade of one of the monuments of English Baroque awhitecturc: Nicholas E-lawksmoor's <:hristchuw h, \\-hi& rises out trf the rough-and-read\- nrighhorhc)od of Spitalfirlcir, not far from the citv. In Kossoff's (:hristchurch pitintings, the magnificent formal insentheness of
a masterkvork that's just down the street become, one element in the dynamics of neighhorhood life. Kossoff, kvho's 69, grew up near (:hristchurch. and in these paintings one feel&hciw nmuch has gone on around the church. \\-ith its ciramatically soaring clock to\\-er. Spitalfieliis has been htsme to \\-ayes of Russian Jewish, Irish, and Rmgali immigration and is no\\- being gentrifie~i(the art team of (iilbert and (ieorge lire around the corner). I n~entilsntitis neighhorhocsd history because Londoners with whom I locked at the paintings in Lrenice tidd n1e about it, but in a sense it" implicit. The social forces that underlie Kossoff's churning surEaccs are kimiliar to anybtrdy who's spent time in the urban maelstrom, in Idondonor New h r k or a number of other cities. Although Kossoff hasn't had all that many one-man sholvs in lingland, he is non- a major figure in Idondon.where he's vie&-eciin the context of an ilngciing lnf,rlish Liclmantic-Expressic~nisttrdition. In tbc past twenty ?cars he has also had t\\-o s h o ~ -in s New York and three in Los Angeles. and these American appearances have left a stmng impwsion. Around 19.50 Ko\soff sti~diecim-ith David Bomberg, a painter \\-ho's gone into the history btroks \\-ith a fe&-angular \Tortic-ist abstractions from I9 12-13 but \\-h<)devoted mo\t of his \\-orking life (he died in 1957) to an emc~tive,painterk realism. The relationship between Bomberg ancl Kossoff (and Frank 4urrh;ich. another Bolnberg student with a ilnir for Idondongrit) is a case of an influence that's so clear that the younger generation's \\-orl\ alrnmt becomes an organic extmsion of =-hat the older generation \\-as doing. Some of Rc?ssoff's drawings, \\-ith their heavy, jutting line,. might be mistaken for the studies of Idondon architecture that Bcimberg \\-a doing fifty years ago. .4nd in Bomberg's earl\- ITorticist works there's an equation het\%-eenthe overall activation of the surface and the over%-helmingnessof city life that Kossoff has had the inspiration to bring all the \\-ay into the open through his everpresent net\%-arkof thickly Lira\\-n dark lines.
Thew in\istent lines give Kossofi's paintings the magnifieci clarity of children's book illt~strations.Such linear overdetern~inationis a calc~rlatedrisk for a painter. and although this kind of thing can work \\-ell in the cityscapes, \\-here it gives contemporary life a once-upon-a-time magic, in many of Kossofi's portraits and figure paintings the results are le,s satisfnctor\-. Not that extreme linear reduction can't \\-ork for a figure painter: it's \\-hat gives I.(.ger's people their placid monumentality. Rut Kossoffwants his heavily \\-eighted contours to suggest psychological clepth. and although he manageflto tell us sc~methingabout n person, his noses and eyes and mouths have a jotteci-iio\vn quality that doesn't really pull together the animated surEaces of these tan-and-t3rirk-colc~red figures.
I think Kossoff is &\\;ire of the pml,lrm. Some recent pitintings of female nudes slumped in a chair are convinringl\- \\eighty; the movement from part to part a ~ g g " t u kincl of unreiaxing exhaustir~n.Rut the drawing in the figures doesn't give us the specificitv that \\-e \v;int from a portrait or a studk, nucie, and the color in the figures, although nuanced, is a bit oppressive. Sometime\ Kossofi's pitint surface, \\-hich has generally been \er> very thick-the
artist's equivalent of a geologic-a1build-u p--suggests
mucidle
rather than depth. Most of the recent heads are too thickly painted; it's mun~mifiedflesh. Part of =-hat\ exciting about some of the recent Ifindon views is that Kossoffis stopping before the surEace closes do\\-n, so that you feel i l u i d i ~as \veil as \\-eightine,~in the handing of the pitint.
All of Ko\soff's figures have some\\-hat oversizeci features and a \\ear) look in their eyes. I've come to think of Knssc~ff'speople a* his lovable. superannuated munchkins. That's not necessarily n bad thing: Poussin did munchkins, too. The comparison ciccilrs to me hecituse it ciccilrred to Kix-,soff. \vho did loose copie5 of a Foushin painting. Cq~hilitrdoil ilerorir. some the s starring roles; f'le years ago. But then Youssin rarely gives his ~ n t ~ n c h k i n sees them as toy people set in over%-helming landscapes. In Knshoff's
cityscapes, the figures have an echo of that toylike charm that we know from Potrssin. I can sec that all the hard 'i\-ork that Kossoff has devoted to the studio nudes pa\-Soff in the rityzcapes. where the little people who scurri- through a Idondondo\\-npour or hurry home from the Undergroun~istation are rendered lvith such summary force. In the (:hristchurch paintings, the figures moving along the side\\-;ilk don't look at the church, and m-e find ourselves follolving their glances even a\ lve look both at them and at the architecture; it makes for a satisfyingly ]a!-ereci experience. Kossoff pia!-S lvith an interesting idea of likeness-in-unlikenw by describing the architecture and the figures \\-ith the same dark lines. There's an equivalence created. so that the building becomes a living, anthropomorphic presence that presses dolvn against the people even as they're pounding the pavement. Kossc~fftakes the exact mea\ure of C:hristchurch3sgrandeur, hut he also like, to bring out the beauty-in-ugliness of a kind of urban architecture t h t ' s grown up a h o s t by accident. The BmbiTtnkn~entStation and M t ~ q e r ford Bridge paintings, with their veritable collage of cla\hing volume, and textures, are as much about the weird kiscination of an unplanned myironment as are the paintings of New York Citv's I h i o n Square and 56th Street that Fairfielii Porter ciid in the '70s. (That won't surprise people \\-ho've found them,elves thinking that there are more than a few similarities bet\\-een today's sprakvling multicultural London and our sprakvling multic ultural Ne\v York.) Kossofi's color is at its best in his cityscapes. more varied and open-encied than in the figures. but even here he sometimes depends too much on surface design. The chilciren's-illustratic~nflatne,s gives the citvscapes a nice element of surprise; I feel that Kossoff is allolving himself to have immediate, unromplicitted reactions to n complicated em-in~nment.The citvscapes aren't ever t,landl\- reductive. hut there's not all\-ays enough spare to breathe. When
Kossoff paints a shade\\-y area that's supposed to supge\t some depth, the color can go dead on him. He likes to squash his perspective, so that dingonals turn into concavities and the plane, that are meant to go bark in space lean to\\-ard the surface. This spatial indecision. 11-hichmight he a painterly equivalent of the feeling that moviemakers achieve \vith their hand-held cameras, is something that Kossoff occasionally overplays. His pulsating city is sometimes jr~sta \\-01~E3lycity.
Kossc~ffisg f i ~ x i n gas a painter; the recent cityscapes seem to be the work of an artist who is breathing more easily. m-ho's not so tense, so clutched. In the newer canva,es, the surfaces have a welcc~meopenness and t l t ~ i d i tso ~ , that I begin to feel that everything is changing. evolving. expanding, right t3efore
m!- eyes. Ihfortunately, though. in Venice, \\-here the British Pavilion happened to he just about the onlv place where contemporary painting \\-as pwentecl as a gamble \\-orthy of
;I
large talent. most people seemed to re-
gard Kc?ssoff's \vork as a take-it-or-leave-it pmposition. He was a painterly painter, and that \\-as all there was to say. For some Yen- Yorkers 11-hci've \\-atched in recent years as London painters have received a surprisingly large nmclunt of a t t e n t i r ~ n l naddition to Ko\soff I'm thinking of Lucian , Frank AtlerFreud, R. B. Kitaj, H()%-ardHodgkin, Rodrigo M o ~ n i h a nand t33ch-the
British presence in Venice roulci look like more of the same. This
year's big theme show in \renice. which the Biennale's director. rean Clair. devoted to the figure in t\\-entieth-century art ancl gave the title "Identity and .41teritC3(that's their English), included work by Knssc~ffasm-ell a, Franci, Bacon, Freud, and Kitaj. Kitaj, on the basis of his paintings in "Identity and .2tteritv,'\\-as a\ccaidedthe Bienmle's grand prize.
In Lrenice, \\here the American Pavilion \\-as devoted to a group of video installations by Bill Viola called Brrrri.il .$ri:rrfr,you roulci see an nglo-.%merican face-off betm-een mind-n~~mbing traditionalism and healthy innovation
or bet\\-ern healthy traditionalism and mind-numbing i n n o v a t i r ~ n l all t depended on your point of vieu: Yet the Engliskl situation was more complicated than the British Pi~vilionmight have led one to imagine, for the British choice was deepl\- resented by those \vho regard them\elves as being on I.on~ion'scutting edge. The)- had their 011-n Biennale shm-. m-hich fentured video and installation art, in the Scuola cii San Fa\quale. a twenty-orso-minute walk from the Biennale grounds. (Like Ko\roff's exhihiaon, it \\-as under the auspices of the British (:ouncil.) Ilinos and Take (:hapman \\-ere the stars of the Scuola. lvith their three-tiimmsional appropriation of the "Great deeds-against
(lf W U I'm ~ ~ the dead!" plate from Goys's DISIISIPTS
not really sure if the <:hapmans meant to declare them\elver a h n - a r or anti-art by reducing the harrokving delicacy of Go)-a's etching to the cimp spectacle of several life-size Km dolls lvith their genitals ripped out, but no-
btrdy could doubt that the (:hapmanil kniw- tlol\- to cause it stir. linglish painters may feel that they're as much at the mercy of antipainting a\ nnyhodv else is today, hut at the Biennale they looked like practically the only artists alive who rare to paint pictures of the \\-orld. Although I don't think that's the case, therc arc certainly people in a lot of places. including Neu- Yt~rk,\\-h<)do. Painting from I.on~ionis becoming a populiir export. .4fter closing in Vmice in September, the Knrsc~ffsho\vtravels to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.
exhibition called '"I;ror7t1 I,ondon,"
\I-bich opened in EdinbuuZr;h this summer anti includes Kosoff, Baron, l:ret~d,Auerhach, Kitaj, and several other artists, will be traveling to Luxembourg, Lausanne, and Barcelona. \*rErilliamLiebernlan, the &airman of tjq-entieth-ccntur~;art at the hletri~politanhluseilm, has had enough rctrospectives of London-haseci arti\ts (Hodgkin is slateci for this kill) to make it seem that \\-hatever the fi~lancialadvantages of transatlantic cooperation. he certainly believes that the Brits arc the painters for the '90s. h Kossoffretrospctive \\ill be nlounteci at the Tate in 1096. m e r i c a n nluseunl officials
\\-h0 \\-atched in 1994 as the I.ucian Freuci retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum became the number-one topic at Manhattan clinner parties might \\-ant a piece of the action, even if it's hard to imagine Kossoff having the knock-'em-dead impact of Sigmunci Freud's grandson. \vhois convinced half living no\\- not in spite of the lvorld th;tt he has the last \\-(3rd on h o ~we're ‘1l ent. but on account of his small, cold t*
linplish art is no more one thing than American art. but there is something to the idea of a national artistic character, and who can doubt that today the English artistic character has an international appeal! In lingland. \I-here the ct~lturalbedrock is literarv, artists have al%-aysbeen inclined to tell stories or illustrate clramatic mon~entscsf the kind that csne k n o ~ -t si - c m ~ poetry, ancl Kosscsff's cityscapes have that literary quality. even if W-hathe offers is as pared-donn a poetic vignette as "I \\-allcell!,t
(:hristrhurih one
stormy summer rlay." There are masterpieces of Romantic poetry that begin \\-ith little more. The literary disposition in Engli\h art has given it an ambiguous status h rnucll of this century, and in our postmodern em-ironment the British resistance to the modern idea that the content emerges from the form can look quite appealing. People arc right to be fed up with such modern ilichks as art-cm?-tell-a-story and art-must-look-like-ncsth-
ing-you've-seen-t,efc)re. They're right to admire Kossoff. But we arc in danger of being \\vamped bj- an equally arbitrary set of postmodern rlichis. and they clo Kossoff no good. <:ontemporary English artists may feel that fcjreigners exaggerate the significance of a national arti,tic character. The English tt~elnselves,ho\vever, arc lnakinp an assumption about national norms m-hen thev insist that an artist" sq-ork tse understood in terms of some other strong sense csf belonging, \\-hich in Leon Kossoff's case has to do with his having gn,&-n up in a poor London j'e\\-i-i\hkimilv. Khen \i:illlemar ]anusrczak, revie&-ingthe Riennale in the limes of London on fune 18, observed that "yt)u can t akL ~ i m a n a
out of the shtetl hut you cannot take the shtetl out of a man," he did not exactly intend a put-do\\-n--ranuszcxitk
hastened to add that the same
could be said of Coutine and Rothkc~-hut
he \\-as sugge*ting that re\\-ish-
ness nlight limit an artist's options. 1 t h c ) u g h lanuszczak is possibly the only London critic \\-h0 said a* much in print, there m-ere quite a few people at the Riennale, pro-Kossoff and nnti-Kossoff, \\-h0 m-ere saying more or less the same thing. Ti, Londoners who arc tired of ail the talk about the EngLishne5s of English art, their comments about the Ie\%-ishmssof Jekk-ish art are probably a case of giving as good a* they get. They have n point. Rut j'ewishness has a \\-ay of being po\ed as a fixed condition, rather than as something that an artist is horn into and gro\vs through and then subjects to imaginative transfc3rmation. Holk-everKossoff may choose to regard or ~iisregardhis Je\vishnesr,it's unquestionably a factor in the work. It has hem ol3served that (:hristchun-h. for a ]elk-ishboy, must have had the seductive-scar\- Fdrcinati~inof the unknown. There's probably something to the fact thtrt the student-teacher relationship twtneen Kossoff 2nd Bomberg \\-as a relationship bet\\-ren t\vo London Iem-S. (Bomberg, who had lived alld painte~iin r;lle*ti~lein the '2Os, would have been pufectly a\\-are of this.) And there is of course much in Kossoff's paintings that brings Soutine to mind. All of this count-hut
its significance must be
read from the 'iq-ark, not into the \\-ark. The connection to Soutine has to dcl \I-ith a lot of artistic Ftctorb that have nothing n-hatever to do with the shtetl. Khat Kossofi's best recent \\-ork brings to mind is Soutine the I'ranrophile,
\\-h0 gave us one of the rentur>-'smost original reinterpretations of the tradition of (:ourbet and (:on~t.That in turn may relate to Kossoff's oft-remarked afbnity with (:c)nstahle. whose place in English art is in certain re\pects not unlike that of (I:c)rrrbet in I'rance, Although some in England \\-ill regard rekvishness and Iinglishne,~as irreconcilable. it may he that in imaginative terms-kvhich
are the only terms
that really matter to an arti\t----they are reconcilable. If English culture is e\sentially l i t e r a r ~so. too, is Je~vishculture. And the English artist \vho. as an outsider to the modern movement, feels at home 11-ithpostmacfern storpelling may fixlii that his Ie&-ishnessfits right into a cleveloping equittion. This mai- help explain \\-h!- so many of the painters who are grc?upeci under the rubric of the School of idondonare Ie\vish. 4 year ago. \\-hen Kitaj reacted to the critical drubbing that his %te retrospective received by saying that anti-Sexnitism \;\-asinvolved, a lot cif ,4nrr?ricans tlidn't know whitt to make of hi, claims. There \\-as a feeling in Ye\\- York that he \\-its euaggrratthat I've been to Venice ancl seen h o ~i n- s i s t m t l ~Kossoff's painting ing. No\\is linked with Kossofi'\ Tekvishness. I think Kitaj \\;is onto something. Khether i.ondon's high-cult postmodern publiritv machine loves you or hateh you, it's definitely something to see it sxvinging into action. Readers
of David Svlvester's essay for the Kossoff show in Venice may find themselves thinking bark to Lucian I'reud, because Sylvester makes on Kossoff's t3ehalf the same overreaching compitrison to Rembraniit that a number of \\-riters make on t3ehalf of Freud. (I may be getting \vhim\ical here, hut is Kembran~lt,n-ho took such an interest in Am\terdam's Jews, viewed as an-
other element in the School of London's Iewish connection?) The compari- a n v t h i q t~sefulabout either Kossoff or son to Rembrandt doesn't say
Freud, h u t qt~alitativedistinctions are irrelevant to a puhIic tfiat accepts Rembran~lt'sname as part of the hack-to-tradition PR mvhtique. Kcjssciff. an apparently modest man \vho just means to mind his 0%-n t3usiness, may be a little startled to find that his perfectly uniierstaniiahle reluctance to permit studio vi\its or give int"rviem-Si, non- repcirted in Gnrt3nesque terms. That Kossoff lvorks in a paint-encrusted studio seems remarkable to some; R ~ d hi c h s , the ctlrator of the Ste~felijk,writes about this \\-orkplarc as if it \\ere some kind of shrine. Sylvester quotes Lakvrence C;o\ving as describing Kossoff's painterly surfaces n a "confessic>nal net-
\\-ork." H;t\enSt\\-e already had enough mumho jumbo rna~ieout of the fkct that there's a lot of paint on somebody's canvases! Sylvester. \vho knew (2acometti and has recently published n book on him, is so into the eustentialisrn of process that he miis up confusing Kcjssoff's fine painangs \\-ith C;iacometti's sublime ones. Rut then literary types have all\-a\-,mistakrn Giacometti for n process-oriented artist. as if his greatness had to do 11-ith his changing t h i n g so much and not 11-ith the perfect accuracy and eloquence of his fillistled canvases. (If incfecision made masterpieces, there would he a lot more of them.) The point is not more paint or l e s paint. or more subject matter or less subject matter: it's the appnjpriateness of what's there. I think Kossoff ~vould agree, Even as he's being hypecl as the art \\-iirIClt3slatest anti-star, tljs piiintitngs are becoming less mannered. more direct. There have been times. especi~tlly in the '60s and '70s, \I-hen Kossoff was into paint far its own sake, and the results \\-ere overly impastoeif surkizes, clotted dark color, and a ciisturl,inglv \\-eM>\-overlay of pray-kvhite drips. In recent years he's twen simplifying his painthandling. and the result. especially in the nrm-er (:hristchurch and Emt3ankment floner-stall paintings. is an admirable openness and lightness. 'Ihese are just libout the best canvaws that he has ever done. Khen he paints the flo\ver stall, Kossoff is declaring his interest in the pan-er of pure color. .4lthough he's not giving up his grily-and-tan \ision of London. he is alloning more and more brightness to seep into the moist atmosphere, and the result is a glinting richnesh. a huc)v;~nc)-.Kossoff is moving from not-enough-color to no-color color. This is something that
you can learn all about in Venice, \\here Titian filled big canvases \\-ith raint>o\v-richgraj-s. Kc?ssoffwon't bear comparison \\-ith that ultimate Iienetian master, but I think it says a gciod deal about this Englishman" sn-ork that it does not look ridiculous in the Iienetirtn context-. SEPTEMBER 4,1995
BORN UNDER SATURN
The j\-ork that Bill Iensen has heen doing in the pitst several years is as exciting as any painting that has ever heen done by an .4mrricitn. This 49-yearold arti,t is a master of inchoate, muffled-yet-fierce emotions, and ncs other arti\t alive has given us sc, many haunting impressions of the loll-ering, saturnine side of the artist's spirit. Bv contemporarj- standards rensen's abstract cam-ases are small-enerally
tkx-o or three feet high----and this fc~cuhesuh
on the autographic force of the surEace. 11-hichhe builds up and rubs down and then builds up again m-ith a concentrated lyricism that's so intense that it can be a little scary. lensen has an alchemist's gift for turning piled-high brushstrokes and flotsam-like bits of pigment into the st~bstanceof a mvt hical natural \vorlci. It's an ugly-beau tiful unkerse, where the vistas are eerie, the color is febrile. and every landmark has a scintillating allegorical po&-er. i of meanderThe poetry of imsen's work is n matter of hints n n ~flashes, unfurlings. There's a marvelous slo\vness to these painti n g ~ unfoldings. , ings: you feel rensm's contemplative pitce. ( h e \\-ay to explain \\-hat rensen doe, is l,\- explaining \\hat he does not do. He never employ\ an end-to-md structure that takes its essential logic from the rectangular shape of the cam-as. Thatk the French n-a>--compcssition as a discipline that leads to a revelation---ancl it has nothing to do with lensen's piece-l3y-piece. questing approach. Although there are many Iensen painting, that contain a singular, looming image. he arrives at that all-in-one impact indirectly, incrementally. Ys~uget the feeling that he's begun each painting by fs~cusingon some tin\ element-the
color of a brushstroke. the weight of a line. the
thrust of a curve---and that for him the process of making a painting is the px~cess""fvatching that first mark or gesture gn~m-.In Iensen's m-ork.
grim-th is gradual, uneven. surprising-like
bits of moss and lichen appear-
ing on drc;i\-ing branches and then spreading unpreciictahly, creating romantically irregular patterns. There are six piiintings in the Bill Iensen show at the Marv Boone Gallery in Nrv. York. ancl in order evm to bepin to look at them a gallerygorr has to t - n o t h i q mood. Tk-o tune in to the artis t's quietert, slo\vest, dc~ing-almo\ paintings. Gbssas ancl Pirijirn, are \er!- impressive. Both are vertical, a hit over three feet high, with a horizon line ciividing the surface into nearly equal parts and summoning up, m-ith almost diagrammatic abruptness. n view of sky , cold blue hrushstn~kesspread above and earth or ocean below. f i b s ~ a r m-ith out before the orange-yello~-haze of the sun, is the primordial. Hclmeric sea. In Pdgira, clouds of that same cool blue scutter armss a greenish sky, a s h that's as unins-iltiw as the n ~ u g hred-ad-black , terrain belt~v. These s~rnhnliclandscapes contain no trace of a human presence; no path cuts through the gloom of
Pagirtr,
no boat could navigilte the danger-
ous \\-ater, of Ct?iirssus. In the lower portions of the painting. rensen curves his elements to give just a suggestion of perspectival depth. hut he's not invoking a particular place so much as summoning a harshly sublime mood. He', an ultra-sophisticated artist creating barbaric scran-ls. And the painthanclling. 11-ithits complete lack of charm. underline the peremptorv spirit of these works. When I look at the pitintings close up, I feel the chill of the palette knife rather than the softne5s of the brush. The roughed-up paint has some of the quality of Eastern calligriiphj-, of those complicated. iconic gestures that seem to emerge almost involuntarily out of an artist's reserves of calm. These landscapes, n-hich feel both 11-orn-out m J tlntouched. are ahnut mapping unmappable experiences, about being in a place that has no beginning and no end. ~ a third painting, ralleci Wlf:turL~fiht,that does a In the Roone s h o there's remarkable job of evoking frozen desolation by means of a fe\v t > r n ~ -marks n
set on a beautifully distressed surfiice. But after Cnlnsus, Pirgerr, a d B7fflbpr
Light, the quality of the 11-orkdrops precipitouslv; the three other paintings are so understated that in each case I can c-onclude cinly that lensen has left some essential part of the story inside his head. 4 s I moved around the gallery. every other painting clre\\- a blank. n d since f e n s e f i dominant theme here is the fascination of near emptiness, the outright enlptiness of one half of the selections can't but t~ndercctteven his subdest efforts. The shc)n-is sunk 1zv all this weak work. It's an out-otrfc~cusexhilzition, cine that conveys no sense of the v a r i e ~ of Jensen's recent pAnting, and I can't see how people leaving Boone \\ill understand \\-hat kind of an artist lensen redly is. This show is a verv disturl3ing event. In the 1940s. Clement (;reenlzerg often complainecl in print that the best American painting \\-as to be seen in the artists' studios rather than in the galleries. This fall Bill fensen confcluncfs us \\-ith the rase of a remarkable artist \\-h0 is showing at \\-hat is generally regiiriieii as one of the most prestigiclous galleries anjunc1. but has left the majori y of his strongest \\ark a few mile\ a%-ay.in his studio in Bmoklyn.
I realize that by compat.inp the shi)w at hfary Boom m-ith the much larger group of paintings I ,a\\- in lensen's studio some six months ago, I'm making a value judgment that's based on in\ider informatic~n.I'm loath to take advantape of such information, but the mismatch betm-een \I-hat fensen has been cioing in his stuclio ancl \\-hat's on display at Boone does such a disservice to the gallerygoer that a critic cannot hut offer a behind-the-scenes view. This is o d y fensen's second ,bm-at Boone, and the gap between his authenticity and her st\-Iishness is wider than it \\-as two \-ears ago, \\-hen he first exhibited on \Vest Bm;td\va\-. There is no excuse for his not shokving at lea\t a half-dozen more paintings, including some of his recent underx-ater universes and fiery nightscapes. There's certainly enough room at Boone to demonstrate that lensen is ntw.- able to present cimplicated embiematic subject nlatter with intuitive ease.
At the t3eginning of the '80s Mary Roone pioneereci, almost single-handedly, an overbearingly austere. Zen-Fascist style in gallery ciesign, and I,\now it ciominates the upscale scene. Boone's space at 417 \Vest Broadnay gave the slob-job work of Julian Schnahel and L);ivid Salle the VIP send-off that it so desperately needed, but this gallery flzttens out paintings that are discreetly emotional. The Mar\ Boone Gallery turns Jensen's pitintings into postage "amp"
even his strongest cam-ases look underpo\vered. The real
stars are Boone's perfectly smooth, nearlv empty gallery \\;ills. This is a hell of a spackle-ancl-paint job, but it doesn't make for an artist-friendly environment, At the very least, Roone coulci have let gallerygoers in on \\-hat Jensen is up to by presenting, in one of the other room\ in her capacious building, the suite of intaglio prints that he completecl in the spring of 1994 for an artist's h ~ o ktitled Pt~stcilnisFlrn Truhl. This collah~rationn-ith the poet John Yan is an homage to the Awtrian poet Geclrg Tt-akl, \\-h<,died in f C)14 at the
ape of 27. In these prints. which are a mixture of iiquatint ancl etching and just about everything else that can be done on a iopper plate, fensen is doing \\-hat \\-@ don't see him cioing at Roone-alternating
skyzcapes and land-
scapes, biding-akvay images and rushing-for%-;irdimages, getting into the details of an imaginary \vorlci. So \\-h\-is the public being cienied access to this \\-orkl Has somebody calculated that Jensen's fezunclity will not go over \I-ith the SoHo auditme? Tit the extent that the Boone she\\- represents Iensen as a visionary kvandering in the lvilderness, it's not a completely inaccurate vie\\- of the artiit. But Jensen is a lot of other things. He's an artist
\\-h0 kncnvs something about complexity and richness ancl pitrariox, and in an art scene that's de\perate for variety and expansivene\s. it's maddening to think that people aren? s e e i q what Jensen can do. Likc so much that's urgent in contemporary art, Ienscn's lvork ciraws some of its force from the artiit's e\sentially solitary position. from his very
liick of significant reliltionship to anything that anybody else is doing. True. Icnsen's small formats. hiomorphic forms, and impastoed surfaces have been lvidely imitated. They have by no\\- generatecl a whole nem- kincl of artschool product. The allegorical polver of his lvork \\as an elenlent in the '80s art experience, hut even so rensen's paintings never lost their sornhrr deAoone, rensrn's solitude is turned into a i.ommercial c-lithi., tachment. &%t SOIMC) and it's easy to forget that he's just about the only artist \vhc)'s h'~~T-en
internal coherence to Neoexpressionism-\\-hicl1
was the '80s \\-a\-of finally
trying to deal with all the overn-helming emotions that \\ere left over from the '60s. Khercas most of the Neoexpressionists have treatecl generational feelings \\-ith tri\ialiring irony, as Zeitgeist t,ulletin\. rensrn has v l s a i l i i z ~ dthe pa\t-'60s feverishness.
Iensenk first breakthrough came late in the 1070s, when he unsovered new life in a strain of mystical nature poetry that had run through ,%mericanart from the stcrrrr.1-tossedseascapes of Alhert Pi11kb;rln Ryder to the musical abstractions of Arthur I)ove ancl the Maine fc3rests of Mars~lmHartley. These \\-ere not exactly unricrknt3~-nor unricrappeciatd artists. \%%at \\-assignificant abcmt Jensen's encounters with an earlier American art \\-as that he uncovered a contemporary urgmcy in paintings that were generally regarded as
of little more than historical interest. Jensen a\r~idedthe risks of antiquuianism: he made the experience of there early American modcms feel very much his OR-n.People sax7Imsen's small fi~rmats,and the specificih \\-ith lvhich he drekv his enigmatic \isions. ar signifying a break with the overbearing scale and homogeneous look of post\\-ar m e r i c a n art. That led to the conclusion th;tt Iensen m-as anti-Abstract Expressionist. h retrospect, him-ever, it seems that Iensen was only fincling his own \\ay back into Abstract Expressionism. Ienscn c-an~eto Kcw h r k kern Minnesota, where hekd studied l;\-ithPeter Busa, an old friend of Pollockk,, and when he first exhibited the paintings
in =which small redefined beautiful it \\-as his \v;$!- of rejecting not h s t r a c t lispressionism but a calcified view of the movement. lensen \v;mted to get a\\-ay from the chilled-out imagery of the later '50s and 'GO\, hack to the high-pitched, densely figured, grittv, even Gothic temperament of Pollock and Gorky 2nd de Kncining in the '40s. His in\\-iird-turning scale. m-hich is as much of an extreme statement n the .4hstract Expressionist\ \\all-sized canvases, \\-as a personal \\-ay of refcjcusing attention on the surface. And once rensen had gotten do\\-n to basics, he knew that he could gci anywhere, t h t he could yrrestic~nall the underlying ? i e ~York f cfioed a\sumptions. In the mid-'80s he experimented \vith a sort of Surrealist lan~lscapethat \\-as so literal it risked at-adernicisrn. He's learned much f r ~ i ~the n strean~lined forms of h r p and other Purist&;and in recent years he's looked farther afield, at the mc~untainsin Trecento painting. at Goys and Micheliinpelo and Chinese scrolls. Khether lensen is reaching for a dense, cloisonn6 effect or something glancing and open-mdeci, he takes the same from-the-groun~1-upapproach to form. E~erythinghegin, \\-ith the cira\ving, \\-hether it's being done \vith pencil, ink, or oil paint. li'hen lensen is drakving, he's cultivating his garden, \\-a":hing things grow. In recent years he has developeci a way of w-orking in t3lark and \\-hite \vith brush and ink that's his alone; in the spring of 1994 on these d r a ~ v i n g ~the a t Kashbt~rn there \\-as a ren~arkirhleS ~ O M centered
Gallery (where Iensen began exhibiting in 1980 and continues to she\\- his graphic work). rensen lai-s strokes clown on thick paper. t3lots and sponge\ them lvhile they're still damp, and then \\-orks t3;tck into the surkce. He's literally \\-atering the paper. so that it become, the soil from 11-hichthe images emerge. He pushes into that dense, loam!- surface (he uses gorgeous paper) over ancl over apilin. so that the result is an em-eloping, dark-pe\\-ter m!-steriousness. This i, parallel to \\hat he doe, m-ith pigments and oils in the paintings. I t h o u g h the highly lvorked paint surface has become a
mannerism in many of his imitators. with fensen it's tied so closely to the discovery of fc>rrnsthat even his most exquisitely rubbed-dc~\vneffects have an invigorating straightfc~r\vardness. In his printmaking. Iensen is doing just about everything that's possible on a copper plate; he seem\ to be \\-orking inside the metal, extracting its secrets. For the past six Years. some of the motif\ that dominate his paintings have also been cropping up in the plates that he's been preparing for Pt?sri-irrils
/n?m iiairkl. The finished hook, which presents the fensen universe betu-een hard covers, bears comparison to some of the fir~ertillustration that French artists did in the first half of the century. True. John Yau's poems. despite some striking line,. are mostly Surrealist t,oilerplate, but many remarkable artists' hooks hilve had unremarkable text\, and in any event Irnsen's real subject isn't Yau's poetry hut Trakl's. This u s t r i a n lvriter is generally seen as a bridge between fin de sikcle dreamine,~and Expressionist simplification. and in many respects Rill Jensen is a kindred spirit. fensen may have had Trakl's "nocturnal lving-beat of the soul" in mind \\-hen he created several t3irdlike forms out of lightly inscribed lines. In Trakl's poetry "Scarlet banners \\-hirl through the mourning of the maple-tree," "The tree of grace t3lossoms golden out of the cool sap of the earth." and "All roads end in t3lack deca>-."It's a late-autumn atmosphere that one knows from fensm's paintings, and in Pt~stcilnisbnn liilki this American contempcirary i, in a German Romantic state of mind, 11-eaving themes of earth and air, heaviness and lightne,~.gro&-thand decay into a shaLio\\-y,interic~rdrama.
Ptntcunisfinn lhki opens n-ith a composition of looming fc3rms framing a t3;trren land. There are hovering heraldic cievices, and bizarre tubular shapes that are like root systems rekacteci t h o u g h a Baroque imagination. fensen even manages to bring comic grace notes to the saturnine spirit of Pt?sri-irrils /nlra
Truhl; he sees the humorous side of his weird visionary landscapes. Pt~st-
cunls /nlra iiairkl i b something rare in contemporarv American art: a collahora-
tion twtkx-een a pitinter \\-h0 glories in the demands of intaglio printmaking and n master printer-Rill
C;oldston of IJniversal I_imitedArt Editions in
Kcst Islip. Ye\\- Y o r k % - h opml,;tbly spends much of his time holciing the hands of big-name artists \\-h0 just \\-ant to make a quick buck lvith some print editions. Kith this collaboration het\%-een<;olciston and lensen, ULAE has become the first Ameriian print studio since Vi'orld Khr I2 to produce an artist's hook that actually ciipitalizes.on the almost limitless emotional possibilities that are inherent in the printn~aker'sart, Atmosphere is a central protagonist in much of Tensen's work. This is
\\-h\-he has. such an intuitive feeling for the velvety chiaroscuro of intaglio printmaking. Many of his str0nges.t Lira\\-ing. prints, and painting leave us in a state of pleasurable suspension, because lve can't exactly saj-what \\-e're seeing. even though \\-e know precisely h o it's ~ making us feel. In the pitintings at Boone this fall, Trnsen takes nonspecificity as fkr as it \\ill go; even the clearest pitintings give us little to touch dolvn on. save for those casually dra%-nhorizon lines that hepitrate earth from air. Ohviouslv lensen is tes.ting the limits of his anticlassical, antiarchitectonic method, and that's perfectly legitimate. The problem is that some of these paintings that are meant to be emotionally elusive are also f~jrmallyunresolved, so that lensen's homegn,&-n. u nto-m!-self strength twgins to look like homegnjnn ot,tuseness.
1 think Jensen meant to offer tls a ke! to this evanescent n-orld of his \\-hen he gave a number of the Roone paintings homage-to-greatmoviemaker titles, One of the weakest canvases is n r ~ n ~ eafter d ,%ndrei Tarkovsky's film
. $ f i l j k ~ rThere .
are three that refer to Bergman: the delicate
B7f'ilrtrr Light, the inconclusive Hi?rrr of rhp BTiY; ancl the vacuous Mud~lnjcJu Suriv (Rergman directed n production of the Mishima plzii- that was presented at the Brooklyn %cadem!- of Music last seas.on). I don't \\-ant to hear dolvn on the relationship twtkveen particular titles and particular paintings-it \I-ould on1y t~nderlinethe problems. \I-itll thew 11-~rks-but I take Tensen
ahsc~lutelvseric~uslym-hen he encourilget us to believe that there's n connection bet=-een movie ittmosptlere and painting atmosphere, 'That conneaion is at the heart of Tensen's recent lvork, especiallv some of the lvork that \I-e're not seeing at Roone. I think Tensea is the first artist of his generation jq-ho's done jq-hat so many have tallied about doing: he" \?rought something of the movie experience into painting. Tensen understands that the e\sence of the movie image isn't its iompositicin hut it\ flow. its changeat,lmess, it\ kinetic feel. ByhereasI);ivid Sdle \\-ill fcxus on the campy ciissoriated qualities of the film still, Tensen \\-ants to use his antiarchitectonic kind of painting to evoke the flooding-over-us high of movie emotic~n.People m-ho k n m - 'Tarkovsky's mc~vie,see immediately jq-fiy jensen is & a - n to them; lensen's loorninp enigmas and watery and misty effects parallel Tarkc>vsky'sallegorical universe. \%%at the critic Piiul Coate\ says of T~rkovsky-that he creates a m-orld that "exists simultaneouslv in the monochrome of depression and the color of joy"--goes
f63r
Tcnsen, too. With Tarkossky, it's the lvildness and the strangeness that Tensen is responding to. In the rase of Bergman. the affinitie, are subtler, more entotionatIy complex, so much so that it's tempting to believe that bnsen has closer artitic ties to this Sm.ecli(rh director thxn t i anv ~ painter living or tiead. Tensen shares Bergman's taste for looming. spiky Gothic imagery. And Tcnscn. \\-h0 comes from a Minnesotan-Scandinavian background, has a feeling for the t,eautv of iie\olation that's part of a Northern liuropean tradition that Rergman has defined for m e r i c a n audiences practically since Tensen n-as born. If such early Tensens as Cri?urz
(f
Ibllrn ancl Ibr IVrljp~rts11g-
ge\t the ciark medievalism of Wergman's .$mi.nrhS w l (kvhich \\;is an art-house chestnut by the time lensen went t o college). some of the Inore recent Sienese lnn~iscapesand ebullient!\- striped snaky shapes ~ ~ g the g euuhere ~ ant Rergman of
nlu -2lirglr- Eleir. In Rergman. sensuciusne5scan flash up in the
midst of severitv, and an allegory can leap into startling life. I think Iensen is bringing these same strong. contradictory forces into his painting. He. too, can give ponJerous elnotions an immediate, flokving grace. The Northern artist is the sensualist who is forever at 'iq-ar with his
,tiding-one-intt>-tl~e-otfieremotions are our emi>tions. With his darkfv tsurning conflicts. his full-out lyricism, his feeling for a beauty thttt's sometime, indistinguihable from the grotesque. rensen keeps us baffled and uncare to knoll- alsout nerved. He knovc-s more al-tout us than l;\-eson~etin~e, i>urselves.X/let ani:holy ? l!ivided? ftlarooned?This is not hon- the generation that started out in the '60%ever expected to feel.
THE THIRD
DECREE
W'hy is it that the critics who trllnlpet the death of painting, or even the end of art as we know it, rarely have anything dire to say about the state of sculpture? The apocalyptically minded could certainly 61ld ditnger signs if they kvmted to. h \ \ - e l l - c o n s t r t d n e n sculpture is much more of a rarity t h n a weH-conhtxucted new painting. &%nd even in the gaileries that are re-
gardrd as strong supporters of experimentation, \\-orks that hang on the \\-all not infrequently outnumber \\-ork, that sit on the floor. f i t not a season goes bj- kvithout somebody declaring that painting, at least painting that's any good, is going to disappear or has already ciisappeared. In some quarters there is a stmng desire to dismiss all the painters, for simply by cioing \\-hat they c10 they have resisted the modern principle of perpetuitl artistic- change. Fainters are still \\-orking \\here they've alw-avs \vorked. which is up agilinst the \\-all. The sculptors. mean\\-hile, have allo\\-rd themselves to be t3;tcked into quite a few- corners. but any jam that they've found themselves in has been turned into yet another rase of healthy experimentation. If sculpture remains the art that the trendu-atchers feel most c-amfortable \\-itheit's t3ecause sculptors have
and large accepted the avant-garde agit-
prop about being constantfy on the rncivt. just \\.hen sinebody might have thought to cieclare the cieath of sculpture. sculpture has slipped away and reinvented itself as a Primary Structure. a Specific (Ihject, as Scatter Art, as something Site Specific. Environmental, or <:onceptual. This season. like every other season. sculpture is in the news. There has been a much-talked-about shm\ at Face\X;ildrnstein of new work by Kiki Smith. whci prohahl\- has the fastest-grokving reputiition of an): contemporary Americiin artist; and there are other shokvs of y3ung-to-mid-career artists, among then1 jessica Stockholder and Me1 KenJric-k, each of =whom has turned sculpture inside out, apparently for no other reason than to keep people's attention. Rut this is not the half of it. If one needed to he remin~irdthat sculpture's quick-change status is not exactly n recent developspecializes in teaching old hats (and ment, there's Claes (Ildenburg. \\-h<> erawrs and clothespins . . . ) n e n tricks, \\-ith an exhil3ition calleci "An Anthology" that openeci at the National Gallery in R s h i n g t o n last \\-inter and is no%-at the Guggenheim in N ~ Kh-r k . Some mai- regard (Ildenl-turg as a
modern classic, but then where does that put C:onstantin Branct~si,\\-h0 is the subject of a retrospective that opened in Paris last spring ancl is n o n at the Philadelphia Museum of Art? It \vould be nice to be able to say that Rrancuhi, a titan \\-h0 died in 1957 at the age of 81. set modern sculpture on its \\-ay ancl is al\vii!-s there for those kvho'd like to get hack on track. Rut the truth is that Brancusi has nothing much to cio \\-ith \\here sculpture is today, and to the extent that modern sculptors look to him the\- hopelessly misconstrrre him. ()ldrnhurg, not Rrancusi, is our fr~undingkither. a fact that \\-ill offer no comfr~rtto museumgoers \vho. 11-hiletaking in thirty-five years of v.-ork in a chmnological %*centaround Frank I_lo\-rl\Krright'sspiral ramp, find that, artistically speaking, it's do\\-nhill all the way. The brusque, \\-ayward charm that Oldenburg could achieve in 1960 and 1061 \vith some painted plaster replicas of cheap clothes and high-ciilorie cieserts evaporated pretty fast. He's spent decades asserting ever larger claims for the same everyrlay subject matter that he first bmught together in The Store that he set up in his stuJio on
East 2nd Street in December 1961. 'l'he tfiought that you rnigbt make
anything into high art by literally inilnting it was a fair joke the first time. t3u t cioe, it bear repeating tkx-ice, not to mention hundreds of times! (
If course nohod\; expects subtlety from this cheerfully megalomaniacal
artist. Everyhod\; just wants Oldenhurg to he himself, and that includes younger artists \vho look at his huge popular success ancl are encouragecl to imagine that the\-. too, have a future north of 14th Street. He's a cio\vnto\vn boy n-ho made it, ancl with
Klilfe SIiclnd
ihri~trgb&%!l (done in 1986 and. like all
the recent \\-ork. in collaboration \\-ith Ctjosje van Rruggen) he presmts a kind of oversized polemical flourish that today's retro-conscious artists
\\-ould do themselves if only they had the \\-herem-ithal.Near the top of the (;uggenlxim's ramp, this tx-elve-foc>tknife blade, made of plasterboard, sticks straight out of the \\-all, creating the impression that somebody has
thrust a gigantic piece of cutlery into the gallery. K~rrfeSllrrrlg ihrl~trghWull is far too calc~rlatedto kick ciff a visceral, en~otionafrcai-tion, but as an insider view of rculpture as contemporarv aggre\sor its nleaning is as unavoidable as a tabloid headline: AItTIST STABS MlJSEIIhf. Dariaist gestures are exactly \\-hat we expect from (lldenhurg. who \\;is Labeled a Neo-1)adaist \%-henPop Art n-as still a movement in search of a catch\- name. Actually, he's remained more of a Neo-Dadaist than a Pop Artist: he's still basically kvreaking variations on the transgressive potential
of sculpture that Marcel L3uchamp first defined in 1915. two years after he'd begun to put his name on store-bought objects and smd them out into the \%-orld.Among those early Readymades were a t3icycle \\heel. a bottle rack, a urinal, and a ,no\\- shovel. 1)uchamp's essential in\ight \\-as that it \\-ould be easier to make anti-art out of rculpturc than out of p~tinting.Go up against u challenging the vigor of Impressionism and Pcistimpainting and y ~ were pxsiconism. of Fauvism and Cubism. Rut go up against sculpture and all you were really ~ioing\\-a\ puncturing a lot of nineteenth-ccntuq hot airall those rom-s of plaster casts of classical sculpture in the academies. all those dull t ~ m n z etigurcs in all those citv squares. The urinal sent up centuries of icy marbles; it pished on the \\-hole classical trariition. d Although the early c Ilcienburgs are ~ i o m e s t i ~ a t e1)uihamps-homemade R e a d \ ; m a d e s l n recent years (Ildenburg h a become a Corporate Daditist. Like just about all high-pnjfile contemporary sc ulpture. ho~-ever. his \I-ork makes its bid for attention on the basis of a paradox, n-hicfi is that Daditism. having t~lrneiisculpture against sculpture. has h n ~ u g hsculpture t to the fore. Sculpt~lrehas become the Other (it can be anything!). and it's popular for that very rcascln. Sculpture can he n friendlv neighhorhciod Other. . for sculp\%-hatarts organizations erect at outdoor sites for summer f ~ mAs tors \vho are in the limelight, the\- are alrno\t invariably doing \vork that's thought to be interesting insokir as it is \\-fiatever it isn't expected to be, And
this season, what is sculpture not expected to be that it's being? Du~ahan~p, \\-h0 perhaps thought that painters dcserved a bigger piece of the action, once c,bser\-rd that "since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and readymade products. m-e must conclude that all the paintings in the \\-orld are "Readvrnades ,%ided."Tcll, at the D i a Foundaticin on Kkst 22nd Street, sculpture is no\\- a giant painting that's galloped off the m-all. Iessiia Stockholder is the artist. ancl the long title of her Dia installation is Yozrr Skuz zn tltzs B?>uth~r Bozrmr i"~lc~-l'arre~~/s P Jtvl3Elc)n PcI~~UIT?V. Stockh~lcicrknon-S
all the move, of the Oldenhurg generation. She roughs up the big groundfloor Dia space \\-ith inexpensive materials-stacking tric cords-and
crates, carpeting, elec-
then she pulls it all together \vith an intelligmt feeling for
abstract color ancl theatrical pacing ancl three-~iimensionddesign. It takes some taste to arrange that huge pile of purple plastic crates near that salmon-colorcd \\;ill, and it's nifty ho\\ the vellom-extension cords run from each light socket on the ceiling into a gigantic heap of table lamps mounted on a pliitfcirm to one side. Rut \\-hen Stockholcicr manipulates a*semhlngist corn-entions-and tions-she
seventy-five years after Kurt Schm-ittersthese
rlrv
conven-
treats them generically, almost academically. There's a t3landness
to the lvork; it lacks in~lividualizatic~n, tmsion, point. Stockhcilder is pmbably expecting us to do the emc~tionalm-ork for her. but then no scutptor who's aihirved
it
big repcltation in recent years seems
pwpawd to take emc~tionalresponsibilitv. Everybody has adopted the Meret
c Ippenheim approach: line the tea c u p 11-ithfur and let the audience do the rest. Riki Smith understands that all the tea cups have already been lined \\-ith fur. and that t3j- now the had-olci bronze figure. under the right con&tions, is the neweht thing aroilnti. In her shorn- at PaceWil~iensteinon (Greene Street, lumpish figures. rno\tiy executed in bronze, hung or sat or stood in odd places, while a flock of dead birds, also in bronze. \\-a\ scattered across the floor. It \\-as Svmholist salon art given a Minimalist presentation.
( If
course Kiki Smith has her carefully cultivated little quirks. In addition
to the figures ancl t3irds. there \\ere chains and charms and baubles hanging herc and there. &4ndher figures have name\ like Llltrh and lip LM~tr,so thzt 11-e get the idea that myths are being retold for our time. Rut her figure modeling-which
is i n \ e c ~ ~ rto e . put it kindly-demonstrate\
no interest in the
body except insohir as it ran kick off m-;in sentimental-humani,t thoughts in gallrrygoerr \\-h<)'\-esecretly hoped that art \\-ould come back around to their \\-ay of seeing things. It's the off-the-pedestals. tops\--tur\-\ in\tallation in a huge. \\-hite cio~-ntokvnspitce that gives this malvkish stuff its ring. In the late '60s. Rohert Morris flung felt strips amund a gallery and they called it Scatter hrt, tn the '90s, Kiki Smith cJrihbles I-tronze irows in a gatlery and it's liso-Feminist. 4 great deal of tmuhle prohahly went into casting all those troll-S,
but the emotion m-as readymade.
Duchnmp turns up in the background of the Brancusi retrospective in Philadelphia. or he cioes if you read Ann Ternkin's catalog essa>-on "Brancusi and His r2merican <:ollectcsrs." A central theme herc is the strong atfvcscat\- of Rrancusi by Duchamp, m-ho\\-asa kry figure in the Franco-American
avant-garde. L3uchamp got .4meri':an dealers and collectors interested, and t h t ' s in part why there are so man!; Brancnsis in our museums. Ternkinthe <:urator of T\\-mtieth-<:entury Art in Philadelphia. \\-h0 organizecl the sh<)\\-\\-ith Margit Rokvell, Chief (:urator of I)ra\\-ings at the Museum of Modern Art-rewunts
an anecdote about I)-LIC hamp, Brancusi, and I,i.ger
going to an aviation show in Paris. "Observing a diiny 1netaI prc)pel!er,'' Ternkin writes, "Duihamp allegeclly a\kell Rranc usi ho&-any artist could pa\"ihl\- do better." I expect that Duchamp knem--ancl he kne\\--that
a Rranr-rrsi Bird
in L 5 ~ ~ m-as i r c ~ better.
Brancusi knem- that
Then agaj, Dui:ba.mp de-
voted a great deal of his life to lvork that begged the question of better and \\-orse, or at least led people to believe that it did. The pmpeller is a red her-
ring, but as a yilr5tion that never seems to go am-ay it detracts attention from the e\sential paradc~xof Brancusi'r \\-ork. \\-hich is th;tt his streamlined, erotically charged nlodern form, are groundecl in a vehemently prernodern, an almost medieval, sense of craft, In Pl~iladelphiathe Brancusi sfiol\- has been presented a little too ioolIv. The installation includes \I-alls \I-ith translt~ientinsets that are an intelligent attelnpt to echo the look of Rrancusi's studio, ancl the low platforms on \\-hich the sculptures are arranged are certainlv attractive. Rut it's all in such damn good ta\te that the show begins to look like one of the ads for Cnlvin Klein's new line of home p r o d ~ c t \ There's . an evenness to the pacing. a lack of surprise. Brancusi could do with some unapologetic showmanship. h u should feel the light flashing off Brril
in
asat.lirect,
unmed~atedexyerience: you m-ant to be awestruck, the way you ;Ire by a glimpse of an Alpine peak. Sculpturecl form is present in the \\-orld in a \\-ay that no form in a painting ever is; the Philadelphia installation pictorialires the lvork, sets it in a handsome. slightly grayecl-iiolvn context, and that's no good. The twonze version of the lill?nri 1Y~firr.s.with its shimmering surhces. is probably the most luxuriantly t3eautiful use of metal in the entire European traclition: it ought to flash out at uh. with the blinding fcjrce of a tropical sun. In Pk-tiladelphia, the Blorril Kt>gr~ssdoesn't make enough of an impression, it's jusc an exquisite Parisian souvenir.
ancl entertained a long list Although Rrancuhi lived in Paris for fifty years P
of famous names in his Montparnasse studio, his achievement stands at a remove from that complicitted, Fdst-moving period in European art. Matisse and Picasso codcl build on f:ez;tnne and Seurat and fngres and Delairrsix; but for Brancusi, who arrived in Paris in 1904 at the age of 28, there n-as only the equiroc;il, high Romantic- example of Rodin. in lvhme studio he \\-orked t,riefl\-. The profound ronneraons that Brancusi estat,lished through his sculpture \\-ith India. Greece, ancl Africa, clo tie into a \\-hole series of early-
tjq-entietfi-century interests in the archaic, the primitive, the non-Kcstern, and the naive: but whereas Picasso and Matisse drew general conclt~sions
m sources, Brancusi put about the nature of h r m and strtlcture h ~ Ear-flung e\-er>-thinghe knew into singular, solitan- objects. If Wranrusi h3~1no significant artistic parent figures, he has also probably had less impact on succee~iing generations of sculptors than Picasso. \\-h0 lvorkeci in three dimmsions only part-tin~e.Even those \l-ho really learned from Rrancusi have tended to for us on his sense of qualit>-rather th;tn on his sense of form. The seamless magic of Branct~si'sgreatest u-ork is not un~elatedto this paucity of ancestors and descendants. Perhaps because he ll-orked on the same subjects or close variants for so long, Branct~si\\-as able to cover his tracks rompletel\-, so that museumgoers don't find themselves \\-orking their way into the sculpture so much as they comprehend it at once. A Rrancusi is a particularity that contiiins all generality. He's an idealist. n mvstic. The various versions of the F f i i l l ~ sC:ilttitlifi, \\-it17 their piled-high rhomboids, embocfv just about everything that Brancusi had to tell us about decorative rh\-thm, and th;lt3sa lot. The
Blrtl
rn
, $ p d c ~is
his definitive state-
ment on the grilvity-defying poll-er of stone carving at its greate*t. rriird
Cu-
and .bfirdemns~tluRj8irtay are definitions of the Modern 1Yoman. Buanct~si,
\\-h0 by rontemporar\- reports spent days on end polishing his bronzes and marbles, knew h m - to give them the irreducible and mai-be unanaiyxahle force of natural lvonders. The great Brancusi, feel as if they've al\x-;iys existeci, and it's in this sense that the\- recall such premoilern monummts as Mic helangeio's Jlur'ils It's an artist's responsibilit>-to help us see the masters in a c ~ n t e n ~ p o r a r v
\\-ay. and it's no surprise that a generation of artists trained to think in t e r n s of context and environment has looked at the \\-ay that Rrancusi set streamlined volumes on rouph-and-ready \vood bases and has frequently been more interested in the bases than in \\-hat they support. These bases do raise
kscinating questions that lend themselves to traditional art-historical treittment. Brancuhi tried different sculptures on difkrent bases and documented his thinking in the t3rautiful photographs th;tt he took of his studio and its contents. He also frequently sold sculptures m-ithout bases. At the Philiidelphi3 Museum of .4rt even the most peculiar in*tallation decisic~ns,such a\ the v\-oojen
that is mounted atop a Glrtnrn, i;rn be supported by Bran-
cusi's 0%-nphotographic record. But which f-tt~citcigraphis one to believe, \%-henBranrusi often arranged the sanle work\ differently at different times?
If you think about Brancusi's t3ases long and hard mough. you may find yourself getting into all sorts of subversive thoughts. \Vas Rrancusi hiphlighting the pedestal because he was afraid that sculpture was losing its pedestals: Are the bases the kev to a more ci>ntemporaf\-)Ilrancusi, a man
\%-h0is tmuhled. in\erure, maybe even t3;tffled about ho%-to position sc~llpturei It \\;is Scott Burton, the artist who made a reputation for himself in the '80s \%-ithfurniture that \%-asnleant to double as sculpture and became a staple in public spares, \vho t3mught thew questions into the open. In IOXO, the year of his t~ntimelvdeath, Brirton organized a S ~ O M at - the Museum of hfodern ,"lt called " h r t o n on Brancusi." Given that Brancusi had done twnches ancl tables and stool$---many of them for a site in his native Romania-Rurton
\\;is certainly justified in pointing to him as an ancehtor. Yet
apparently Burton could not accept the possihilitv that for Brancuhi, making a table or an arch \\;is no stranger than it had twen for Bernini to make a fountain or a stair\%-a\-three centt~riesearlier. In the brochure for the Modern shm; Burton in\isteci on renaming the bases of Rranrusi's sculptures "pecie\t;ll-tabler." The "pecie\t;ll-table." he said, is "an object simultaneously prrfcjrming a function and acting as its own sign. It is a
irrirhlip
meditation on utilitarian form." Burton's thinking is fairly deft. if you like the \\hen-is-a-table-not-ii-tiiE>Ie?kind of que5tion. But does this really tell us anything alx~uttables or about art?
Modern art \\-as born amid a lot of W-oollymetaphv\irs. and it seems to be dying surrounded l>\-more of the same. The ciifference is that whereas the early moderns tended to phiIo\opfiize about the transcendent and the ideal, contemporary artists tend to philosophize ahout the kvorking process. about \\-hat you'd think are the most bitsic facts of what they do. Therc is a kind of contemporar\- sculpture-I'm Kichard Ileacon-that
thinking of W-orksby Martin Puryear and
in its all-in-one sense of form and its emphasis on
the abstract value of natural materials might be thought to be Brancusian. but artists such as Puryear and Deacon bring to craft itself the same kind of \\-illful complication that Scott Burton brought to the t3itse. These artists are so intent on demonstrating their fascination with materiajs that they highLight every detail of joining and construction, sci that the work Lmes whatever formal wtierence it migfit have h3d. Mel Kendrick, some%-hatless \\ell-knokvn than Puryear or Ileacon. is caught in the same confusions, nnci I mentic~nhi, 11-ork because Kenclrick has from time to time demonstrated a strong sculptural feeling that makes his chaotic s h m - at the John Kkber (;allpry this fall all the more ciisturl3ing. In his last exhil3ition at Kctxx, Kendrirk sent a roll- of jagged wooden constructions that \\-ere raiseci off the floor on pieces of pipe straight clown the center of the gallery, nnci the\- added up to n zany, engilgingly rough-hewn futuristic Flntasy. There's one lvork in the current shon-a raiseci aloft on more metal poles-that
tree trunk
does have something of that gangly,
gravim-defying feel, but the rest of the show is just theorizing ahout sculpture. with tree trunks doublecl by rubber castings of tree trunks, and castings turneci inside out to shall- us how it's done. Me1 Kendrick has taken m o ~ l e msculpture apart, and I see no \v;iy on earth that he" going to be able to put it I-tack together. The Kranc.usia.n themes that are Lo+ed someu-tiere in the depths of his mind have a lot to do \\-ith his occasional t3ursts of energy, but mostly he seems to \\-ant to de-
construct Rrancusi. Apparentlv Rrancusi is of no help to anybody right no\%-;he's thorouphlv n~isunderstood.In 1989, Sccitt Brlrttrn m-rote that "Rrancusi's enlargelnent of the nature of the art object is as original as Duihamp's n e n kind of object. the Read\-macle." This is the kind of ludjcrous ctsmplin~entthat is now being paid to a supremely intuitive artist. Rurton is telling uh that \\-hat Rrancuhi did 11-ith a piece of oak hears comp;"iam \\-it11 a store-bought sniw shi,\-d. Rurtrrn i n ' t pr;lising Brmcusihe's giving him the third degree. MO\\-long is it going to take people to get over the idea that every three-clirnensirsnrtt cibjeit that's set in a galler)- has to have a tl~eoreticalsubtext? Lecinardo cia Vinci, perhaps the mo\t inte1lectu;tl artist \\-h<)ever lived. showed a gruiiging comprehmsion of his arch-rival Michelangelo, \vhm he \\-rote in his TTYII~ISV (v1 P ~ ~ I Ithat ~ I I "the I ~ s i l l l p t ~ in r creilti~lghis \\ark cioes so l,\- the strength of his arm." Leonardcr \ \ - a t on to ,a\- th;tt sculklture "is
lmth slon-
\\-orking, thought-pn~voking artists---ancl although L)ur hamp is surely no Leonardo, he must hiwe regarded the marble-Just-covered Brancusi as a spirit as alien to him as Michelanpelo was to 1;eonardo. In one of his sonnets, Michelangelo \vn)te. "The best of artists never has a concept/i single rnarlde block does not contain/Inside its husk." XI car\-e \\-as to release the concept, to achieve s o m e t h i q spiritual through plain ha.rd work. 'fbdav's scdpttrri, may not be afraid csf hard work, but a lot of theln are afraid of the abscslutely phj-sical nature of the sculptor's art. They spin theories around sxveat and pl;i\ter dust. ( h e of the glories of Rrancusi's work is that it make\ y ~ stop u thinl;ir-tg,You just love it. it's that simple.
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A N U N K N O W N MASTERPIECE
Iean Helion's Lilsi fud~tlivrtt ihings, a t\x-ent\--seven-foot-lt>ngtriptych that is one of the fen sure ma\terpieces painteci an\-\\-herein the pa\t tjq-enty years, is being seen in New York for the first time this spring, at the SalanderO'Reilly Galleries. (:ompleted in 1970, \\-hen the arti\t \\;is 75, 17iu Lilsi f u 4 oimt is an allegory of endings and renejq-als that takes the jq-oncierfully uncomplicated form of
2
ramsharkle flea market-the
an element in jq-relcly markets all over I'rnnw-m-here
sort of sight that's young r ~ ~ and en
\\-omen are poking around amidst the merchan~iise,trying on n thing or t\x-o, carrying a\%-aya hulk-\-purchase. This is a jq-ork of magisterial informalitv, in m-hick1the n ~ o s acute t naturalistic oE>servationsare recorded in clncet~ver-lightlylayers of gidtiil\- bright acrylic color. Beginning jq-ith an end-to-end orchestration of graved-do\\-n oranges and saturated greens, Helion has unfurled an ordinary jq-orld that's also an extraordinarv explosion of telegraphic abstract signs. Helion, u-ho died in 1987, has received a number of major European retrospective~in the past couple of decade* and has been included in such key exhibitions as "A New Spirit in Painting," at the Royal .%cadem\-in London in 1981, and "Identity and .4lterit\-." at la*t summer's Venice Biennale. He's by no means an unknown artist; in fkct, he ma!- be the most grievously underestimated \\-ell-knoll-nartist of our time. Thirty-five years ago, kvriting in the international edition of the Ifi~raidIkbtttru. the poet Iohn Ashhery remarked that "Helion is not just one of the great figurative painters; he is one of the gmatest painters of any kind today." Five years ago, in an interview that u-as published in the Oxfirii . l r t \orinlul. the late Mever Schapirc), who {m-necia rityscape by Hklion, spoke of his having been a "good friend" and
gave a svmpitthetic account of the work. Yet the complexity of H6lir)n's career, \\-t.rich includes pure absrradon and nnturatistic poaraiture and a lot in twtkx-een. often leaves even interesteci viewers feeling m~stified.The internal logic and overarching originality of this \\-onderfully unpreciictable achievement ialmost invariably misread n n serie, of reactions to other people's ideas. Through most of his career. Helion \\-asso much at odds l\-ith mainstream thinking that there's probably little chance that even an event a\ impcirtant a\ the arrival of ihr Ldsi-\uiiqmunt
$l7lmi(s
in New York City u-ill
have much resonance beyon~la fen rontemporarv artists and writers \\-h0 are a\ clued in as Ashher\- \\-as in the '60%ancl Schapin, \\-as in the '40s. Yet the pitinting has finally arrived here, and for those \\-ith eyes to see, it may be it
experience.
In almost every generation there's at least one painter who brings a novelist's thematic intriclicy to the \isual description of the modern \vorlii. Renoir and Seurat did this in the late nineteenth century with their paintings of Parisians at play: Ltger's Cl(\) defined the situation after \Xrorld\Xhr I: and Helion has done something along the same line, for our own time. Standing in front of
nlu Ldsi fuii~ninrt. I'm enveloped by its stirring nrchitec-
tural dimensions, and there's so much to look at that the experience hecomes supremely active. The story unf6,lds ns it might on an enormous (Iriental screen. Helion include* a baker's dozen of figures ancl a va\t array of buyahles that are strewn across n table. n bench, and the ground. In the left panel, clothes shopping is the main event. ( Ine man has gone into a tent to try on a pair of pants, another holds up a suit jacket. while a \\-Oman looks for just the right pair of shin): black high heels. There's so much going on that it may takr y ~ au minute to notice the pair of lovers embracing in the shacio\v\- depths of the t m t . (Iutside, a \\-oman is examining some ranvares and a man carries ciff a tal3le.
Htlion \\-rests n ca*ually iconic impact from acts a* ordinary a* shopping for shoes, ancl then \\-ithout missing a beat he shifts to an interlude of cheerful Surrealist enigma in the center panel. \\-here two dressmaker's mannequin\ arc making love. % rather unusual aspect of nip L i l t
\u~i$ni~tiris
the
sire of the panels. Khercas most triptychs contain pitnels of equal size or a larger central panel, Htlion has joined tm-obroad hcirirontal side ciim-ases to a much narro\\-er central canvas. This may he his way of expressing a nonhierarchical view, of ruggeating that the flea market experience is one of instability-that
the rcnter doesn't hold. The abl3revi;ited central panel is a
mysteriotls intulude-like evening ballet-after
the drcam sequence in the middle cif a full-
=which. in the right panel, Helion once again pursues
\\-hat at first may appear to be more mundane matters. There's a big table holding a tuba ancl a record plaj-er, and lots of other stuff is arranged \\ill\nilly on the ground. A man is examining some candesticks, a \\-()man looks into a t~ook,\\-hile all the \v;$!- to the right we see a mv\terious circular staircase. Scattered near the base of the stairciise are a kvoman's high-heel shoe and n man's hat ancl p a n t : obviouhly. m-e're meant to understand that nnother pair of lovers has juht disappeared upstairs.
The Salander-( I'Reilly show inclucie\, in a~liiitionto 17iu Ldsi
[u~i$ni~tir. some
tjq-o dozen m-arks r a v i n g aiross the artist's career. People who haven't seen the scattered gallery shows cievoted to H6lion in Ne\\ York over the pitst t\\-enty years \\-ill get a glimpse of his early Purist abstraction but hardly any sense of the almost lt:len~ishrealism of the nlid-'50s. Khile the density and variety of M6lion's career does not lend itself to a brief overview, the Salander-t )'Reill\- s h m - may enable gallerygoers to see ho&-17iu Lils(fei!qwi.nr pulls together themes from all through the lvork. I think it's immediate!\- apparent that a picture of people rummaging around in a flea market is about see-
ing neu- life in old formr, and the more you knon- ahout Helion the more you'll understand ho&-this process \vorks. H6lic)n al\vavs \\-rote ahout m-hat he \\-a\ doing, and a tm-o-volumeselection from his notebooks, titleiifillrnrirld'irrr pplntp. \\-as published h- Maeght in Piiris in 1992. (;oing t h n ~ u g hthe sections that cover the years \\-hen Tlr Lu~r\ir{qm~rri
\\-ason Hklion's mind. it's evident that he's reflecting on events that go all the \I-al; bask to the '20s. The Jo~mbtlincludes some references to '7~1npsrtpfrt)uvi. "
\\-hich \\as at one time \vh;tt H6lion \\-a\ planning to call the painting. The French title, Lr Jugorrt~rrril~rntrrJtyr
C ~ ( ? S P S ,also
suggests more than m t e r i a l
thing" Mnion pn,h;thly means us to understand
ihdrspr
as having some of the
same implications that it has in the title of the third volume of Sirnone cir Beauvoir's autobic3graphy. Lu fire tk, ilii~ro.u-hich n-a\ publishell in 1963. Ihr
Lust fui%(munr if i%rn(qsisn't just ahout seeing things, it's a l o about thinking ahout things. Another title might have been Ihu Fled Murkrts tfl\fy
Mdyv
&lion \\-as horn in Yommandy in 1 904. He arrived in Paris in 1921 t i ~ apprentice to he an architect, hut bj- the late 220s he was already an accomplished painter. The IJruguayan artist roitquin Tc~rres-Ciarcia.m-horn Htlion met in 1927, had a great and in some rerpec ts lasting ilnpac t on the young painter: there are echoes of Tc~rres-(;arcia3scanvases, 11-ith their mysteriously effective fusion of tenderly fcjlkloric and purely nhtract elements, all thmugh Htlion's career. It \\-as also Ti3rres-Garcia \\-h0 introducecl Melion to a Parisian zivant-garde that by the '30s included such expatriates n Mondrian and Kandinskj-. M4llon. \\-h0 always had a gift for friendship. soon joined forces \vith van Doerburg to form the hstraction-(:rkation group, \\-hich providecl a rallying point for nonol,jective artists at a time \\-hen mo\t sophistic-ated Parisian painters accepteci semial3rtraraon t3ut not total abstraction. Melion acquired an excellent grasp of English, and in trips to England and n l e r i c a in the '30s he rnacie the case for his o\vn severely cool compo"tions even as he talked and \\-rote about the full range of recent
nonol,jective work. In Nem- York he helpeci Albert Gallatin put together a significant group of paintings. \%-hich\%-asexhibited in the '30%at Nen York ti~~iversity-it was the first pi_ll,fSicollection in which Nen- York artists could see a Mondrim on permanent displiiy. B\- the time \Krorld\Khr I1 was approitching, H6lion \\-as living in .4merica \%-ithan American \vife. He was already juxtaposing impersonal. silvery-coloreJ fc)rr?i~s to create figure-like configurations, and after a while he \%-as painting men in hats, a sort of mid-century Everyman. (In the eve of the \%-are Hklirsn returned to France to fight. He was taken prisoner by the (;ermans, spent many months \\-orking on a prison farm on the Polish border, ultilnately e5caped ancl made his \\-a\-hack to Paris and then to the IJllited State$. Before returning to his easel, he m-rote an excellent hook in English about his 11-arexperiences, 171yy Silirll h i l t ilmr .Mu. which hecime a hest-seller. The E-took contains a nun~l-terofaccotrnts of the frenzied l-tlack-market activit\- in the prison camps, ancl thew fc~reshado\\the series of market paintings of thirty years later, 11-hichinclude studies of vegetable and lobster vendors a* \\-ell as the flea market triptych.
In 1943, M4lion exhibited at Pegpv . . Guggenheim's Art of This <:entury (;idler)- in New Rxk. Tt,t70 years later, he married Gilgger-theirn's daughter Pegwn. Back in Faris they haci a family and later separated, but for the rest of his life Hklicsn maintained ties with the high bohemian world in m-hich Pegpy was a great figure. During France's post\%-arrenem-al. Helion painted the \\hole variety of Paris: the parks and the streets, the m m reading newspapers, the poets and the artists' models, the baguettes heaped on the table in the atelier. In those years, Helion knem-t-toth (;iacometti and Balthus. and all their 11-ork gained force, depth, and plangency from a sense of iump5
rutrt,uvP
from their memories of artistic beginnings in the '30s. .4 particuliir
spiritual affinitv-a
tv,-ilit poetic unreality-unites
Ral thus's Pas$i!qf ilrr Corn-
Frlrrcu Sul?~l-/lndri,\%-ithits vie\.; of a tinv street not far from the Existentialist
cafes on the boulevard St. <;ermain, and the ciim-ases that Htlicsn \\-as painting around 1950, in \\-hich poets fall asleep on the Parisian pavements and dream their dreams.
In 1967 Helion embarked on the first of %-fiatwould turn out to be a cycle of triptychs. n scene of the rue du L3rapon in the 6th .%rrondissement. \\-ith people sitting in a cafe and some of Htlion's own earlier abstract paintings on displq in a gallery \\-indo%-.Here Paris has a light, open. prosperous feeling, a feeling that we also encounter in the cycle of lithographs that Giacometti was \\-orking on at the end of his life for an album to he titled \ulrr
f n The year after completing the
l i l p r , j q ~B ~ 4
Pdrls
Dr~fiiirr,H6lion underlined
his sense of a citv that had regained its youth l,\- cirvoting another triptych to the events of May '68. Although Helion rcgariirci some of the ideological foray\ of the Ye\\- Ideft\\-ith the skepticism of a liberal temperament and of
had visited I%ussiain the early '31)s but had been an anticomsomeone \\-h munist well before the end of that decade, he found '68 Eascinatinp as viiual theater. and he \\;is by no means unsympathetic to the stucirnts' bold, experirnentiil spirit.
B\- the late 'MS, Helion halt switched from csil to acrylic, and the change, initially necehsjtateci by an allergic reaction to the oil solvents. jump-started his final liberation from tonal rolor. There's a candy-colorcci craziness about his final full decade of \%-ark: he's the first arti\t to find a formal logic in the startling artificiality of ar rylic hues. Htliun's style. \vhicli had been elahorately naturalistic in the earl\- '50s. \\;is becoming l,rnaclrr, increasingly expansive, so that I ~ vthe end of his life he had recovered his earliest abstract concerns, hut m-ithin a representational context. In the '70s Helion struggled \\-ith a series of eve prol,lems. some ultimatel~inc~~rahle. and, thinking of the possible loss of his o n n sight. he sent a stream of blind men tapping their cane, along the side\valks in many of his canvases. Then, after pitinting the rnmt broadly cc~nceivedof all his compositions in the early %h,he lost
his sight in f 983. In his 1a\t years he \\-rote a book, ,Mnni.rrn $P
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in \\-hich he describcci all the pitintings he haci not had time to complete.
Ever since (:ourhet put all the sides of his life into the immense Studlo in 1855, modern artists have from time to time created encyclopedic pictures that give personal experience a polemical force. and Hklion's
Lirrr
/ai!qnirnt fits
right into this line. Helion all\-ay\ \\-antecl to come to grips jvith the most intellectu;tlly challenging a\pects of twentieth-century life. and his ranvahes have the plain\poken impitct that you sometimes t i ~ d in the \ v ~ r kof artists
\\-h0 arc not averse ttr taking controversial public stancfs. Kbether Welion \\-as painting or talking about painting, he roulii suggest the traditional logic behind a pared-dokvn abstraction or the progressive ilnpulse behind n realism that struck man!; as e\sentiaIly reactionary, Wtlat's so miraculous t of complicated material, about his work is the direct, s t ~ i c i n ipresentation Hi.lion That's something that characterizes <:ourhet, too. In 17iu Ldsi [u~i$ni~tir lay, all his card, on the tiible. and part of W-hatmakes the painting n reach for our postnlodem tastemakers i, that they are so unused to forrhrigfitnes that the\; mistake it fcx naYvet6. In 17iu Ldsi-\si!qrne~irlve're present at the act of creation. \vith people and trhjects summoned up thmugh hroitd stn~kesof acrylic paint. E~erythingis so simply done that the effects make me smile. 4 table or a tigure emerges from a fen- pit\ses of the brush across the canvas. Hklirrn cloe\n3tgive us all the cletail, of a tigure, hut after a lifetime of dralving and painting he's a marter of ge\ture, and he pitints actions that have hardly ever been painteci before. The figure in the tent \\-ho's trying on a pair of pants brings a nem- kind trf everydayness into art. H(.lion3sunrivaled eye for the telling prosaic gesl the ture unclerpins all the ,R-irling allusions in this painting that is so f ~ dof fascinating clutter of f<,rgottm things. 1711. Ldsr lfiilglnrtit is about collecting the past. and it's onlv because H6lion's feet are planted so firmly on the
gmund that he can nmake such sensational finds. He's a Fauvist and a Cubist and a Surrealist-and
of course a realist-and
he" so untroubled about be-
ing all of these things at the same time that he ran only be himself. The Surrealists turned a visit to a flea market into a search fcjr the HoIv G r d , hut Hklicln tops tbcm h)- getting a L-a.tck~-as-iatck~-iit.n inlpetuousness into this treasure hunt painting. M6lion alludes to that Surrealist rallying cry. I.nutr6amont's de5cription of "the chance encounter of a he\\-ing machine and an ulnbrella on a dis5ecting table." by casually leaning a couple of umbrellas against an old-fashioned floor-modej sewing machine. This is Suneatism without any fancy ctsbt;\;ehs; so arc the dressmalierh smannequin5' amours and the st&rn-;l!- to nolvhere. And the same kind of loosened-up, almost happy-go-luck\- response that Hklion offers to the c,rthodouies of i n d r 6 Rreton, the Inan who \\-as ~it.lledthe Pope of Surrealism, is key to the tops\--turv\ but someho\\- nonconfrontatiod approach t h t he takes to bristian dogma. H6licin is so sure of himself that he can m-alk stright t h n ~ u g hthe allegorical minefield of a painting of modern life lvith a (:hristolopical theme and leave you 11-onciering\\-h? ~
I L thought I
there might he a pn~hlem.In an early
study for TIPLast JULLII;IIT~P~Z~ (Q-hiih is reproduced in the \orrnrtrl) he inilucied a grocer's scale. the sort of ordinarv ol>jectthat vendors in the markets use to \\-riph potatoes or carrots. It's one of the fe\v items in the sketch thttt doesn't s h o ~up - in the pai~mting,ancl I imagine that's because Melion concluded thttt the presence of a set of scales in this secular Lilstfei!ijmuat would push the metaphor too Etr. There's nt~thingdiscomfiting about HClicin's mo~iemization of the (:hristian end of days. He ohserj-esthat 11-e'reall making judgmmts all the time, but he cioesn't c i r a one grand conclusion. (:ert;linly he's tuned into a piuiiate~i.let-the-chips-EtIl-its-they-1nayside of (Ihristian iconopaphy that you sometkmes encounter in French Romanesque pai~mtingancl sculpture. He has an affiniy for the kind of Romanesque siulklture in =which the \\-orld is
represented as a complicated pageant lvith each person plaving- a small, apt *
role. And he ol>viouslyadmires the ralligraphic, exuberantlv imaginative spirit of some hvelfth-centur>-m-all piiinting5, in m-hich people seem to m-hirl along on the currents of life, exuberance. In a way, it's st~rprising Htlion's Last fuliijrnent has a ycsuthf~~ll to realize that this frieze full of young adults is the work of a 75-year-old man. hut of course part of the expliination is that Helion is recalling his own earlier davs. The \\-hite soup tureen in the left pitnel \\ill be hmiliar to admirers of HOlicsn's earliest still Liks. Writing in the Jcrtrrt~rrlat the time that he Helion recalled that he bought that tureen \\-as \\-orking on the Ldsi [u~iijni~tir, in the Saint-Ouen flea market in the ' 2 0 . So in a sense lbv LlnsiJuiiigme~atis a recollection of Hi.lic~n'sfirst decade as an artist. Helion goes on to explain that in 1929 he smaheci the tureen. and looking bark on that smash-up he csherves that it seemed to S\-mholizeboth the break-up of a marriage and the t3reak-up of his first realist style into his early abstracaons. In lliv
Lilst
[uiiijrnenl the tureen is hack in one piece, m-hich is surely n demonstration of tr~npswtri7rn.i; Yet there's even mtrre gtrinp trn tiere, because the unbroken ceramic is non- broken up formally.
lines that run all the \\-a!- from top to
txsttorn and turn its flo\\-ing curvilinear volume into a series of elegantly s y n ~ m e t r i d<:ubist sliapes.
To paint a Ldrr fei!qwi.nr is to \\-eigh the impart of the past on the f u t u r ~and , certainly Hblion 11-ould silver the arrival of this vast composition in New Ycirk, a city that ttie great artists \\-horn he knew when he was yotlng, among them L6ger and Mondrian. looked to as the metropolis of the future. Htlion's post\\-ar painterly realism, m-ith its ceiehratic~nof a pure French lyrical style, can be read as a rcjei-tion of thrtt r2merican vision, )-et it's interestJohn A%shl>ery remarking, in a 1960 e5say for Artnpivs, that Hi.lion's ing to fi~d stvllistic shift \~j-ouldhrtve occasioned fewer shock 11-avesin S e w York than it
did after the \v;ir in Paris. because in Nem-York you coulci count on a "peareful coexistence l-tetkx-eenal-tstraction ancl realism." Of course, even ar Ashl-tery made that remark. the olii '50s-style Neu- York heterogeneity \\as collapsing in the face of an academic abstraction thrtt <:lement Circenberg insisted n-as the only viable alternative to the apotheosis of 1)uchamp. But if there is still a svmpathetic audience, holvever small, for Helion's \\-ork. it's an atxdience that senses the funclan~entalcoherence of n ~ o d c r nart as \;\-ellas Iohn i2sllbery did \I-hen he u-as an American in Paris and rean H6lion did years before \\hen he \\-as a Parisian in Ye\\- York. Such insightr are not l-toundl,\- chmnology or geography. There's a great pattern that runs through tkventieth-century art. for once an artist has recognized the e5sentially abstract character of all \Vestern pitinting, then the naturalness of abstraction is a fcjregone conclusion. Khen the young man all the \\-ay to the right of 17iu Lilr/si!qrne~irpicks up the two pieces of a broken record, he's presenting us 11-ith a miniaturizeci, emblematic version of this story: the real thing h3s turned into an abstract thing that is of sourse also real. Instead of buiiding a realist pzrinting out of abstract element. Helion treats abstraction and representation ar dynamic principles, neither of which can exist on its 0%-n.Helitin un~ierstoodthat modern art, m-hich \\-as a revolt against nineteenth-century official taste, \\-as a decentering of taste that emhrareci populirm and ohrcurantism and hedonism ancl areticism, ancl he refused to reject any of the options. He believed that the hyperstimulating atmc~sphereof modern art's heroic days cc>uldcontinue t~nafsatecf;he rejected the idea that n-hat the avant-grtrde giveth the avant-garde taketh
zi\~-q,
In Ye\\- York we're often told that the grand modern design has faded past retracing, and it's po\sihle to argue that Helion's vie\\- of the 11-orld ar n flea market fits in n-ith this sense of exhausted possibilities. E-lklion confronts the cc~nfusionand the breakage and the lors, but he doesn't find all of this
dispiriting. ?%P L i l t ]uilijwi)rrt is an optimistic allegory of the arts. Helion regards the past not as a sinking monolith but as a changeable lanclscape that enwunter every day. just open your eyes, he seems to he he's delighted t i ~ saying. and you'll 611d \\-hatever you need: the real and the surreal, abstract signs and narrative situations. The po\sibilities are unlimiteci, only you must not allow yourrclf to be over&-helmrd. In lllv Lust \uJgmrnt people are thoughtful hut not immol,ilireci. They make their choices and move ahead. Htlion's me5sage isn't f w the hint-hearted or the e a d v intimidated, and it's precisely his independent subversive spirit that's held the attention of renegade artists in New York from the '30%right clown to the present. This is not the place to present the conlplicateci history of jean Hklirrn's American impact, hut it v\-ouldhe untrue ttr the inveterate optimism that he impired in others if I did not give at least one recent raw in point. ( lnly a fen- lveeks t3efore this s h o openeci ~ at Salander-( I'Reilly, Barhitra (Goodstein had an exhibition of her recent painterly relief sculptures at the Bower\ Gallery, and the near-abstract calligraphy of her landscapes and ritvsciipes presented a logicill extenhion of the decisive hrushkvork in Htlion's later canvases. Goodstein has taken Htlirrn's strokes of paint, \\-hich suggea the t~m;tcloutlines of an object. and reimagined them in dabs and slaps of modeling pa\te that are in fact precisely plotted acts of suppression-a
refusal of detail so elegant
that it feels celebratory. In the past (;oodstein has clone some variations on Htlion's themes, and looking at her triumphantly self-assured nem- m-ork. in \\-hich she occasionally inclucir\ found ot,jects such a\ bits of hmken colored glass ancl rust\- metal, it's possible to feel that she is quite literally moving fc3mard from 16e Lur luJg~nrrtf
l h r n p What really counts are the deep
structural affinities, the sense that \\-hat\ abstract ancl what's real arc t-toth a\pects of the same still-unfolding pattern. nip Lilsi
]si!qrne~iris full of patterns and tools and machines: there's a key,
an easel, the dressmaker's mannequins, n be\\-ing machine, eyeglasses, n
recorci player. an LP record, a pair of drumsaiks, some musical instrumanual for artists-and ments. You could say that this painting is a hc~&--to a celebration of creativity, of putting things together. The shoe fits, the hroken things can be mended, and a young painter gets n bargain on an eawl that he'll take home so that he ran paint his first masterpiece. And then there's that m)-steritrus spiral stairca.re,\\-ith its tight, corliscrem-curve. ( Ince you've taken in the bits of clothing casually cieposited on the steps. you knoll- that you've been left to ilnapine \\-hat's going on upstairs. T h i is a painting that gets y o u "'in&\-crrking
ilvertirnr. The cistrxs arc bright and
taut and changeable: they seem to fly along. with some of the gravitv-dcfving speed of ships' \ails caught by the \\incl. Helion is telling us that the possibilities arc wide open and the sky is the limit.
APRIL29, 1996
ABSTRACT
MATTERS
Nothing has less to cio \vith the art experience than a fc3regone conclusion. yet Mark Rosenthal, \vho organized "Ahtracaon in the T\%-entiethCentury" at the (Guggenheim Museum. doesn't seem capable of regarding the history of modern art as anything else. This immense survey of an eightv-
yar adventure that began with Kandinskv, Mondrian, and Malevich was designecl to show us ho\\ \\-e arrived where \\-e arc, and the keen expectat i o n that the exhibition inspired suggested that althougt~mainstrem k s tor\- is out of hshion people still yearn for the big historical sweep. The st~o\%had its own kind c~fforward nlovenlent, but ""Al->stractionin the T\%-e-entieth<:enturyV moved right b\- us, because Itosenthal-n-ho
was
;L
<:onsultative <:urator at the (;uggenl"im
when he emharkrd on the pro-
ject and is now at the National (;aller?-doesn't
know n-here we are. Even
t3efore the exhibit closed, people had t3lottt.d it out of their minds. like a dream that had gone bad 2nd n-;is best forgotten. "IAhstraction in the T"\I,-mtiethC:entury" was meant to be a sfiimmeringly pure vision, and the trouble started right there. because anything me,\\- or ambiguous or interestingly unresolved \\-as sirnpl\- bleached out. At the beginning of the ratalog, Rosenthal declared that although recent artists have parodied passages from classic abstract painting. "there ino neo-abstract movement." That conlment left me kvondering \\-here Rosmthal has been keeping himself in the past few- years, t3ecause \ve have been drokvning in neo-abstract styles. The n10\t oI?vious is NeoGro, but anybody
\\-h0 has gone to the galleries ha\ also been seeing Neo-Abstract lispressionism and Nco-hfinimalism. Most of this work is featberm-eight and forgettable. 1 svmpathize with 1t~rsenth;ll'sdesire to believe that the stuff doesn't exist. But vou cion't help matters t3j- being ohli\ic~us.Indeed, you may be ambuslied bj- the very attitude that you abhor, Icosenthal m-ants us ttr understand that he is not hostage to "the no\\--discredited role of doctrinaire fc>rmalism." yet his o\\-n taste for visual impoverishment combined =with theoretical uplift seem, like neo-doctrinaire formalism. "Abstraction in the T~t~entieth <:enttlrvVwas one mtrre vxiatian on the hackneyed idea that abstract art is about removing everphing from painting. The s h m - \\-as a hroken-iitsn-n csne-m-q hi+\\-?- to no%-here. The painters \vho invented abstract art \voulci have never dreamed of poing into a nluseum in order to find out \vh;tt \\-as going on (or \\hat to cio next), and Rosenthal pml7;tbly meant to pay tribute to their fearlessness by subtitling his sho\v "Total Risk, l'reeciom. I)iscipline." The phrase. =which \\-as t3orro\ved from the sculptor Eva Hesse, certainly gave the exhibition a newsy aura of art-\\-orld S&M, hut \\-hen it came to figuring out \\hat artists
actually do. Rosenthal retreated to the most progrilmmatic kind of lecturehall thinking. According to Rosenthal. this century of abstract art hasn't been about the triumph of personal expression so much as the grinding inevital?ilit\-of historical forces. Ultimately. \\-hat \\;is so appalling about the s h m - kveren't Rosenthal's pitrticular decirions, but his inal?ilit\-to bring the jq-ork together into a coherent viscid experience. He seemed more concerned \\-ith \\-hat he \\-as keeping out than \\-ith \\-hat he was putting in. Although I went expecting to disagree \\-ith some of Rosenthnl's choice\---\\-hi kvoulii have been perfectly all right---I left l\-ith the impwskon that his choices l\-eren't based on \\-hat he liked but on \\-hat he felt he ought to like. K h e n it came to hanging "Abstractitrn in the Eventieth <:entury," Itosentl~alhad so little instinct for the internal coherence of ctarsic alsstract art that he couldn't even create vivid gallery arrangement with paintings is\- Kandinsky, Mcindrian, and Robert I3elauna)-, lvhich in the past have looked marl-elous in the Frank I_lovdli'right museum that un~ioubtedlv p a \ e m ~ " s u ~challenge* "l fcx a curator. .4r fcx dealing with more recent (oft m larger) works, =which have never fit very \\-ell in the Guggenheim's idiosyncratic spares, Rosenthal \\-as simply helpless. The Pollocks lveren't just cro\\-ded, they \\-ere shockingly un~ierlit.Rosenthal turned li'righ t's grand flo&-into a tortuous, stt~p-and-startprocession. A \\-orl, such as Sophie Taeuber-hrp's lovelv 1916-17 embroidery after a design l?? Iean h r p \\-as hung n-ithout anv context, so that it looke~ilike an eccentric blip, Agnes Martin \\as given a protracted, deacieningly repetitive presentation. \vith each painting kiiling to make the same less-is-more point. liven museumgoers \\-h0 don't k n m - contemporary art felt the detached
mood of the show, hut if you have fr~llo\\-edrecent development you may have Eseen a little astonistled at the extent to 'iq-hich Kosenthal insisted on an crutmoded evolutionary scheme. He was still thinking about art histor\- in
terms of paintings li~ledup like d ~ m i n o e seven . though there isn't an\thing that first-rate artists ran agree on any longer except that there arc no guiding principles. Khen I'm really interested in some new \\-ork. the question I find myself asking isn't horn- it fits into a historical scheme. but h o n the artist hits arrived at his cir her particular inter\\-eave cif assumptions. VCk're in the midst of a fiiscinaang phase in abstract art. hut you \\-ouldn't have guessed it from this programmatic, evasive sholv.
BY no\\- a h s t r a c w t might he expected to he a tradition like any other, and there is certainly a lot of conventional thinking that gets mixeci up in the recent nonobjective painting. Still, the rejection of reality remains n fundamentally subversive idea, The old a\sun~ptionsahout stylistic evolution no longer pertain. and each artist is forced to im-ent a personal history of art that cuts a path straight to the stuilio door. An artist ran be elegantly discrete ahout all of this, hut there's something e\peciiilly engilging ahout an abstract painter such as Jean Sny~ler,who rnakrs the interkveave of \ources nakecily evident, so that it's not only a suhtext hut frequently her subject as \\-cll,
In her most recent abstract paintings, which \\-ere at ElirschI & ,4dler Modern this spring, I felt that Snyder \\-as quite consciously not merging all the clisparate elements. She \v;inted us to regard each szra\vled flower and collnged-on hit of tm-ig as an individual choice. Ancl there m-ere l o t of ilc?\ver, in these pitintings. n d lots of collageci-on bits of twig. Mark Rosmthal \\-ould tell you that Rohert Rvrnan (with his lont:,eries of white-on-kvhite canva\es-eactt
different, each the same) and the sculptor iiiihard Long (a
sort of lico-Minimalist. arranging rocks in large, simple geometric shapes) are the contemporaries \\-h<)grapple with the big que5tions. Rut their ta\te is so prcciictahle that vou can't really call it ta\te-they've
made no choices:
they're just plqing by a set of rules. That's not anything you ran say about
Toan Snvder, \\-ho's reaching for such a feeling of cheerful ciecorative elegance in her new paintings, many of which are about gardens, that she seems almost naively una\\-are of the point where her taste becomes so good that it loses its bite. I don't think these paintings are quite at the level of some cif the jq-ork that Snvder exhibited at Elirschl & Adler hfodern in
1990, but their excesses and ionfilbions \\-ill tell you more about risk and freedom and ciiscipline than anything from the p;t\t quarter century that
\\-asin the Guggentleim show. Snyder may not be a great a"is-I'n1
not sure that her m-ork ha.s a truly
captivating internal logic---hut she's a formidable painter, and her hest canvases hold perfectly in the imagination. \%%at makes Snyder, \vho's 56, so unusual is her \\-a\-of giving personal exigency a formal impact. Khen Snyder paints she's plotting the fever charts of her moods, and lve'rc cioubl\. mgaged, 130th hv \\hat she's feeling and horn- she's managing to get those feelings into form. Looking at her painangs can he like reading a writer's journals or letters; I \\-ant to know what's happening to the person. hut I also want to ]\no\\- h m - the first-person story is transfr~rmedinto art.
For a gallerygoer \\-ho's hmiliar with Snyrler's \vork. going into Hir,chl & .4dler Modern \\-as like turning to the next page of this ongoing journal, \\-here the same geometric or paintrrly forms, the sitme stylized trees or flonerr, the sitme kinds of found objects reappear, onlv presentee1 \\-ith a somewhat ciiffcrent emphasis or attack. In many of the paintings---they're rno\tly around five feet high-Snyder
is doing yet another series of varia-
tions on one of her mo\t effective tfiemel; she's imagined the surEaaie of the canva* as an upended piece of earth on m-hich t h i n g grow and decay and grow again. This time around, the result is frequently a carpet of abstract floral fragmmts-a
tapestry effcct. I firxi m!-self getting caught
LIP
in the
high-spirited cacophony of color. Even \\hen I'm unc~nvincedby a pitrtic 11lar c-anvas,I like the tt~erne-and-variation?,ct~aracterof the \\-ork.
In the new canvases, Si~yiieruses a mixture of acrylic and oil paint, and the result is a surface on \\-hich shiny passages and matte ones intermingle. There arc ciifbcult juxtapositions-they
could look fussily experimental---
but Snyder is a horn painter, and she hold\ everything together \\-ith a gift for painterly effects that \\as already apparent in the big strokes of bright color that she \\-as t~nfurlingon canvar around 1970, when she was just hitting her 30%.Thijse mnvases, and the ones m-ith strolics played agajnst grids from a fc.w years later, \\-ere the work of a confident, somewhat conventional artist. They may look more interesting no%-than the\- did then. because m-r can see ho\\- f i r loan Snyder has taken her first, pro\-isic>nal c3ppositions between order and abandon. Everybody 11-ho's discussed Snyder's move into more and more conlplicatecl imagery-it '70s--has
began in the mid-
spoken of a rejection of a modern tradition of pared-iioll-n
ahstrac tion. Rut \\-hat's hardly ever acI\no%-ledgedis that all Snyrler's landscape fragments, childlike drall-ings, \\-0rc1 poems. and collage elements echo rlarsic modernism-echo
Picasso. Kandinsky. Klee. ancl Mirh. Snvder
has defied the less-is-more n ~ o d eShe . har defied it even \\-hen she's in one of her iconic moods and seems to be suggesting that less is just one of the limitless porsibili ties. In the '70s. Snyrler \\;is inclinecl to explain her rejection of a Minimalist sensibility in terms of a cierirc to get more of her own life into the work.
- ..fiii BTinzni, in n-hich one panel is There's a 1974 triptych, called .)fauil S~nil~ktsi, crammed with words, mostly observations about the marginal status of \\-omen in the art schools; Snyrler \venders \\-hether any male instrtlitor can
~ i a'c~mt.rr r c ~ ~ is a really t~nderstanda '"female sensibility," The Srfrull J y r ~ ~ ~ filr heartfelt piece of ivork. but Si~yiier' best pitintings have never been the ones \\-ith lots of words. Sometimes \\hen she's tried hardest to press our buttons (W-ithsubjects drawn from the Holocaust or Me\\-\ reports about dometic violence) she's been unable to find a link between the story and the style, so
that the richners of the l;\-orkhas looked like then~aticc-ontrivance rather t h n ~netapfioriccon~plexity.Yet even \\-hen the results are less than \\-onderful, Si~yiier' painterly instincts are leading her in the right iiirection, and that's often to\\-ard the work of certain early m0~1ernn~asters.generally men. m-ho shared her desire t o get n lot of themselves into the picture. There's a politically incorrect logic to this artist \\-110 ran be taken for politically correct, and although there's no m!-stery a\ to \\h!
Snyrier's \v;$!- of
advertising her opinions c m make people who love painting uneasy, the ideological edge is part of \\-hat gives her canvahes their \\-ildness, their beautiful sting. 'I'he brand-new Snyclers are about bucldinps and burstings and an emotional high: a garden full of variegated blossom, is \\-hat Si~yiieroften has in mind. Everything hovers at the surface, and we're invited to pay attention to this or that vafiation on the expansive, upbeat mood. It's lilce lookng at different flo%-ersin a garden; each one makes its sepitrate claim, and sometime, thev come together into a glorious blur. Most of the paintings contain S\\-irl\of paint that create floral t3ouquets: hut there are also passages where the brush just shimn~iesarmss the surface, leaving quirky traces. liven the dark interludes have a punchy elegance; the black velvet rectangle in Cd~mln~t (which is not exactly a grtr~ienpainting) is a glamorous touch. And
the fen- murky, scumbled passages-kvhich
in earlier paintings suggested
nightmares and torments---no%- pass quickly, like moments of mental unease or anxiety flashing through a basically sunny ciispo\ition. l'or Snyiier, the upfrontne,~of the canvah is an opportunity to she\;\- us everything she's seen and k n m - n . She attaches hits of dried foliage to the surhce (in the lists of materials they're identifieci a\ herbs), ancl they suggest dome\ticateci pastoral cielights, a medieval herb garden, which in turn ronnects to the paintings' tapestry feel. Those herbs are the polar opposite of the bits of rusty barbed \\ire that Snyiier \\-as including in the S\\-eeping.
dark-toned elegies that she paintecl a ciecaile ago. Looking at the new painting" I find myself thinking about everything she's brought in over the years-the
scraps of rill, and the rough t3urlap and the handfuls of straw.
Sn\:rler has a \\-onderful \\-ay of quoting from other artists. If the h e r b stand for nature, the squares of solor, n-hich evoke Maleviih or E-lofmann, signify culture. Si~yiierappears to associate different painters \\-ith ciifferent mtoods, and \\-hen she reiapitt~latestheir motifs as if the). \\-ere her own, she's adding particular emoaonal colorations. Thih s h o n incluileii a few paintings 11-ithoversized suntlo&-er,. ( If course, they make you think of Van
(;ogh, of his unashamedly, boldly turbulent ms~od,.There's sc~methingof Paul Klee in the cheerful pastoral fantasy of the at3stracteii gardens, and something of Warnett Ne\vman's portentous emotional self-containmmt in the verticals that run through a few of the less successful paintings. And then, in any number of paintings, there are recollections of Toan Mitihell's brush\\-ork. It's a 1opica.lconnection, because both painters are nature poets, t3ut \\-hen Snyiier attempts to assimilate Mitchell's jittery calligraphy she tmds to underline their ~iifferences.Snyrler regariis nature symbolically, allegoriialiy-this
is an unahasheill\- urban
\irk\-
\\-hereas for Mitcheli nature is part of the orLlinary rourrc of events, something experiencecl day by clay.
In many respects Toan Snyrler is a '60%person. She has the '60s gift for entertaining rantradii tory creative impulses, and for a contemporary abstrac t painter that exl3rrin1ental spirit can provide a link bask to the \isionary mood of an earlier generation. S0 much of \\-hat has been kvritten about the early years of abstract art has emphasized the struggle to achieve an absolute that \\-e'rc sometime\ in danger of fcorgetting that abstraction \\-as originally about rejecting certiiinty and letting the possibilities explode. Tb n greater extent than \\-e mai- care to knolv, the first half century of abstract art \\;is
about wacko people thinking and doing l\-acko things. Some of them were geniuses: others, such as Hilla Ret,a\--the
first director of the Guggen-
heirn. who \\-as herself an artist and got to knoll- Solomon R. (Guggenheim \\-hile painting his portrait-were
sometimes extraordinarily attuned to the
geniuseh in their midst and at other time, indistinguishable from \\-hat \ve think of as ordinary crackpots. Favt of the rea\on that '"Abstrac tion in the Tkx-entieth (:entury'\tirred such high expectations \\-as that there \\as something marvelouslv apt about mounting a definitive nsessment of abstract art in a museum that had had a historic role in bringing the nem- painting to America. Rosenthal sohviously had that connection in mind \\-hen he dediciited one gallery at the shon- to a reconstruction of Hilla lieha=,-\soriginal Museum of Non-Ohjective Painting. This show-11-ithin-a-shou- salt~tedthe treasure trove of Kandinshs that Rely- brought to America. a\ \\ell as her very earl\- suppart for an admirable Alnerican abstractionist such as I1ya Rs~loto&-sky. hut it also highlighted her enthusiasm for Ruciolf Baucr, \\-hose Kandinshihh canva*e\ are a kind of avant-garde kitsch. RV exhibiting the Kandinskys and a Rs~loto&-sky alongside a Bauer and other examples of plod~iing,claustnlphobic '40s work, Rosenthal certiiinly demonstrated the shakines of some sof Reha=,-'\tiiste. hut \\-hat \\-as the point! From the time the muheurn first sopened in 1909. Rehay had an equivocal reputation among the American avant-garde. h u n g painters went to the milseum, m-hich \\-as then located son ffa~t54th Street, and htsoted at the Bauers and at Rebay" portentous displ;i=,-techniques, \\-hi& included gray cloth l\-311s and canned classical music. But they \\ere there twcause they COD Id learn from the Kandinshs and Klee, and [email protected] imagine that lotin Snvder, like so many artists since the "Os, has also &a%-n her 0%-nconclusions &or11the c-ollection. Perhaps Mark Rosenthal thought that the insufferat3lv stuffy look of \\-hat is called the "Museum of Non-t Ihjective Fainting Installation" \\-ouId
put visitors on notice that this museum has come n long. long 'iq-ay. Rut \I-hat Rosenthal's rigid reconstruction really told us was that he felt al'lenated from the beginnings of the museum, that he hadn't engaged m-ith the me\%\-,yea\ty origins of the nonobjective adventwe. It \\-as Rebay who cornmissioned Frank Llo\-Li \Yright3sbuilding-it's imaginative daring-and
the great monument to her
even alloning for all the impracticalities of this
nc~tt~rious space, there's an excitement about the rotunda that ought t o have been harnesseci to give the s h o a~visionar~dynamic. "Abstraction in the T~ventieth<:mturyWshould have been related to the e\sential metaphor of Wright's museum. \L-hichis that in the end you arrive back at the beginning: that although vou go mund and mund and see many different things, it's all part of the same expanding, mveloping experience. It's been four years since Thomas Rrens, the director of the (Guggenheim and Mark Rosenthal's boss on this job, added a stack of boxy rectangular galleries to the northea\t corner of the museum, and by no\\- it takes an effort to remember that \Yright3s mtunda is anything more than a series of access ramps serving those inertly proportioned new rooms. Rosenthal isn't resp3n"ihle for this architer tural fiasco, t,u t in installing "hbstrac tion in the T~ventieth(:enturyV he put so much emphasis on the nem- toner galleries that museumgoers could t3;trcly relate to \YrightSsglorious. light-filleii container. There's no longer any \\-ay to experience the huilciing's miraculous details-its
secret rh\thms and subtle surprises. Ro\mthal justly included
Kright's mnseum zilnong the modern n~a\ter-ic-ixksilI-tlstrated in tlis L-atalog: hut he botched the supreme opportunitv of suggesting to museumgoers that the L-ontainerthat held the show 'iq-as itself a kev 'iq-ork of abstract art. True, the startling unconventionality of Kright's cir\ign has frequently been criticized l,\- artists-including
cir Kooning, \\-hose work \\-as of course
in the exhihiaon. Rut \\hen the t,uiliiing finally opened to the public in
1959, the year of \Krright's death, his hreaka\\-a~organic form. =which had roots all the \\a\- t-titckin the Neoclassical f,lnta\ies of eighteenth-century architecture. struck many people as regenerative, astonhhingly youthful, the first t-tuilding of the t\\-enty-first century. \KrWght'smuseum may succeed all too \\-ell as a metaphor for the transcendent impracticality of the abstract experiment. hut Rosmthal in\talle~1his sho&-\vith so little sm\iti\itv that Kright's space ended up looking incomprehensible. inert. mundane. n d . come to think of it, that's more cir less wh;tt ICosenthal tlic1 'iq-ith the entire history of abstract art, He removed the crazy curves and 11-onderfulzooming trajectories. He straightened everything out. in the T\"r-rntiethCenturv" the decades passed by a d tbr At "&%bstraction dreams ciiminisheii and then diminished some more. Perhaps Rosenthal \\a\n't unh;tpp\- with the result. If it \\-as a \va\teland. it \\a\ his very own hiphfashion wasteland, Yct even those inclineit to believe that abstract art is in a paiod of narn~wingpossibilities seem to have been rather shocked by a lack of gmenlsih in the show, They h;td \\-anted to reconnect with Kandinsky's (and Kright's) let's-try-it spirit, hut this \\as not to be. (:ertainly after going in the 'l\%-entiethCenturv'hnd endt~ringall the empthrough "&%bstraction , could undcrtied-out images with \\-hich Mark Rosenthal filled his s h o ~ -you stand \\-h? Fian Si~ydcris scrax7ling flo\vers all over her canvases \\-ith such Nothing could he farther from the dour calculations that loony cheerf~~lness. dominated the u-asteland up at the C;t~pgenheim than Snviier's &on- at Hirschl & Adler Modern. The new Snyders. =which are about cultivating yjur OR-^
garden, present escapimm as a principled stand. 'There's a vehemence to
these insistently upbeat canvases. Toan Snyiier wants us to k n o n that \ve haven't reallv E-teen banist~ed&on1IMCICIC~M art's Eden.
AMERICAN
REAL
Still life, that most matter-of-fact kind of painting. achieves an astonishingly unforcccl monumentality in the \\-ork that Louisa Matthiasciottir has been doing over the p3\t ten or fifteen years. Mathiasdottir arranges ordinary objects-a
big iron pot, saj-,and a few squash and tomatoes-so
infor-
mally that their reliitionship seems up fcjr g r a h . Then her supercharged color and shorthancl-naturahtic brush\\-ork go to m-ork, and m-hat at first
100hlike randomness turns out to be urgency. lucidity, freedom. These good-sizecl canvases, in lvhich everphing is bathed in a t,right, clear, gray light, are probably the most off-handedly honest stili-life paintings that an\-bodv h a ever done. Mntthiasdottir h a been inventing subtly angled compo\itions for a quarter century and more, and by no\\- she's pushed beyond plane geometr\- into the mvsterious laws of physics. In her recent painting. a small gliiss jar set \\-a\-off to the side is dense, heavy, magnetically charged, while an eggplant or melon that's right up front has a \\-eightlessness that defies its mass. Matthiasdottir has stripped am-av still life's allegorical and metaphoricill meanings. She's gone hack to the basics, \\-hi& turn out to be startlingly complicated and unprcclictahle. The objects controf the space. ,%ndm-e're elil~ijarated,because everything seems to be corni11g together right before our eves. Several of these still life, are included in the first retn~spectiveof Matthiasdottir's \\-ark ever organizecl in the f inited States. The sllou--\vhich
reaches
all the \\-ay back to an eutraordinariiy accomplished pitinting of a boy at play, done in 1937, \\-hen she \\-as20. ancl includcs landscapes of her native Iceland and delicate portraits nncl the most spectacular self-portraits anybody has done in years---\\ill be touring the countrv, \\-ith stops at many college gal-
leries, well into 1997.This small retrospective, \\-hi& has been drawn from the artist's own reserves, isn't all high points. .4 l'ig outclocir scene, based on a photograph of farnilv meml'ers on an ncursion, is uncharaiteristical~fuzz\-:the unequivocal color has the paradoxical effect of making everything seem tinted a d remote. And certitir-1lancfst-apesbecome almost melhanical, with their stiff architectonic arrangemmts of Farm animals in green hills. But a fourteen-foot-kvide tripqih of animals in an Icelanclic landscape has a winning decorative charm. The portraits from the 1960s are kvonders of toncdl con, highlight the trol. Many of the small oil studies are quite deft: the\-
unselfconscious fluidit\- of Matthiasriottir', brushwork, \\hi& is kej- to everything that this 79-year-old artist has done ciuring the more th;tn five decades that she's l'em living and \\-orking in Nem-Ynrk. n c l the recent seltlportraits and still lifes are nothing short cif miraitllous. K h a t first impresses a gallerygoer about Matthiasiiottir's still lifes is the overall orche5tration of the colors and ho\\ much it varies from painting to painting. There are ci3mpositions that are tike a5cencfing colnr scales, gcsing from purplish gray to yello\vish blue. and there arc other paintings that arc deliberately strident. like crazy quilts of oranges. greens, reds. Then, almost before v o h~x e had time to take in this overail effect, each object begins to shine forth with its own unique colors; the heavy green of a painteci table, the maroonish purple of \vine vinegar, the light yello\\- of a grapefruit, the deep red of v.-hat look like peppers in a jar. Mittthiahdcittir knolvs how- to bring out the individuitlity of objects. She's a master at catching the variety of light reflections that complicate a form even as they articulate it. The summary exactness of the painting of some of these ordinary forms is bre;ttht;lhing and a little unnerving. n d the small violation of naturali~iclogic that's involved in the cleare\t object sometimes
. giws the compositions a delicitsus air of analso k i n g the cine farthest zm-av d
tinaturalistic possil'ility. Mittthiahriottir refuses to bring a whole pai~ltingto
the same level of t;;li,.~~s; she knows it 11-ouldbe t~nbearal->le to look at-tivershe sends us off to done. too tight. And so from the heights of illusi~nisn~ other objects. m-hich may he painted with little or no surhce specifics. John hshl?ery, an adnlirer of Mittthias~iottir's\\-ork, once \\-rote thitt her painting. "despite its tendency to\\-ard broad simplification, has an air of heightened realism---it kind of trompe-l'oeil that \\-orks on a m m t d rather than an opit turns out, B a natural phenomenon. tical level." <(:onrtructivisn~, In some of Matthiasdottir's recent painangs. vegetables and utensils seem juht placed here and t h e r e a s if they'd heen set do\vn on the countertop in the kitchen m-ithout much t h i j q h t . Yet there's a logic to thew thjects. a logic that gro\vs out of the experience of handling and uhing things.
T\vo plump rucchinis, aimed in different directions, become the longitude and latitude of a tabletop. In the Still L!fu witit (;rum Ibbir
urid
Bluv Cloth there's
a \\-hole grapefruit, a grilpefruit half, and a knife, and together these simplest of ohjects unfcjld n drama of transformations in \l-hich black turns vello\\ pink, meaning that the black knife has cut through a m-hole grapefruit to reveal its inside\. The plane cuts the sphere to reveal the circle. Matthiasdottir doesn't explode oriiinary ol>jects.she just opens up their possil->ilities. and the decisiveness of her painthandling, m-hich m-eaves together simplification and complicittion, makes the multiplicity of meanings seem naturill. inevitable. Kith a tablecloth she ran do anything. Pulled tight, the cloth sets up a q ~ a c ea u x d ~ l yas a qunttrocento piazza; rumpled, it's the \l-orliI in confusicin. m-ith space colliipsing in on itself and objects teetering on the brink of ol->li.i-ion. ()\-er the t\\-entv-five years that I've heen seeing Mntthinsdottir's plctures. her work has movecl closer and closer to the center of ;tn imaginary map of contempor;lrv art that I carry around in my head. Mntthiasdottir has alliays heen a first-rate artist. and if \\-hat she's doing no\\- seems especially important. it's t3ecause her optimistic pragmatism is set in high relief \\-hen
so much of the strong ne\\- \\-ork that we're seeing in the galleries is producecl by arti\ts \\-h0 arc circumspect about their emoaons. She's a virtuoso \\-ith pitint \\-h0 can suggest the softness of a tablecloth or the cold gleam of a knife blade 11-ith n few passes of the brush, yet there's never anything shcm-v about her painter!!- effects. Matthiasiiottir depends on a dramatic juxtaparition of color shapes to build a spare, and then her giddy interluclrs of naturalistic extravagilnce saturate the space m-ith life. Strangely enough, it's often the more sophisticated gallerygoers who feel that Matthiasdclttir's realism is a little bland. Cclrrld it be that the seamlessness of a naturalistic image. especially if the illusion doesn't call attention to itself, appears naive to people m-ho are all\-a\-, looking for a subtext! If only they knrm-: Matthiadottir has suhteuts galore. When she's \\orking at the top of her powers. straightfomardnw is her wav of npressinp complicated feelings.
Khen she lets her brush pass quickly over an object in a still life or the particulars of her face, she's defining the limits of what we
~IIOR-.,%ndwhen
her
color is astonishing!\- vibrant, the heautif~~lly structured compositions can seem like a \\ay of bringing order to big. amorphous emotions.
R\- giving her hest pictures such an unfussy emotional impact, Matthiasdottir sets a standitrd against \vhich I 611d it useful to measure other people's \\-orli. It i",nteresting to j uxtapore Matt hiasclottir's mm-canvases v\-ithsome of the paintings in the A1e.i Katz retrospectiveial1ed "Mex Katz Under the Stars: American landscapes, 19Sl--1395'LtIi1at \\-as at the Baltimore Museum of Art over the sumfiler and is no\\- touring. And it's also \\-orth seeing h o ~some younger realists stack up against Matthiasiiottir, such as Philip Geiger. \\-h0 has had a string of sho\vs at %tistcheff and Ct?. in New Yt~rk.
For years. realism \\as a minorit\- taste in the hnlrrican art \\-orld, and sometimes even people in the know \\ere inclinecl to keep fairly quiet. They
didn't want to deflect attmtion from abstract art, =which \\-as recognizeci the \\-orld over as a ciefining achievement of postwar Ne\v York. n d no\\. \\-hen abstract painting is often said to have run itself into the ground, there is almost a g w a e r desire to cling to an ehtahlihment genealogy that begins \\-ith Pollock and goes all the \\-a\-to Robert Ryman and Brire Marden. Yet nothing could he farther from the truth than the idea that painting \\-hat
you see is not a New York thing. Hans E-iofmann, l;\-ith \;\-t~cin~ Matthiasciottir studied after she arrived from Iceland in the early 1940s. always structured his teaching aroun~ithe experience of working from a still life or a nude. He certainly encouraged Abstract Expressionists such as Toan Mitchell to bring a stmng perceptual element into their \\-ork, and the important painters of figures, landscapes. and still fifes \;\-h0studied 'iq-ith H o h a n n inctude not only hfatthiasdottir, but also Nell Blaine and Robert I)e Niro (the father of the astor). It's some-
times forgotten that C;i;icometti's mature representational style \\as first
hewn not in Paris but in NCWYork, at the Pierre Matisse Gaflery in N4X. And it's also significant. I think, that Balthus's first museum retrospective \\-as in 1956 at the Museum of Modern r t . \\-here it ran roncurrcntly with a Pollock she%-. Nem- Ycrrkers hilve alliays had their romantically speculative s hestreak, which led them to abstract art, hut they're also p r a ~ t h t \\-h0 liese that \\-hat ycsu see is what you get. After a decacie \\-hen everybody has been looking for alternatives to the less-is-more approitch of much Nr\v York Schciol abstraction. you'd expect that attention \vould focus on all the other painting that goes on in New York. There has been some revisionist thinking, hut it hasn't really amounted to much. People gm\;\-\\-earl. of the old mvths, hut they cling to them. too, and \\hen the time comes for a change, there's a tmdency just to pile nem- mvths on top of old ones. This helps to explain \\-h?, m-ith abstract painting losing its allure. Americitn museumgciers \\-hci want to get hack to
nature have heen inclinecl to embrace the School of London, lvhich is presented as a realist alternative to Ne%-York. In 1994, Lucian Frerrd" retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum became dinner party conversation all over hfanhattan. Frei~li'shigh bohemian London, with ariStocratic latfie~ and a drag queen all undressing in the artist's barren atelier, had a hard-hitt m ciorummtary impact. n d Nrm- York succumbed. I'reuii's figure pAntings are at the Acquavella (;aller>- in Nem-York this Edl. He renders each square inch of flesh-he \\-rird mounds and ridges-and
pile, on the paint until it creates
he \vows an auiiienre that sees this nitpicky
naturalism as painterly magic. He's transformeii a rather traditional studio exercise into a high-concept postmodern game, and although the programmatic thinking makes his paintings feel airless ancl inert, there's an audience that', \villing to accept such overdetermination as a kind of meaning. I'reuii is so ariiently realistic. so illtent on pro\ing that he will not be abstract. th;tt he satisfies people's arsumption that abstraction and representation are irreconcilable absolutes. Freud i, admired for being everything that the New York Sc-hoolis not: he has stories to tell, and he dots all the i's and crosses all the t". And he's not the onl\- London artist that Nem- York finds increitsingly mg;iging; there is also heiphteneii interest in R. B. Kitaj (an m e r i c a n \vho's lived in London for decades) and reneu-ed attention paid to Francis Bacon, and a g r o ~ - i ncuriosity g about les-known figures such as i.eon Kossoff, Frank . h e r txich. ancl Rodrigo MO\-nihan.The Brits suddenly seem relevant. precisely because they're o u tside the New York loop. The M;ltthiasiiottir retmspective ought to be recognized a\ a key event in contemporar\- art. It ought to he at the Metropolitan Museum, \\here Lucian Freucl h3~1his sho\v. BUt that kvon't happen, since this artist's majorleague emotic~nalimpact is so unlike m-hat people have heen led to expect from important n e n painting, e\pecially in N e n York. Matthiasdottir doesn't care to startle us \vith the very fact of her being a realist. She insists on
an old idea of visual credibility, but she gives that approach an uncategorirable contemporary freedom, and she does so 11-ith a feeling for color and ctsnstrtlction that comes straight o u t of abstract art, She's a Neu- York School painter \\-h0 \\-ants to celebrate the overx-helminp reality of the citv; her still lifes have a Ne\v York clarity. a N m - York piice. Her work is such a thoroughgoing S\-nthe,is that it may be misunderstood as cautiously conventional. Rut if you tune into \\-hat Matthiasiiottir is doing, you may end up thinking that if this isn't part of the main*tream, then the mainstream can gt-ttt""hell.
hlex Ratr started out at mughly the same post\\-ar moment a\ Matthiasiiotc h praise tir, and there's redly no m p t e r y as ttr whj- he garnrrs so 1 ~ ~ 1more than she cioes. (Going through Katr's landscape retro,pecave, you sce a smoothly intelligent man turning the \\-hole \\-orld into an abstract painting, \\-hich can make smse to people \vho are inclinecl to read abstract painti n g landscapes ~ ~ anylvav. Katz leaves the tension het\\-ern abstract strur ture and realist imagery right there on the surhce, for all to see. If you can overlook the yawning chasm in recognition that separates Ratr from Matthiasiiottir, it's clear that thei-"c %\-orkingsome of the same terrain. Katz also wants abstract and realist impulses to flo\\- together. The difference is that he insists on making the svnthe,is look svnthetic-and
therefore hip.
Ratz ha\ al\x-;ivs ignored all the annoying detail\ and clone one-colorp e r - A v e m-ork. His preferred brand of flattened-t~ut.everything-up-front space \\-as already in place in the lanclscapes he \\;is doing in the mid-'50s. \\-hich incluclecl small colored-pitper collages a\ \\-ell as bigger oil,. A tree become, an interesting ragged-edged fcjrrn. .4nd whatever details Katz does include are treated autonomtiuslv, as if they were visual stage directions .bft?reindicating the \\-eather or the sea\on or the time of day. In 17iri-k B7~i~ils.
(1992) the all-over dark green is given a dappling of whitish strokes---
those are the leaves flickering in the \\ind. only freere-framecl. (kii dad liiilck
#%(1993) is a big yellow Rarnett Neu-man. except that Newman's black vertical stripes have been angled slightly and hung jvith a few leaves so that they're transfi~rmedinto early spring trees. Katz's bare-bones enigmatic look, w k h turns dark iitv streets and briIliant Ne\n Engl;ind mornings into Minimalist icons. seem\ e\pecially suited to our t3een-there-clone-that moment. His pitintings have this t3uilt-in cii.j:l vu. He knows that we know that abstract art elnergecf a\ artists from Monet to MonLlrian rethought the landscape, and the \v;$!- he reverseh their march toward nonobjectivity gives the pitintings a sn-;ink pop allure. His nighttime canva\e\ are .%d Reinhardts, except that the silhouette of a tree or a hank of \\-indci\vs in a loft building has suddenly appearccl. These are simple. alrnmt arithmetic propositions: nhtract impact pluh naturalistic detiiil equals Alex Katr. n d Katx, \\-h0 kno\vs that an artist ought not force his effects. brings
off the visual fvissons with casual aplomb. These are effective pictures, but the ahstrart-intc)-rc13resentatic1nequittion is statecl so starkly that a viewer can't reall>-engilge. E ~ e nthe a\\--km-ardhits are meticulouhly preplanned. I admire Katz's panache. hut these paintings don't amount to much more than ingeniously personalized \\-all decor. The cievil's bitrgain that Katr has made \vith abstract art is ea\iest to grasp
\\-hen you take a look at the \\-ork he's done \\-ith his cutouts. a rariically different nlecliunl that he dreamed up in order to create some cleft studies in do\vnto&-ncharisma. The c u tou ts-R-hich
have foc uhed on several genera-
tions of art-ancl-literature notable\. from the poet and ciance critic lidwin Denby to the pitinter I'rancesco (:lemente-are
about the fun that people
have \\-hen cutting a figure in public, and became the cutouts arc literally cut out and stood up in a gallery, the comic implicatic~nsare absc~lutelydelicious. I'm glad t o see Katz letting loose m-ith his naturalitic gifts: the cutouts tend to he suavely executed. m-ith n good deal of eiegilntly meticu-
lous detail. Yet there is a paradox built into the cutouts, because it seems that Katr only takes seriouslv the \\hole que5tion of h o n to give painted form an imposing solidiy \\hen he's gotten away from the discipline of a rectangular c-anvas-when
he's not, in other u-ords, really painting paint-
ings. Katr is a tease. He \\-ants to undermine the very illusions he's creating. I'd like t o see a Katz cutout set nest to one of the self-portraits that Matthiasdottir has done in recent years, say the Su!jlPi~rtruit~
l r k (irurn
Ailan.
Matthiasiiottir's self-portrait\ are ahou t going . -solo: she's a great-looking 130hemian lad\. \\-ho's reached old age. And \\hen she regards herself, she is every bit a\ amusing an observer of the inexpensive chic of dc~\\-nto\vnartistic circles a\ Katz \\-as n-hen he did his cutouts of the poet and dance critic l'dnrin Drnlx-, exi-ept t h t she's also painting
it
painting. f he kno~v\-\ how to
make the smallest details link up orgilnically with the bmnd compo\itional moves, and that's way , he\r)nd . Katr. This slim m-oman 11-ith the beautifully shaped head has the same kind of penetrating though guarded gaze that Katr saw- in Denby: it's the look of the ad hoc aristocrat. Kith her rammdstraight po\ture, boldly striped ,\\-eater. and bright green shoe,. she's almost an allegory of her 011-n severe hedonism. Her head. 11-ith every importiint plane in place, presides over a naturalistic essay on the proposition that less is more. And the scenes-from-everycdiiy-life props in certain other self-portraits-an
umbrella, or a pitcher on a table, or a big shaggy dc~g-suggest
the same t3;tck-to-basics spirit that \\-e knoll- from her still lifes. Matthiasdottir has a sense of humor and a smse of play. I presume that she paints her self-portraits looking in the mirror. hut interestingly she does not reprexnt herself in the act of painting. These self-portraits kvithout brush, palette, or easel are not about a painter at work but about a painter reimagined as an in~lividual\vho ran be in a painting. Fainting herself fulllength. unenculnbered by brush or easel, Matthiasdottir creates n fictic~nal 'i"~-orld that she finds livable. There's a 11-onderftllelement cif theater in these
paintings. She see, portraiture a, nssociiited m-ith the theatricality of personality. sc~mething\\-e ]\now from the Baroque ma5ters. Her affitinitv with the B a r q u e is intuirve; it comes ou t in the alrnoit sneakit? comic \\-ay that she has of presenting herself as ciirector. set ciesigner. and star all mlled into one. The self-portraits arc about Mattl~iasdottirrolnancing Matthiasdottir. And her straight-forn-ard, at3solutely unilambovant demeanor makes the egotism all the more elusive ancl interesting. Though M;ltthiasdottir's expression is invariably a little grave, these are \vonderfully happ!- paintings. She is \\-here ,be m-ants to be. She's in the painting, lookinp out at L I ~ . Solne paamitifis nmak rus believe that n person's deepest emotions are inscribecl on the &ice, if only we can rcad the signs. It's a view with \\-hich Matthiasdottir apparently does not concur, at least \\-here her own &ice is concerned. Still, she has a way of getting at pyck'logicitl truth. l\-hich has to do \\-ith she\\-ing us not \\hat she knows about herself t3ut \\-hat she e ~ a person can and ]\no%-Swe ]\no%-about her. The self-portraits s ~ g g \\-hat can't see of another person: the\: get at the fiin~iliiirfeeling of being nhsolutely in the \\-orld ancl yet not really ]\no%-nor unclerstood in the world. Matthiasdottir expresses this paradox fcjrmally. in terms of a tension het ~ - e e the n forthrightnes of her stance and the elusiveness of her face. In the paintings, it's n contra,t---a
disj unc ture-that
l\-e experience thmugh dif-
ferent kind$ of contours. different \vay5 of handling paint and color. In the tmdy everything is crisp edges. decisive plane, of color; in the &ice the contours arc often smuclged and the contrasts arc often reduced. In the hest self-portraits, the unclearness =within the clearness is true to something that ever\-body proI3ably experiences, namely the idea that a person's purely phj-sical pre\ence has a lot to tell us about the mvsteries of personality. Matthiasiiottir's bruhstmkes, broad and forthright and unsho\v\-, pull everything together. In America, m-herc \-irtnoso brush\vi>rk has been so overdone that it has become n cliche, many punctilious realists have a hard
time remembering that a painterly b r u h r t m k e isn't a cieail end but a means to an end. Scln~erealists no%-recoil from the freedom cif the brush. That is their loss: but there is also hell to pay if you get so caught up in the mystique of painterly painting that oil-on-canus turns into an artsy philosophic quagmire. Katz first came to prominence as an artist \\-h0 rejecteci pitinterly painting, hut in his big landscapes the brushstroke has returnrd---like n hanclprint of the 1950s, a jokey recollection of the davs \\-hen paint \\-as king. As for Matthiasdottir's view of the t3rushstrokc. it's poetic-ally matter-offkct. Go thmugh her retmspective and you'll see an artist who understands that the paint that reveal, can also veil, and who \v;ints to cio a bit of both. The problem is deciding \\hen to cio what, and \\-h\-.These aren't necehsarily conscious decisions. The character of an artist's b r u h n o r k ought to emerge out of the painting process itself, and there is al\v;i!-s one or another realist who is just making a name and kncnvs how to give a painterly style some tantalizing unpredictability. Philip Geiger. who is 4(F----hismost recent sl~o\%at Tatistcheff and Co. \;\-asin 1995 and another is slated h r next spring-constructs
contemporary interiors out of a \veave of jaggeci, ner-
vous strokes. Pictures that are filled with a distinctive contemporary in\tat3ilitv are the result. (;eiper$ smallish canvases are updates on the old idea of the conversation piece: a relaseci group of kimily members or close friends.
\\-h0 in these paintings are talking or having a coffee or dayiireaming. Geiger has an intelligently understateci \v;$!- of getting at some of the conlplexities of their relationships: he does it I3v keeping the painterly rhythm of his canvases open, uneven, a bit unpredictable. K h e n he leaves a Fice a little t3lurred. he's picking up an undercurrent of tension or uncertainty: he \\-on't let everything come into fcxus. and it's that not-quite-all-there aml3iguitv that holcis our attention. C;eigcr3s suburban .4merican interiors are pleasilntly hut rather sparely furnished: a couch. a table. a cie\k. a computer. nothing much on the \\-alls,
few- rugs, no curtains. These might be the homes of !-ounger middle-class people m-ho don't have the mclney for a Lot of fancy things ancl maybe don't \\-ant to be stifled l,\- possessions, any\\-ay.The expitnses of empty white wall ,upge\t that the people \\-his live here aren't dug in ti1o deeply; thev \\-ant some mol,ilitv. But those blank spaces also create a structural challenge, because (;eiger can't let them become holes in the compositions. These paintings are ahout a slightly cold domesticity, ancl in an odd \v;$!- the prairies of \\-allhoard relate to the gray walls that Matthiasdcittir leaves above her ohjects. although (;eiger has no\\-here near her gift for giving such intervals a positive fcjrce. If Geiger understands abstrac t structure-ancl to what extent he cloes-it's
I'm not sure
not in a start-ti-orn-scratc t~ <:onstructivist
sense but in it more act-and-react Abstract Expressionist m-?-. (Geiger's narrative improvisations and Matthiascfottir's absolt~tistrealism are separated not only by a vast difference in qualitv hut also by an e\senti;ll difference in expectations. You could sav that we're seeing a generational difference here, and maybe that's an element, but there" more to it, too. (Geiger is the kind of realist n-hcs nleans to make sense of the randomness of Life, whereas Matthiascfottir's idea is that if she ltstsks hard enough at the 'i\-orlcl it \\-ill turn out to have the cIassical order that she kno\\-s alrcadv from art. That's an ethical position. In the tan-and-era\- portraits that she \\-as cloing in the '60s. Matthiasdottir \\-as a painterlv Expressionist \vith Neoclassical Leanings; she lcsoked at the model and saw afterimage\ of Corot and <:ourbet. .4 quarter century Later, she has complicitted the equation further:
you might saj- that no\\- she's looking at nature and seeing afterimages of MonLlrian and L6ger. She still \\;$nth nature to confirm her ideas ahout art, but the process is extremely complicated, because ideas ahout art are al\\-ay\ in a state of flux, which must mean that nature is changing, too. There are realists who seek an inviolable truth that they can oppcfie to the relativism of modern art, but their neatly polished work suggests a refusal to see.
(Geiger inot l;\-ithouthis corn-entional idea. but at l e a t he doesn't quite k n m - m-hat he's going to find, so that his work has an interesting spark. More than anything else, it is Matthiasdottir's cle~rheadednessthat set:, her apart, In her recent still lifes, where she leaves much of the table bare, h e ' s reminliing us that the tablettrp is as primary a rectangle its the citmas itself. This is the kind of consideration that you find in the very greatest still life painters-in
(:hardin, in Matisse. Is Matt hiasdottir that gcioci! Iuhn Ash-
r the \\-a\-hack in 1072, observed that her work "v.-ill twry. lvriting in ~ l r t r r p u ~all
be remembered long after the big name, of this season or nest sea5on are as forgotten a, those of the pt~lriplcrsof !-ester!-ear." I agree, but jq-e're still \\;liting for the shakedo\\-n to occur. % quarter century has passed and many more "big name," have come and gone, and many people have still not had their first look at the l;\-orkcif an artist who came to S e w York when she \;\-as in her 20s. Through it all, she's stayed on course. In the recent still lifes, hfatthiasdottir
i1i~c.sbring
<:hardin t o mind. You can't say that about an\-
trther painter jq-lio is wortiing mit\:
N C ~ V ~ ~ ?f f L , 1996 TRFK
FLAG BURNING
Iasper b h n s cultivate, the same gloimily an~ltiguousn~otrdin j tlst about every painting in the huge survey of his work that is at the Museum of Mcdern Art this \;\-inter.These canvases are altout stalen~ate,and dead ends and insoluble purrles: they're headache, \v;liting to happen. Over and over again Iohns replays the same old Dadaist is-it-art-or-not? routines, until the everything-is-nothing mantra has turned your mind to mush. Iohns's
\I-hite-on-\\-h* .bfd~?s are unucadable, his numbers blend one into the other, and when he paints the .\ijtlsi?nshe gives spring m d s u m l e r the s m r n ~ t ~ r k y chill as a u t u m n and winter. This artist's iraltsmanlike punitilicsusness serves only to give his negativity a distinguisheii pittina. His idea of fine finish is a nihilistic grace note: a solitary clrip here, a t3lackish smutige there. The retmspective surveys a forty-year-long funk. Kirk Varnedc~e.the Chief <:urator of Piiinting and Sculpt~lreat the Mociern, has orginized the s h o ~himself, rather than delegating the job to one of his lieutenants. He loves k~hns'sfrost\--( . Ilvmpian . Iladaist foravs. He may think that Johnsk sourness is what mi~seum-quaiit\;art is all about, but his support is not a selfless act. Lramedoe knows that there is peril in presiding over a great collecticin of earlv modern paintings m-hen he also m-ants to dominate a postmociem scene that's inclined to regard all painting as irrelevant. Iohns, who is both a Dadaist anti a nearlv universally atlnlireci painter, ran function as the rnaster of dttente. And tlttente is what brnetioe needs, Marcel I3uchamp is the ghost \vho stares out from every pitinting and scdpture and h a v i n g in the sl~on-.Jrhns knew Iluchamp in the %h, and his o\vn polished persona mai- in some respects be modeled on the likable a*pect\ of Duchamp, \\-h<)could appear a paragon of bohemian tiiste. eleall the n e n tlevelopments in Nengance. and unilappahilitv as he fc)llo~-eci York right up until the time of his death in 1968. Johns may m-ant us to n ~an p august historical figure, but \\-hat he and his friends think of D ~ ~ c h a as ,a\\- 13ehinil the kicatle of the impeccable aesthete \\;is an inrentliar\ geniuh \\-hose anti-art apergus could be accepted as law precisely became they came from the lips of a man of such vast sophistication. In an interview in 1066. Duchamp dismissed Antire Breton. the poet and polemicist of Surrealism. a* "a Inan of the '20s, not completely rid of notic~nsof quality, composition. and the beauty of materials." The point \\-as that Duchamp \\-asa man of the present \\-h0 had e*caped from 1111 those outmoded idea*.
If Johns sometimes looks Likes L>uck~amp'struest disciple, it is because he trumped the old aesthete's rejection of the idea of beauty by resurrecting "notions of quality, composition, and the beauty of materials" a\ parodistic imitations. k~hns':.slurp\- surfaces are a send-up of paint quality, just as his
\\-hat-you-see-is-\\-hat-you-get subjects arc send-ups of subject matter. Bv non- Johns is such a pervasive infl~lenrcthat it's sometimes difficult for people to separate his sen~i-upsfrom the real thing, hut that is a confusion that
Kirk Vunedoe s e e m to m-elcomr. In a catalog e,sity he explains tha.t j'rhns has helped him to see that one ran unite 1)uchamp's L>;liiaism and "the more traditional mainstream lineage of <:4zanne and Pica\ro." These artists might have once appeared "antithetical" and "incommensur;lhle." but after b r n e d o e looked at Johns's \\-ark he t~nderstoodthat 1111 of this "'can be grafted together . . . to pmducc a hybrid of potent fertility." Iohns is a hybrid, all right. but I'm not so sure about the potmt fertilitv. Nothing in this retmspective is \\-hat it seems, and this conundrum is s the word "\-ello\vW supposecl to keep us on our toes. In 19.59,k ~ h n stmriled on n painting m-ith blue letters. and the confusion delighted him so much t h t he's done the r a m thing over and over; a recent canvas hiis the m-ortl "red' kvritten (this time back\\-ards) in grai-.Iuhns doesn't go anywhere with this pauadox. He lacks the mastery of color thtrt might enable him to give a gray the rousing heat of a red. Mityhe he just \\-ants us to mull over our confc3uncied expect;ttions. f t e r Duchamp died. Johns \\rote that the older artist 'UeiIarccf that he \\-anted to kill art ('for rnvself") hut his persistent attempts to cie\troy frame\ of reference altered our thinking. e5tablished new units of thought." 1)oes j'ohns inlagine that his mismatched ioiors and \\-ords signify a new unit of thought? Johns has said of one of his white paintings of a flag that he nleant to create something that \\as "neither a flag nor a picture. It can he both and still he neither." That has a nice enigmatic t\\-a.np, but \\-hat does it man?
The rontemporar\- art audience \\-ill generally take a crack at a puzzle. even if there is reason to stlspect that no solution exists. The c h a l l e q e h the arti\t is to keep people's attmtion after the initial noveltv has \\-orn off, and certainly Icihns is some kind of genius \\hen it come, to m-eaving and rem-eaving his phony-t3;tloney spells. His manipulative savvy can sometimes t3amhnozle even more discriminating museumgoer,, because he bases his effccts on a claw stuciv of the \\-ay that other-mostly
t3etter---artists have
managed to grab the audience. rohns will takr n nifty methcid of handling paint from de Kncining, a dazzling image from Pica\ro. He provides something for everybody: a bit of trornpe l'oeil virtuosity for collectors \vho \\-ant their money's \\-orth, a little porn for younger artists \vho might other%-ise mspect that b h n s has lo\t fiis edge. Ioflns's work does have a c-crtain fidgety elegance. But his effects are so
drearily localized that the refinements
down a picture imtead of
p ~ l l i n gus into II \ \ - ~ r l dthat has an integrity all its 011-n. He probably m-ants it this \v;$!-. hut those of us \vho want something different are perfectly justified in rejecting not only the product hut also the appmach. This artist moves around hits of pigment n if painting \\-ere some kind of post-Armage"-fdon game, tike Ducfiamp at his chessboard. It's easy to argile that Iohns has rescued the dying en~hersof a vanishing art, a, long as you ignore the fact that he stood bj- applauding \\-hile his hero poureci the p a l l i n e and lit the match. bfins, m-ho is 66, e m r g e d at a sea-c-hange nloment in iimericitn art. 111 the late 1950s, succesh \\-as coming to the generation that had arrived in Ne\\- York after the \var and had lvatrheii as Pollock and de Kooning achieved natic~naland then international fame. Much good 11-ork\\-as being done, t3u t there \\-a\ also talk of Ahstrar t Expressionism turning into a nenacademy. With pllleries and museums responding to the enthusiasm of a rapid? gro\ving audience, there were t3eginning to he signs that the public's
appetite for innovation might eventually o u t t r i p \\-hatever surprises the artists had to offer. All of these development peaked with the Pop explosion of 1062, but alreaeiv in 1958, \\hen Iohns shm-eci the paintings of flzgs and targets that he'd been doing since the mid-'50\ at the fledgling Leo Cnstelli Gallery, there m-ere signs of ~fiscontent.People 11-antedchange, and * i a starin johns they found just enough. If his readymade subject matter h cte tling Dariaist impudence, his ruggeci-t3ut-elegant surkces seemed to prove that there \I-as life left in Abstract f:xprcssionism. This 'iq-orh'iq-as an in~mediatesuccess when it was sho.t\-nin 1958. Alfred
E-l. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Mrsdern Art, earmarked four paintings for the
L I I U S C U ~ 'pernlanent ~
collection, thereby t3eginning
an institutic>nalrelationship that h a culminateri thirty-eight years later 'iq-ith the current retrospective. And Thorn%\R. Mess, the editor of .?rtrr~u$\ and one of Lie Kncining's most loyal supporters, reproduced a johns lbrfirt on the cover of his magazine. This was an amazing response to an artist's first shou-. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that all these years later people kvhci care little fcjr Dadaism and still less fcjr Pop keep a \\-arm place in their hearts for those first flags and lbrfirts. Even many skeptics \\-ant to give Iohns some credit for having fussed so mightily over the Flufir;. The artist 'iq-ould r u t his stars o u t of newspaper, glue them d o n n . then \\-ash over some milky, translucent pitint (it's mcaustic, a \\-a\-medium). There's lots of detail involved---close work, I gue5s you'd call it. johns kvorries over those surfaces. inch by inch. hut this is t3asically an amateur's idea of technique. ,ince it has n t r iurnuiative impact.
, turns an American icon into his own kind of W'ith those first F l ~ g s johns thingamajig, and if that's not saying much. it's more than I ran saj- for the rest of the work in the sho\v. In the %OS, when rohns tried his hand at big, horizontal u-orhs u-ith lots of heterogeneous elements, such a\ -4ci-c~nlltafifc
B7kut,he roulcin't achieve even the vapid decorative sxveep that his old friend
Rauschenl3erg \\-as t3ringing to oversized surfaces. hnci therc is al\v;i~-S trouble \\-hen he intmduies collage elements (another Rausc hmherg specialtv). Iohns is far too intent on keeping everything under control to allo&-for the explosive metaphoric possil3ilities of assemblage. The painteci tmdy parts in t~ look the early I k r t j ~ twith PIdstrr Clrst,, ( 1 m55)and the broom in Fioill1q l h ~ n(1962) both feeldr and pretmtious. I can't imagine a \verse combination.
Iohns is too much of a control freak to let loose \\-ith the possibilities of paint. VC'hen hi work pies abstract in \\-hat arc known as the cross-hatch paintings (the\- dominate the '70s) he leaves us m-ith prilcticitlly nothing to look at. because there is no feeling fcjr color to give some dynamism to his twoken patterns of parallel lines. Iohns supplies these ahstracaons \\-ith &nc\ metaphoric titles such as .$cent. Ctorpsu irriil ,llrrrglr, Diracurs trri
ir
Plirrie, and
Brtuunr tlir Clot-k irnd tlir B p ~ i Nothing in Iuhns's work goeunanaiymci. and museumgoers m-ho are disposed to m-ork out the metaphors can certiiinly get their minds spinning. The Burburk Tier from 1975 i s apparently bitsed on a p h o t o g ~ ~ that p l ~ Iuhns saw- in
1'dtlotiul
(;nyruj?hri.\\-hi& shm-ed n Mexican
man concocting n sort of barber's pole by painting stripes on a tree. Michael <:richton, the author of the catnlog of rohns's 1977 retrospective at the Khitney, rcproduieci this photc~graphand observed. "It \\;is pml,ahl\- the underlying idea of painting over realit\- that interested Iohns." Oh, of course, painting over reality. For an artist \\-hci's already painteci over the North ,d\merii-a.n L-ontinentin hi., .9,4ibp5, painting over reality is just the next cosmic leap. Kben you see the cri~ss-ha.tl:t~ paintings in this big retrospective, where they mark roughly the halfway point, they look like lohns's \v;$!- of putting some clistanre betkveen his Pop-oriented beginnings and the painterwanted to become. Vie\\-ed this \\-a)-, the philosopher that he has alxx-a\-& cross-hatch painting provide the perfect lead-in to the work of the '801, in
\\-hich rohns attempts to situitte himself among the immortals hy cm%-iiing his paintings lvith selected references to C;riinen;ilcl, I.eonardo. Picasso. and. lilter, Holhein and (:6zanne. rohns presents these snippets from the masters in the same clrailpan spirit a\ he once pre\ented the icons of the American heartlancl. His art- historical potpourri has no particular logic, hut he insists on his quotiitions with his trademark cool belligerence, so that you can scarcely t3elieve that they really nlean this little. Over and over, he repmduces the outline\ of several fallen soldiers ti"~lnC;rUne\;\-ald's Rt>surrkiitlo?a, And tm-o Pic-a\sos from 1936, BTrt~ilurrn LI
.Stlutv
I~Q and T Thp ,Mznoflrur .bft?~r~g 1115
IIi~rse,crop up more than once, as does a skeletal tigure from Picasso's 1958 F&
Oj-Icarfls.
lohnsh adn~iret-Skno\%-their art histor); and in klis recent work the!; imagine that they're seeing a repla~-of the mysterit~usprocess by lvhich a very great artist sometime\ becomes most him\elf m-hen he quotes almost line hv line from a 11-ork that he passionately admires. T h i extraordinary phenomenon cannot he m-illrii into being. yet some of our postmodern painters are so tired of the present that they 11-ouldjust as soon pretend that they're immolating themselves on the altar of the p3\t: it's the nouveau-traditional thing to do. Mean\\-hile the critics offer specific explanations for some of lohns's alleged arts of self-immol;ltion. \Ye are told, for example.
q1 Milasp f i r ~ appeared t as an that a fragmmt from Pira\so3s .\ilrm,filrir i k f i ~ ~ r11 elenlent in the Spirsarr of 1985--86 t3ecause k ~ h n s\\-as changing his acldress. That's perfectly logical, hut it saj-Snothing about the impart of the quotation in the \\-ark. K b e n Picasso salutes tngres,
he" reexperiendnp the magisterial acaile-
mician's sensuous arabesques in term\ of his 011-n feeling for line and color; each stmke is a sympathetic response. F h n s just copies elements: a few outlines here, a complete image there. He treats great paintings as an art director might. He crops and edits. cuts and pastes. His canvases are message
tx,ards, sometimes literally so. as in Rdctng Tiziragkfi (l983), in \\-hich a silk screen repmdurtion of the ,Llond
Llsil
is affiseci to a bathroom \\all by several
trornpe l'oeil bits of tape. He notes clo\vn things he likes and personalizes them \\-ith a little joke. as in a recent series of tracings clone on clear pla\tic after n reproduction of one of Ctz;mne3s Bilihurr. An): art student ought to k n m - that n tracing of
3
pitinting isn't
II
response or an interpretaticln; and
even the I3ariaist scs-change operaaon involvecl in turning one of (:4zanne9sm-omen into a man 11-ithan erection hardly registers alnid Iuhns's lackluster \\-ashes of ,epia-toned ink. ; of In the pitintings that arc gathercc1 in the final room of the s h o ~ bits Picas50 and Griineniild are combined with floor plans that are said to represent a house in \\-hich lohns lived as a child. Here he is suppo\ed to he in one of his meditative moods, a sort of fugue state in \\-hi& art history and p e r ~ m a history l begin to merge. This Inan kvhcise idea of an hcimage is to do tracings after (:i.zanne is trying to convince us that he is keeping the high art tradition alive. Ifohns's tamped-clown palette doesn't achieve the t\\-ilit poetry that he's probably after. but the gun-metal color scheme doe, put us on notice that this is sol->er11-ork.The nlort recent canvases are nleant to convey an impression of middle-aged maturitl-. lessons learned, challenges met. These high-priced grai- paintings are the art-11-orld equivalent of a very expensive gray suit. They are mgineered for importance. S o ~ n people e saj- that Ifasper Jcihns has been lnakinp an impression for so long that by no\\- he's beyond the reach of criticism. Michael Kimlnelman explaineci in his 1Vrw Yixk liwi)s review of the k ~ h n show s that he cloem't rare for a lot of the \\-ork. hut he also observed, "It's pointless to argue about Mr. Iohns's place in history: this issue \\-as settled decacles ago." By reasburing his reaclers that lohns really is an important artist. Kimmelman may intend to soften his 0%-ndiscomfort at finding himself on the \\-mng side of current taste. \Yhen Kimmelman concedes lohns his "place in history." hmvever.
he's jumping the gun. The idea than an arti\t \vho has been acclaimecl for thirty-five years is a permanent fixture reflects a shortsighted \ i e ~ of - history. lohns's long relationship \vith the Museum of Modern r t proves nothing except that he is the clowst thing to an official artist that \ve have. and that doem't prove much at all. kvhorn we count among the There are ofticial artists, such as Velrizq~~ez, irnmc)rtaLs. And their are official artists, suc h as I,el->run,'iq-ho don~inated I'rance in the second half of the seventeenth century, filling Versailles much as John!, n o n fills the Modern. m-ho hardl\- count with anybody today. Artists are htriled in one generation and hrgotten tu-o or three generations p Later. I wonder if lt3hns recalls an observation that his friend I ) ~ ~ c h a mmade in 1066: '5uCcess is just a brush fire, and one has to find n-ood to feecl it.'"
Kirk Varnedoe has thrown on lots of ivood, and the fire is burning furiously. This huge retrospective is the ultimate accolade that F h n s will receive from his contemporaries. What remains after the flame\ die down is another matter entirely. 2, 1996 I)~.E;E~~\/IRER
THE ACE OF R E C O V E R Y
The art 11-orld is in recover). The economic climate is soberly optimistic, 'iq-ith an improvecl auction situittion and a smattering of n e n galleries. But recovery means different things to ciiffcrent people. r t i s t s and dealers \vho built big reputations and fat bank accounts in the 1080s may still be trying to get over their disappointment that the boom sr-reelhed to a ha.lt \\-hen the art rnarkrt plunged in 1900. Then ngilin. if they \\-ere into the dom-nto\vn
mix of art. sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, they've probahlv considerecl the losses to heroin and AIDS and are just glad to tse alive. As for the countless artists \\-h0 felt swamped h\- the glamourmongering of the '80s and t3reathed a sigh of relief =-hen it \\;is over, they're finding that. so far as the gallery scene that they once expecteci \\-ould support them over the long term is ronrcrneci, recovery is nowhere in sight. Nan Goldin, the photographer \\-hose this-is-our-life slide sho\vs made her an East Village celel3ritv in 1981, kept her camera focused on her friends thmugh all the \\-eircleci-out aclventures and terrifyingly bad time,. and this \I-inter found herself m-ith a big Krhitne]i rctrc~spective.In the shou-k f,t_left)r catalog, each do\\-nto\\-n memory has a darkly shimmering allure. L3arr)-l Finiknev revisits the old neiphl3orhooil ancl come\ upon the entrance to the t3uildlng \\-here N;in lived. \\-hich "hegin, to resemble the entrance to a tomb." I.uc Sante observes that "\ve \\-ere living in a movie of youth in t3laik-and-11-hite that in order to he grand neeiied to be stark." Goldin uses Nen York as the setting for a portrait of the arti\t as a young hipster, ancl she c,hvic~uslvknows something about the unfocused, mood-S\\-ingingintensity of youth. That feverishnesh reintroduces a m-onderful old theme-the heartaching fervor of
iir tvt.
btjhirriu-hut
after a \\-hile you may \\-ondrr if
these kids \\-h0 are supposecil~so heacl-over-heels about art and visit museums and pin lots of art postcards to their m-alls knoll- that there's more to creativitv than letting it rip. .4lthough some artists m-ho never really cared for the Old Masters are no\\- glad to regard the museums as the places \\-here they go for their retrospectives, most painters \vho spent a lot of time in the museums in the '80s are finding that the '91)s is a decade much like an): other. The signs are not all bad, hut ho\\- you read them depends on \I-here you're cclming from. An interesting art season in a great city requires some fc3rmidahle museum shows, some rontemporar\- \\-ork \vith a magically personal aura, and
an audience that's im-olved. In Ne\n Ycxk the element are all in place, hut I \\-onder ho\\ many of the gallerygoers \vho are lvilling to take the time to see u-hat there is to see, are either open-minded enougll or tlard-nosed mough to make the mo\t of =-hat come\ their way. Ho\\ many people are reaciy for a marvelous surprise. like the small, perfectly paced retmspective csf Edt\-in Dickin\c~n(1891--1978), that mc~stpoetically m!-sterious of mc~dern American realists. at Tihor de Nagy's new space on Fifth k e n u e ! Byell,it's good to know that there's a gallery th;tt believes that some people arc ready to revisit Ilickinson. <:ertainly there have been days this season when a gallerypoer could find something to enjov, and if that's the rase it can hardy seem to matter that a lot of the audience is pml,;tbl~being pointed in the \\rang ciirection. th;tt much of the hest n e n \\ark is in danger of being csserlookeci, and that the museum sho~t-sare frequently botched. If this sounds depressingly kimiliar. all I ran saj- is that recovery often means returning to where vr,u started. The liunjpean visitors \\-h0 form so large a proportion of Ne\n Yc~rk'scurrent museumgoing itrltlience help to quicken the city's pace, even as their presence returns the cclmpIimrnts tha.t m-e've paid tcs their cities elver the years. The Nan (Goldin sho&-provides foreigners with one kind of insider's Netv York, but visitors \\ere also enthralled b\- the spectacle of the huge lillsm-orth Kelly she\\- at the (Guggenheim on Fifth \enue.
Kellv. \\-h0 has
in the p;t\t exhibitecl photograph takm on his visits to (Gaucli's Pi~rk(iiipil in Barcelona. \\-here the colored patterns of broken tiles are arranged on curved forms to such sumptuous effect, must have enjoyed the tvay his own colored patterns mosaicked the tvalls of Frank I_lo\-riByright'srotunda. The Kellv retrospecare \\-as far too large to establirh any fine discriminaticsns among his tvorks, but it hail a thumping m g i c . This a r t i t has taken the old modern idea csf forn~alreduction as ernotional intensification and honed it going for a until intensificatic~nbecomes it\ 011-n rationale. Kelly is alxx-a~-s
big. fast, precise impitct. ancl he's still achieving that kint.1. of immediacy in \\-orks such as the huge, single-color. shield-like compositions in tdack, red. yello\v, and green (painted in 1996) that filled a large room at the loner end of the (iuggenheim ramp. The show was Ells%-orthKelly's apotheosis a, the ultilnate Manhattan artist: all\-a\-,reaching fcx the bigger effect, alliays slicing through. mciod, Institutions seen1 to be in a do-'i"~-hat-n~ust-E~e-t1.~3ne-tc~-sur~ive and that's not necessarily n had thing. The (;uggenheim--1-hich
in recent
years, under the direction of Thornas Krens, has often placed its dream, of global empire hefore its oblipaaons to the hc3metonn audience (and by some reports has nearly gtrne bankrupt in the process)-came
t h o u g h this
season \vith both the Kelly sho&-and "Max Reckmann in lixile." at the (Guggenheim SoHo. The Reckmann exhibit had its o\\-n kind of Manhattan synergy because this CGernlan artist found a home in ?;e\v York, \\-here tie finished his last triptych and died in 1950. If Kelly's charged-up color planes come out of the citv's post\\-ar ebullience, Reckmann's triptychs. 11-ith their c3verlnpped allegories ancl convoluted narriltives and brilliant colors lnuftled bv black lines, evoke a Sem- York of Old VVorld exiles n - t ~ u-erc o mostly ghosts long before this neu- generation of tourists arrived. In New York, artists have all\-a\-, wanted to set their 011-n brilliance in high relief against the liuropean achievements, and in Reckmann's triptychs. one of \\-hich has hung in the Museum of Modern Art since 1942. the arti\t3s self-conscious pile-up of memory is a challenge and a spur to action. I find Reckmann's \\-ork too imparted ancl \\-illful to rank near the top level of modern art, but displayell at the (;uggenheim SoHo, in the midst of Yen- York's highestdensity art ne&hborhiiod, the s h o ~\\-as ~ - rigfit on target. Khen the Guggenheim SoHo first openeci in 1992, there was the exciting pn)\pect of bring able to look at modern classics a n i d the contemporary flux, and from time to time, to some degree. that promise has been fulfilled.
I saw Mari I.yons's landscapes of Montana at the First Street Gallery just after coming out of the Reckmann sho\v, and an affinity thttt I noticed immediately in L~ons'semphatic dark linear framework \I-as confirmed on her curricult~rnvitae, which indicated that she studied 'iq-ith Beckn~ann\\-hen he taught at Mills College in 1950, not long before his death. Some \\-ill 611d echoes of Rerkmann's Keimar period night life in Nan C;olciin's \\-ork. As for \\-hat a pitinter can learn by just lt~okingat Rezkmann's paintings, there's an ersa>-in the (Guggenheim catalog about that
the painter Eric I'ischl, and if
l'ischl's 0%-npainting seems to take off from the mo\t indulgent of Beckmann's ambiguities and just confuses them further, well, that's part of the story, too. I'ischl httd a show of nem- pitinting5 at the Mar!- Roone Gallery this fall, and it would have been a t\x-o-minute \\-alk from the Berkmann exhil3it. except that Boone has n~ovecther ertablishn~entto Fifth ,&venueand Fiftv-seventh Street. She's looking for the high-en~ishoppers who still cnlss the golden intersection thtt t'r home to Tiffany and Rerpiiorf C;ooLiman, hut other dealers are expecting those shoppers to follow the art to Chelsea. \\-here. in the Kest T~ventie,.het\\-een Tenth and lileventh A4~enue,.the grariuitl cievelopment around the 10-year-old ilia (:enter building has suddmly turned into n stampede. Kith SoHo overrun by fashion and home furnishing shops, n nulnher of the gdleries that like to give an inlnic spin to consumer cult~lreare turning to (2wlsea for some critical distance. Perhaps painting is the only art so intently handmade and noncommercial as to be &Le to make an impression in a SclHo now ciominateii
Ammani / X .1. (:re\\-, and Banana Republic. (Banana Re-
public is saluting the painters bv sponsc~ringthe s h o ~of- li'illem dr Kooning's late \\-cirk that is at the Modern.) In the end. Chelsea will he juht another po\h locale. as it has already become for Matthew Marks, the m-anclerkind among the dealers of the '90s.
\\-h0 this fall exhibited portraits of chilciren by Nan Goldin in his Madison
;i\enue gallery \\-hile he had painangs by lills&-orth Kelly hanging in Chelsea. Kelly fits right in 11-ith Chelsea aesthetics. 11-hich are about doing ingeniously elegant things in smashingl\- scaled spaces. the most recent instance being some lengths of string that Freci Sandhack stretched as clra\vings-in-spa" in Dia's spectacularlv austere rooms. Such en\ironmental interventions beg the \\hole question of the freestanding authority of art. But then <%elsea is not an artistsbeighborhcsod; it is an invention of wellheeled dealers and real estate interests that are turning kctory spitces into high-md co-ops even as the galleries open their doors. 4 s for the artists, forget Manllattan-the\-
ran't even afford to live on the I,oM-erEast Side.
An art scene that has received a lot c~fattention in Nevc- Elrk never dies, it just Jisappears into the mrrseum4. A dccacle ago each seascln I-trought a new constellation of stars, and the mid-career retrospective\ came in rapid-fire succession, so thzt la\t year's neu-s could be bumped over into preclassic position. Nan (;olclin, \\-h0 has been on the scene since the late '70%.may feel that she's haci to \\-ait an a%-fullylong time for her retrospective. Yet she also seems to feel that the time is right. After years of living by night. photographing friends \\-h0 often had tn,ut,le getting out of bed and seldom ,a\\- the sun. Goldin is ready to trade her ila\h t3ulhs for natural light. She's been on "Charlie Rose." It's a new day downto\vn, and a lot of people seen1 to be tuned in to (;oldin's some\\-hat httrdened. skeptical spirit. It's part of the recovery. Her she\\- has an elegiac impact that it couldn't have had a decacle ago. (Goldin has the true photographer's gift. m-hich is rarer than is generally imaginecl. She's %\id for appearances; she brings a restless attentiveness to everything she sees. This alertness probably has at least as much in m m m o n 'iq-ith a novelist's intuitions as m-ith the structural instincts that are a painter's e4sential tools. There are great photographers m-ho compose "like
painters." hut if you look at the work of Sander or Hine or -4tget. you'll see that for them composition is an almost involuntary outgrolvth of their reactions tts a subject. The close-up textures and double-strmgrh ctlii-tr in (;oldin's pictures convey the intensity of her relationships, and at least at the t3eginning of the s h m - I \\-as glad for the explanatorv labels. =which told us who she \\-as sleeping =with, \\-h0 \\-as her hest friend, and \vho was his E-toyfrienci of the monlent. (Goldin gets at the thrill of intimacy, and at how that thriii can turn scary. She rooms in on dishevelee1 t3ecimoms and couples caught in the act. and she finds \vays to she\\- people 11-ith their defenses do\\-n and still not turn them into grotesque,. She reveals a friend in the midst of a had night or a really crazy time, and the emc~tionalnakedness lets some poetic heautv come through. It helps, of course, that so many of her strung-out gang are so goo~i-looking.Still, considering their frequently t3lankcd-t,ut looks. it can't he that easy to draw- us in. (;oldin has terrific in,tincts about angles and expressions. so that the camera's eye feels affectionately ciirect. The title of the VYhitney s h o ~ ''I'll ; Be h u r hliruor," which is the titie of a Irelvet ihdergrounci song, bring to mind all of (;oldin's shots of people in those between-the-acts moments \\-hen they're cl~eitiingout how they look. Goldin understan~isthat kind of all-h!--yourself-W-itl~-yc~t~rself intimacy. She gets at the narcissistic charge of the behind-the-scene\ interlude \\-hen a \\-Oman fixes her lipstick. or a cirag queen makes sure that her persona is in place. And Golciin pushes the t3oundaries prettv kir in the photograph of friencis on the john. You may lvonder if you want any camera to reveal that rnucll, but there" something renlarkable about the absence of sensationalism in these photographs. GolLlin's imperturbal3ility recalls Brassiii's work in the night world of Paris in the '30s, \I-here he recor~iecfa prostitute on a bidet and people dancing till dawn in a gay cabaret. Goldin's cool appai~dfltlrrnciut to h2t.e their 0%-nromantic impact.
(Goldin keeps her openness all the way thmugh the show, at least intermittently. Yet a\ the exhibition moves fcjrward it doesn't sustain its fcjcus, and the intimate impact of picture after picture begin* to be overtaken by n
~~-hate\-er-happened-tc~-the-]t~a~t-l~i1litge narrative that the pictures don't so much advance as illtlstrate. 'l'he slion- is \\too 9big, but (:;iddin's itrnbitions for her photographs are too big. too. TCIthe extent that she nleans to tell not just her own story but also the story of her community, \\here d r u g u n d AIDS have taken such an enormous toll, the onslaught of events makes her work look inadequate. and the disjuncture becomes a huge problem. Surely Goldin sees n metaphcir in the \\-ay that the unmade heds in \\-hich people frolic and argue in the earlier part of the s h o turn ~ into the hospital t3ecis that they die in later on. but I'm not sure that there's anything a phott~graphercan do =with this materiiil that doesn't end up seeming small. By the ronclu,ion of the s h o ~ \\-hen ; (Golciin is photographing in s i i t and Europe and fincling more unmade heds and more people killing in and c>utof them, the shon- has turned into a hishiiinahle, one-world orgv. (Goldin bonds =with her subjec ts and produces some terrific photogritphs. but her attitucie to%-ardthose photographs is pious. \Vhen she gathers her \\-ork together into slide sho\v\ and hooks and exhibitions, she glorifies the imagery. she turns her friends into ~lo\vnto\vnposter kids. And \\hen the photog~tplxdeal with death. 11-r'reforced into an emc~tionalhind, heciiuse the real-life tragedy becomes the trump card that's suppored to ignite the art, and if \%-ehave rerervations jq-e can be at-cctsedcif callotrsners. <;oldin is being pmmoted ar a photographer who hit Ne\v York running and kept up the pare for a deca~ieand became a profi~undartist along the way. I cion't think that she's anywhere near that important. In his essav in the catalop, Pinclintry observes that in the East Viliage
many people fell "under the spell of the ruinous message that a wild life indicated a fertile imagination." I'm not so sure that that idea has really been
rejected. The people \vho have survived need onlv to look around to see that a large sxvath of the art scene has conilateci \vilciness with fertilitv, and careers on the shifting that lots of artists have pmceecirci to t,uild successf~~l foundations of an ever-cirepening aesthetic mora\s. Accoriiing to the new artistic dispensation. everything is on a continuum, and you can go from producing m-ild parties to performance pieces to painting to movies. Pinckne\- menaons Iean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and believes that d r u g a t lea\t fueled their scrambling of personal a\sertion and artistic expwskon but of course nrti\ts such a\ Salle and Schnahel, \\-h<)attended reputable art schools and didt-i't live quite so close trr the edge, simply have a more cleanly packaged version of the same art-is-life-is-art confuhions. There's a high-art aesthetic that's derived from aclvertising. and it goes much deeper than an .4ndy Khrhol look. K h a t artists have learned from comlnerce is that the\- have to go out and meet the public where it lives, or \\-here it thinks it lives. 4 lot of artists really believe that their job is to psych rrut the Zeitgeist and then plzii- into it. (That's \\hat Goldin does.) Rut m-hat's mo\t striking about some of the hest gallery shows of the fall---the paintings Harriet Knrman at Lennon. \Veint,erg: hv Trevor Kinkfield at Donahue/Sosinski: and by Rita Raragona at Ro\\-ery-is
that these artists are
\\-holly focuseci on what thev are doing and expect uh to come to them. I have no idea ho&-many people got to these shows. Khether it \\;is t\\-elve or twelve tltlndred, it wouldn't alter the nature of the relationship between the galler\-goer and the painting. For the gallerygoer, there's an mchantment in accepting art on its 011-n term\: hut if our -4ge of Recovery is about kcing hard realities, pitinting fails the test. Fainting, even the most natur;lIistir. painting, is about impracticitl prclptrsitions carried to refilled conclusions. There's an imposing \\-eight to Harrier Korn-ian's ca\ually clunk? ralligraphv. \\hich. in three or four paintings, she pu1ls together into mysterious escutcheons composed of densely m-orked
figure eights and triangles. Trevor lyinkfield. lvho probably regarcis his repertory of zany, hard-edpeci geegakvs and humanoids as a personal tarot deck, scores a triumph in three big paintings; he's extended himself and found a new security in architec tonic composition, an amplitucie that gives his a\vesomel\- nuttv iconography a pitgeant-like authority. Rita Baragona. in her eighth she\\-- at Ro\\--er\.combines an overall soft luminosity with a steel\- pinpoint accuracy and brings this unpredictable painterly attack to t,ouquet:, and to her gariiens raging lvith rainher quiet violet-and-yell(>\\-E-tow-hued B(]\\--ers.
All of this painting. of course, can be said to be olci hat, but if there's any advantage to living in an art scene where everylne claims to have nlreadv seen everything. it's that pitinting shares its rctro status lvith lots of other things. "The gee-\\-hi/ factor is perishable." hnthony Haden-(iuest announces near the close cif
?iuy
. -4rf B70rid, and alCoIi~rs.?%PR43ill L .l f ~of'thr
though that might seem like an admis,ion of defeat at the end of his gee-whir survey of the past several decacle\, it doesn't keep him from looking for the next thing. K h a t the postmoderns have learned from pitinting. \\-ith its august trariitions, is the trick of dignifying the present l,\- invoking the past, and so Matthekv Aarney's videos or liobert CGober's sinks or Ianine hntoni's performance paintings rnacie \\-ith hair dye are bolstered by pointing out that 1)di did movies, Pit-*so \\-rate a play, (;ourhet was it political activist. For all we kno\v, I.eonardo da Vinci \\-as the first couturier. Ay no\\ever\-body has dealt lvith painting and the end of painting and painting agilin, m-ith ugline,s and beauty and the beauty of ugliness, m-ith politicitl art seen it all and art-fcjr-art's-sake and political art as art-for-art's-sake. \Kkr.'ve before; l;\-e've seen it all simt~ltaneci~rslv, son~etirnesin cine work of art. flverybody knoll-s all the angles, and the result is a know-it-all ~ietact~ment, It can't have escaped hnthony Hitden-(iuest or his publisher that ?irru
Golitrs arrived in bookstores on the tail of Prrmilry Colilrs, the satirical nave!
about (:linton's run fcjr the Khite House. Khen y ) u think about it, the appeal of thew bright. joke\- titles is related. They describe absc~lutes,and for that reason they a1n~1seus, because n-e k n m - that the books are full of haiftruths ancl out-and-out lies. =which are cielivercci by characters who are satisfied with their second-rate ambitions and m-oulJ, in a rational world, play minor roles. In the '90s, Inany people have found themselves n k i n g the same quedions atmut the art world that we've askcd so often about the Clinton ndministratic~n.Ha\\- can people m-ho are so intelligent go so 11-mngl Ho\v c m you knoll- so much and miss the point so completely? HOB-can you believe in everything! Some of our most pmminent artists, curators. and critics know so much &out the situation that there's no space left for the d u m b Fict of the imagination. They've been through everything. they've recovercci, ancl still it cioesn't make a difference.
I:EBRI-ARY 17, 1997
I M P E R S O N A L ENCt-lANTMEET
Icff \V;tll brings an unsettling, fire-and-ice dissonance to his mural-scale photographs. He catches some of the qucjtidinn romantic poetry and the lustrous, blue-gray light of his native British <:olumhia in <:ibachrome transparencies that arc mounted in light boxes and edged in silvery-pray metal. The hi-tech ad za~npaignstyle of the m-ork makes it possible fcjr \X511 to tfueeze-hame his senstlous reactions to colors and textures. He z o o n ~ sin on scrappy roadside sites and the hces of people m-ho are sc~metime,in the rnicibt of heated conversations. Thew huge images-often \\-ide-make
ten or tv,-elve feet
kimiliar objects look special, preternatural. It's a\ if R l l \\ere
pwring his perceptinns under the microscope. Mlhough I wouldn't s;iy tbc results add up to a \vonderful experience for a gallerygoer. this is clearly the \\-ork of a man =with a deft visual sense and an interestingly comp1ic;ited mind. Kall, \I-howas born in 1946, is the subject of a retrospective that is at the Hirshhorn in \i:ishington this spring. The show \\-as organized at the Museum of <:ontemporary r t in Los n g e l e s . \\here it \\-ill be next summer, and after that it goes to Tapan. .4ltl1ough his name hasn't yet become \\-idelv kno\\-n beyond art circles. \Krall is a regular in the big group she\\-s that many curators, dealers. and collectors depend on to track reyutiitions. Thew exhil3itions include "Post Human" (1%-hichtoured liurope in 1992-93); the 1995 \Krhitne]iBiennial; "Hall of hfirrors: Art and Film Since 1945'"at the Los n g e l e s Museum of (:t?ntemporar\- Art la\t summer); and " h c u ti
ishis-
torre'' (at the P O I I I ~ ~ (:enter ~ O U in Paris this \\-inter). \Vall's work is po\t-paint and pro-narrative. m-hich links him to better-kno\\-n contemporaries, among then1 <:hristian Rottanfci, h n e t t e hfessager, Rxnt-e Nauman, Cinrfv Sherman. and Rill Lriol;i. I don't suhcrihe to \\-hat I believe is the unspokrn a*rumption of much of this \\-Q&,which is that painting is no longer a suitable vehicle for complex figurative expreshion. I am far from being con\inced that photography or video can ever achieve the subtly nuanced pan-er that 11-e expect from large-sciile visual art. Rut I do believe that Teff Kall makes the case \\-it11 a rare v\-it,perspic-acitv, and panache. This is n o one-note artist. He doe, land\capes, still lifes, and figure groups; and he experiments \\-ith different kinds of iiranlatic intensity. ranging from mild genre xene, to macabre fantasies and film-noir-style scenario\. He's attuned t o t h e melting-pot experience of the Pacific North%-est.\\-here the invitingly open look of fast-grokving cities is an unusual backdrop for multicultural tensions. Some of his phcitoyraphs look like slices of life; hut even some of h i most direct-feeling image, are elah-
oratelv staged constructions. In recent years. W ~ l has l heen using lots of computer-generated effects. He \\ill add or subtract figures from a photograph, or move around the shadokvs, or someames even practii-ally ~ireanl up n composition from scratch, using elements from a number of photographs. W~ll'swork is ciistantly related to the fancy combination printing techniques of mid-nineteenth-century photographers such as ()scar
G. Itejlander and Henry Peach Itohinson, \\-hose a t t e m p s tii create grandiose narrative structures were grounded in an idea. har~ilyunfamiliar all thew years later, that pitinting is going to fade a\\-a\-.The artificiality of Rejlander's and Robinson's collage techniques has turned their allegories of good and evil and life and death into period pieces, into camp; t ~ Wall t may have less trouble \\-ith the a h n a t u r a l element in his photography. since by non- the long ,hado\\- of Surrealism has convinced us that disjuncture is a\ real a\ any thing else. R l l is in6dtu;tted =with the dream of painting ancl the technique of photography. He is caught between Old Masters and m o ~ l e r nmetho~is.For decades no\\; men and \I-omen \I-ith no abiding involvement in dra\\-ing or painting have been flooding out of the art schciols, ancl n curiclus outgro\vth of this situation has heen the appearance of arti\ts such a\ \Rill m-ho have an avidity fcjr cliissical pictoriiil values hut little or no feeling for a han~is-on csr ituisdael's creative process. \Vt~enKatl h o r r o ~ t:aravaggio"s s chiarosc~~ro
panoramic effect\, he she\\-s an appreciation for the cliissics that you don't getday, in <:inil\- Sherman's slick jokes on Olci Master portrait styles. R l l also has an unusually expansive response to photogrilphic technique,. The \\-ay that he illuminate\ his pir tures from t3ehind gives the surEaces a pearly g l o that ~ ingeniously parallels movie image\ experienced on the big screen. Yet the range of his tttelnes is so broad that he can strike a museumgoer as less an artist than a sort of impresaricl \\-h0 stages all kinds of fetching visual idea\. R l l is a brain\- postmodern aesthete. He gives the old painterly magic
a kiscinatiny clinical chill, and in the end I find m!-self thinking of even his best lvorks less as dramatic events than as e,say\ in dramatic possil3ilitier. All of Wiill's strengths come together in .I ,sat)
StiJtlpn (;list
lf
biaJ
(ufipr
Hoku-
(1993). Here he is a likat,le, almost a happy-go-lucky artist. \%%at first
c a t c h , my eye is the great sheaf of papers that's spinning through the sky, miviny =with the autumn leaves. Then I go to the unlucky man \\-h0 h a lost control of his brindle; he's in an overcoat and sports jacket and white shirt to the left csf the scene. This hold, ocfli compo4ition has and tie, all the \\-a?- over tm-elve feet m-ide. There are a specificit? that holds me. It is very, big,
four m m in the foreground, and although they seem to break up into two groups (the ones in t,usiness dress, the one, in casual \\-ork clothes), they arc also united in their halletic effbrts to hold on to their headgear and keep their balance against the strong gust of v.-in~1that's \vhirring arms, this flat, scrappv landscape. I like the 1011-horizon, the gigantic sky, the citv glimpsed P
4
in the distance. The effect is ordinary, l3t1t with a tcstlch of the sublin~e.I \\-onder ahout the seemingly \hallo\\- body of W-ater.=which might be an irrigation canal. I also \\-onder \\-hat's brought this ociii assortment of men together in this particular place. Rut the enigmatic quality isn't tmuhling; it's actually rather enjoyable. The softly perva5ive light ,\%-retensthe shambling pic turesqueness of crooked po&-erlines and corrugated metal huts. This modern scene is based clowl\- on a Hokusai \vooilcut print. 11 IIlgh
B7lnil tn Y ~ r / l r ffrom , the ; P h l r t y - ~ r1~ 5 ~ ~ ' sitft. FIqi (1831-33), hut the shift in size tf
and in medium makes it R l l ' s own. There is nothing calculated ahout his adaptaticjn. My gue,s is that he was excited by the \\-it of the Hokusai work and couldn't resist responding. And his version-which
lacks the pic-
turesque grace note of I'uji, looming above the action like a giant calligraphic exclamation point-accrues
some ciistinctly European associations.
I'm reminded of landscapes by Hobbema and Ruisdael, =which arc also ahout traveling beyon~ithe city limits. There's a Ilutch sort of poetic practicality
here, a feeling that happenstance can have an emblematic power. KC amay \\-onder \\hat sort of agricultural \vork is under \\-a\-. \Ye may suspect that the men in t3usiness clress are engineers or entrepreneurs. That sheaf of papers lost in space could he the specs for some big-time project. Rut W ~ l l doesn't in\ist, and \ve are left with the pleasantl~speculative emotions that \\-e might have after driving pa\t a r urious scene on a country road. linfortunately. Khll i n ' t alxx-a\-$this circumspect. He can overplay the Jrarna,
a\
in Ourburst, a scene in a \\c-eatskrp, \\-here a male super.\-isor
l a h e s out at a 11-omanseated at n sewing machine, while several other female 11-orkerslook on meekly, ohviousl\- afraid for themselves. I suppose W111 means to dramatize the terrible conditions under =which many people m-ork; and the fact that both overseer and 11-orkersare Asian certainlv gives the poner politics an extra twist. Yet the scene is so keyed-up that the sentiment turns kitschy: it's basically a poliacally correct cartoon. The same goes for a series of heads called
Yiillfij(
b77rk~rs.each of which fc3cusr.s
on an ordinary person looking off into the heavens. Maybe Khll means to enntrbIe his subjects, but mostly he seems rnirecf in a camp? response to Stalinist-era Social Realist photography. There's also a reclining male nude (1%-earingheadphones) that is a reversal of the old odalisque idea and comes off 8s just plain silly. KalI i m ~ o \can,-iniing t \\-hen the sociologica1 insights in hi.,m-ork register a\ undercurrents, a\ a tmuhling pressure. In ,Llrik. \\-e find ourselves \\ondering \\-hat this disheveled. attrarave man is doing sitting on the pawment. squirting milk from n carton inside a paper hag. It's hard to figure this guy out. Is he homeless trr crazy or \\-hat?I notice that he's 11-earing shoes \\-ithotrt stloelat-es, and that makes rne \;\-onclerif he's from a mental institution or a prison. The ambiguity makes for a striking image. But it is also a puzzle =with a naturalistic resonance. since m-e have all had the experience of finding that \\-e can't really read as much from appearances as we
haci hoped. The bright light in 41rlk someho&-heightens the mystery; we're seeing everything cleariv, and yet \\-e cion't knoll- a danln thing.
m11 finds beauty in the harci-edged ambiguities of ever\-day life. His \\-ork has reminded man\- people of (;o~iard\ movies. In an intervie\\- he turns aside the comparison, for, although he eagerly arkno\vlecigeh the impact of the movies, he apparently feels that his images are clo\er in spirit to the stor\telling coherence of. say, Bergman. Still, it is (hdarrl \vho come, to mind \\-hen you see the \\-a=,- that this bright, articulate artist can give even his mo\t politically strident ideas a surprising, thm&-akvaybeauty. Sitting at a (Godard rno\ie. I'il find myself losing track of the story and feeling anno\-ed at the fancy obscurities, and then suciiienly there's an image as simple as the headlights of a car coming through a dark afternoon fcjrest or the rhythmic lapping of W-aveson the twarh. and it's so alive and instinctive and lovely that I can scarcely believe it. Even \\hen Godard is lo\ing him\elf in flashy polemical ideas. his eye for color and light and composition keeps operating. That goes for leff \X:lll, too.
There is a streak of indepencimt-mindedne5s in \Xhll's \vork that h'w e s it an c,ff-center appeal. You feel the idio\yncratic intelligence in some conversations that arc included in a new vt~lumeon \ValI in Phaidon's "Ct~ntemporary ,d\rtiits'h\erie. (It's a rnuc11 better introdtlction to the artist than the catiilog of the she\\:) Especially interesting is a conversatic)n het\\-een W111 and two of the 13iggest name\ in theory-oriented art history, T. 1. Clark a d Serge (iuilbaut. with whom he spars in a friendly hut heated manner \\hen they try to fit his work into a Post-(:onceptual frame%-ork.\Vall can talk their talk: big \\-ords trip easily off his tongue. Yet \\-hen he's que5tioned about his desire to achieve a narrative po&-er,he ohvic~uslv\\ants to dernonstrate that he's not henlmed in
a particular set of ideas. "Serge," he says
at one point, "you and I once had n discussion in a cla*r in =which I accused
you art historians of being more avant-gardist than the arti\ts. because art historians were trvinp to kcep thiTlking ithiout jq-hat cant-gartliarn mezint, and h)- imylicrttinn, jq-hat it m a n s , or, where it n-ent. They n-ere more interested in it than man!; artists, \\-hi>seem to have gone on to other things, like expressing then~\elves." The clinical look of feff \Viill's photographic light t3oxes may tell us that he's clissatisfied lvith the high-art trarlitions of the past, yet lve ran see that he \I-ants to keep company \I-ith the Old Ma,ters, too. 'The most orthodox \I-al; of thinking ahout culture now," he relnincfs Clark and (iuilbaut,
'"S
to
talk at\%-aysabout disc-ontinuities, breaks, ruptures, leaps." He goes on to say that "discontinuitv cloe, not exist in isolation from \\-hat seems to be its polar opposite, scs I think it is just as valid to talk about reinventions and rediscoseries, not to mention preser\-ations." After h i own fashion, Kall is n traditionalist. He is far too intelligent to entirely dismiss the old artisanal methods. hnci yet I'm not really sure how much he knolvs ahout those traditions. Alluding to the deep spare in his n e n lvork. and the way that the tigures are "nhsi~rbedin the environment." \X511 suggests that "it's n move from Caravaggio to \Ternmeer or Rruegel." That is rather glib, even for a remark in n tapeci inter\ie~-.\Viill is moving amund compositional elements, but that's not \\hat painting is ahout. He salutes the past, but he also gives a cleanedup, romanticized vie\\- {of a tradition that is gn~undedin hancis-on lnhor, in creating a universe painted inch by painteci inch. In a couple of photographs from the earl\- '90s. \VaU takes pre-photographic pir ture-making a\ his theme, and his attitude seems equivocal and sentimmtal, as if he regarded drawing anci painting as quaint, retm activities. I'm thinking of I l i l n d t t w~ikrr. a photograph of a young m m working on an anatomicill dra\\-ing, and
Rtpstilr~titatr,in
m-hich several people are im-olved
in the meticuloulr cave of an enormous circular panorama by the nine-
teenth-century pitinter lidouard (:;tstrcs. These images are about \Viill's &iscination m-ith the intelligent attentiveness involved in an older artisanal tradition. The atmosphere is quiet, cloistered, silver\-.Wall is suggesting that an artist \\-h0 makes s i n e t h i n g by hand inhabits an autumnal miverse. I: don't kno\\- if he's ever photographed n person at an easel painting a modern painting, hut here are self-consciousl~old-fashioned images of an nnatomical illustrator and restorers m-orking on a period piece. He is at once saluting and saj-inggood-bye to the dense-textured oil paints and lead-primed canvases, to the ronti- rravons and l00 percent rag papers. \Vall seems to see \\-orking l,\- hand as a custodial activity. as a \v;$!- of shoring up older traditions. There is an aura of gentle industry and slightly out-of-it, never-giveup concentration to thew images of a BieJermker tiream \\-orid. R l l \vould prol,;tt,ly saj- that that's just the \\ay it is, that representational painting is hasically an outmoded activity, and there is nothing \ve can do about it. Rut I don't think that his wistful reveries are quite as disinterested as he kvants them to appear. \Vhen he presents one of his hip valentines to a vanishing (or vanished) craft, he
L I I U S ~do SO
\\-it17 a sigh of relief,
t3ecause if painting is dead, then there ran he no cioubt that the painter of modern life has become a phc3tographer with some digital kno&--h()\\: \Ye are living in n period \\hen there is an ingrilined nssumptic~nthat new media \\-ill over%-helmold one,. ancl despite his carefully reasoned argummts. R l l is too quick to overlook some of the underlying dvnamics that shape a museumgoer's experience. When phc3togrnphs get too big, they lose the fine-tuneci quitlities of a graphic art. They become something else. Rut what! I'd saj- photograph\- becomes a 11-annabeform: painting for people \vho can't paint. Khll's backlit images are an impmvement over the gloss\- opacitv of other artists' huge photographic surfaces, hut I: question \\-hether he can ever compete \vith the dynamism of a magnificentlv painted surface. His oversized phc3tographic transparencies, despite their nl-
luring detail&and overall plon; push a nttlseilrngiier a\?-?-. fn one interview Kail announces t h t no%-is the time to transgress "against the imtitutions of transgressicin." He's hilying that the avant-garde has become an institution, and that artists can liberate themretves by adopting d d e r storytelling conventions. f heartily agree, but f think that there's stiil nothing like painting on canvas ar a way to transgress transgression. R l l speaks of wanting to 611d coherence in a complicated kvorld, but his of Lean street scenes don't have a fraction of the dissimilarity-in-sin~iliirity Rossc~ff'spaintings of a ramshackle nlulticultural contemporary Lonclon. As for modern allegory. I don't like \Xrall's(:iharhromes an\-\\-here near as much as Gabriel Laderman's Hoirw &lfOrirrhirrlii L$ (1984--85), a noirish thriller staged in a series of cubicle-like rooms: or R. B. Ritaj's Cci-rl C:t?trl? (198-+84), that comic ode to disloc;ltion and t3c,okishness: or Ralthus's nightmare vision, Lrlrg Clif~nl~osttfot~ ttirtlr Crow (1983-8hj, in ~ h i i t the l artist makes a mvsterio u s a p p e a r m e as a miniature figure carrying - .an enormous cage. These
painters know at least ar much ar \X511 about the strangeness of modern life. and the\- complicate the equation m-ith all the risk-taking that's involved in hanclling paint. There are painterly precedents. of course, for the chilliness of \X;1ll's \\-ork. Manet, that ciarling of the postmodrrns. cultivated a cion't-give-adamn mix of old and new styles, and Kall, never missing a beat, haci already created his 011-n hcimage to the Parisian's cool demeanor in 1979,\\-ith Ptcten.
/br B70nrm. This response to -1Bilr ur tilv Fi?lr~s-Brrfi;ru might he said to he Kall's signature piece, since it cioubles ar a portrait of the late-twentieth-century artist in his studio. In Manet's fdmous essi~yon seeing and being seen, n bored t3;trmaid is center stage. At first she appears to be focused on nothing perspective) at ail, hut then \\-e notice in tbc mirrtsr 13ehind her (at a sfcc~--rd the man ?vho must be standing u-here u-e are, ordering a drink. In Kall's version, the Parisian nightspot has become the artist's studio, but the
\\-()man, no\\- standing to the left, ciressed in a simple blouse ancl jeans, is still lo\t in a dream. All the \\-a\-to the right is a slim boyish figure in tdack T-shirt and black pants. That's jeff'iF'all, Me has an abstracted look, too, but \\-e knoll- that he's hard at lvork, because in his left hand he is holcling the shutter releaw meshanism of the big camera on a tripod in the c-enter of the room. Artist. camera, and model arc lined up in front of ;t mirror. and \\-hat \\-e're seeing is the studio reflecteci in that mirnjr. The fascination of Ptcreru
fiii
a"71mun is in the shimmering details that are
like amusing punctuation marks. There are roll-s of glistening hare lightbulbs on the ceiling, lots of shiny metal pipes, some old-fashioned office furniture that looks great in the big loft spare. This phottjgraph is full of appealingly ancinymouh stuff. Plitrirrjiir
BTjtnpn,
in n-hich the camera's eve ex-
amines us while a man a d a n - o m n suhtlv avert tbcir eyes, is about the poetry of impersonalitv. Both artist ancl model step aside. t~ t in cioing so they solidify their rontml. \Ye look at them, hut they lvon't look at us-that's their poner play. j'eff Byallis taking this picture l,\- remote control. lirnotionally speaking, he takes all his pictures that \\-a\-. He's an anti-hands-on artist. At his best, he offers depersonalized enchantment. and as n museumgoer I find rnv\elf responding in kind. At the Mir5hhorn I felt as if1 \\ere being affected t,\- remote contml. I registered many interesting emotions and left t~ntoucbed.
A P K 28, ~ ~1997
EARTH
If you want to see the bedrock of contemporarv painting, you might begin
l,\- looking at the work that landscape painters do. Although the strongest recent painting is by no means all landsciipe. landscape painters grapple \\-ith an e5sential paradox of the creative act. t3ecause they make something
of their c,\;\-n out cif a worltl that they have not made. Their
materials
are the surrountiings that everybody knows, but m-hat the painter needs to knovc- is how to find nature's l3asic structures anti hovc- to then anaton~ize them and recreate them on the canvas. In a kiscinating study published in 1947, the art historian Mau
1. Friedliinder wrote that n lnn~lscape"rises up
t,efc>rc us like something m!-sterious, a melody rather than a statement." Making sense of th;tt inefhhle spirit mai- pose an e5pecially interesting challenge for the current generation of painters. m-ho took the hack-to-nature ethos of the late 1960s as a starting point. (:ertainl\- landscape is the only kind of painting that enables artists to explore museum-art conventions even as thevke slil3pinp Thoreau and (Lry Snyder in their knapsacks and fo1lo\\-ing the nineteenth-century rapane5e poet-painters to the hills. The airterglow of that toss-off-the-cares-cif-tile-city attitt~decan still be felt in the consistently strong she\\-ings that landsciipe p a i h n g make\ in New York galleries, year after year. The hest new landscape painting that I ,a\%-this sea5c)n \\-as the six-foot\\-ideview of upstate Nen York farmland that was the centerpiece of Temma Bell's exhibition at the Roll-ery Gallery. I imagine that Bell means to suggest
~ rltiii a storvteller's poll-er \l-ith the nalne of her big painting. Orrr r h (idrdun T h r i ~ q hi i l the R~lmr;.Her ear mai- have failed her in that rather jejune title, but the hand of ;l master is evident in the unfurling rhj-thms of her t3rush. She
seems to pull her subject straight out of the day-to-day life that she's living far from the metropolis. The garden enclosure in the foreground. \%-ithits dogs and poultry and fence tv,-ined \vith grape vine,. is like the scene-setting c3pening descriptic~nin a novel. And from there, moving past n beautifully rendered treetop to a golcien-green field and deep blue hills. she holds us thmugh the ra\ual assurance of her dashe, and scratche, and scumhles of paint. \%%at sets this painting apart from Bell's smaller-sized lan~iscapesi the complexit\- that she is able to encompass here. and the aviditv for experience that such complexity implies. By the time my eyes reach the top of the canvas, a \\-hole \%-orIdhas I-teen revealed. Bell combines pinpoint accurilcy =with hee~ilessease to give the Ameria once-upon-a-time magic. She's one of can Northeast a funny ~1%-eetness, those rare landscape painterr \vho thinks tmth literally and lyricitlly, so much so that the tkx-0 impulses become echoes of one another. The smallest naturalisac incident conveys a shuddering emotional intensity, and the most sweeping movement feels taut and particular. This marselous d);namii has its origins in the early fifteenth century, when the Limbourg Brothers painted a cycle of miniatures depicting the occupations of the months for the L3uc de Berry. The same dynamic is there in Bruegel's em\-clopedic panoramas of Flemish life: in Ruhens's \\-ide-angle view, full of exactly renciered details; in Maryuet's pellucid harbor scenes; and in Balthus's p a ~ c i r a lreverie,, m-ith their grayed-over light and gently rolling terrain. Bell may not he on a par l\-ith all thew nrti\t\, hut m-hen I look at her painting I feel that their concerns arc alive. No landscape this complex vet easygoing has been exhibited in a Nen York gallery in many. many years. The taking-it-all-in spirit of Bell's big new painting is more than a matter of \%-hatthe eye can see. Bell, \\-h0 is 5l, has been \%-rittenabout in n ~ o s t of the major art magazines over the years; this April marked her sixteenth one-kvoman shorn-. Yet she is no%-herenear as n-ell-km\?-n a\ she ought to
be. and it's possible to feel that she's defying her underground reputation thmugh the hroadne\s of her gaze. In doing so, she suggest\ the general situatit~nof liindscape painters today. The\- see the natural \\-orld in terms of ccrmplicated interaction?, hetm-een nature and culture-rrnd,
meanwhile,
the curators and dealers and collectors who put the big money on contemporary art a s u m e that landscape begot earth\\-orks. after l\-hich Rohert Smithsonk ,$ptrol.jertv sank beneath the surhce of the Great Salt Lake and *
landscrtpe became an emblem, an ictsn, a special case. There is al\v;iv\ somebody \\-h0 want:, to paint the landscape to end all landscapes. In the nineteenth century it \\-as Frcderic I:d\.iin Church, the American maestro of gaudy sunrises in exotic locales. who \vo\ved them at the Salons. In the 1980s. it \\-as hnselrn Eefer, \\-hose scorched-earth images. those gray-(in-gray hymns to diminishing po\sibilities, \\-ere l,\- some perverse logic of the time\ celel3rateci a\ a rcsurrcction of possil?ilities. Church and Kiefer (the British painter Iohn Martin alho come, to mind) fawir an apocalyptic m t ~ o dthat generally involves treating n large surface in a pointecily singular \\-a\-.That may have a certain potency as a staement. but it is a statement that denies the very idea of difference-\\-ithin-\\-hcrlene\sthat is the essence of iitndscape painting. Mas 1. Friedlgnder \\rote that "land is the 'thing-in-itself,' lan~lscapethe 'phenomentrn."' Tb respond to such complex pfientrmena, a painter must be open-minded yet assured. Ternrna Bell threads thmugh all the varirtv \\-ith an easy-floll-ing, quicksilver virtuosity. Stuart Shils. a Philadelphia artist m-ho had his first Ye\\- York one-man show at Tihor de Nag? in Ianuar\-, suggests more abrasive reactions through his dramatically broken t,rush\vork; he has a feeling for sensuous verisimilitude. and in a few- compa\itit)ns in which all we see is the green of foliage and the gray-blur of the sky, his riled-up surhces make convincing poetic flashes. Lennart Anderson. a painter a generation older than Bell and Shils, had a lnn~iscaperetnlspec-
tive at the Salander-( )'lieill? (Galleries in Januauy and demonstrated an amaringjy poetic conversational tone in his luxuriiintl\- green \irkvs of America, Italy, and Greece. Anderson uses a combination of strictly construc teci volume and near-ahstrart surface design to make u\ feel as if -we're right there m-ith f i i f t ~as he muses on the scene. When &4ndersonpasses lightly over certain details, it in kind of dicretion. And \\-hen he turns from a passage of summary ciescriptic~nto a more naturaliracally structured area. I feel his randor, his desire to be absolutely clear. ()bviouslv these one-person s h o ~ -represent * only a small fracticin of the jq-oric ~lrtistsare doir-tg, and L-ert;dngalleries, au-afe that much 1nc3re is going on, mounted useful group exhihitions during the seascin. There \\-a\ "Landscape as Abstraction" at (;raharn, and "Landscape" at the hinting (:enter, and "C:ityscapeWat Marlborough. Of the ne\\ paintings I sal\- in the lan~isciipe gnmp sho\vs this season, among the most convincing \\-ere several by Carl Flansh at the Painting (:enter. Flansky carries his impressions of trees and t3r;lnches into such overall skvirling effects thttt it's not especially easy to knon\\-hat vou're seeing. The landscape becomes a pai~~terlv effusion. Yet the rhoppiness of the strokes conveys a brash immediacy, n Zen-like thuncierbolt of revelation. Plansky's canvases capture some of the roistering thrill of days \\-hen it's so sunny or \vindy or rainy that the weather feels hyperbolic.
The Romantics u-ere the first artists
regard the natural n-orld as a reflec-
tion of their moc~ds.&4ndonce Friedrich and Turner had painted landscapes that coulci be describcci only in term, of emoaonal state\---as. say, exalted or depressed---the matter-of-factne5s of nature began to give \\-ay to the c,ther\vorldliness of ahtraction.
Jean Mitchell, m-ho died five years ago. is n
touchstone for many mid-ciircer painters. Plansky among them, because h e built a whole career at the point \\-here landscape became abstradon. There's something opulrntlv inscrutable about Mitchell's work, since so
many of her shimmering naturalistic effccts appear to he pulled straight out of an intently nonobjective approach. K h a t Mitchell tiihes from nature is the idea that there are no strict t,c,undaries. no absolutely definite forms, and it son~etirtle\seen15 that this vie&-of nature has l->ecomesuch an article of Fdith in Ye&-Elrk that an artist such as Temrna Bell, \\-h0 cloer not care to equivocate, ran be rcgardrci a\ naive. Although Bell is a modernist in her c,ffiand painthandling and brilliantly concise renderings, her telegraphic \\-ay of creating an illusion does not lead her to question the legitimacy of that itlusion. As kir as quality is ronrcrneci, of course, the decisive factor is not where an artist ends up on the nature-into-abstraction continut~m,so much a\ the character cif the snlall, clisirete decisions that build the image. Byhatmatters ultilnatelv is how the painting rnakrs us feel, and the feeling has everything to do \\-ith the \v;$!- the pitint is laid on ancl the pitrts arc brought together.
Some revealing, almost technic4 observations on the way an artist construr ts a landscape ran be found in a brilliant e\sa>-."Ahstract Expressionism and Landscape," \\-ritren in the early '60s by Fairfield Porter, who was as gifted a critic- as he \\-as a painter. Porter liked the rapid-fire evoc;ition of liindrcape mood nncl light in his friend de Kooning's nhtractions, but he \\-as alliays also attracted to particularity and an exacting kind of reportage. In n sense, this essay is Porter's version of the age-old clynamic interaction hetween literalism and lyric-ism. only instead of beginning \vith the Renaissance. he bepins \\-ith Abstract Expreshionism. Porter recalls d r Rooning remarking "that liuropean abstractions clerive from still life, \vhile his referred to landscape." De Rooning, Porter teils us, had an idea about "the difference het\\-een European and American painting in general, that even liuropean landscape has an ohjective renter, as if the landscape \\ere a still life, of, say, a mountain. l\-hile .4merican painting does not have this sort of center, this elivi3ion into %subjectband'backgrtsund."'
Porter. who was fond of a certain kind of \vordplay. is leading his readers to the idea that t k r e is something ni3ntrbjecti.l-e-that jects-;ihou
is, not fiaving t h -
t American landscape. This is ot,viously a ,R-eeping generaliza-
tion. but it's also a useful one. hlex Katr's landscapes, Porter explain\, are nonol,jective. Porter saj-s that Katr "once said that in nature he preferred a field." And then Porter adds, pitrenthetically, that "a field is not an ot,ject." It oczurs to me that Ternrna. Bell paints lots of fields, but she fills them 11-ith animals. 11-hichis a \\-a\-of giving an objectivity to the nonohjectivity, n \\-ay of introducing a st~hjectthat turns the field into a background. As for what Porter does in his own landscapes, he is sometimes more objective and sometimes more nonohjec tive, and often he seems to seek a rapproi: hement twtkx-een the t\\-o. Porter \\-as the subject of a small retrospective in May at the Tihor cie Nagy Galler\-. In one of the largest paintings, I3ty
dr fiitp
13t~or
(1 970). he renders the side of a house in Maine \\-it11 the greatest fidelitv. hut then knits it into a pattern of grass. \\;iter. boats, distant shore, and sky, until the vieu- becomes nonobjective, which Porter defir~eras a landscape that is "'a iontinu urn of relatic.lnships." Porter had fifteen one-man she\\-s at Tihor de Nag\ betm-een 1952 and
1970. and he is no%-bring pre\ented by this gallery as n sort of fdther figure for a contemporary realism that the gallery strongly supports. This is an admirable effcrt t o shore up an embattled contemporary tradition, hut I sometimes fear thttt Porter's paradoxes are being turned into another gmeration's pietier. I don't k n m - if Stuart Shil,, the 43-year-old pitinter who exhibited at Tibor de Kagv four months before the Porter retrospective, is familiar n-ith Porter's essay on l a d s c a p e , but there are certainlv lots of fields in Shils's paintings, ancl sure enough they give the paintings a nonohjective look. That's perfectly all right, except that Shil, doesn't k n m - where the nonol,jective landscape ends and the objective landsciipe begins. He is attrxted to fields because they're as flat as the canvas, but he also wants to
use the volume of the paint to s u g g e ~ zn lush, light-fiiled atmosphere, and so the result is all too often an atmosphere in a void. R r k i n g in oil on paper mountecl on hoard. Shils practices a sort of Expwskonism-in-miniature that makes us acutely %\\areof the m-a!- the painting is put together. These paintings, generally on!\- a foot high, are a little in a hrtiku is scaled big in retation to the Like haikus: and, just as the 11-or~l poem, so in Shils's paintings the brush\\-ork is scaled big in reliltion to the c l one pass liindrcape. The side of a building or n tree or n hill is s ~ g g e ~ ewith of the brush. It's the brisk agitation of the surEaces that gives these vie&-Sof fields and stands cif trees and l->roaclskies and citv streets and red brick houses their appeal. But things are locked up too quickly. Shils reinforces an overall look by reining in the complexities. He pushes all the information into clipped, repetitive, rectilinear compositions. K h a t he has going for him is n charmer', \\-ay m-ith a painterly surface, hut the surfaces don't get your imagination g o i q . Judged as nature poetry, theyke vague. IudgeJ as painterly ahstractic~n,they're fr~rmuliiic. Shils's show stirred up a fair nmclunt of interest nmclng people who care about landscape painting. In part that \\-as because the Tibor de Nag? Gallery was giving to a less-than-kveii-kno\\n representational painter n kincl of major presentiition that is no%-rare in New York. Yet going through a room full of these small paintings. all haicitlly the same sire. I began to suspect thzt mo\t of the artist" critical decisions had been made before he ever put paint to paper. I t h o u g h this is no \\-a\-to do a landscape, the elegantly levelheaded ronsistenr\- that results may he miphtv appealing to an audience that is tired of overhyped art nncl is \l-illing to settle for something that looks sort of like a Porter or a Morandi or a Ryrler. IfTemma Bell faits to find a hllou-ing among the same audience, it could be because she h3s gone her own u-ay and cared not one n-hit what Fairfield Porter or anybody else thinks that a landscape ought t o look like in the
jq-ake of Abstract Expressionism. Such a skepticism about Abstract lispressionism also hiis a long histor\- in Nen York; and, although Bell is kvithout doubt an original, her particular brand of independence clor\ owe something to the impact of her parents, IdelandBell and Louisa Mattt~iasdottir, tjq-o of the most in~lependent-mindedpainters of the previous generation.
In a painting by IdelandBell or Matthiasdottir. a realist's experience is organized in a (:onstruitivizt's terms. n d those principles have an afterlife in
Ten~maBell" 11-ork,if only as an instinctive recoil ti-cim the tors-of-the-ttice chiincine,~that an immersion in painterly liindscape can, for better or for jq-orse, imply.
Ternma Bell cloe, not see instability and confuhion as part of the modern expe"ienr-c, but her rejection is personnt and idio\yncratic, and it has n i t h ing to do =with the imperious chill of a rearaonary gesture. She keeps so close to the immediacy of the act of painting that we experience things right along m-ith her. Her dogs, poultry, vine-covere~ifence, and arching tree seem casually described, hut the\- have a \\eight. a force. Bell's exhibition this spring, like most of her others, included iozy interior scene,. \vith children reading tx,oks and cats sitting on tables heaped jq-ith pumpkins and squash. The variety of her interests and the lightness of her touch could have led some people to miss the incisiveness of her thought. In the landscapes. certainly, the slighteht shift in tone or touch convey\ a topographical sensitivity that bears iolnparistsn to Iiuisdael and (:ourbet. Bell gives a contenlporarv exubermie to an older kind of tsbjectivitv. She reiIaim\ the s t t ~ r ~ t e l l i nrichness g of landscape for our generation. This is a major ac hievenlent.
A PAGEANT
Therc have always been arti\ts \vho dreameci of reviving the elaborate costumes and stylired affections of the Middle g e s , and Trevor li'inkfielii. \\-hose painangs are packed =with ahurdist heraldic devices. is one of the dreamers. li'inkfield, who \\-as tmrn in Leeds in 1944, brings tough-mindedness to his kvhirling arat,esques, and there's something ineffikbly linglish about the resulting combination of f a n t n y and precision. I find distant echoes of the delicate Lady Chapel in the fourteenth-century- El\. (:atheciral and the labyrinthine m-ork of the nineteenth-century painter Richard DIIC~LI. lising flat, crisply modern shapes, li'inkfield imagines scenes from some zany toy theater and fiils them with the elegilntly florid patterns of a chivalric age. He's lvrittm that he still has vivid memories of 1953, the year of Elizabeth E's cormatinn; C) at the time, he n-as struck
h!- atI the "ceremi>yand
religiousritual (particularly the handing over of regalia from archl3ishop to sovereign, and the hierarchiclil poses adopted by the sovereign \\-hen \\-eightrii ciown by this regalia)." The boy \a\\- a modern princess transformed into a C;otl~ic heroine, and he probably saw it all filtered thuot~gh the newsreel fcjotage and crude tabloid images that \\-ere available in a provincial English to\\-n. It must have seemed as if medieval manners \\-ere zooming straight into the pop present. and that's exactly \\-here Kinkfield takes up the story. \Xrinkfieliifills his paintings =with court je,ters, tournament props, and monkish hoods. yet this is also unmistakably the work of a modern man. \\-h0 see) abstraction as a fact of life-a
visual equivalent of a more general
cultural disarrai-. He's hasiciilly attracted to medieval pageantry because it's an idealized order. and if his own post-abstract sense of structure leave, lots
of room for upheaval nncl confusion. that's his way of measuring the distance that we've traveled from the time of ihr Rornulrip
of thu Riir. K h a t
Kinkfielil understands is that the pomp and circumstance that may have been a meclieval reality have become a modern f,lnta\\-, and because he has such an intuitive feeling for that never-never land, his paintings, although chock-n-block m-ith off-heat pedantry, aren't overly self-conscious. Hi\ exuberant rolor and get-the-job-done painthandling lend even the most liihj-rinthine imagining, a streamlined ease. \&'re able to glance easily over m!-steriously nntiyuarim encounters. In Brinhficld's paintings, bizarre juxtapo\itions are every~lavocctlrrenzes. He's telling us that modern life. is a crazy pageant. Like nlurh strong painting that's produced today \Vinkfield's \\ark sugge\ts an ambiguous universe where naturalistic forms are reshaped l,\- ahstract forces. In his c-anvases,the cliish of apparently irresoniilahle traditions has an i~ncferlyingbii~graphic-a.lmeaning, because the itrti\t, a l t h i j q h horn and educatecl in England, has pretty much hecome a New Yrrtrker since moving here at the end of the 19hOs, when he n-as still in his 20s. Thus \\-hereas the nautical doodads and general air of Ed\varilian nursery room humor say "Englishv-ancl
saj-it even to those m-hodon't know Brinkfield's story-the
. strident look of the paintings could be stamped "Macle hard-edged, jo\-full\#
in IJSA."In Kinkfield's ciinvases the old Ellglish eszentriiitv is reconsidered from the vantage point of mad Manhattan. and if his be\t pitintings summon up a feeling of cheerful panic, ho\\ could it be otherx-ise! Kinkfield is living in New York and contemplating some\\-heremor something---else, \\-hich is a fairly common situittion. This is an art of cool surkices ancl madcap subjects. I'requently, the rentral attraction is a figure, and there's something both touching and trout,ling about personages that are such odd amalgams of householcl objects and hardm-are and cild-fashioned costumes. Winkfield's jet-rv-buil t hu-
manoids call to mind eighteenth-century automata or avant-garde maric3nettes. Thev're ghsists l\-ho've ransacke~ithe flea market for an identity, and the loopiness of the outfits is obviously a burden, n freakishly jolly carapace that must he carried every\\-here. \Krinkfielci'sl\-eirdos, in spite of their up-for-anything smiles, are ambivalent about the roles they play: it's overjq-helming t i ~ he center stage or to bump into the stranpest props jq-hen you make the slightest move. Kinkfield has said that among the kev intluences on his \I-ork he counts "the pinball machine effect of Uuchamp's Lircq;~(;i~~ss-hsi\\- one object leads to itnotlter, and in so doing activates it." His paintings have their own assembly-line-like absurdism; they're Surrealist pink3311 nlachines. This painter loves sleek. machine-tooled forms, and he's creating n m-him\ical, cottageindustry version of mar5 pmiluition \\hen he fills one painting with half a dozen or so identical hrn~s-l3alls
cir \;\-heelsor matchstic-ks or c-trbes cir
mallets. &4ruanpedat various odd angles, tltese rising and hiling dooilads, create aui-s and trajectories that take us on a tjq-irling journey. The Littered objects give some painting n li'illiam Morris-like husyness, l\-hich Kinkfield is oftm inclined to oppose to a hackdmp of hjld planes of color. so that the little incident turn out to he neatly pinned do\\-n, like butterflies in n curio cal3inet. In several recent pitintings the strong-jq-illednut raw \vho's trying to call c-a.nvasis its the shiits is at-tualf?.an artist. it turns out that prr tting brush t i ~ ~ In 171~ P ~ I I I I Prim/ I. good a \\-ay as any to rope jq-ith the n ~ a e l s t r ~ofnen~hlems. flr5
?/lliw. the birdlike painter works on his small seaxape \I-hile the muse,
equally t3iriilike. holds up a schematic plan of a sailboat. There's so much going on here that it's difficult to know \\hether the painter is in control or just soldiering on. A sort of chessboard that doubles as a palette may refer to Duihamp, but I have no idea \\hat to make of a group of forms that surround the muse: they look a bit like medieval halberds and a bit like the
jacks that a b t r ~keeps in the hag with the marbles. 'l'he artist \\-h0 negotiates this t~npredictahlet~niverseis a cross between an anonvmtJlrs medieval craftsman and a character in a sjnpstick comedy. He's also a sort of harassed director-type. overseeing a production thttt's taken on a life of its own. <:onsidering the on-the-g<)feel of so many of Tinkfield's painting. it's quite logical that travel is one of his k o r i t e theme\. He fills his pitintinps \\-ith things that move-birds.
boitts. \\-heels. fish. even pairs of hooves. l 1
these symbols of tra\-el tie into a taste for the exotic and unkno\\-n, u-hicl1 Kinkfield then ciomesticates. so that a journey to kira%-ayplaces also suggests a journey home. The pageant t3ecomes a pilgrimage, and of course there are lots of stories to be told along the way, Among the clearest of the recent travel paintings is i/>eugu 11, \\-hich, with its \v;ive-like scallops. stylized splashe, of m-ater. ship's mast, gull, rla\sical head. and Greek harp, adds up to a h t a s y about cruising the Mediterranean. Here the pilgrimage involves a flashback to the Age of 4 )ciy,seus.
II-nj~g!qu 11-part
of a six-ciim-as cycle on the theme of travel, and, at 45 by
72 inches. among Kinkfielci's bigger paintings-is
a grand reflection on the
iconograph7- of ocean vt,yage\. It's ahou t everybody's dreams of distant horizons. \\-hich are often a\ affected by advertising brochures a\ by trip* that can he measured in nautical miles. .%l1the dazzling color and processionlike movement ma\- also imply n vtlyage of life. althciugh Kinkfield is too subtle to insist on the Big Theme as anphing but a ,I\- a\ide. The mood is grand yet unaffected. The full tilt, surprising color-kvhich
inclucie\ ecsta-
tic blues and oranges in acidition to some oddly chilly green\--gives elaborate conceit a brisk, busincssiil;e elprit. 'f'herc arc elements in
this
II-oYL~N~~ JI
that I can't decode at first, stlch as the roll-s cif tonlatoer and the ice-cream cone,. Rut then it occurs to me that \\-hen I relnelnber a great trip to Italy or southern France, bursting tomatoes and melting ice-cream cones are part of \\-hat come, to mind. .%nd in any event. the stnlng, left\%-ardmove-
ment of Winkfield's composition carries along even the most enigmatic hits. Kinkfield knm-s that this cargo of lunatic h c i e s \\ill sink if it iioesn't ,R-im, so sxvirn it does.
The ronfouncling occurrence$ in \Xrinkfielcl'spaintings are something more than accidents: they sugge\t a general principle of poetic unprcciictability, than of painters. \I-hich 11-emay be more gimiliar u-ith in the \I-ork of ';~ritcrs Kinkfield \vould no cioubt saj- that painters can learn from kvriters (and vice versa); he has devoted mush time and energy to editing and translating, and he ha\ also \\-ritten critical essay\ ancl pmse poems. For some of the artists and 11-ritersm-ho first cime to ]\no\\- li'inkfielci a quarter century ago. \\hen he \\-as single-handecily editing an impressive literary magazine called Jurl-
iirni, painter mai- still seem like only one of the hats that he \\-ears, although
I can't imagine anyone doubting that it's tlte trne t h t suits him best. A look at Ilcilbrii, n-hose contributilrs included the novC"list Harry Mathews and the poet Tame\ Schuyler, helps to place \Xrinktielci'sm-ork 11-ithinthe renewal of interest in Ilaiiaism and Surrealism that \\-as a part of the '60s experience, both for artists and for writers. Edited in Ellgland but with the accent on a d i s t i n i t l ~Sem- Yc?rk--l"aris axis, the mimeograptted
J f t l f l ~ l r dm-as obviot~slv
t3;tsrd on some more impressively pmdureci hr-flung manifestation of the S e w York School, such as -4rt inrrLa Lltcirtatzrr~, which came cit~tof Lausanne, dashingly typeset a d printed on good pigper. The 11-onderhl visual garrulousness in Kinkfield's \I-ork of the past n art t s and literature a q ~ ~ l t r t e r decade ran be tracecl t3;tck to the ~ r ~ s s c ~ r r cof century ago. Recalling h m - he came of age in Lonclon in the '60s. Kinkfield has \\-ritten that "everybody . . . seemed to have donneci the n l e r i r a n aesthetic, and it t~ecameabsolutely taboo to promote the old bugbear the 'EngLishne\s3cif Engliskt art. . . . Scsbodv could see the point of a suburban snow scene \\hen there \\;is ( Ildenhurg to aspire to." Rut \vhm Kinkfield invokes
this orthodoxy. \\-hich \\;is related to the po\verful impact of Fop Art and Color Field painting, he really does so in order to argue agilinzt it and to nssert the importance of alternative or parallel currents. =which included a resurgent painterly realism, a schc)larl\- reexamination of Duchamp, and \\-hat lyinkfield called, in praising the range of work that his friend Simon Cutts shm-ed at his (:oracle Gallery, "the m-hole kit and cahoodle of suppressed Englishness." Solne of this eclectic spirit fr~undits way into Brinkfield's fellloril, lvhich at one time or another included texts by Iasper Iohns and n dram-ing h\- Fairfield Porter. It \\-as among the more independentmin~iedspirits of the '60s that Brinkfield fr~undfrien~isand supporters, first in lingland, later in the land of Oldenl3urg. Kinkfielii shares lvith lvriter friends such as John hshbery and Harry Mathens a great enthusiasm for the early-t\\-entieth-century French author Ra;-mond Roussel: he named his magazine after one of Roussel's characters. much as another of the little magazine, of the pericd, him St~ius,took its title from a Roussel novel. L3ecades ago, Winkfieid translated an essay of Koussel's, 'WO\\-1 ByroteC:ertain of My Books," and more recently, in f 995, he edited a va1u;tble Roussel anthology. One of Roussel's methods of compo"iti>n, =which involve~igenerating plots from the double meanings of carefully selected phrases. probably in*pired some of the visual double-entmdres in Brinkfield's \\-ork. lyinkfield has a passion for lvord plai- that ran o of Le\?-isCarroll ephemera, inbecome visual play; he edited t ~ collections cluding some word game, that suggeg logical pmcedures fcjr generating t Carroll's multifacetedne4s, the fact idiosyncratic sentences. He n ~ u s like that the inventor of Alicc \\;is also a mathematician, a poet, a photographer. Le\?-isC;trn,ll \\-as a I'ictorian \vho \\ore many hats, and of course parailclxical headgear is n specialty in Brinkfield's 11-ork. And ar far as cireaming up lveird images goes. Raymond Roussel is in a league of his own. There are passages in Roussel's elaborately bizarre fictions
that can almost function ar ~lescriptionsof the odciballs anci panjancirum, in Kinkfield's paintings. Here are some lines about 1.e ~2uillec.the "one-eyecl ancl repulbi~e"court jester in Lot-as Soirrs. "To exaggerate his physical gn~tesqueness."Roussel \\-rites. he "al\vays clressed in pink like the ditintiest squire. Brittv in repartee. he hid lvithin a comic sheath a good and upright heart." It's possible to image more than one of the denizens of 1Yinkfield3s canvases as relatives of the one-eyed 1,s (Juillec: there is the piilm-leaf collar in
Trrrrpllii, the
130)-
\\-ith the
four-arme~ifigure 11-iththe upide-~iokvnpot of
t u l i p in Iidl~j?rtzgBfr& un~1Bw5, the winge~iinvestigator holding the 13cakc.r in
n l u M~rmirid\ Rnrrriji.. ancl the yellow-heed gent lvith the omitholo@ral headdress in I Will
l b l ~ r u t pSlrilj Issrrht~rdrnirtrijtaj~?~~~ :My Pets' Winkfield presents his
\\-ildest imagining\ lvith an imperious austerity that echoes Roussel. Making pictures tell stories is never easy. and Brinkfield has spent the better part of t n o decacle, figuring out ho&-to turn an aura of literary kin-
In the '70s and early '80s, he tasy into an immediate v i s ~ ~ experience. al painted on paper and could never quite give hi, intricately plotted emblems a freestanding poetic ferocity. Even after he made his critical shift t o stretched canva, he was at first overly dependent on black, iIlustration-like c3utlines. He also had n tendency to depenci too much on hlnck-and-kvhite dappled effects that may have been meant to mimic photomechanical repn'duction hut did not really engage the eye. Byhenthe breakthrough finally came. in 1986 or 1987, it had to clo \\-ith taking the antinaturalistic risk of edgy <:onstructivi\t color. 11-hich Brinkfield fcwnci that he could use to give designs that \\ere sometime, claw to dangemu\ly quaint a rontemporarv theatWcality. 1Yinkfield's masks, signs, and emblem, gain in aml3iguitv
a* they gain in force; their brilliant clarity makes them all the more difficult to figure out. The claylit mystery is nothing new in art, and Brinkfield has dra%-nfrom a variety of sources, as recent as L3uchamp. as distant as \Termerr and
ticcello. Anyone \\-h0 is seriously interested in WinkfielJ's work will be able to trace some of the5e influences. And thmugh his work as an editor and author, he has helped the curious along. The full range of his inspirations. ho&-ever,is something that I don't believe you can k n m - unless you knollthe arti\t him,elf, and I'm glad that \\-e've become friends-son~ething
that
does not always happen between critics and arti\ts. even if they are on the same \\-avelength. Bre've ended up exchanging enthusiasms, as often for \\-riters a\ for arti\ts. and Kinkfielcl has urged me to look at the \\-ork of a number of literary figures \vhorn I've come to think of as mystery men. Kinkfield is e\pecially keen on literary and arti\tic personalities \vho cut a figure in public while remaining emotionally elusive. Recentl~.Brinkfield has \\-ritten essays on \'ermeer. perhaps painting's greatest mystery man, and I'lorine Stettheimer, the m e r i c a n artist who turned Jazz Age Manhattan into her o\\-n kind of rococo bohemian enigma. (If course Raymond Roussel fits right in lvith this group of artists and writers who are both outrageous and enigmatic. So does a figure of the \Vorlcl War II Lonclon literarv scene, the Ceylone\e editor Tamt,imuttu, fcjunder of P I I P ~ (~l tJ~ r i r i i ~ r i j Kinkfielii. . \\-h0 has of course clone a lot of editorial work, loaned rne a l->c>ok of rcminiscenses of Tan~birnuttt~, a sort of kaleidoscopic collective portrait of an exotic figure \\-h<>slipped in and out of people's lives, sometimes living splendidly. someames barely getting by, hut alxx-ays a dramatic presence. Probahlv even closer to Brinkfielii's heart is h.j.h.Svmons. the British author, bihliophile. gourmetand magazine editor-\vho
is mostly no~vadaysremembered as the
author of Tkiiu Qsnt/;jr Ct~rai,his study of another literary eccentric. Frederick BriIliitm Rolfe. AI.&%.S>-monsmanaged to live elegantly on so little money that even his brother. Iulian Svmons, couldn't q u i t e figure out h o n it had been clone \\hen he \\rote a t3iography of his older sibling that might he called ihr
fir .l f A.
Qui~~r
Khen Brinkfield gave me a xemxeci copy of one of Julian Symons's pieces about his brother, he ciilled m\- attentic~nto a photogrilph of .%.T.A.Symc~ns
\\-h, seen in profile. looks like an extremely attractive, overgro&-n rhilci. He's smiling subtly to himself, 11-hile holding n small gla*s (it looks eighteenth-century) that c-ontainssome rare vintage or ~ieliciousi.Qn r i p t
~ Brink.
field seemed extremely fond of that photograph. and \\-hen I thought about it after\\-ards it occurred to me that the man-child's profile. the smile. and the glass are all reminiscent of elements that frequently appear in Brinkfield's paintings. That photograph of Symons mai- or may not h;tw in\pired some of Brinkfield's iconography, hut its inimitable aura of oddity and aplomb, the t\vo sensationally mixed, is something that you find in all Kinkfield" best 11-ork. Many of the figures that careen through li'inkfield's paintings might be said to be-like
I'lorine Stettheimer, Tambimuttu, and 4.T.A. S!7mon\--
aesthete* 11-ithnerves of steel. So is li'inkfield himself, m-ho has gone his own \\-ay yet managed to exert a subtle and (for N e n York) surprisingly nonaggressive hscination. In the past feb- \-ears, as the letters and journals of the N e n York School of the '60s and '70%have begun to be published. I've been
amused to find li'inkfield make n number of fleeting hut engaging appearances. His name comes up at least tv+-icein a recent selection of Tames Schuyler's correspondence. There is n 1968 letter in 11-hichSchuyler i, imagining \\-hat the poet Ron Faclgett is cioing. "An\\\-ering the phone: it is IXck (Gallup. He \\-ants to read y ~ an u item from page 41 of yesterday's
Sisltior
but
you h;tw alreaciy cut it out, altered a fen- lvords ancl sent it to Trevor Brinkfield." T\vo \-ears later, in a list of things to do. Schuvler offers these possihilities. "Go pick \\-ilii stra\\-berries?[Thmn. Take a photograph! Bleh. Type something up and send it to Trevor! (Gmorch. li'rite John?He o\\-es me a letter." The John is of course Iohn Ashhery. who. in k~sephCtlrnell's journals, brings Trevor li'inkfield along \\-hen he visits the reclusive artist in his house
on Utopia Parkwav in (lueens. " 1 1 /6/69 cerise rabbit presented to Trevor \Krinhfiel
ink in JohnAshberyk shirt-
vertically striped1.l raspberry red in the linzer tart."
I'm sure there \\-ill be more Kinkfield sighangs as more letters and memoir, are published. K h a t makes thew initial anecdotal slivers so much ~ begin to c o m p ~ \ ae portrait of the arti\t. It's a veile~1portrait fun is h o the\that. not surprisingly, resembles one of his own paintings. The clipping from the Sooner (%-hatever that is!), the unwritten letter, the n-ild stralvberries, the cerise rabbit, the pink shirt, the verticd stripes, the rarpherrv linzer tart make an exciting collage but arc difficult to explain entirely. The thrill of the juxtapositions has something to do 11-ith the puzzle pieces not quite klling into place. The que,t for \Krinkfielclcontinue,. FALL, f 997
DEATt-l A N D R E A L I S M
Realism, a clarion call of riiciical utopian empiricism for artists in the nineteenth century. suggests very different ambitions today. For Gahriel Lzicierman. whose Dirrtrv (lf Dvilth is the most exciting neu- figure compcisition to he exhibited in Ne\v York in many years. realism is melancholy and nostalgic: as he constructs n complicated illusionistic image, Laderman ialso spinning a haunted, hyperbolic mood. For Chuck (:low, \\-hose large portraits. many of art \\-orld notables, are the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. realism is a puzzle hidden in a photograph. \\-hich he grids off and elat3orates by means of painting techniques that are deliberately abstruse. I~derrnruland Close are intent about the details, but in their
very ciifferent \;I!\
they are reaching for effects that have less to d o \\-ith
clarification than with complication. They labor to create ambiguous illusions. Laclerman's figures have the doll-like mystery of Iapitnese banrilkn puppets. Close gives faces an unnervingly fractured look. I do not m-ant to create an equivrtlence betx-een the \\-csrk cif theire tm-cs men, because I like 1,acic.rman's a great deal and <:lose3snot at all: hut both artists give the figure an anxiouh, preoccupied aura. Their m-ork is pervaded by a feeling that reality is the stladolk-kingdom of twentieth-century art. Most ever~hndy\\-ill agree that important contemporary art does not have to be abstract. Still. \\-henever impressions of the \vorlci arouncl us get s modinto the picture, \\-e are forced to confront one of the great m ~ h of ern art, =which is that realism has died. This m!-th has manv versions. some of which are contradictory, and the more that vou look at all the crisscrossing stories, the more you will believe that although realism is fueqt~entlr. changing shape nncl pl;i=,-ing hide-and-seek, it never really dies. Art terminology. =which is like alphabet soup, can confuse matters plenty. t3ecause it's easy to make too much of the ciifferenceh bet\\-een. say, the realism of 1850 and the naturalism of 1870. Rut even leaving aside the mismatch het\\-een \\-hat happens in a painting ancl ho&-it is described. you roulci still say that artists have spent the past 150 years pon~ieringthe questic~n."Xlhat is realisn~?" "The title of Itealist \\-as thruht upon me,'' <:ourbet announced in 1855. and although he embraced the title as his destiny, he was such a boldly adventuresome arti\t that he was exploding the definitions even before they \\-ere fully formed. <:ourhet's scintillatingly experimental use of pigment and palette knife, e*peciiilly in his later landscapes, dematerialize* nature in favor of a poetry of paint, and in so cioing leads straight into abstract art. As for <:ourhet's thematic obsessions--1%-ith sleep, \vith c h i l d h o o d - t h ~ make him the granddaddy of the Surredists. In a rapturous essay about
<:ourbet, de <:hirico announced that "<:ourbet. 11-hofelt more profoundly than Delacroix the sense of reality. is for this very reason more poetic and romantic.'" Itsservations such as this can be disrnissed as little more than critical play, except that sublime visual play \\-as m-hat the <:ubists (who admired <:otxrbet and \\-h0 influenced, and \;\-erein turn influenced h-,de <:hirico) used to t u r n reality on its head. Pretty soon Mondrian \\-as explaining that nhtraction \\-its "the true vision of reality." And after all t h e e theme\ and vari;ttion, there is n t r surprise in hearing k c o m e t t i remark, ttr the critic Pierre Schneider during a visit t o the t.our-re, that realism is "I3aleierdi1sh." h contemporar~realist is under no obligation to grapple \\-ith this pitradoxical history. but the artists \\-h(?are regarded as belllvethers do tencl to. Chuck Close, m-ho is 57, jq-ci~ltfnot hrtve a retrospective at the Muset~mof Modern Art if many people ciid not t,elie\-e that he has t3mught off an elahorate synthesis of naturillistic imagery and Minimalist-C:onceptualist principles. .4nd Gahrirl Idaderman'sstnlng undergn~undreputation is furled by n sense that even \\-hen the work of this 68-year-old painter isn't totally successful, he is \\-re\tiing m-ith 11-a\-,to give naturalistic form a late-twentiethcentury pulse. In interviews. <:low tend, to steer clear of the realist label. \\-hich is the last thing you neeci if you're hoping to maintain a t3lue-chip Ne\\ York reput;ttion. As it happens, though, <:lose and Laderman \\ere t ~ r t hincludeci in the show that first bmught the return of realism into a nlajisr museum, the W I ~ i t n e ~""22 k Realists" in 1970. ,4lthough <:lose and Laderman have lately been incorporating looseneci-up pitinterly elements and higher-keyeci color into their \\-ork, they both started out as sharp-fc)cus. tonally conservative painters, and they are still concerned \\-ith the dranlatic power of illusionistic effects. Sharp-focus is often regarderi n the acid test for contemporary renlism, no ciouht t3ecausc naturalistic detail ran play such tricks \vith the
kind of paint-a-paint literalne5s that is celebrated in some classic abstract art. Yet onlv an artistic reactionary can overlook the strange fact that it \\-as realirnl that gave tsirth to ahtraction \\-hen the exquisitely rendered optical shimmers of Impressionism began to dissolve the very objects that the). n-ere meant t o describe. Realisnl is al.il;ays a process of abstraction, and the more subtly true a realist" sn-ork bet-omes, the more you m-iIi find that a feeling for abstract force\ comes into play. When I see some of Fairfield Porter's brushily \\-orkell yet acutely observed landsc;ipes, or i.ouisa Matthiasclottir's still lifes, in which the almost (:onstructivist compositions someho&-add to the astonishing credibility, I know that the freestanding pm\-er of a tsrushstroke is a direct response to svhat the artist has experienced in the svorlii. Painters who want t o catch all the lights and shades of nature wiii be u-orking against the f u n h m a t a i i-iatness of a canvas, but the urge to play ngilinst the plane is n old as art itself. There is ever\- reason to believe that realism is as much atsout the essence of painting as abstraction. But if abstraction is tsorn, does rcalisn~die! And can alsstraction and realism live together! These are the que,tions that Lziderman is confronting in his Duricv of i?vilih. I11 his s h m - at Tatistcheff this past fall, the majority of the paintingfivere of %-omen,clothed or nude, in unprepossessing interiors. Solne of these canva\es contained provocative or com-incing piissages. and there \\-ere a couple of beautifully painteci heacis, hut I don't 611d that idaderman has the intuitive feeling for paint that is required to bring thew moody pychological portraits to life. In the middle of this shm-, hosb-ever, there \\-as Durlcv
if
D u ~ t h a, hugely rich and complex vision that Laderman has
tsroupht off m-ith dazzling forre and assurance. Lacierman is an artist who come, into his own \\-hen he is pushing him\elf to the limit. (:ompressing an elaborate choreograph!- of seven figures into space that. though large. can barely contain all the action, he not only fills up his subject. he albo
breaks the bounils of the subject, until
Dirncv ( j f D ~ u t become, b a reflection on
\\-hat painting can and ianntrt do right non; This isn't the first time that Lzidcrman has clone a painting about death. Indeed, his hest figure compo\itions al\v;i!-S seem to be about clying: in 1984 there \\-as Mfiriivr unil i t Ct~riruq~mir, anil in 1984-85.
(lfD Y U ~ LIfr ~
Ili?fls~
(IH~
Thew multipttnel pitintings \\ere made up of heautifull\- plotted, brilliantly juxtapa\ed e)?ist~des.NOM; by merging a complex narrative into a single allegorical moment. Idadermanhas deepened the dvnamics. In
Duricv (if Duilth,
the life-against-iieath theme is fueled by the painter's hard-\\-on ahilitv to invent fully climensional figures. The large picture-it feet wide-is
is seven and a half
a stvlistic daredevil act, a nerve-jangling combination of
sharp-fc~cusrealism, impit\toed pitint. high-pitched Expressionist rolor. and angled, neo-<:uhist forms. Idaderman', burnt reds, lemony yellon-s, and t,ro\vnish purple\ lark the inevitability of great color. hut they create the
mood he needs. The color launches some of the most inventive figure painting of the past tx-enty or thirty years. Laderman seems to he \;lying that if realism lives. life gee, on. And realism cloe, live, and life does go on. In this perfervid meclitation on lovers cut clown in their prime. a young man anci m-oman,m-ho should he dancing together, are instead partnered by two skull-topped stick figures. Lziderman's clreamily interiorized vision of Death has little to do with the figure in Holhein's kirnous \\-oodcuts. Holbein's Death lilies ttr sneak up on men and m-omen its they go a"bi>tltthe ordinary twsiness of their 111-es;those unannounced appearances, sparing neither the humblest nor the mightiest of men, are a renlinder of the vanit\- of all human desires. Idaderman'scleath figure, l,\- comparison. is almost passive. This Reaper, compo\ed of a fen- pieces of m-ood hinged together and attached to a skull, doe\n3tquite have the po&-erto snatch people a%-ay,or to lead them in the meanciering medieval line-dance that inspired the mo\t ki-
mous image in Ingmar Rergman's lliv Si>t*rnlliS P ~ I.nrierman's . young man and n - o m n are eventy matched \\-ith their strange partner. They itsin with Death in an intimate, almtist n-altz-like dance. They are getting to know Death. This is closer to a nineteenth-century Romantic conception of the Dance of Death. except that in place of the kscinating dark stranger of Ronlantic ballet. there is an afrnmt <:onstructivist stick figure. Laderman has invented a Rauhaus cieath figure: it is. come to think of it, an image of the figure in an age of abstraction.
Dirrtrv of Drirrh is set in a ncit-quite-inside-not-quite-outside space that is just right for the elaborately compressed narrative construction that fills the painting. 1Ve begin m-ith tlie two \\-omen, seated at a table, each sunk deep in her own thoughts. The\- seem to be sitting in the privacy of their home; hut Lacierman is presenting inside and outside as interpenetrating state,. and so this interior is also an exterior. lvith a glimpse of yellolvish.
by desert-like landscape to the left and, behind the table. a \v1111 p~lnct~lttecI a windoll- that reveals a darkened interior, The woman at right, in the red dress. \\-ith her heaci leaning on her hand. supge\ts the contemplative saints of seventeenth-century painting,. and those reverberations jibe with Laderman's sense of overlapping and trimgulating reliitionships. The \l-oman in red appearugain, behind the table. hands in the air, as if leading the dance. And the young \\-oman. dancing \\-ith Death all the \\-ay to the right, reapmaybe '. twice, for m-e see \\-hat must he the same figure, now pears ~ m " ~ naked. kvalking off into the yelloll- landscape, and, perhaps again, peering through the \\-indo\\- of Death's house, where the table reappears. no\\holding a skull. In the darkened room, the dance is over. Bllt Laderman is also telling t ~ s that the dance goes on. The entire composition, lvith its cioubleri figures and its enigmatic locales. has a cyclical rhj-thm. 1Ve feel that everything \\-e are seeing might have been dreamed up l,\- one of the participttnts. And their
expe"ienr-es h&
i ~ s 1.aclerrnan . knci&-Show to give &amatic point to each
clenched fist, outstretched arm, and furro&-edbra\\: The nightmare of the dance is reflected in seven piiirs of sadly averted eyes. La~lermanun~lerstan~ls that a realist's pokver to disturb has much to do \\-ith horn- unnatural naturalirm feels to sophisticated galler~porrs.And that is onlv one of the conundrums that he is addressing. BY p r e s e h n g painting as n compelling vehicle for meditations on death, Lnderman is turning on its head the idea that painting is on its deathbed. Duricr
(f
Dpilih
nlifit 1-K. t a k n as a ci-tilnterallegor\-.an argrlmrnt against those \\-h0 believe that \\-hat has really happened in the past fiftv years is that reality has demolished painting. By that logic, 1)uchamp's urinal \\-as the ultilnate realist statement, a time bomb that haci been ticking since (:aravaggio painteci his do\vn-and-clirty saints. Iivou take this logic a step farther. the true heir, to <:nravaggio ancl (:ourhet are Ed\\-ard Kienhcilz, \vho did sensatic~nalistfullssale reconstructions of end-of-the-line flop t~ousesm d sleazy bars, m d Bruce Nauman, in some of his videos of torture sessions and angry couples. Fainters and sculptors \vho still think of themhelves a\ realists of some more or less traditional stripe are no\\-adays in the odd position of trying to set time hack on the time bomb, =which is perhaps \\-hat gives some of their \\-ork its strange, t\\-ilight-zone kscination. Helen Miranda Kilson. \vho is a generation younger th;tn La~lerman,exhil3ited nearly tkx-o dozen small s h scapes at the )ason Mi(:t?\- gallery this \\-inter. and her precise ren~leringsof \\-hat she sees \\hen she looks up to the heavens. \\-ith their great variety of cloud formatic~nhand daylit and nighttime skies, give a slo&-ed-dokvn,halLucinatorv pan-er to fleeting effects. In this fascinating she\\--it's the best 'iq-ork she has ever done-K'ilson
creates her ci'iq-n eerilv marn~oreal1111-
pwskonism, a verisimilitude so divorced from earthboun~lexperience that it twcorne\ enchantingly abstract. And a completel~different kind of gravity. hut also imbued \\-ith an out-cif-time realist feeling. held me in some of
Rohert Taplin's figure sculptures. =which \\ere at Trans Muclson in the fall. There are problem, lvith Tixplin's lvork, but at his best (particularly in one of the seated male figures) his modeling is heartfelt. tough-minded, lurid. Tixplin brings a great rhythmic fervor to the representation of the moht ordinary appearances. I.ooking at his depiction of the creases and folds of a man's shirt. I begin to feel the very m-eightof life's troubles in thew exacting renderings of rumplecl surfiiies. Realists need to k n m - the idiosyncratic polver of detail. Arti\ts such as Taplin. Kilson. and Lziderman will emphasize the little things in \\-a\-, that play funny tricks m-ith scale and give the work an aholutely modern tilt. Thew choices about the degree and complexitv of articulation are \\-hat give their work its openness, its life. And it is precise!\- that kind of life that tends to get lost \\-hen painters ciepend too much on photographs. 4 photographic model ran give a painted image a sensationalist all-in-oneness, a, is the case in hnselm Kiefer' nem- paintings of hrickuork structures in India, \\-hich \\ere at (;agositin this \\-inter. Kiefer' jazzily overn-rought pitinterly surfaces lend these huge compositions a personal impart. K h e n I have loiked at this photo-derived 11-orkfor a 11-hile,however, f find it tfiffict~ltto avt~idthe conclusion that an artist \vho takes the basic reliitionships and values of a painting from n photograph has lost his freedom to choo\e. Painters
\\-h0 depend on photographs are adruitting that aIi the time bombs have gone off. They have turned a painter's sneaking-up-on-you revelations into a snap-of-the-shutter fact.
The Chuck Clr~seretrospecare at the Museum of Mo~iernArt is realism \\-ith a no-illusions-left pose. Basically, Close is a realist for gallerygoers lvho hate realism, and you cannot imagine a more &ishionably parailc~xicalattitude than that. This work has a tough, analytical look and is ot,viously lat3or-intensive, hut ronccptu;tlly it's larv. lazy stuff. Close makes something
that looks like a kice o u t of fingerprints or funny little circular marks, \\-hich is on the order of making a model of Manhattan out of matchsticks. Thew paintings are not about people. they arc about \\hat (:low doe, \vith p h o t o g ~ ~ pof l x people. These hillhoilrd-scale portraits have a side*ho\;\-fascination. Close shovc-s tect~nicalkno"i\--hc)w,but this is different from tec-hniyue. In an effort to provide this m-ork n-ith a bit of historical context, the Muheurn of Modern Art has given museumgt)ers an opportunity to see. before the\- enter, a self-portrait bj- l e x Katz and a dout7le nude bj- Philip Pearlstein. Neither of those canvases is a great work of art. but they were the last painting m-ith l;\-hichI could connect at all, until I had made my way thmugh the Chuck Close sensor\--deprivatic~nexperience and laid eyes on them again. The portraits th;tt Close began to do in the late '60s arc the \vork of ;tn artist who has no sensibility nncl is proud of it. Ince Close has blown up a p h o t o g ~ ~ ptol ~he , sure, he still has to decide ho\;\-many fingerprints he m-ill use to describe a particular feature, or \\hat kind of bright paint he \\ill use to indicitte the color in a paracular area of the p h o t ~ g r a p h .Basically. though, alI (:lose\ deci,ionmaliing is boxed in. The milg shots on which he has t3;tsed his canvases for the past quarter of a century ~lictateall the shapes and all the tonal relationships m-ith =which he \\ill he kvorking during the months that he is painting. Ancl the grid that he so often clamps over the p h o t o g ~ ~ gives p l ~ the structure a Draconim inevitability. There is nothing \\-fi>ng\vith an artist using a photograph to get his imagination going (Vuillard did): and the grid can he a terrific starting point for rhythmic invention. Rut Close doem't use the photogrilph and the grid as julnping off points. He useh them a* mares. nncl he is the rat running through the mare.
"I still makr art the old-kishioned m-ay, one stroke at a time. all by m\-self," Close conlments in an interview \;\-ithfCokert Storr, the cLrrator in the Depafimem of Fainting and Sculpture at the Modern \vho organized the
shm-. \Yell, so \\hat! There has al\vays been plenty of boring art producecl in "the old-kishir~nedm-ay." So Close is an old-kishioned rat running through a nem-fdngled maze. This 11-ork is highfalutin paint-hy-numbers. It's not about grids: it's about grid-lock. Close's recent paintings, which fill the last room of the show, have a heated-up look that may get some museumgoers excited. He has given thew more tightly cropped images a chicly improvisational look, t ~ int a fe\\- years they are going to feel as n ~ u c hlike period piece\ a* the airbrushed horrors from the '60%=with 11-hich the show begins. It's all just piecework. <:lose\ coolness isn't interestingly matter-of-kict; it's deaclmingly mechanizecl. The photograph is always a photograph. The grid is al\v;i!-s a grid. livery one of the5e portraits is a case study in ciissoriation. Rut for muheurngoers \\-h0 have spent decades trilining them\eIves to nccept the l;ite\t hooey, dissociation may he the only experience left. h Muheurn of Mc>dernArt retmspective is the ultimate accolade that a living artist can receive. Some of the Modern's recent choice\, such a* Cy present the T\t~ombIyand Robert Ryrnan, sl-~ggestan interest in arti\ts \\-h logicill conclusion of a dominant twentieth-century trend. who s h o mod~ ern art going to extreme\. Bllt the museum is also interested in artists \\-h0 are s\-nthesirers, and in this category I \\-ouILI place Frank Stelln and Jasper Iohns, along \vith Chuck Close. The work of each of these painters is in some \\-ay seen as bringing order to contemporarv art's disputed claims and contested definitions. These artists are said to make hold yet neat equatic~ns about \\-here modern art is no\\: Chuck Close's recent m-ork. in 11-hichphotography, pitinterly realism, ancl Minimalist abstraction are all \\-rapped up in a celehritv portrait package, tells you a lot about the Muheurn of Mc>dern Art's agenda. 'I'he iuratixs at the Modern W e to empllasize the eccentric, go-it-alone side of Close's portraitist-in-an-;1.ge-
meet*-realist g m b i t s . And that makes n perfect fit m-ith a museum that. though rommitteci to the idea that modern art moves inexorably to\v;ird abstractic~n,can hardly ignore the stubborn persistence of one or another kind of realism. The Modern habituallv t r e a t such m-ork as a quirk, a divertimento-as
bread and circuses, and fun~lammtallyunserious.
Khen Close grid&up his hies, the curators at the Mc>dernfeel that realism is at long la\t getting dolvn to twsine,s. Sophisticates like to see faces frozen, blown-up, ciigitalired, cageci. If they must have realism. they prefer that it be dead. and Close's garpantuitn mugs cio the trick. Close gives realism a creep\- impart. This s h o is~ an update on the Magic Realism that the Modern h o r e d half a century ago. <:lose's not-quite-there faces coulci be Pave! Tchelitchew's exercise interpreted a\ the descendants of Hlde-ira~i-S~~k. in dissolving everything into everything else, which \\-ent into the collection in 1942, the year i t n-as finished, and \\-as for decades just about the mo\t popular painting in the museum. At the Museum of Mc>dernr t , realists are generally presenteci a\ being c,hsesseci 11-ith freaks, loners. and outsiders. There is Ralthus's portrait of hfirii. \\-h0 some people m-ill think is a little too ilow to his y o u q dai~ghter. There is Giarometti's portrait of his mother, a tin!- figure lost in an enormous room. And there iEd\\-ard Hopper's decrepit Victorian house, isolated apilinst the gray sky. At the Modern, realism tends to be regarded a\ n marginal endeavor. n kind of painting that is nl\vay* at odds m-ith the tm-entieth-century mainstream. In a sense, that" not far horn the truth; )-oil could argue that the very essence of the realist enterprise. \\-hi& is its empirical nature, means that t l ~isi an anti-pand-tradition traJition. Since realists are by definition artists who celebrate particularity, the\- are al\~-ays t3reaking cionn the generalizations. lvhich relates them to the essentially dissident spirit of tnentieth-century art. Yet the onlv kind of break-up that of Mc>dernArt is the break up of realism itseems to interest the MU~CUIII
self. \%%at is disheartening is how often in recent ciecades the monummts of realist painting have been seen, at the Modern and elsewhere, as foreshadc,\\-ing the death of realism. And L)uchamp3s follom-rrs are not the only guiltt: parties* In Clement (;reenherg's 1960 essay on "The liarly Flemish Masters." painters such a\ Gerard David are pressed into the service of an argulnent about the abstract value of color that seem\ to segue into Color Field painting. t
the t3eginning of this strange e\sa>-.(Greenherg observes: "As far a\ I
knm-, not a single important painter since the end of the sixteenth century has, in either \ v ~ r k sor jq-ords, betrayed any significant interest in an)thing in Flemish painting before Rosch." n d having declared that this work is disregarded by artists, (;reenherg feels free to rule that the cietailed naturalism of Flemish painting \\as a liat3ility. It had to be counterbalanced, in Mealling and in David, by the "sheerlv pictorial po\ver color-translucent. vitreous color-is
capable of even u-hen it cioecrn? '"bold the plane."' l'rorn
there it's only a hop and a skip to Morris Louis's f1o;tting veil, of color. In the early '60%.ho\vever. no less a figure than Giarometti \\;is copying b n van Eyck's ;2/ftllz rrr Q lurblrtt and observing tha.t " b e e a tree like Mantegna and van Eyck rather than tlte Impressionists." S.i~chconcerns would not have registered on (Greenherg's radar screen. since they \\ere the concerns of a realibt, and fcjr (Greenherg n realist was alrnocrt hy definition not an important contemporary artist. I \vould say that (Gerard L);ivid and Morris Louis is a marriage made in art-theory hell. Rut once you've \\rapped your brain around that equation, you have seen ho\\ realibrn can he used to holster just about any argulnent ngaincrt realist painting, and you are ready for the cornments that the video artist RillLriol;i, \\-hose work is currently the subject of a retrospective at the li'hitney. recently made in the h u w York lir~zriMafiiirinu. "'\'an livck was an increcfihje craftsman working n-ith the most altvanced imape-making system on the planet at that time-he
\\-as uhing high-~ielini-
tion." The implication, of course, is that Viola's videos (and perhaps (:low's Polaroid camera i.Io\e-ups) are on a continuum with van Eyik's brush. Fainters \vho arc botherecl
I'iola's remark. and I think they ought to
be, u-ould do \I-ell to bring the discussion back to (;iai.ometti's interest in . kneu- better than (iiasometti u-hat being modern meant, van E ~ c kNobody and it is significant that this artist. \vhci had gone through abstraction and Surrealism and \\-as never n nit-picking realist. \\-a$$0 fascinated h\ van livck. (;iacometti sal\ that van Eyc-k's scintillating verisimilitude \\as grounded in the abstract patterning and intricate h t a s y of mecliesal art. And he must have smsed that this early Renaissance evolution \\;is a model for the t\\-entieth-century realist. \\-h0 is also huilcling on a more abstract and &inta*ticitlkind of art. The gravity of van Evck's imagery gren out of the artist's sense that realism \\-as not so much birth as rehirth----living t h i n g t3mught t3itck to life on the canvas. n d if there is a mortuary aura to realism in this century, it is because realism in the \\-ake of abstraction is al\\-al;s exhumation. Yc>u could write a whole history of death ancl realisn~in the twentieth century. It m-ould include Ralthus's
I'ritlni,
painted in the late '30s. in m-hich
\\-e see a ycjung \\-Oman reclining \\-ith her eves closed and a knife nearhj- but no \\-ound on her hod\. Sabine Reniild, in her ratalog for the Metnjpolitan's 1984 Balthus retrospective, observes that this \\-r,rnan is "'not
redy
deacl, perhaps only mommtarilv clrained of life," and in that thought is an allegory of realism in our time. The l\-ork of the English painter Stanlev Spencer, who was the subjei-t of a retrospective at the Hirshhcsrn la,t fall, is full of images of death and resurrection. liven his m m t searchingly direct nudes, landscapes. and self-portraits have a grayed-clokvn look that makes us feel that the life has gone out cif things. This troubled m o ~ l e r nreali\t tradition echoes throt~gfiCGabrieI Idaderman's Dunru
(lfDrdtil
He has filled his compcisition u-ith a marselous play of
purplish shado&-sthat are doubled and tripled into mvsterious patterns. so that beneath the dancers' feet realism seems to he clissolving into abstraction right t3efore our eves*Laderman is going he\-and realism into emblems, kinta\\-, magic. He make\ us t>elie\-ethat this is all part of the realist's territory. His theme come, out of the late Middle -4ges, ancl as you study the iconograph7- of the Lkinie of Death. you realize that some of the most hmous represcntaaons of this strange confr~sntationare also among the great monuments in the rise csf E u r v e a n naturalism. f am not sure that Idaderman \\-as &\\-;-areof all of this while he was painting, hut it hardly matters. In confronting death, he has recovered realism as a life principle. , ~ P P R I 20,1998 L
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A R O U N D
THE
M U S E U M S
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FORMAL AFRICA
Carving is mrtrrmorpt~osis.Vibrking in m-ood and stone, the great sculptors make intrilctable material pliable, the)- turn h a r d n e , ~into softness, they transfc3rm the vegetable and mineral kingdoms into animal kingdoms right '"kfrisa: The Art of a <:ontinent,'"ttle E-teibre our eyes. &%t
irnn~ensestlrvev
that fills the upto%-n(Guggenheim this summer. these change, take place, again and agilin. There is more extraordinary carving, e5peciiilly kvood car\-ing, than n~useun~goers are used to seeing in one place at one time. Certainly in Nrm- York. a citv where painting generally takes precedence over sculpture. this s h o n induces an almost unique kind of exhilaration. You take it in with your eyes, but you somehokv end up feeling that you're experiencing all those marvelously variegatecl surfaces \\-ith your fingertips. 1 though much of the work and virtually all of the ~ - o o carving d clates from ~ reach all the \\-a\-bark to prehistoric the past hundrecl years, the s h o does time,. This encyclopeiiic exhil3ition. lvhich originated at the Royal c a d e m y in London (and has also been seen in Berlin), is the first attempt to stlrvev the entire artistic pmiluction of the continent, from Ancient lig!pt to tkx-entieth-century South f r i s a . In acliiition to figurative lvork in \vooil. stone. and metal, "The .%rt of a (:ontinentWincludes furniture, pottery, textiles, tools, and other everyday objects. In all there arc more than 500 item,, and that's do%-nsome 300 from what \;\-asseen in Lc~ndon. tTn\vincling amund the ramp of the Guggenheim and filling most of the adjiicent galleries. the s h o looks ~ better in the space than anything since Margit Ronell's pathbreaking (:onstructivist shon, "The Planar Dimension." t-t;tck in 1079. The sleek Plexiglas cases and starkly cur\ing \\-hite \\-all\ provide a suave yet neutral setting that alIon-s this panoramic Jiaple- to ex-
pand; the sculpture is a comlnanding presence. Like most of the pioneers of the modern movement, Frank I , l o ~ dWright had an abiding interest in nonKestern art. so it's not surprising that the theatricalitv of his mtunda pro\ides such a spectacular backdrop for this pageant of African art. Adegbovega A%defc~pe and V!( o
Rod l'aulds, who are responsible for the
(Guggenheim installation. de\erve special praise. ".4fricaVin spellbinder, hut Ne\\- York appears to he sidestepping the spell. It's strange. In London last \\-inter the s h m - \\-as a huge hit for the Koval Academy, an institution wliere you're more likely t o see nineteenth-century EngIi\h v\-aterc-olarsor paintings by Pc-,ussin. The London installatic.rn \\-as as overcrc.l\viied and inelegant as the New York one is spare and refined. hut apparently in Britain the \\arehouse approach only added to the shorn-'S revelatory impact. Visitors felt as if they were disco\-ering things for themselves. That installation \\-as especially apt in London. \\-here the work is less kimiliiir to the general museumgoing public than in New York, yet Americans
\\-h saw '"4fuica" in I , o d o n expected
the shou- to strike iikr iiphtening here. The ,d\merii:an media ought t o have taken one look at the catalog and seen that this is a blockbt~sterto be reckoned \\-ith. Three of t h e biggest names in black studies have contributed. Cornel Kest \\rote the introduction. Henry Louis Gate\ j'r. offers an essay on European reactions to .%fricanart. And K\\-ame .4nthonj .&ppiah confronts the mysterious fact that "neither Afiiiil nor ~rt---the tu-o animating principles of this exhibition-played
a role
QS
~Liraiin the cre-
ation of the objects in this spectacular shom-." .4ppiah kno\\-s the dangers of m-hat he ih a i c d l y regarding as a crossover event. Vi'hen objects created to fill practical cir magical hnctic~nsarrive in the museum, who can doubt that the\- are somehon changed? But Appiah also finds the change exciting. He" gglad to see an &%sante gold%-eightor an (Iron aniestor figure transcend time and place.
These A%fuican-Americiin intellectuals n l t ~ s thave hoped that the show \\-ould take the nluseunl world by storm. And they surely knew that juxtapming lnaterial frtim Ancient Egypt and Idamic North .%frica =with work from south of the Sahara suggests a provoc;ltive rethinking of the rclationship betsveen the African continent and the Mediterranean kvorld. '"Africa" might he having n sc~mem-hatdifferent receptic~nif it kveren't at the (iuggrnheim, a ln~~seuvll that the media likes to dump on, and often with good reason. But non- the C;uggmheim has done itself pmud, and the responhe is by and large the same sputtering dismissal. I can't help feeling that the generally chilly reaction to this dazzling, complicated show is just one more demonstration that all anybody \v;mts any longer from our big museum\ is bland cultural respectabilitv. The \X;inslo\v Homer retrosprrave. \\-hich c3pened at the National Gallery in Khshington la\t m-inter and is currently at the Metropolitan. a few blocks south of the (Guggenheim, is an overblokvn event. yet people are flocking to see \\-hat the\- regard as Homer' feel-good Americana. and they've been encouraged h\- the c o m e n t a t o t . . ,in the ne7;i-spapersand magazine5 and m TV t-Itrrner \\-as it great graphic artist in r? illustration\, but he generally overreacheci \\hen he \vent his I l i r r ~ ~ ~B7~i.uklv into full color; he's a better n d r e w \Vyeth for people who ought to know better.
S
a nluseum experience, certainly, he's a plq-it-safe rla\sic. n d if
that's \\hat people \\-ant, it's no wonder that they're avt~iding"Africa." Although the educated public is reluctant to criticize such PC extravaganzas ar the 1093 Khitney Biennial or the Museum of Mc>dernArt's rurrent "ThjTlking Print: Books t i ~ Biilboitrcls, 198045,'' the truth is that when people head for the museums the)- want a b r e d from the culture 11-ars. The\- \\-ant hmiliar rla\sics, and the\- don't rare if they're not quite first-rate. The\-'ll settle for Krinslo\\-Homer-or
ran Steen, \\hose able but generally
undrrpo&-ered scenes of the seventeenth-cent?
I)u tch at play, =which are
at the National Gallery this summer, have been discussed in some quarters
ar if Steen \;\-erein the same class as liern~eer.All that Lrernleer ancl Steen an3 Homer hitve in common is how snugly they fit the museum context. They're reliable experiences, which doesn't nlean much more than that they come in gold-leafed frames. "Africa" may he overlooked because it comes kvithout the frames. This s h m - stirs up the museum, an3 that's not necehsarily \\hat people \\-ant on a weekend afternoon. It upsets expectations, perhaps ehpezially for the likely core audience, =which is sympathetic 11-ithpolitically correct thinking an3 may have a vested interest in believing that non-\&*tern art and the Kcstern nluseum are not an easy mix. In the catalog \ve are renlinded more than once that many of the intmtions of the m m and \\-omen \\-h0 created this work are alien to us. True enough. Bmvls. spoons, hea~lrests,and gold\\-eight\ inevjtahlv lose n ~ u c hof their everyday, utilitarian feel \\hen arrilnged in cases in a muheurn. .4nd even experts in the field mai- he hard p ~ l t o explain the complex lnagical significance of a particular type of mask, or the commemorative functic~nsof figures that were often originally part of large quasi-architecturid arrangements. Fertilitv figures \\-ere not designed to be contemplated t3ehinil Flexiglas. But then \\-hat are m-e to make of the fait thrtt so much of this sculpture takes to the museum environment \\-ith ease a d itnthoritv?The organizers
of "Africa," kvhci seem to be t~nernbarrassedabout their Atfuocentrisn~and unembarrassed ahciu t their appeti te for quality, take the PC:-twain-thatshall-not-meet and make then1 meet. There \;\-arksare not safe classics. The s h m - suggests an uncompromisingly integrationist aesthetic, and that's not e\pecially popular toclay.
Iust about everyboclv \\-h0 visit:, "Africa: The Art of a (:t?ntinentWis going to feel as if they're in over their heads. That's part of the excitement. The shifts in size an3 s a l e an3 material can make you hyl3erattentive-can
put you
in a trance-like state. Every few yilrcis you're ciiscovering another kind of simplification or complication. another \\ay of treating natural materiitls. The sculptors operate in some rare, privileged space hetn-een nature and culture. They draw strength from the very grilin of the \vood. m-hich sugge\ts emotional colorations, a range of moods.
I imagine that even people \\-h0 are experts in one or another a\pect of this huge subjec t are going to be confronted with unfiimiliar material. The exhibition is ciivideci into seven geographical section\, each of =which ranges over the full historical spectrum of U-ark created in that area. (The only exception is the section on "Ancient Egypt and Nuhia.") If you really get into the shm-. you can't help but feel that you're trving to take in more information than you can reasonabtv be expected to absorb. The exbibition is a reach. Yet it's possible. if you go to the (Guggmheim t\\-o or three time,. to
find yourself dra%-nto certain objects. and if p > ufcdlo&-your intuition5 you might just acquire the beginnings of an education. I kept gravitating to the section that ti~suseson "West Ahica ancl the C;trinea <:(>art."The 2,000-mile stretch from (Guinea to Nigeria is one of those parts of the \\-orld where a feeling for sculptural form run\ e,pecially deep. (In this respect it reminds an or the island of Java.) 1started to plai- around with me of K ~ ~ r g u n J i France
m!- reactic)n\ to some of the pieces in that part of the show. I wanted to see \\-hat sense I could make cif t h e m One of the kingpins of the exhihitic>n comes from \Vest Africa. It is n sculpture of a seated. midtile-aged man, cast in almost pure copper by smiths in the city of Ife. in the Yoruha community in \\-hat is no\\- Nigeria. sometime in the thirteenth or fc3urteenth century. This riveting image of a self-a\sured yet in some respects unprepo\sessing personality suggeas a moment in the development of an art fcjrrn \\-hen naturillism is fully achieved yet the bloom of discovery is still on it. My impression is th;tt little is understood about the evt~lutionthat led to this n1irac1110us realism. except that
the use of copper and hrars in casting depended on the trans-Saharan trade routes (1%-hich\\ere also in\trumental in the spread of Islam in Africa). Yet the achievement of the Ife artists. lvhich began to come to light early in this century hut \\-as not discussed in much depth until forty or fifty years ago. demonstrate\ ronclu\ivel\- thttt mime\is is very much a part of the African tradition. This seated Ife figure, \vith its full sensuous lips and eyelid^, has the kind of unforced yet penetrating truthfulness that we k n m - from van livck. And it's po\sible to feel that van E ~ c hrepresents a similar moment in liuropean art, before a gap appeareci twtkx-een literalism and formal grace. This Ife ma\terpiece, lvhich \\-as until relatively recently \vorshippeci as a fertility figure in a village on the River Niger, is a rare, miraculous survival.
t infclrrunatelv, the current state of archaeoftsgiial and art-historical research does not help us understand much about \\-here this naturalistic poetry led: \ve may never kno\\- for sure. Yet the realization that on the African continent abstraction nlight flo\\- out of realism jibes =with much that \ve have come to understan~labout liuropean art, too. In the years during lvhich Ife sculpture has grariuitlly become knokvn. art historians such as
H. P. I_'Orangeand Kilhelm Korringer have fr~cusedon the gns\\-th of ahstraition in the late Roman Meciiterranean ancl in Gothic liurope. They've suggested that representation ancl decoration---or \\hatever one \\-ants to call these tkx-o impulses----are dynamically related. And if one accepts that idea, then the seated male Ife figure, kir from being an anomaly in African art. announces an essential theme. m-hich is the extraordinarv pm-er of the torso. In European sculpture, all the \\-a=,- from the Greeks to Michelangelo and Rernini and Rodin, \\-hat's essential is the abilitl-of the legs ancl thighs to defy gravity ancl free the figure from the earth. African figure sculpture is about something very different: it's about the \\-eight that we carry on our shoulders, about our n~otednessin the earth. In the great
Bufirrli Klr~gRvttrrrlfng b
n ~
1
it's also \Krest.4frican. from the (:ameroons, po\sihly early-nine-
teenth-century-the
upper torso ha\ an akvesome heft. and the t,rn;t~i,lean
articulation of the shc3ulders serves as a springboard for the power of the neck and the haunting surprise of the head. A smile of feverish ecstasy animate* every muscle of the king's face, as he shows off the severed head of a victirtl in his left hand. Like the Ife sculpture, the Hufirrtz King is a seated figure, hut the focus in African sculpture is often on the torso even \\-hen the figure is standing. K h e n you look at a female figure from the Baule people on the Ivorv <:oa*t---this piece comes from n private collection in Ye\\-York---it'\ not the p""-"fully
bent legs that catch your eye first, hut the great inverted li-
shape created !,t
the unbroken flow up one long, long arm, across the
shoulders (which alrno\t include the breasts) and then straight do\vn the other arm. Since the hands rest on the knee,. it's almost a* if the loll-er legs have become an extmsion of the smooth. lithe. tightly sprung upper torso. This figure has a monumental, centrifugal force. The imaginative genius of African figure sculpture depends on the tramformation of anatomical partic u lars into decorative ahstrac tions. Khen this process is most persuasive, it's because it has an underlying naturalitic logic. .4nd a* often a* not, that logic begins and ends with the torso. The trunk of a tree is related to the trunk of
3 body,
arms and legs are rcimag-
ineci as t,ranch-like extensions of that central form. The ravishing visual flow in the elongated ( Iron ancestor figures ciepends on this e,sential metaphorical conceit. Preserving at least an echo of the trunk's primary form from head to toe. the sculptors alternate hands of broadly curved and tightly an~ that are not gled shapes to articulate a torso that then breaks into t \ \ - legs so much independent entities as recollections of that great singular column. The rhythmic control of decorative variations in the )n,n ancehtor figures. althc3ugh in no sense realistic, is nonethelehs gn~undedin a feeling fcjr the
natural gronth of forms. These artists can make big shapes sprout small shapes \\-ith the matter-of-factness of a hand's ending in five fingers or a t\\-ip's t3earing leaves and flowers and fruit.
"Africa" includes a daunting range of material. There are dozens of tin!- gold \\-eight\ from the Ivory Coast, adding up to a universe in miniature in \\-hich every kind of ft~rrnis present: abstract and tigurative, geometric and expressionist. There are exuberantly simplified masks that are as tall a\ people, fetishes bristling with nails, tinically carved pieces of ivory, fnntasticitl triumphs of the ironmonger's art. No area of the show is kvithout its high points, though the sections dealing m-ith "Ancient Egypt and Nuhia" and "'Northern r2frica'brc neither so extensive nor so io~npellingin S e w Yixk ar the\; were in Idondon. Southern Africa is particuliirly strong in nonfigurative 11-orks,at least so ~ One lidded vessel by a Northern Nguni artist is a specfar a\ this s h o gee,. tacularly complicated bulbous form. lvith its 0%-n\\-eircllv grotesque kind of t3eautv. Carved from a single piece of W-ood,articulated all over with clrep striped incisions, this imposing composition. lvith a central vessel ringed around 11-ith pipe-like tentiicles, is an almost sci-h-kvild fiinta*y. .4 large collection of headrests, also from Southern .4fricit, adds up to one of the she\\-'s great variations on a theme. In one example. the t,;tse, carved from a single piece of W-ood,hecome, n congeries of intertlx-ined, rootlike fcjrms. There are numerous variants on the basic V- or X-rhape of the headrest. some starkl\- simple, others dizzily adumbrated. Here the \vood often has a smooth. agecl patina. so that the objects seem to give off a clark yet lustrous g10\\-. The n-ork in "'Africa: The Art of a <:ontineat" has been gatherecl from a va\t arrai- of public and private sources. liurope's oldest ethnographic collections are represented, a* are nem-er museums in Africa. The Alnerican leg
of the shon-includes strong W C I Yborrowed ~ from ,%mericandealers and collectors. Much has happened to some of thew objects since they left the hands of the artist. The life span of W-oodsculpture in a tropical climate can be brief. And attitudes about conservation and the place of the arts in society are as varied in Africa as any\\-here else. Khen some of the older kvorks in this s h m - originally left Africa around the turn of the century. the\- \\ere regarded more as cultural artifacts than as art. And although it's doubtful that anyone \\-oulci any longer ciispute their formal values, the question of ~ O M we -
can b e t make sense of this 11-orkremains a conlplicated one.
hfany questions that muscumgoing invariably raises-Dt-,
v\-e go to a
museum to feel things or to learn thing! K h a t do feeling and learning have to cio \\-ith one another?-are
heightmed \\-hen the material is nem- to us.
<:onfronted \l-ith so much that's so unusual, a museumgcier is going to ask lots of questions, and one of the criticisms that can he lodged zigilinst the (Guggenheim s h m - is that although it's strong on art, it's \\-e31\ on explanation. This exhibition, =which counts on our reacting vi3ually and viscerally. can leave us in the dark as to the original function of many of the objects t h t m-e're reacting to. It's exactl\- this question that seems to have ciominateci the rather scant p r e s u h a t the shall- has received during the first half of i t run. Holland Cotter, in a review in the inc"~tvf i r h ?jrnps, complained that the show '?makes Little sense c i f ~ h a.t. . cibjects nlight mean.'' Cotter thinks that the she\\- attempts too much and delivers too little. Nobody can doubt that an exhibition that focused onlv on. s3v. headrests \vould give us a lot of valuable infcjrn~ation:cif course \\-C \;\-antto knoll- that these headrests \;\-ereused to protect men's elaborate head~iresses.and that they often include ahstrac ted female figures. ancl that many of them \\-ere buried with their olvners. Cotter does not dispute the formidable quality of much of the work in "Africa." but he worries that this high-profile anthology may distract attention and
funding from more tigh tlv focused, infc>rmtitrn-orienteci sho~b-s,suc h as ' cersome that arc done at the Muset~mfc>rAfricitn Art in SoMo. Fundin&IS
tainly a pml7lem in the museum \vorld, especially for unusual projects. Rut I think that Cotter is denying the seriousness of this overvie\\- \\-hen he states that "entire social and spiritual \vorlcis are passecl over for the sake of yet another scenic hike along the Guggenheim's ramps." "Africa" appeals to our eyes----and \\-h? deny that power to non-Kkstern art \\hen m-e m-ould not think of denying it to Matisse! ( In this point I am in ~ ~ "'tabels agreement with Peter Sihjeldahl, who wrote in the 1'1IZagf~ 1 7 1that
explain . . . uses, uselessly-as
if learning that something served for an ini-
tiation ritual made it accessible. If my o\vn initiation into the work is Romantic, that's beCatlse I can't imagine a more pactisable n-av to do it justice." If C:t?tter means to suggest that \\-hat Schjeldahl calls "the bliss of being blitzed" is somehokv incompatible with a more ethnographically oriented experience, I cio not agree. There's a danger of creating a false duality. The sho&-that is at the Museum for African Art this summer. "Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History," which is the kind of L-ircumsituibed project that Cotter prefers, focuses on the Luha people of Zaire and how several types of objects have helped them to sustain a sense of historical contirtuity. It" a shcm- in which tbc tilt is ethnographic-and yet \\-e \\-ant to respond to the \\-ay the objects look, just as the heautv of the \\-ork in "Africa" presses us to a*k all kinds of que5tions nhou t use and context. I'orrnal values are S\-mholicvalues and vice versa. The African sculptor
\\-h0 worried about mastering his craft may not have been thinking all that differently from Braniusi. The anthmpologist who initially asks \\h? somethe cc~llectorof modern thing was made will have to look at it closely. &%nd painting"\-'tlci
acquires some .4frican masks \\-ill quite naturally m-ant to
k n m - ho\\ they were used. When it comes to uncierstanciing art, compartmentalized thinking doe5n3tget you very far. Iconogrilphers need eyes, and
formalists need to know \\hat they're seeing. Term Fhillips. \vho is an artist. spearheaded the Royal cademv's or~inizationof "Africa: The r t of a Continent." and he is certainly not indifferent to the archaeological or anthropological aspects of the subject. (Michael Kan. a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, \\-as chair of the committee that adapted the show for Ne\v Yt~rk.) linfortunatelv, the grievously underfunded (Guggenheim has published nothing but a skimp\- greatest-hits catalog on the occasion of this important show. There isn't even a complete list of the 11-orks.The much larger and more complete KO)-alAcademy catiilog-l\-hich
is bring distributed in this
country by Prestel and is zivailahle at the (Guggenheim---is quite a help, but even this 613-page tome lacks the o\-er\iens that one might have hoped for. The Royal Acaclemy catalog is a some\vhat confused affidir. \\-ith too many authors given tocs little overall guidance, but at least its packed, helter-skelter appmarh conveys a general feeling for the field. It's clear that many of the contributors have qualms atxrut this enc~clopeciicsurvey. if only because it suggests hci\r- m c h the public has to learn. Yet these scholars also see this as a chance to gain a wider auciience for some very great art and to reflect on hovc- n ~ u c renlain4 l~ to be done. Schjeldahl predicte~ithat 1996 would he the summer in New York "when Africa ruled. And \ve argued about it. pn~h;thl\.."I would have thought so, too. Bllt the argnments have not beg~lt7.I:ron~the art press to tlie black press, the reaction has been mostly silence. One can make too much of the nonresponse. It may have a lot to cio \\-ith inadequate PR. But at a time \\-hen the very mention of non-Kestern art inspires guilt in some quarters and selfrigl'te~umeuin {others, the organizers of "Africa: The r t of
3
<:ontinentW
may have committed the unpardonable sin of expecting us to enjov the shol\: As you make your \\-ay a r o u d the Gupgenheim's ramp you keep conling kce-to-face with the feverish aml3ition and the visual ciaring that you find
only in the greatest art. The names of the sculptors are almost all unknown. t ~the t inlpact of their jq-ork is perfectly plain. Could it he that all this fommal audacity has embarrassed New York into silence! Could it he that people simply refuse to believe that the art of Africa is this good!
SEPTEMBER 2 , 1996
PAINTING IS A W O M A N
In (:orot9s masterpieces. which arc selciom more than tkx-o feet high, all the kst-moving transfi~rmationsof nineteenth-century liurope register seismographically, thmugh the slighte\t shifts in color. shape. and scale. 1r;tn-Baptiste-(:amille (:omt. \vho died in 1875. a year short of his eightieth year, \\;as ahsolutelv a Inan of his time. hut he regarded everything from his o\\-n unique, at-an-angle perspective. He poured a tidal flow of artistic intelligence into a relatively restricteci range of themes-over painted a village road or a m-oman reading a hook-and
and over again. he he relied on the
concentrated emotional \\-eight that he brought to every stroke of paint to mix poetry and pragmatism in startling neu- \\-ay,. I think he is right up there with the giants, an artist of!~e1izquez9s raliber. He goes into the dust\prop fix31n of nineteenth-century art. l\-ith its pictureque ruins and pea\ant iostunles and mandolins, and he regards the humtirum items jq-ith such rapt attentiveness that they become magical tokens of a time ancl place that's becoming m!-thic as it disappears. Corot doesn't make a big ciral about turning the mundane into the absolute, but trnce you set. what he's up to
you can glimpse, beneath the delicately lvorked surfaces. reserves of rneaky exhijar ation.
I don't know that there's anything in all of art that makes n ~ happier e than \\-hat C C I Y Cd )~~) e sin there c-ansases. The density of his effects is heaven for anybody who really cares atmut p a i h n g . To pack so much into such a small compass suggests a controlled extravagLtnre that has n o equai. In the lioman vie%-sthat Corot painted while he u-as in his 305, all of paganism and <:hristianit\- passes before our eyes n the artist fine-tunes the rolor of
3
shadokv on a crumbling \\all. Corot's silvery views of trees
and rivers around Paris define some catalytic out-of-time-and-sl~aceexperience in \\-hich the twilight of Romantic-ism melts straight into the cia\\-n of abstract art. And in the series of a half dozen vie\;\-scif
3
'i"~-orr?an in the
artist's studio that he painted in the late 1860s and earl\- 1870s. Corot joins
s :\fpnrnirs and the WLtteau of the \'elizquez of h
( ; P P S L I I D ~ ;.('lji?r)s~gti ~ 3s
one of
the immortal chroniclers of the artist's relationship to the audience. In Corot's studio paintings the audience har d\\-indled to a single visitor who sometime, scarcelv seems to be looking at the canvas on the easel, and the result is a definitive description of the gathering solitude of the modern artist. Corot's gift for pulling epochal shifts out of the tiniest fc>rrnaldeci\ic)nsis \\-hat mdears him to pitinterr. They feel that on some transcendent level he's making the same kinds of judgments th;tt thev k n m - from their everyday \vork in the studio. t
the press preview for the Ctlrot retrospective that
is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this \\-inter. I saw more pitinters than
I can recall at a cclmparable event. I can't think of a show to \I-hich artists have responded so immeciiately ancl so unequivocally. \Verb into the run. there are people taking in the pitintinps one by one. ancl you can tell from the \\-a\-that thev're moving close. studving the surfaces inch by inch. that many of them are artists. In the perfection of his tone,. the originality of his forms, and the rhythmic luciditv of his compositions, Corot rivals even Titian, and artists may lose him more, because Corot cioesn? insist on the
grand scale ancl elaborate themes that sometimes threatm to depersonalize a genius's \\-ark. There's an easygoing yet strong-kvillec1feeling that runs thmugh (:t?rot9s achievement. He \\-as n prolific artist m-ho experimented endlessly m-ith the kincl of big painting that ultimately earned him n hard-\\-on popularity 11-ith the public of his clay. f i t those efforts, ho&-evermuch they strained his gift for hair5hreaclth-preci,e effects, never really deterred his inclepenclent spirit. I ir-ilapine thzt C:or(~t'sability to remain t~im\elfW-hilenot totally rejecting the taste of his age hscinated Mc>netancl I)egas and other avant-garile artists
\\-h0 \\-ere establishing themselves during the last years of his life. I~ecades after his death, it was Corot's uncanny independence that made him such a touchstone f w Pic-asso and Brayue and C;ris, and for Matisse, n-ho in 1912 ranked Corot among his five kivorite painters, along \\-ith I)iirer. Rembrandt, (;ova, and Manet. I \vould guess that anybody \\-h<)truly love\ Corot loves him for the huge freight of meaning that he packs into each brushstroke. But that (:orat is not the artist whom the organizers of the large retrospective at the Metropolitan have placed beneatb the spcltlight. 'I'he Corot exhibit is just about the m-orst structured retri~speitivethat I've ever seen at the Metropolitan. n
artist of C:orot's caliher can't really be
ruined, but this s h m - come, dangernusly close to turning him into a broken-~io\\-nnineteenth-century period piece. The exhibit. which has already been in Faris and 0 t t a ~ - a\\;is , organized bj- Michael Pantazri of the National Gallery of Canada, Vincent PtsmarCJe csf the Z,ouvre, and Gary Tinter(>&-* the linpelharil (:urator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan. These m m are ohvic~usly competent scholars m-ith a fcjrmidahle knowledge of the documentary sclurces, hut I don't think that the\- really gra\p the re\tiess intelligence that races through this achievement. Like so man\- students of nineteenth-entury art, the); tend to evaluate an artist in terms of career moves, not in term\ of the play of his imagination. Some of the documen-
tary material in the ratalog is very intere\ting, hut it's pusheci so kir into the forcgroun~1that it sometime, seems as if the paintings arc little more than illustrations of the journalirtii- accounts that \\ere piling up, higher and higher, as the nineteenth centmy pri~gressed.
In the last decade5 of his life, Corot became one cif those Great Men \\-horn the French public \\-as glad to venerate? even if the man in the street haci only an approximate idea of \\-h? this pitrticular gent \\-ith a beret \\-as a legend. It's this adorable-genius view of (:orot. I think, that the curators of the retmspective \\ant to revive. Pantarxi. Pomari.de, and Tinter(>\\-have exhumed the \\-oor\--\\-arm atmosphere that ,R-irled around the aged artist \\-h0 fcjund fa-vor =with both the academy and the avant-garde. By giving pride of place t o the large. loosely-brushed imaginary landscapes that earned (:omt a reputation a, a fc3m-ard-lookingpainter \\-horn even conservatives could enjoy. the curators have explaineci \\-h\-(:orot gained in popularitv and could be referred to by one critic as "the patriarch of landscape painters." Rut I suspect that Tinzero%-and his colleague, also find a certain perverse postmodern satiskiction in pl;?-ing the populist card. Ry resurrecting the nineteenth-century hlockbu\ter popularity of Lu Piru
Cilt~r. Tinterow
and C:ompany hrtve uncovered an arti,t m-ho fits with the bIockbusttl.r m o d of O t l Z InLISeLBnl\. The show has a \\-ax\\-orks atmosphere, \\-hat \\-ith the deep red \\all,, tufted circ~llarottomans, and svmmetrically hung pitintings. l 1 of this may be intended to honor nineteenth-century ta\te, hut mixed v\-ith the sc:-bcilarly earnestness is a stnlng dose of camp cynicism. The comhinatic~nis unfc3rtunately familiar. For at least the paht thirty years, curators and art historians h x e been dismantiing the old vieu- of nineteenth-century art as a fast-breaking zivant-gilrdist narriltive in favor of a static ilnage of the cenfirst, some of the rcvitury a, Europe's ultimate Temple of Bad Taste. &%t sionist dabbling in kitsch \\;is a breath of fresh air. a \\-elcome dissent from
an increasingly fwsifized Less-is-more vision of modern art. B!- the mid-'70s. however, the retro-chic thinlcing had degenerated into an automatic upgrading of an)thing the moderns didn't like. And then the French. who had often been the lar,t to catch on to their 011-n zivant-gilrde, gave the gold seal of approval to the new disposition m-ith the opening of the Muske d'( 1rs;ly in Paris in 1086. The (1rsay has turned into a huge tourist attraction, but I think it's fair to sit)- that people who love pitinting get the \\-illies in this place where Ingrer and Court3et are left t o jostle far space with rules Rreton. IranCharles Catin, and rules Rastien-Lepage. The Orsily celebrates a reverse snobl,er\- that makes it fashic~nat,leto denigrate formal values, and it's this attitude that Tinterow and h i colleagues have brought to hear on Corot. K h a t lve're seeing at the Met is the Orsayization of Corot. He's being celebrateii as a pro~luct-maybe even a victim--of
nineteenth-century
taste, Tinterow \\-ill insist, of course, that he really admires those big pitintinps of Corot's. I'm sure he doe,. In the catiilog some of them are called masterpieces, ancl the value judgments are hacked up \\-ith lots of nineteenth-cmtury opinion. [luality, as \ve all k n m ; is a matter of opinion. and opinions are at least in part a function of one's experience. There is no mF,tery ar, to
\\-h\-a curator who \\-orks in the bread-and-circuses atmosphere of the lug contemporarv museums might feel a certain identificatic~nm-ith the breadand-circuses taste of an event such as the Universal Exposition of 1855. \\-here Corot is said to have had his greatest popular success. The truth is that the salall-is-E-teatxtifulside of C:orot-L\-hich tus anlong an elitist avant-garde-m-on't
cinse earned him icon sta-
make much sense in a museum
\\-orld \\here the corporate sponsor is king. And for those who went to the Mrtmpolitan to see the Comt revered by Pirar,so, Braque, and M;ltisse, this ,bm-corner, clme to being an out-and-out lie.
Corot \\-asn late starter. His parents. \vhci owned a celebrated millinery shop irn the m e dtl Bac, wanted him to go into the haper's trade, hut by the early f
when he was alreaJy in his 20s, he had set his sights on painting. like
many turning-point figures in nineteenth-century art. he could operate at n distane from ertahlished taste because he had an income from his family; he \~-orked u-ithout givinpmt~i'hthought to sales, which only began to add up "-hen he \\-as m-ell into lniddle age. This man. \\-h<>never married and
\\-h0 lived lvith his parents until his mother died in 1851. \\;is in many respects not an e,pecially vivid figure, but he always seem, to have knolvn his irwn mind. Right a\v;i!-. Comt kstened on landscape as his essential subject. He studied briefly =with r h i l l e - E t n a Michallon. a significant Nenclassii-a1 painter
\\-h0 died young: he then \\-orkeci for three years with Michallon's teacher,
lean-Vie-tor Bertin.
Bv the tinme Corot arrived in ItaIv in 1825-he
mately made three exten~iedtrips-he
ulti-
had n startlingly idiomatic \\-ay of
transl~ttingcomplicated vistas onto tkx-o-dimensional surfaces. And some of the fceling for clearly juxtaposed colorr and forms that animates the oil sketrhe, passed into (:orat's early essa>-Sin Salon-sire painting. Mir8irr
in
rh~
B7flriurrrfir(18.151, =which is in the Metropolitan's collection. has a clean-lined. otftrbalancc E-teatxtv that is far from It'coclassical conventions. There's something winningly unarmpromising ahtrut t11e n-ay C:orot goes right ahead and paints an angel hovering above n highly specific l;tnd,ciipe; this ma\- not t-te a completely satisfying picture. but it's certainly the product of an original mind. In the smaller paintings th;tt Comt began to paint practically before he unpacked his hags in Rome, his originality is unfcttered, and he brings n new kind of naturalistic inventiveness into art, Looking at the (:olosseum and the Forum and the Tiher \\-it11 the Caste1 Sant'Angelo, he sees much more in the himiliar scenes than anybody had ever seen before.
.%S
he sur-
veys the Forum, he turns the cluttered ruins into a multidimensional checkerhoard, a quirky topograph7- of volumes and vt~ids.Stancling in front of the Villa hfedici, he rhvrnes the nearby trees ancl huntain 11-ith the distant dome of Saint Peter's to create a visual spectacle that mirrors the citv's historical overlays perfectly. Khercver Comt sets up his easel in the Eternal City and the surroun~lingcountr\side. he turns the (;raeco-Roman tradition. \\-ith its strongly modeled fc)rms, into pitintings that have their o\vn \\-oniierful, something-old-sc~n~ething-new p l q of light ancl shacie. Khat's astonishing about thew pitintings is the immeciiate, peremptory impact that Corot achieves even its he ictebrares nuance, p a r d o s , and contradiction. He seems to be conveying some of the omnivorous excitement of a Flung man \\-ho3sbilling head over heels in love with the sunnv south. Yt~ucan see h()\\- really unique his achievement here is if you go to "In the Light of Italy," an exhil3ition that focuhes on the open-air pitinting clone in I t a k in the late 1700s ancl early 1800s h\ arasts from all over Europe: it c)pened at the National Gallery in l h s h i n g t o n last spring and is at the Broolclyn Muscum this winter. Organized hv RliIip Conishees, Sarah f:aunce, lererny Striik, and Peter Galashi, it's an immaculately lucid, medium-sired scholarly show. You feel the earnest ancl intrepid high spirits
of the artists from all over Europe m-ho congregated in Rome. There is much outstanding m-ork. Especially the lVelshman Thornas )ones and the Dane (:hristoffer Kilhelm Eckersberg can n-ork marvels \\-hen it ccjmes to picking some precious vignette out of the Roman spectacle. yet neither they nor any of the other artists in the she\\- ran match (:t?rot's plangent color, or his rhythmic assurilnce, or his genius for transforming visual happenfiance into fcxrnal arabesque. ()hviously the work that Corot did hack in France looks different from the Italian achievement. if for no other reason than that there arc so many differences in topography, light, and vegetaaon. Still. there's more of a
steady development through the \\-hole of his landscape p a i h n g than is sometime\ ackno\l~-ledged. It's o1~viiiusthat a m-ork such ar the I-trokvn-mbrn\\-n stuciv of njoftops done in (Irleans arounci 1830, after the first Italian trip, evinces the same eye for surprising jt~xtapa\itionsthat we knon- in the Roman \\-ork. But so too cioe, a late masterpiece that is not included in this sho\l~;Ibr Rrrdfie cnt ,Watrtp~(l868---70), in which the juxtapo\ition of treecl and bridge creittes an end-to-md interkvoven spare that's a\ poignantly specific a\ any of the vie&-sof the Roman Forum. In his bigger \vorks, Corot struggled to twcorne a generalizer. and sometimes he succeeded: but he always loved specificit\-, and the mind that brings a few tin\- figures into a Roman view in order to supge\t a social dimension is still hard nt work in 1871. m-hen Corot p a i n t the to\\-n of Douai. the corners of two loc~mingbuildings frame the foreIn ?%P Belfry. D,~rrui+ gnjund, a street full of figures and the elaborate twlfry recede into the distance, and \\-e have a view of the oriiinarv life of a French to\vn thttt's quite a\ definitive as \'ermeer's 5trui.t
in
D ~ y i Corot . is absolutely Vermeer's equal
\\-hen it come, to focusing so intently on everyday occurrences that time freezes and we slip through a trap door into eternity. The old man \\-h(> painted ilouai had lo\t none of the zividitv for detail that fills to bursting the terra-cotta-and-t,lue visions of Italy that he ciid ciecades before. He is no longer inclined to hit the accents quite so hard; it is n more experienced kind of clrarheadedne,~that you feel in his infinitely calibrated grays. Corot set out to he n Neoclassical laneiscape painter, hut almost immediately he gave the realist oil sketch an unheard-of geo~netricintricacy, and by the end of his life his close stud\- of the rain\%-eptnorthern atmo\phere had ushered in a new kind of Romantic visual poetry. In (:orot's \\-ork all fixed stylistic c;ltegories dissolve. This \\-as kiirly typical of the great arti\ts of the nineteenth century. It \\-as a dazzlingly exciting age for painting, for even as left many artists frozen in place, the the collapse of art a\ a public avo\l~-al
great minds turned cata\trophe to their a~lvantageand ruheci forniird unens un~bered. <:()rot \\-asmuch more of an experimentiilist than you m-ould gue,s from this shcm-. Tinterojq-'Sinstallation includes no drawings or prints, and although the reason for this is no doubt in part a practical one having to do \\-ith lighting Levels, it's a pity to deny mllsetlmgoers the ~nconventionalitv of (:orat's dra\\-ing. Especiiilly in his figure studies. he explores contours and volume, \\it11 a Lack of preconception that declares his complete freeciom from aca~lemicstandards. There's something alrnmt naive about the \\-ay that Corot \\ill underline an edge or turn the shaded side of an arm into an au tonornous dark shape. Rut \\hen y ) u think of thew exploratorv skrtches in relation to the heautifillly resolved volumes and intervals in his figure paintings, you see that the\- are great \\-orking Lira\\-ings, the kind of thing that pitinterly painters from Titian to Ronnard have clone prior to turning to the canvas. The Landscape tfra\\;ings hiwe their own kiscination, and there" also a Lot to be said about C:orot as a printnlalrer. He v\-asa great etcher. ,%ndhe is the only nrti\t \\h<) made something truly original of the titrlii-vrrru n methci~iof scratching into a t3lackened glass plate to create a negative that's then printed on photographic paper. These titrliis-vi'rros hilve some of the look of an etching, hut \\-it11 a softer, siivery sheen. Corot gives the new technologv a moodiness that brings some of the chiaroscuro effects of early photograthe draftsman's control. A couple of ilithks-turres are included in a p h ~under concurrent exhibition at the Metropolitan that is devoted to the photographer Eugene C:uvelier. who \\-as a friend of Corot's and helped him \\-it11 his
clithks-tturres. Rut even though these few- p r i n t are up elsewhere in the museum. it's no substitute for their being included in the retrospective proper. <:urntors need some m-it. some feeling for the Lab\-rinthine tx-ists of a great imagination, to deal \\it11 an artist as subtly forcef~~l, and sometime\ as
carelessly prolific. as (:orot. Corot paid his respect\ to the idea of the oldf,lshioned ma\terpiece, but the irony of the situation \\-as that the very concept was so corrupted by his time that only an artist m-ho kne\\- how t o handle slightly garish fortissimo effects could make a really big painting \\-ork. 17ir IJvoilng
,.)tilr
(1864), with its dramatic juht-before-darkness sky and
silhouetted figure, is the kind of lyric icon that a contemporary of (:orot's such as Millet nlipht have been able to imbue with the requisite syrupy drama. If Millet-a
great artist, though not in (:orot's league-haci
nip l i v r o i q Stilr, he \voulci have sholvn us \\h!
painted
this \\-Oman is reaching to\v;ird
the stars in a gesture half%-\\;$!twt\veen hope and resignation. There \voulci be a driimatic engine that focused the m-ork. Corot is too refined---and too modern-to
\\-ant to tell that story. He depen~ison his finely calibrated \-d-
ues to hold together the five-foot-l\-idepainting. I understand \\hat he's trving t t e10, ~ but the result is a one-note compo\ition that's as static and kitsch\ a\ a Maxfiellt Parrisb.
R\- the IXbOs, Corot liked to conceive of a large painting in terms of an end-ttl-end shimmering opalescence. He may have seen these tone poem\-\.;hi& ta\te-as
reject the knock-'em-dead effects of mainstream mid-century anti-Salon Salon paintings, but their quietne\s is generally scaled
\\-ay too big. Ctlrot loses track of the inch-by-inch movements that ought to carry us through the painting: he ends up inventing his 0%-nkind of nineteenth-century clichk. (Inly rarely cioe, he manage to make this idea of an alrno\t evenly inilected immensity m-ork fcjr him, hut it certainly clicks in the Soavrtzrr of ,Wortp{i~nrurrip(1864), in \\-hich the small figure of a n-c)man reaching her arms up the trunk of a tree t~ecomesa miraculous image of longing and hope. It is absolutely typical of Corot that this canvas is just over tm-o feet high. In a sense, he's uhing an idea that goes all the \\-a!- hack to the l
installation that visitors may miss l i ~ u v r n i r~fMt1~tff;iltt~in~. in =which ( : t ? r ~pret figures in paint a kind of 1)ebussvan orct~estration,because it's nearlv crushed hj- the juggernaut to its right, the ghastly in~prussr~?s tfl/i,lming (1855). in 'iq-hich(:orot's rn~rsicturns to Muzak.
BY the time you've arrived at the last rooms of the retrospective, \\-hereTintero\\- has gathered together many of the great hgurc paintings that poured fcjrth ti-cim Corotk easel in the 1860s and f870s, the she\;\- has been overtaken t-ty such a coarse-grained, gaudy Second limpire tone that museumgoers may he hard p u t to grasp Corot's ineffi~hleemotions. Corot paints a few men-one
in nrmor. another pliiying n cello---md they're superb, hut it's
the kvomen \I-ho really hold the vie\\-er. They are as innumerable and as E-teatxtiful as the maidens on the Parthenon frieze. Sometimes the model is a sophisticatcld modern \\-aman, dressed kir an afternoon at home. More often she \\ears a costume thttt suggests a French or Italian peasant or a gypsy. In some paintings a ciark t-te;tutyis draped in hbriis from a North African h;tra;tr; in others she \\-ears nothing at all and. reclining in a scrap of landscape. seem, to consider the possihilit>-of impersonating a godde\s. (:orot pitints \vomm plai-ing mandolin\ and \\-omen reading and \\-omen m-ho have dose3 their I-tooks. -le suggesb a muse, as117,yt,an aifegorv of contemplation. And therr's a \\inninply inf~jrmalfeeling about all the make-believe, as if neither (:on,t nor his rno~ielstake the role-playing especi~tllyseriously. The costumes are 11-orn so casually that y ) u feel they could just as eitsil? he set aside. 'f'hese \\-omen have mixe important things on their minds. Rut \\-hat?That's the question that holds you. Corot had painted some heautif~~l hgure studies in Italy in the 1820s and some accomplished though at time\ slightly stiff portraits t-titck in France. Yet the ohsession with the figure that seem\ to grow and g r m - in the last decades of his life cioe\n3texactly come out of the earlier lvork. \%%at we're
seeing here is one of those profouncl shifts in appetite or attitucie that sornetime, overtake people in the middle of their lives. It's almost a, if Comt suddenly found himself applying to the painang of the figure all the g long years as a landlyric-realist techniques that he'd dcveinped d ~ ~ r i nhis scape pitinter. n d in thew hundrccis of stuciies of one or another heautif~ll young lvoman. he really invents a n e n kind of landscape. It's a topographv of human feeling. In painting, a most concrete medium, m>\teries must he spelled out. and the glory of Corot's figures is that they give the human enigma an up-front. unequivocal shape. The selection of figures in the retrospective is large hut by no means definitive, and they're hung \vith little akvareness of the way that the internal scale of one painting can clash n-ith that of the nest, The installation doesn't flo\\-. Still, there are so many peerless examples included that you should be able to get a feeling for the infi~litevarietv of C:t?rot's effects. M;ltisse once oherved that (:orot \\-as one of those artists who "on each occiision paint the portrait of
3
hand, a n e n h;tnd each time." n d so he \\-as. He tries all
k n d s of things, and he almost all\-a\;$succeeds, C:ertain exmples, such as nip (;rr)rk (Ari (1870-73), are full\- modeled volumes. with a feeling for sculp-
tural form that rivals Lecinardo (whose Mi~nilLlsil Comt had challenged di(Ither canvares, such as d rectly a decide earIier in his K7rnu~1wrflr thr PvLII.~).
B7,mila Reildtrrg (1869-70) from the Metropolitan. arc almost anti-sculp tural: here Corot turns the arms and tcirsc-, into a series of idiosyncratic arc-like shapes that support the quietly shado\v\- face. It's in tightly-packed compositions like this R?mila Reildtrrg-as
\\-ell a, in the c i t y s c a p e r t h a t C:t?rot pre-
figures <:u&sm. Picasso, Braque, ancl Gris looked at Comt's canvases ancl saw in his gray and tan ancl t,m\\-n structures the prologue to everything that they m-ere doing. It's the astonishing soliditv of the paintings that makes the metaphors click. The particularity alio\\-s the poetry to fly. "Who irre the\-!" the poet
lames Merrill asked al-tortt Corot's l;\-on~en in 1960, and jq-e all know the happv bewilderment that he's describing. Mrrrill \vould admire Corot: the painter \\-as a Northerner who loved the south ancl knem- ho\\ to caress hut never punr ture the t331100n of a big idea. Merrill \vonciers if C:t?rot's kvomm are "the last of the I.nmias! The first patients of Freud!" .4nd they do exist in t on the some never-never land t3ordcred by Keats and Freud. C t ~ r otourhe, unfiithcimahle feelings of the bereft. Not included in this retrospective are several marvelousl\. unexpected cansa\eh from 1872, in \\-hich Comt brings together tx-o or three of these lost souls in a twilit fouest: a mother and daughter, a child on a pony and another \voman =with a kvalking stick. In thew pitintings Corot foreshado\vs the mv\terious presences of (:ezanne's Biltlirrr
ancl Pisitsso's Siritlmhosyirui. in front of which Rilkr wrote the great lines
I J I Y ~ I c , which could also apply to (:t?rot9s\\-omen (and no cioubt in 17iu I~NIIII inspired Mrrrill's que5tion): "But tell me. who
d r they. ~
thew \\-andererr.
even more transient than l;\-e ciurselves?" Looking at <:orat's later figures. you sense how deep and secret an affinit\- he had \vith these \\-oman. He come, closest to defiliing the nature of that relationship in the six pitintings of ;lmodel seated before an easel in the studio, and lwkily they're atl in the retrospectiw. The
lie\ to t k s e paint-
t the model to take iir place. She may be a visitor. ings i~ that ( : t ? r ~ allm-, but she" no interloper, a d as she sits in the i:ba.ir that he might have trr.cupied only n mc~mentago. the distance het\\-ern arti\t ancl model narrokvs. The studio, which is his home, becomes hers. ancl they become one.
I \\-outdnk \\-ant to cfiooe amtrng thew paintings-eadl lar magnificence-hut
has its particu-
there are t x o of which I never tire. One is the ver-
sion in the National Gallery in \X;lshington. \\-ith its infinitely subtle t3m&-ns.Here the seated \ \ - ~ ~ li~ ~ envelopecl an by the geometric complexity of the atelier. 11-ithits stove and \\-all full of pictures and elegant dog. This is Corot's h\-mn to the j o ~ ,of e\-eryrla\-nrss, to the things that he must have
looked forx-ard to seeing each morning m-hen he began to work. In an entirely different vein is the cansa\ in the Muske ci'Orsay. No%-it's late in the day, and C:t?rot uhes a (:;travaggesque play of light to pick out the \\-oman's head. her right arm, a bit of her shc)ulder, and the uphc)lstered hack of a chair. Hc3tding a mantlotin, lookng not so much at the painting on the ease! a\ off into space, the model is transfixed hy that melancholy hour \\-hen the light has finally failed. The model in this deep-toned canvas is a dreamer jq-ho's vanihing into her dream. In his \tuiiio paintings <:()rot gave an account of his life in art that is in almo\t all respects the exact opposite of the story that (:ourhet told in the immense ihu P~lntor?Sruilrt?.done n decade earlier. In order to create an allegcirv of his modern life, <:ourbet l->elieved,he had to resurrec-t the mural-scale masterpiece, and he nearlv succeeded, in n 11-ork that includes elegant collectors, n rag picker, and n portrait of Raudelaire and that adds up to the strangr\t studio party of all time. (If course (:ourhet's picture is a \voncier, but \\-hen I think of it in relation to the heart-stopping simplicitv of Corot's studio paintings, I can't help hut feel that \\-hat that notoriouh resolutionarv <:ot~rbethas wroupht is old-fiistlionednm incarnate.. Churbet insists on placing himself center stage. 11-ith the model as a strong-though sensitive-noman
stanLling l,\- her man. C:t?rot pares the allegory ciown to
an incident ancl then vanishes. In the last ciecade of his life, this man \vho never married \\-as saying that painting is n \\-(?man,a kvoman kvhci is as beautiful and complicated and undefinable a\ art itself. Gary Tinterokv concludes the retmspective on a cio\vnbeat niite, with three turgid l;indsca.pes that span the career, hut h\- then museumgoers have had so many epiphanies that they hardly ought to care. The hemines that <:()rot painted in his la\t years have risen out of their century to join the kvomen of Piero, I,eonardo, and Katteau in a realm where understatement is the language of the god,. Of course each \\-Oman has her
appointed role---Queen. Madonna, Lover. Muse---hut these immortal heroines understand that a role is ntrthing hut a pretense. They Itnon- what <:()rot ]\no&-S,m-hich is that only by refusing to reveal anything m-ill the\- he able to tell all, JIX~-ARY
A
SERPENT, A
6 K- 13, 1997
SMILE, A PRAYER
The magisterial exhibition of ancient <:amhndian sculpture that is at the National Gallery in \Xrashington this summer begins \\-ith a many-headed serpent luring seven piiirs of teeth and ends \vith a beautiful youth kneeling in PILL\-er. \%%at a museumgoer may initially re\pond to in thew images of fury and quietude is their alien pon-er: the serpent ciates from the late twelfth or earl\- thirteenth century, the \\-orshipper from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. (In reflection, though, the hail-ancl-&re\\-eH placement of \uch singularly contrasting statues will kick off thciughts of modern-~iay <:amhodia, a country that man\- have hoped \\-as at last emerging from decades as murderous as any in the annals of mankind. "Sculpture of hngkor and n r i e n t <:ambodi;l: Millennium of Glory" is presented in darkiv iolored, st~btlt-lit gtlleries; it has the dramatic impact of a look into the past that forces u\ to see the present a little differently. But fe\v at the National Gallery could have imaginecl how dramatically the meanings of the glo~-ering monsters and enigmaticall\- smiling gods \\-h0 fill mom after room at the muscum would resonate. for the simple reason that onlv somebodv with a close knowledge of the <:ambodian scene could have even
suspcted h011 rapidly the situation in Phnom P m h \\-as going to ditrken in the n-eeks after the exhiisition openet$. ' . of ;l variety that is often placed at The serpent sculpture, calle~ia ~ I I R L is
the entrance of (:;tmbodian temples to signal the pasbage from the secular \\-orld to a sacred place. When the exhibition \vent up in lyiishington at the end of Tune, this many-headed monster felt like a kvonderful felicitous touch. because the s h m - \\-as (among other things) a sign that (:amhnilia \\-as putting behind itself the nightmare of the \-ears het\\-een 1075 and 1978, \\-hen more than a million people (probably \\ell over one-seventh of the country's populiition) died at the hand, of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. The new conlitir~ngovernment, elected in 1i.N.-sponsored elections in 1993 11-ith n huge voter turnout, m-as, to say the vrr:. least, not m-ithut its problems. Because he had the military clout to im-alidate the election by ftjrce. Hun Sen. \\-hose (:;tmboilian People's Party (formerly the <:ommunist Part\-) lo\t the election, \\-as brought into the government as co-prirne ~ninister\\-ith Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Still, in the la\t fen- years <:amboilia has experienced some economic improvement and the t3eginning of a startlingly independent press. Part of the reason the (:mbodians sent out this grand horde of sculpture. much of it originally from the great hnghor conlplex of temples and palaces. \\-as to reinforce a cautic~usinternational optimism about Cambtrdia and ttr give back sometliing to iountries that have been heipinp Cambodia get back on its feet. The st~o\%was fir\t seen in Paris (\x~hictialso contributed more than a third of the works, horn the Musee Ciuimet) and is scheduled to go on to rapitn. Khen these ancient <:ambo~iiangods arrived at the National Gallery. they were ambasbadc~rsof a rickety but still pmmising young democracy, a country that the praying y m t h at the close of the show a\sured us could crnlv gain in strength. For Americans, the dozens of smiling deitie, m-ho
filled the galleries might seem like a vision of hope emerging from a maelstmm that we had a hand in creating. especially in 1973, \\-hen U.S. planes carpet bombed the countrv. Rut no%-,only n few \\-eeks after the opening, all the meanings are scrambled, if not reversed. (:amhodia's coalition government is no more. Hun Sen. \vho has seized sole control. is r o ~ n d ~ nU Pg and executing Prince Ranariddh's supporters: and the prince tours the \\-orld. begging for help. The
ridgd's
ciefense of the sacred over the profane
suddenly seems all pose. almost comic. The smiles of the gods have turned tmuhlingl~enigmatic---you're so &\\;ire of \%-hatthe\- \von3treveal. n d the praying youth isn't sxveetly optimistic hut mutely de*pairing, eternally resigned. International 1o;tn sholvs, especially ones such as "Sculpture of Angkor and .4ncient (:amhodin" that involve the transport of a significant proportion of a countrv's artistic patrimony, can be criticized on a number of counts. Shipping master%-orks around the world probably inw~lvesfar greater risks than most rnrrsellm people are wiiIing to admit, and the resulting exhibitions, though they are often attendance grabbers, ran force unfiimiliar images into an environment so alien that only a fraction of their true
conies
t o the fore. These iss~tesare not irrelevant t o the
<:nmbodiii shcin-, but unlike so many en~ieavorsof this kind, 11-hich are the pmduc tu"f executive decisions by tourist hoard, and corporate sponsors, this one has an almo\t frightming urgency. r t that \\;is created some 700 or 800 y e u s ago probably has no direct heuing r,n current events, h t ~ at t lea*t there is the possibilitv that muheurngoers \\-h0 have been touched by the greatest achievements of (:ambodian ci\-ilization \\-ill give some more thought to what the <:ambodians are suffering no\\. hctuallv. (:ambodiitn art and architecture have played a part in li;l,tKcst relations for more than 100 years. In the 1860s Ernest Doudart cie Lagr6e, the French representative in (:ambodiit. along =with the artist Louis
Delaporte ancl others. began bringing hack to France information about the vast hngkor complex. (Although building at hngkor began in the ninth century, the structures that are hest-known todav date from the tkx-elfth and thirteenth centuries.) In the )-ears auound tW0, the stylized mountain pnjfiles of Khmer architecture. with it\ epochal ha-reliefs and huge faces snliling dolvn from gates ancl tolvers, came to cirfine an alien idea of heautv. Rruno Dagens's richly illustrated study of the \Vestern fdscination 11-ith <:ambodian art, An~ktlr Hvuri
(lfQn Asrun I'nlprru, reproduces the huge recon-
structions of hnghor \Vat that dominateci the French (:t?lonial Expo\itions of 1922 and 1931. Dagens also she\\-s the lines of luxury cars ciirrying wealthy tourists from Saigon and Bangkok to the ruins in the '30s, as \\-ell a\ images of Angkc~r\%it that were used as n hackdn~pfcjr ad, selling everything from refrigerators to guns. There \\-as more than the pop-chic appeal of exoticism t o this earlyclassics. In Southeast twentieth-century fascination with the (:an~l->cidian Asia. where the heaped-on-high elaboration of the architecture \\-as rontrasteci \\-ith the pared-cio\\-n lyricism of the sculptures of the gods, liurop e m d ~ s c o v e r e dsc~methinglike the polar opposite to the classical Greek idea. =which \\-as to use the stripped-donn power of the architecture as a striking backdrop for all the animation and complication of an increasingly naturalistic figurative art. <:ambodian sculpture had its own kind of serpentine allure. You feel its effect in the dra%-ingsthat Rodin ciid of the KO\-al Cambodian dancers \.ifits visited France in 1906. The dancers, whose style \\-as quite evidently descendrci from the poses of the figures on the reliefs at hnghor R t , actually performed at Rodin's house in Mrucion. In the \v;ish drawings that this la\t of the Romantic sculptors produced, Rodin is pushing beyond the alienne\s of first impressions: he's allokving his hand to he propelled by the surprising, off-kilter angles and curves of the (:amhodinn arabesque.
Through their systematic study of (:amhndiitn sites. French arrheologists and students of Sanskrit began to understand the full extent of the Khmer achievement. The hnghor Engclom \\-as begun by 1ay;tvarman 11 in
802. He declared him\elf a iievdrajir, a god-king. and therel3y inauguratecl a line of rulers \vho a\sc,ciated themselves with Siva, king of the Hindu gods. The majority of \\hat is todav most kmiliar in the hnghor complex (1%-hich covers some forty square miles) \\-as created by Suryavarman 11, \\-h<)built hngkor Brat, and rayavarman VII. \\-h0 was responsible for the city of Angktrr Tl~orn,which encloses the Bayon, the temple m-ith the sn~iling &ices. Both .4ngkc,r Bht and the Rayon recapitulate the shape of the sacred Mount hleru, 11-ithits five peaks, n-hich is the center of the Hindu universe and home of the gods. Surrounded by vast reservoirs (called birriiys) and reaching high into the sky, these ~ n a n - ~ n a dmountains, e \\-&h their cangeries of stairs and portals and arracle\, impress us immediatel~as vast allegorical expressions of a primal relationship het\\-een earth. \vater. and air. Kamales~-arBhattacharva. in an essay for the National Gallery ratalog, ohserves that <:ambodian religion is oftm "monistic, in the smse that it recc,gnizes no dualit\- het\\-een God and the m-orld, the \l-orld being the manifestatic)n of God." You feel that these temples are the entire m-orld.The <:amhodians gave the fara\\-ay land of the gods n concrete. here-ancl-no\\fc>rn1.
Such a nti,numentah ambitious art might not be expected to convey an); elusive shades of feeling, hut in ancient (:ambc,dia subtlety and grandeur \\-ere not irre~on~ilr-lblg, In a room at the c-enter of the esliibition there is a huge, serenely smiling bronze head of the gocl Vishnu that has a surpri\ingly intimate allure. Together with the shoulder and tx-o of the original four arms, this immense head (about a yard high) is all that remains of a vast re-
clining figure that once dominated an island in one of the hiir~ijjsat .4ngkc,r. The bronze \\-as uneartheii only in 19.16, but we have a description of it from the late thirteenth centmy, jq-hen the (;hinew envoy icbou Dagnan, m - h o quite understan~lahlymistook this paradisiacal figure for a Buddha. ,a%-\\hat is in fact Vishnu reclining in cosmic sleep on the serpent n a n t a set in one of the birrirys lvith \\-ater ilokving from his navel. Lrishnu is seen in the midst of the creation of the ~-0r1d;out of the 10ti.l~in his navel \\ill emerge Rrahma. or, in another version of the story. Rrahma. Siva. and Vishnu himself. This is a religion that, like the art it inspired, is full of repetitions ancl echoes ancl trajectories t h t manage to return to where they began. I'rorn a clistance this Vishnu has a dazzling theatrical impact. even though the surface is much abraded and what were probably inlays of precious metills are gone. And as I move closer m\- impression of the God only becomes richer, more nuanced. Lrishnu's head is at an angle; he gazes off, above and beyond us, into the distance. He is completely self-ahorbed, but the effect isn't chilling. (2uite the reverse, we are hscinateci to be catching the divinitv off-guitrd, in a private reverie that it is beyond our polver to disturb. The size of the head obviotrslt. underscores the fact that Lrisllnu is tlifferent from us. but it also has the effcct. something like that of a gigantic close-up in a movie. of creating n m\-rterious rapport. The scale amplifies the smile that plai-s across the fkce. Despite the t,;tcil? clamaged surface, the features are lucidly readable; we feel that lve're seeing the G o d clearly. I'ishnu has all the elegant enchantment and other&-orldl\-delicacy of a dreanler in a painting l,\- R t t e a u . But if \Viitteau's m!-sterious figures can on!\- hope for their own happiness. Vishnu's dreams are for the whole \I-orld. This (:ambodian masterwork carries 1Viitteau's kind of Bickering fantasy-shadings into the scale of cosmic m!-th. The Khmer smile. lvhich animates Vishnu's &ice,greets visitors almost e\-er?\%-herethe\- turn at the National Gallery. That smile appears in bronze
and in sadstone, onLrishnus, Brahmas, Sivas, Buddllas, and ant; number of other gods and podiiesses and dancers and demons. Le\\ tentiitive than the smile of the kouros figures of sixth-century Greece, less personal than the expression of the Madonna in the great stained-gla\s \\-inLlcl\\-at Chartres. it is a veiled smile-a
glimpse of a mystery. No\vadav\ we tend to associate
this smile with the deep inm-ard c o n t m t m m t of Buddhism, a religion that has its origins in the spirituitl odyssey of a Nepalese prince. Siddhartha Gautama, \vho probably died in 483 1i.t . But Ruciiihism \\as not the official court religion at Angkor until the late tkx-elfth century, and the smiles on many of the faces from Angkor are not those of mortals n-ho achieved bliss but of gods \vho control man's kite ancl hold the secret:, of the universe. At Angkor, \I-here the mix of Hindu and Arrcidhist influences is exceedingly complex, the smiles of the gods often achieve a kircinating intermingling of Buciiiha's sublime serenity and I'ishnu's a%-e-in\piringkno\vlecige. This smile is apotheosized in the imposing faces that ciominate the tokvers of the Ra:-on. Pierre I.oti, in his book An ~ l r i ~ k t Ptlgrrfn. rr rccordeci in 1912 ho\\the expressions on those kices seerneci to change \\-ith the \\-eather ancl the time of day. going from ironic benevolence to peacefulness to pity. There's knokvledge behind that smile. and for those of us m-hci do not have that knov\-ledge,there can be tlnease, too. Angkor is part of the popular imagination. so much so that museumgoerr may find that some of these statue5 carved half a \\-orld a\\-a\- are more immediately appeding to them than many n Madonna by Raphael. B\- no\\- a vaguely Ea5tern idea of spirituality may he more familiiir to a 'iq-idesvc-athecif ,knericans than the storie5 in the ?;e'i\- Testanlent. And it's albo true that modern art, h\- declaring its distance from the High Renaissance, has prepared us for Asia, \\-hose artists of course taught nlodern Eur o p a n s z i thing o r t\\-o. Gauguin, one of the rnort accessible of late-nineteenth-century radicals, d r m - inspiration from phcitographs of
the Javanese sculpture of Borobudur, in Indonesia: and from Borobudur to n g k o r \Vat isn't so Far. No wonder that the 4meric;in museumgoer \\-h<)knt,v\-s(Gauguin's 'f'ahitim id+s and llerrnann I-Irsse's ,Iiiidlrtlrrhu can strike up such an easy acquaintance lvith the Hindu gocls of (:amhoclia. \\-hose frequently serene demeanor suggests a cleep Bucidhist coloration. There's a fcjrmality to the strict. hce-forward symmetry of these gods that can feel foreign. hut their smiling aplomb strikes a chord in the contemporary audience. =which may he all too quick to mistake t h i contemplative pose for some kind of post-l'reudiitn bliss. Helen Ihbitson lessup, the guett curator who has organized the sho\v for the National (;aller\-, has lvorked \\-ith the designer Mark Leithauser to create a daring1y effective instiiliation. (The other curators are Thierr\%&phir,associated with the M~lsGeCiuimet, and .4ng C:houl6an, an assi3tant to the (:amhodian Minister of State in Charge of the (:ultural Patrimony.) lessup has 11-iselvset freestanding statues in front of reliefs, so that the installation twgins t o suggest t h e enveloping experience of seeing Southeast Asian art in its original context. Generally, I d o not care for dark \valls and dramatic- lighting in museums: the cast shadokvs may obliterate too much detail. This is sometimes a problem here. Yet on balance I prefer this rather souped-up presentation t o the chillier. perhaps more museologicaliy correct installaticln that I recall at the she\\; of Indonetian sculpture at the National Galler\- seven years ago. In the later rooms of the <:amboclia sho&-there are even some large blokv-up\ of engravings t3aseci on L)elaporte's drawings of the temples as they looked in the nineteenth century and of photographs h\- Kenro Izu of the monument&as the\- are today. \\-ith trees coiled monstrously around the carvings. Some \\-ill say t h a t t h e w engravings ancl photographs have n o place here. I \\-ould have expected to feel that \\-ay. Yet there's something to be said for giving some heat to the presentation: these sarringly romantic images re-
mind us of the tropical contest, and of h o ? marvelous ~ these vast monuments look \\-hen seen from n considerable d i t a n c e or n surprisingly close vantage point.
Not everything at the National Gallery clerives from the hnghor complex. but Angkor is the fulcrum, the place \\-here. over a period of decacler and centuries, (:ambodian artists al3sorbed the lessons of Indian art and 11-enton . art and arc-hitecto create an awesome serenitv cif their ~ w n <:an~l-todian ture. like that of Indonesia to the south. flcm-Sout of anc1 responds to the gigantic achievement of Indian art, lvhich is so much a matter of repetitions and eliihorations, of complicated araheque, repeated ancl adu mhra ted until they achieve an uncoiling po&-er.\Vherear in the (;raeco-Roman trarlition carved forms are generally regarded as a \\-a\- to accent relatively unintlected arc hitet-tural surfaces, in Ir1c1ia and Sou t heart &%si;t the lnonun~ental impart of the architecture is generated out of the overflo\v of detail. Some \\-ould say that it is not in India itself hut rather in the great monummts of Rc~rohudurand Angkor Brat that this idea is expressed most perfectly. I haven't seen the red sandstt~neto\\-ers of Angkor. hut I have been tt, Rorohudur, nncl that astonishing experience leaves me kvilling to believe Helen Iessup \\hen she remarks that although "some of the fabled m-onclers of the \vorlcl fkil to equal their reputation, Angkor blows its legend away, rcndering it a pitle shadci\\- of the reality."
c If course, you can't have that experience in W~shington.Rut y ) u can glimpse (:;tmbodia's architectural miracle in tkx-0large peciimmts from Bantea\- Srei, a relatively small temple locateci north of Angkor proper. Bantea) Srei, jq-hich was built by Brahlnin priests, \\-as never ci>nnected\\-ith the cult of the king. With its intilnate elegance, it har the special charm of a some\\-hat private m o n u m m t created in an overn-helmingly public age-rather like Bernini" Saint Teresa in Iton~e.
It \\-as to Bante.?\- Srei, one of the jewels of (:ambodian art, that And& Malraux traveled in 1923. \\-ith the object of stealing a number of iar\ings that he hoped to take t3;tck to France. Malraux. his \vifc Clara, and a friend \\-ere caught red-banded in Phnom Penb. They were arrested and charged \\-ith trafficking in antique\. Malraus and his friend were tried and given prison sentences. hut Clnra managed to return to Paris and rallied Malraux's literary friend,, who obtained his release. Not one to he emharriissed by his o\vn nefaricst~s~leeds,Malraux p t ~ much t of the experience into irlii. R:)yd/
B7uy, the novel he publi\heci in 1930. He has the dul3ious honor of being the mo\t distinguished man to be im-olved in the theft of ancient (:amhodinn art. hut he's far from the only one. and the plunclering has certainly not lessened in succeeding decades. You can understiind \\-h)- (:amhodians hacked &\\a\-at the temples in the grim years of Pol Pot's asccn~lancy,\\-hen a head from &%n&ornlight be traded f r ~ ar b o ~ -of l rice; but the adventweus and archeologists and government officials \\-h0 have stripped historic sites. not to n~entionthe dealers and collectors 11-horeceive suck1 n~aterial,are an-
other matter entirely. o Srei pediments that are in the Yational (Gallery were reThe t ~ Bantea? moved from the temple site only after it proved impossible to reconhtruct the portals on =which they sat. c h e of them is no\\- in the museum in Phnom pent^, the other in the j\i'ZnsC"e(Guimet in Paris, The sandstone panels, each
roughly four feet high, are essentially triangular, but \vith an elaborately carved border that gives the shape an unduliiting, flame-like complexity. Kithin thew frame,. =which arc ma\terpieces of a rococo h t a s y that is emphasized by the rich, pinkish g10m- of the stone, unfold stories from the ,Mahiibhiirirtir,
the massive Indian epic that s t r i k o foreigners with its dizzying
narrative intricacy. In both pitnels, an atmo\phere of ceremonial grace that pervades even violent moments is announced by pairs of small flying cleitier just beneath
the peak of the triangle. Their flung-out arms ancl legs supge\t a flokver-like shape that harmonizes lvith the t3lossoming-and-tlickering spirit of the form in the frame. Therc are echoe, of this same kincl of b~~rsting-o~twarci leaping m-arrior Rhima in one panel and, to n lesser degree. in the devil\ Sunda and Upa*un~iain the other. You feel the pressure of conflict in thew panels, yet it registers n n dance-like experience that has no specific dramatic narrative. The sculptor ha* chosen to reveal his meaning not through the partic-ularities of a ciramatic confrontation. hut through the coursing animation, the skvirling ferwir. To grasp the effect of a great <:amhodi;ln temple. you must imagine thew effects multiplied---a hundreci-fold at Bantea\ Srei, a thousand-fold (if not a million-fcjldj at Angkor Kht. The result of a11 this multiplication is \\-hat Heinrich Zimmer, in his A r t iflrlillurr
jlszu, called a "1%-ondrous life-ahunclance." The dynamic principle of
<:ambodian art is this decorative flc~od.m-hich sweeps up fiintiistical curlicues, luxurimt plants, sleek animals, elegant dancers. and, in one of the mo\t himous panels at .4ngkc,r \%it, a vast panorama of Vishnu churning the sea in the davs \\-hen the world citme into being. K'hen integrated into architecture, thesc deeply carvecl reliefs, some of xx-k~ichmay look a hit crude \\-hen seen close-t~pin a museum, take on a rich, allusive coloration, a shimmering plz9- of light and dark. There is something inexorable about this ciecorative f l o ~ ;and a part of the appeal of the frequently symmetrical and near-immol,ile statues of the go~isis in the counterpoint that they pmvide. The\- give us an interval of rest----a quiet inlet at the edge of the \\-hirling rapids. The (:;lmbodian gods often have a sensuousness that is subder rind more discrete than that of the Indian deities. These Khmer imn~ortalsabsorb all the tensicins that surround them; their stillness has a weight. That is certainly the impact of many of the most hieratic. almost stolid-looking works in the show; I'm thinking of some of the Preah Ko style statues from the ninth century.
Thew imposing figures may not impress a museumgoer quite a\ much as a number of the more refineci images that appear later on, but you can't deny that stiltue) such as the Siva and Vishnu from the late ninth century have a centered elemental power. Khmer sculptors regard the human form not a\ a complicatecl mechanism but as a singd~irity,a totalitv, V711at matters is the endosing silhouette; and so the auticulation of the musculature is kept to a bare minimum.
In the greate\t of the statues. it is the sustaineci line of that silhouette. like a ribbon running through space, that defines and reins in the fullness of the form. The body's out\\-arii-preshiq impact is present yet someho\v veiled. The vehemence of ln~~sctllar movement is gently enclosed. The tm-t) intertwined torso\ of the Wr~criurs(second quarter of the tenth century)a motif that. m-ith its Liitrcoifti-like arrangelnent of coiled arms and legs. might have interested Michelangelo----in fact suggests n liquidity that is reminiscent of certain effects in Brancusi. The C:ambociian god?,assert their strength, hut they frequently refuse to flaunt it. In one of the mo\t beautiful kvorks in the show, a male deity from the eleventh century (number h5 in the catalog), the gently modeled torso is as subtle as one of thme Khmer smiles. And the incised carving that describe\ the folds of the god's simple cloth m-rap gives a m-elcorne hit of specificit?. Those crisp creases are like apt bits of punc tuation.
At the National Galler>-,a museumgoer can appreciate the refinement that C:nmbodiiin nrti\t\ bring to sandstone surfaces. and the aura of equilibrium that the clearest, mo\t uncomplictited volume\ exude. But when it comes to the miracle of the grancle\t, e\sentiall\ sculptural monuments. such as the small temple of Bantea!- Srei and the huge n g k o r \Xht and Bayon, even the kno&-ledgeableotxerver will be hard put to explain how a near-infinitv of separate elenlents is united to create a totality that has an altogettter ciif-
ferent kind of po%-er.hnghor \Vat ancl the Bayon arc religious architecture of a variety that bursts definitions ancl categories. The builders used all the tricks of their trade-everythi~ the\- knellabout form and structure and light and interval-to
invent a space with
c,therworldLy rcsonances. .4nd h\- bringing divine space into the here and non, they created a transcendent experience that is, incredibly enough, knit into the fabric of human experience. Everybody notices ho\\ thew monuments have been worn down hy time, hut \\-hat ifar Inore interesting is that their meanings arc not diminished so much as transfc~mmed.The architecture takes on new implications even as the very idea of the sacred that t3mught the temples into being fade\ a%-ay. The ancient (:amhoJians set out to recreate the sacred \vorlci a\ a palpable reality. That this reality has changed and transmogrified, like everything else in the world, is the most magnificent proof that their labors were not in vain.
S
intrigued as we are by \\-hat hnghor once \\;is. those of us \\-h0 are
not claw students of ancient (:;tmbodia arc perhaps even more hscinated by \\-hat it h s I-tecome. The immense tree trunks and root systems that overrun cioorn;i!-S and to\\-er, and stiltue). creating a disquieting inter%-eaveof nature and rulturc, have a haunting hscination. perhaps because the red sandstone reliefs seem a\ much a part of the natural order as the vegetation them. Those sandstone \I-allsLook triumphant that threatens to over.;~~helm e v e in d
i
. n d even \\hen hnghor \Vat \\-as losing its significance as
the center of a cult of the Hindu god-king, it \\-as acquiring a nem- nleaning a* the heart of <:nmhodiiin Buddhism. Angkc~rKht's galleries have at times been full of almost casu;tlly heapecl Buddhas. some of which draw the pious to prayer even today. In the French phcjtographer Mari Rihnud's alt3urn. Arlgkilr. 7 %Sure~mity ~ [if BsliiNilsni. u-e see the gatherings of Buddhist monks, n-ith
their shaved heads and axetic mien, still eating and praying ancl collecting alms in the ,hado%-Sof thew 11-all, that were put up so long ago.
Thew stones do speak--of
Hindu kings, of Buddhist monks, and, no\\-,
of the d r e m of a modern (:amhodinn democracy. During the darkest days of the '70s. when the m-orld \vondrred if .%ngkorm-ould survive at all, it \\-as not only twcause people feared for its neglect, hut perhaps even more hecause they understood that Pol Pcst wanted to obliterate the very sense of history that had ftleled interest in these ancient (:arnk-todian nlontrnlents. fol Pot wanted to return to "year zerow-his own brave neu- u-orld-and
in
order to accomplish that feat he intended to destroy not only the people
\\-h0 remembered anytt~ing,but also the things they might ren~ernber.And for those \vho in recent years have hoped that <:ambodia \\-as becoming a
place \\-here freedom might flourish, thew images of ancient gods and their mountainous retreats are at the heart of what muht not he forgotten, of the kno~-ledge of the past that is integral to the life of the mind kvithout l\-hich democracv cannot survive. York (In July I I , \\-hen the 51
i j l ~ z t >ran i 11 photograph
of ii soldier from
Hun Sen's <:nmbodian People's Party, rifle in hand, guarding .4nghc,r \%it. there could be no doubt that <:ambodia, of X-hichAngkor \Vat has become such potent a svmbol. \\-as again under siege. 4 s for the mFstery of h m - a t3uilding that originally honored the absolute polver of a god-king could become the emblem of democracy's hsipe, that is only the most recent yurstion to \vhich the immense &icesstaring do\\-n from the to\\-er, of the Ra:-on have chosen to rcspon~1\\-ith their enigmatic smiles. ,%XU(,T~ST If K- 18, 1997
LATEST A N D GREATEST
I have rarely been so happv at a nluseunl she\\- as I \\-as at the exhibition of G o r g e s Braqw's late paintings that \\-as at tbc Menij I:t>llectinn in Htsustr,n over the summer. In the tjq-o decades preceding his death in 1963 at the age of X I , this master. m-ho n half century earlier had handed together with Picasso and created I:ubism. \\-as taking issue m-ith his own seamless virtuosity. It's fascinating to \\;itch as a supremely accomplisheii artist reache, \\-ay \\-ay beyond \\hat he knolvs for sure. The series of paintings of the artist's studit,, \\-hich preoccupied Rraque in the late '40s and early '50s. is in many respects his summing-up achievement. Thew compositions are filled to t,vertlo\\-ing =with the palettes, brushes, eawls, and ciim-ahes that must have felt, after all those years. like extensions of his o\vn body, as hmiliar as his arms, l e g . and hands. Studit) 11 ' 11 gives off ;l soft, peach-fuzz, early morning Light. The rest of the canvases are mostlv dark toned and shalton-y, and of these I think the fine,t are Srriilrt) 11 ' and Srridztr I X Braque uses the nocturnal look t ~ fthe painting to create a sensiltion of boundless mystery; it's n if \\-e're seeing the constellations in the night sky. Man\- of the
. ) r ~ i l l ~ suggest ?~
a burning-the-midnight-oil fever. yet
Braque's juxtapositions are so elaborately labyrinthine that the ardor has n slo\ved-iio\vn, valedictory effcit. The Srririlos are full of overlapping images and plunging spaces and pictures-kvithin-pictures5They're about unft~lciing pofiiihilities. and the something-from-next-tcl-nothing miracle of artistic creation. Kben the painter and phc3tographer Mexander Ijberman wrcste about Rrayue in 1960 in 1 7 .?rtrsr ~
in
I f i s Sruilrt?, he remarked that visiting this
studio \\-as like "standing in a luminous womb," and thzt i o n o t h e r , t ~ n i verse-in-miniature \vav of describing the experience of the paintings.
Rraque is allo\\-ing himself to drift and \\-ander. His mc,vement are such an a*tonishing mix of deliberation and abandon that I find rn~,elfmesmerized and \\-ant to fcjllow wilerever he leads..
No artist has ever taken greater risks. Braque coml3ines the mo\t or&nary stuciio paraphernalia \vith images of birds, one perched on an easel. several others with full, soaring kvings. Thew birds heighten the allegorical Jrama; n-e know instinctively that they represent the artist, ready to take
off. Rraque i, exploring his pliiyfullv, daringly anarchic impulses-he's ing-ancl
fly-
there is an alvesome wmplesity to the n-qthat a ta\te for fantasy
and caprice complicates his pa*sion for beautifully mea*ured effects. Rrayue remains essentially a still life painter. but he brings such a concentrated attention to the most kmiliar object:, that they acquire a neR- kind of dranlatic presence, at once jq-armlt- inviting and eerily bizarre, These late works have their knotty. ot7tuse passages. They're an olci man's aperjus piled high; that's their kiscination. Braque is Iqering impressions to create an allegorical ruckus. The Stuiilos are summing-up paintings unlike any others in the history of art. for the reckoning has less to do with putting matters in their proper place than m-ith catching n definitive impression of the kvhirling. m)-sterious -\l-ay that we take in the \\-orld. "Rraque: The Late \X'orksVwas organized by the English art historiitn Iohn Golciing and created a sensation at the KO\-a1hcadem!- in idondonlast \\-inter. Late style has hshion value in our fin-de-si6cle-bescitted time,. but even so Rraque remains a to-the-side kind of tolvering figure. Although he can satisfy an increasingly kviciespread craving fcjr en~igamedramas, he \\-ill disappoint thaw who think of late style as over-the-top style, and are foH Osexual ~ cused on the hell-bent brushwork of Titian's Fiuyrng of M U ~ S Y Uthe looniness of Picaso's L)ionvsiac explosions. There are great artists 11-ho,as they near the ends of their lives, seem to \\-ant to shatter each pictorial problem a* the\- resolve it. and the result is work that achieves n startlingly un-
complicated availability-a
peremptory, all-in-one impact. Rraque goes
pretty far. too, hut he goes in a different directic~n.He is rather like Poussin. in that in his final phase he \v;ints to give an elaborate, alrnmt pedantic at~ most specialized tecfinical questions. Braque's late m-ork ha.s a tention t i the veiled impact. He is elaborating mvsterious, elusive effects. He is the aged <:ubist king, surveving his domain, still meditating on and enshrining the very rules that he's done so n ~ u c hto invert and overturn. The .$tuilos. \\-hich filled one of six rlasbirally proportioneci galleries that provided a grand setting fcjr the show at the Menil, represent only a fraction of W-hatRraque accomplished in the years after \X'orld Khr E. Rraque \\-as puAing in many different directions, and, e5pecially after completing the last of the Sruilrm, he seemed to \\-ant to clear the air, to adopt a spirit of radical simplification in paintings of bouquets, of heaches and fieliis. and. finally, of birds in flight. C:oming near the end of his life, $<)meof those intimately scaled landscapes and nlonunlental birds have the unforgettable bre\it)- of parting glances. In one small picture of a bicycle in the rain (which \\-as not. unfcjrtunately, included in this shm-), the dashes of rain supge\t a tear-st;lined, final farewell poignancy. Khen a great artist is still \\orking at this kind of fever pitch at the end of his life, there is so much accumulated experience going into everything he cloe, that even his tiniest move has a remarkable scale and sn-eep. In the ' 5 0 ~\\-hen ~ Braque \\-as intervien-ed h\- b h n Ribarcison, he observed that painting \\-as rather like "reading tea leaves." .4 part of the glorious complexity of Braque's late m-ork has to do with his being not only the fcjrtune teller \\-h0 reacls the leaves. but also the rook \\-h0 prepares the brew and the seeker after truth 'iq-ho finds his next n ~ o v ecleternlined F>\- what the tea leaves tell, The some%-hatcontradiltory impulses that c o m e through in tbc late painting reflect the personality of an extraordinarily refined man m-ho is also an audaciously free spirit. Kk recognize this personalit\- from the ear-
lier jq-ork, b ~ l tthe Fdmiliar elements are no\%-heightened, untlerlined. Rraque m-ant a palimpsest-like quality. with his youthful, Cubist and even I'auvist aclventures echoing, ricocheting, becoming louder as he nears the end.
A number of &%mericancritics n-ho wrote about the Braqtle exhibition \I-hile it n-as in Idondonregretted that the show would not visit Ne\v York, the citv that still leads taste in America if not the would. 1 agree. There are many nrti\ts in New York \vho adore Rraque's late paintings, but the adrninm s to be akrgic ttr this istrators 11-hobook the sfion-Sinto the 1 ~ ~ 1 s e n seem \I-ork. This is not a nem- situation. In 1982, the P'ilillip (:oilection in \*rErashington nlounteci another magnificent s h m - of late Rraquc. and it. too. bypassecl New York. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nrti\t \\-ho summoned up those great clreams that are the Studztrr and the city that pride* itself on the fact that it never sleeps. .4nd if we reckon that the restlessness of New Ytxk is in some measure a paradigm for the restlessness of late-tkx-entieth-century art, then jq-e can begin ttr grasp Rrayue's paradoxisal reputation at the end of a century \\-hose art he helped to shape in so many e\sential w a p . Braquc
j q - 2 ~a
man who had his o\vn aristocratic indepen~lence,jq-hich
gave him the confidence to take those definitive steps away from Renaissance perspective at the beginning of the century. But by no\\, a generation and more after his death, his instinctive indifference to received opinion has turned him into a figure apart. l o n g with a nunlher of other long-lived pitrneers of the first quarter of the centurv, Rraque fcjund hi, m-ork becoming kmiliar to the huge public that came to modern art after \Vorlcl \Xhr II; but if Picasso. I.(.ger, and (:hagall sought popularit\- and \\ere loveci for doing so. Rraque earned his patriuchal status m-hile pursuing the narrokv intensity of an art de*igned for an older aristocracy of ta*te. In the era of the expanding art audience, he did not spurn the public, hut he did not court it. either. The
audience loved him, hut from afar. The\- respected the cloistered elegilnce of his art, They understood that he preferred not to reach out to them, that he expected them ttr come ttr him.
Rrayue work\ from instinct; he \\-ants to sneak up on his subjects, to dream his \\-a\-into them. He
\\in
muse on a motif as unexceptional as a kvrought-
iron gariien chair in a series of paintings that stretches over a period of years anci even decades. Rut these series have none of the orderly. prepared-to-heexhibited. almost scientific-minded spirit that \\-e k n m - from Monet's
II~ystircksor Ciltil~drirlr.B r a q ~ is ~ etoo cieep!? subjective an artist to ever exactly categorize his impre\sions. He seems to \vmt to grapple with some initiL: l :1n1' pxuion, and that process involves indirectness, \vatchfulness. He m-ill trj- to represent a single object-\a!-.
a pitlette----ill as many ciifferent \\a\-$ a\ he ran
pofi"i>l\-imagine. He pursues his motifs not necessarily until they have reat-het$some clarified form, but until he has satisfiett hirtlsellt: B\-which time the motif may have nearly ciissolved, as is the case in one of his late\t and largest lianciscapes, \\-hi& focuhes on the shadtr~-Y. pointillist image of a plw~-. Rraque's subject\ do not expliiin themselves easily: that is part of their f,lscination. He seems to be drawn to a partic~~lar stretch of land or a pitrticular trhject m-ithout knowing quite \\-h?: m d the pitinting ~?ecome\his wa). trf finding out. Rrayue spent much of a decade painting interiors dominated
l,\- a t3illiard table. yet he \\-as at best a casual billiarii player and did not own a table. He probably fcjund in the geometry of the billiard plme some emblem for pitinting itself. He mai- have been %\\-arethat <:hardin---the key figure in the art of the still lit;;.,at least befixe <:tzanne-\\-as
the son of a
cabinetmaker l\-ho built billiard tiihles for the king. .4nd Rrilque probably likrd the game's aura of masculine aplomb. .4 man n innately elegant n Rraque m-ould have seen billiards as part of a seductive ntmc~spherethat also inilucieci comfortable leather chair,, soft evening light, good cigars, anci old
<:nlvados. Rraque evokes a \\-hole range of associatic~ns\\-ithout quite bringing then1 into focus: ultimately we're just glad to sink into the artist's contemplative mood. All the later \\-ark* have a medit;ltivc intensit\-. Rraquc lingers over hrniliar t,l>jects; he clevelops his own technique* for evoking the naturalistic darzle of ephemeral effects. He's Edscinated by the \\-ay light glances off variously colored and textured surhces, and he uses the substance of the paint to describe e v e r ~ h i n gfrom the softness of a ilower to the gleaming harilness of a ceramic vase. In 7lrr SIOI~P (1942). he become, almoht cibsessed jq-ith the refleitive pmperties of metal surkres. Yet his feeling for the repre\entational basics is complicated-anci
even explodeii-t?\-
a real, at once pragmatic and meta-
creates an illusion. .4 kind of now-yju-seephy*ical, to see exactly h o ~paint it-no\\--you-don't magicianship had r harac terizeci his grandest Cut3ist painting in 1912; and in these later decade, Rraque \\-as enlarging on the Jrolleries and comic high-\\-ire acts that
had been Cubist grace notes, until
he defined a n e n principle of radicallj- naturalistic perception.
In l l i Cirlriiirtsr ~ (1947-49). Rraquc isolates the several strokes of preciselv differentiated gray that create the highlight on a vase, so that each stroke takes on a fveestanding sknificance-a
life of its own. He is simultane-
ouslv creating an illusion ancl pulling it apart. His handling of paint is nl\\-a\-, thrilling!? unpreiiictable. In some painangs a piled-high glob of pigment will he set right next to the thinne,t. m-atercolor-like effect. And he uses wild, surprising colors to heighten his put-it-together-and-takeit-apart clramas. In the Sireiitj.;. I see more subtly differentiated Frays than I imagined could exist, and the breathtaking fine-tuning of those values beconles a dimension of t h e artist's gutsiness. In other still lifes, flower
~ the color painting" and landscapes, Rraque dreams up hues that f l off charts: shocking. ziinily lush purple* and orange,; light-drenched yello\\-S: jq-eirdly clissonant greens.
Braque is quite ohviousiy JeIiberating over every move he makes, and it is a kind of deliberation that invites leaps into the unknolvn. The clissonancc twtkx-een the prosaic character of manv of Braque's subjects and the elahoratmess of his technique lends the paintings a peculiar gravity. A plain-asplain-can-be m-heat field or an ordinary stretch of beach takes on such poll-erful personal nssociiitions that y ) u feel sure that you m-ill relnelnber it for a lifetime. I.ooking at these ciinvases, I feel that I'm going through a slolv-moaon pmcess of discovery.
I'mm time to time---especially, I think, in the later '50s and early '60s--Rraque fails to integrate n composition. and y ) u begin to \l-onder if his poll-err aren't declining. A painting called
Coniptfilfrija
~ t r h.$ruis (1954-58).
unfiimiliar to me. is so over\vorked yet friigmented that it's hard to look at, and that's uncharacteristic of Rraque. \\-h0 generally rises to the challenge of n loaded motif. The garden chair painting incluiied here. I'be
Tt2rrbfi-e
(1948-61), is fussy and diffuse: hut this is n problem of selection, for T/w
Mirave (;drdr,i
Cilirlr (194740)---another
niit imit~dedin the ehibition-is
painting in this series. hut one that is
an idio\yncratic masterpiece. Rraqur re-
mains a really surprising artist right to the end. In those last years he allows the birds. lvhich had appeared in the '40s as \isitors in familiar interior spaces, to take off on their own and fill some fairly big canvases. Thew are among the odiiest ancl mo\t clisquieting of a11 Rraque's painting. The subject provokrs thoughts of soilring freedom. hut there is often something terrifyingly earthhjund about the compo\itions. j\-ith their heavily j\-orked, h ! p e r - l a t e r i a i d surhces. Braque's birds are anything hut streamlined: this mo\t elegant of artists seems to be taking the risk of a%-k\vardness.The nests that appear in some of the paintings suppest that a nem- life is t,eginning, but these nests also force the grolvn-up birds to stay clme to home. Braque is thinking as much about the pull of the earth a* the glory of flight.
There could he no better setting for Braque's paintings, =which are at once imperious ancl austere, rn~sticaland matter-of-Eact. than the severely elegant galleries of Houston's Menil (:t?llection. Ilominique cie Mmil, \\-h0 is the guiding intelligence behind this unique n l e r i c a n in\titution, is a collector \\-h0 knm-s that the nholute materialit? of art can take on a spiritual dimension, ancl she has created a conlplex of buitdings in which those transformations take place, time and again. Hcr museum includes beautiful Russian icons and South Sett\ and African idols (1%-hichBraque also collected). Nearby t3uitdings house the Rothko Chapel ancl (the complex's most recent ad~iition)n B\-zantine Cypriot Chapel with remarkable t h i r t e e n t h - c e n t u ~ frescoe,. At the Menil you are always &\\;ireof that leap into the beyond that some of the greatest art achieves, and in Braque's pitintinps you find a marter of the clo\e-to-home subject who is also one of the century's greatest poets of the impalpitble. the evanescent. These arc not paintings that you can feel half-n-ay about. You may be made uncomfc~rtableby their stanc1-alone a\surance. But if you like them you will probably love them; and if you love them you may feel. lvhile you are in their prcsmce, that therc is no other painter \\-h0 matters.
I can't remember \\-hen I didn't love Brayue's late pa.intings, and m a few occasions I have seen them under perfect conditions. There \\-as the shcm- at the Phillips in 1982, and several installations in France. one of late landscves at the I.Pger hfirreum in Biot and another at the I:ondatir>n hfaegl~tin ft.-Pad-de-Venw. But I have never seen these latest and greatest of Rraques presented as \\-ell as the\- \\ere in the Menil (:ollecaon's luminous interiors. Brayur's paintings can hardly he appreciated 11-ithout natural light. and the Menil's ingeniously skylit galleries. lvhich \\-ere ciesigned h!- the architect Renzo Piano. gave Braque's dense and complic;ited surfaces the delicate natural illumination that is needed to bring out this artist" sslrbtfest shifts in tone and touch. &%SI rounded a corner into the last
room. lvhich \\;is filled \\-ith the paintings of birds, the sun was breaking through a rainy Houston afternoon. h burst of light. streaming through the ceiling's louvered pitnels, turned this gathering of W-ingedforms into a glimpse of paradise. OC:~C>BFB 20, 1997
SETTING THE STAGE
At lea\t since the Renaissame, painters, sculptors, writers, conlposers, and
choreographers have fantasized about an art that would unite all the arts. and m-hen these imaginings have come clowst to becoming a reatit? it has generally been lvithin the framing device of the theatrical stage. The theater brings togctfier sight and sound, n1crs.ement and metaphor; it is a place \\-here all the arts ran join forces. at lea\t theoretically, to achieve a single goal. ( If course the reality is al\v;i!-s more complex, because sometime, talents kiil to mesh. or various meciia prove irreconcilable. or a presiding genius obliterates all collat,c,ratt~rs. In retrospect, the riskiness of even the souniiest artistic alliance$ is underscorcci by their ephemeral nature. Khat remains after the audience has gone home-\\hether
script. score, cos-
tume, set, sketch. memoir, photograph. or video tape-almo\t
inevitably
represents the interesting parts rather than the glorious \\hole. Rut even these fragments can exert a pokverful attracaon, for although \ve knonfrom experience that each art for111 follo\vs it\ 0%-nlogic, our visceral responses to the greatest painting, music, and dance tell u$ that ultimatel\there are only a fen- sky-high places where art ran go.
"Design. Dance, and Music of the Ballets Russes. 1909-1929." at the Kadsxx-cirth Atheneurn in Harttiird this fall, was abo~tta time when the fantar\- of a u n i y of the arts felt within reach ancl maybe, on certain nights in the theaters of
and Londcin \\-here Serge 13iaghilev3scompany \\as perform-
. the end of the nineteenth rentur:.. I3iaghilev ing, actually twcarne a r e a l i ~At had visited lyagner's Bayreuth almost annually, and tm-o decades later he forged something like Kagner3s(;~santrkr,nsttrPrk.but in the heterodox atrnosphere of mmtieth-centurv
The glue that held together the variep;iteii
talents of C:oiteau, Satie, Picasso, and Massine in Pirriade (1917), or of Derain, Respiphi (adapting Rossini), and Massine in Lrr
Bijtrfiijai.
Ft~nirlrque(19 19), owed
much to the star power of the d a n c e r s a n ~to l the adrenaline of a sciphisticated audience primed for a new experience. Many of the Ballets Russes events that had a strong visual arts component-uch
as Stravinsky's Le Cliirr~idft nest#-
r1111(1920). with sets by Matisse and choreography by Mnssine, or Jut-k-in-ihu-Bilk
(1926), in which L3er;lin ancl Ralnnchine m-orked together-no\\-
exist in such
fragmentary form that any attempt to assess their success can be counted \\-ishful thinking. n ~\vhm l there is so little concrete evidence. serious reservations that have been raised zibout the entire enterprise i;mk exactly 13e refuted. Aniirk I.evinson, the greittest ditnce critic of the period. announced in
1918 that "the het is the painterlv side of a pniducticin contradicts drama's hasic charaaer and essence: movement, development, dynamii:s." 'f'hat was twfore the major School of Paris painters got really involved. Later. counterarguments \\-ere made. a\ \\-hen (:orteau suggested that Braque's sets for
Lu5
Idilire* were so dynamic, so full of movement. that the\- hecitme n kind of choreography that rivaled and eclipsed Nijinskit's. Which may of course he another wav cifdescribing the failure of a collahoraticin. However imperfect manv of these collaborations \\-ere, ttterc has to be high drama \\hen visual artists of the ralibcr of Picasso. Matisse. Braque. I3e-
rain, and Gris devote large amounts of time and energy to the dance. n d the Kads~-orthAthenet~m,u-hich has the finest single collection of rnaterial in this field. is surely the place to explore some of the elements that \I-ere involved. Much of its treasure tr<)veof designs fcjr ccj\tumes, scenery, posters, zmQrcprograms \\-as p u r c h a ~ din 1933 from Serge I&r. a Ballets Kusses star and L>iaghilev\ saver for much of the '20. In recent decade\, the htheneunl has further enriched its holdings. especia1ly in costumes. True. the collection is spotty in some areas-it
does not, for in\tance, include any
nlateriaf relating to Pdritrii., the n-ork that marked Picasso's debut at the ballet---hut there m-ere a few original costumes on display in Hartford that could single-han~iediyresurrect the temper of an age. Iuan Gris's Cortlrrnr for
il ilrrbiid
comes out of a time \\hen the giddy pros-
peritv of the '20s hecime a hall of mirrors for artists, with \\hole lo\t epochs flashing into view. Gris casts his resurrection of the geometric fc3rmality of the Court of Louis XIV in through-the-rnists-ciffn~ez1~c>ry tone, of mauve. grav, ivorj-,siher. and gold; he gives the sculptural artu:tlity of the co\tume, \\-ith its crisply delineated panels. a painterly nostalgia. This Fmiifully dressed-up herald, \\hose almost absurdly beautiful livery suggests a delicious an~irogyn):.stands at attention. tooting on a golden metal horn. He's a Cubist's version of a Baroy ue boy toy. .4nd if ho\- to\- sc~un~is like a prepos*
.
terous \\-ay to describe a '20s version of Louis XIV courtline\s, realember that the Ballets Russes period \\-as serious about being preposterous, as \\-hen (:live Bell remarkeci that "the inspiration of jazz is the same as that of the art of the gwrril z~Pclc." Korking in the midst of a fashionable revival of interest in seventeenttlcentury costume and especially in the m-ork of lean BPrain, Gris took the <:uhist's feeling for the geometrired universe of Pciussin into the theatrical realm and found another area in lvhich to play \\-ith a modern idea about the all-too-human appeal of an impersonal kint.1 of order. This costume, al-
though originally designed for Roris Kochno's ballet Lus lkrrtutll~nsJe iir B~rfii'r~. \\-as actually first used in a pageant that I)Iaghile\- organized at Lrersailles in
1923. "The theater for l;\-hich Berain and his fellows designed costumes," Eevinson \;\-rotea little later, "N-asaloof, abstract, remosecl to an heroic plane but splen~lidlvhuman." .4n~lthat paradoxical spirit. which (:ubism had prol,ahly preparecl twentieth-century Parisians to recognize in seventeenth-century dkcor. saturates Gris's herald, who is so grave and so aclorable. Alexander Sct~otlsaloffW-rotethe detaiied catalog of the c-oikction, \\-hich has just been published b\- Yale. (The s h m - \\-as organized by three curators in Hartford.) .4cting as archeologist ancl historian, he has produced entries of great sensitivity on work that ranges from a late version of the Eton Rakst costume that Nijinsh had originally worn for Lu Sl~tprlwi l ~iir msi7 (191 l), to Rahst's co\tume\ fcx Diaphilev's legendary 1921 productic~nof 1 7 ~
3Evt~pmgBrlarrty (called T h p Slilil11rtr)liPntiipss), to Andre Derain's cle\igns for *flrcl;~n-tilp-fiirx. f
i t no s h m - could clo justice to the nlultiple 1;Lctorsthat und~rlay
this period of intense (and often kir from effective) collaborations. The bitsic plot. though. is simple. L)iaghilev gradually shifted from productic~nsbased on the design talents of his Russian compatriots, especialiy .4lexandre Benois and ECon Bakst, to an increasecl invcilvement 'iq-ith Schciof of Paris painters. for many of W-hornhe provided their first involvement m-ith the theater. Behind this bare outline, there is the more complicated story of how Iliaghilev made the one-act t>allet,=with its fully integrated vision of dance, music. ancl cle\ign, into the model for theatrical dancing in the \Vest. For arti\ts such a\ Matisse. Pira\so, ancl Ilerain, \\-h0 had been collapsing illt~sionisti~ space in their o\vn work in the years just after 1900, the stage held the fascination of a return to the deep box of air that they had left behind. Rut for choreographers, the elaboration of the dkcor coulcl t3ecorne an inhibititrn to the dance-sometimes
literdy so, when costume, restricted
movement. One of the main attractions in Hartford \\-as n group of costume, designed by cie Chirico for Lu B d (1929). \\-hich marked Balanchine's first attenlpt at choreographing a young-man-meets-Cite-at-a-piirty ballet. You only had to look at these magnificently Cintiistic im-entions, in m-hich
de Chirico t i ~ r n smen and \\-omen into afchitectural cc3ni.eits-bristling \\-ith columns and capitals, bursting \vith his creep- Bamque fcc undit\--tc) see n-hat Balanchine u-as in flight from Later on, m-hen he taught Ye\?- Yark to expect practice clothe, and an un~lecoratedstage. liveryone agrees that 1)iaghilev came closest to his dream of a fully integrated theatrical art in his joinings of music and dance, e,pecially in some of his Stravinsky c+ollabciratic3ns,which ar-11ievt.d an intricacy, flexibility, and concentriltion that had few precedents. Diaghilev never joined the visual arts to dance or music 11-iththat kind of hand-in-glove intensity; yet he \\-as acting out of the most serious motives m-hen he gambled that he could. Refore Diaghilev ~ievotecihimself to the ballet, he had a part in introducing a modern approach to painting to Russian eyes u-ith Kqrili i f Art, the magazine that he published in Saint Petersbuug. f o r LSiaghilev, painting n-as a key to dance. ( h e of the gifts he sent to i.ifar \\hen he \\-as stuciying \\-ith the t3allet master linrico (:ecchetti in Italy \\;is a package of "pamphlets containing reproductions of pitintings t3j- about twenty kmous artists." In his autohiographv, Lifar recalls that Later LSiiighilev took him to see the (Giottos in Padua, \\-here "'our tkx-0 souls met together more t h n ever in an upswge to\v;ird the Beautiful." It \\-as after seeing the (;iotto\ that Lifar's "destiny \\-assealed": he would be a con~n~anding presence trn the stage.
And if p a i h n g could d o that for a dancer. \\-h? \vould LSiaghilev not have expected that there \\-ere things that ciancers and choreographers could do for artists, too? In Kqrili [$Art.Diaghilev had said that "paintings either h x e merit or they don?, regardless of =-hat style the\- b e l o q to.'We \\-assaj-ing tha.t there \\-ere certain structural constants, v\-hether a painting
jq-aa I~~rr-oco, realist, or Postimpreilsionist. He carried that principle into the theater \\hen he joined forces \vith Fokine to create t,;tllets that nlight be (Iriental or fr~lkioricor cliissical in feel hut \\-ere al\\-ay, guided by an idea of the complete coherence and integrity of everything that the auiiienre jq-oufd see. The painters \vho jq-ent to see the Ballets Russes from 1910 onkvards, and it seems that all of them did, may initially have been struck less by Diaphilev's deep visual culture than by his ability to give n theatrical spin to some of their recent ciiscoveries. The green and orange color scheme of Sihi'irbiir~ir~ie (191 1) may have revolutionized Parisian taste in fashion and inte-
rior dkctrr, but painters were well am-are that Bakst's Eastern-or t,aricV-palette
"bar-
\\-oulii have been unimaginable if the Fauves hadn't put
such colors in their p a i h n g s half a ciecade earlier. Picasso (according to Stravinsky) called SL-hiiiiirirzild~a masterpiece, hut Matisse counted Bakst's scheme\ arbitrary, an "avalanitie of color" that had "'no
forcev-Salon
Fat.1-
\-ism. WC jq-ill probably never h i m - exactly m-ha.tthese artist., tliought about the ballet before they became ciirectly involved; prohablv their thoughts \\-ere t,;trcly formed. B\- 1913. ho\vevcr, the painters had to be a%-areth;tt Nijinsky. in his choreography for L'ul~ibr-wrdrJ'tm faanp, [err*. ancl Lu .$iriw iltr Prrnt-
unzps. v s Lira\\-ing on archaic Greek sculpture. (;auguin's Tahitian compositions, ancl mai-be fr~lkart. as he rethought the hwis of figurative eupwskon .4nd at that paint, there \\-as no longer a questic~nof theater people t,orro\ving effects from painters. No\\- pitinters and dancers \\ere digging together ~ i o ~to- nthe fcIundations of Western art. The argument that Pic;tsm and the rest of them \\ere selling out the modern revolution m-hen they took up m-ith L3iaghilev \\-as \\ell advanced by
1920, and it has never really gone 21%-ay.Yet the closer y ~ look u at the synerg)- betm-een the Ballets Russes and the artists, the dearer it became\ that painters of the caliher of Pica\ro and Matisse \\-ere hnding in the dance m-orld
a new key to the inner logic of their art. RV the time these painters began to \\-ork in the theater, they knew they \\ere not going to follow their own mo\t radical revolutii~nsinto \\hat seemed to some like the next logical step of pure nhtract painting. Ancl dance, a kind of abstraction that \\as nevertheless centerecl on the figure. th;tt beclmck of Kkstern art, must have had a deep, imtinctive appeal. Dancers and choreographers understoijd t h t even the most startling innovations of the Ballets Russes were grounded in old ideas about movement. That feeling of groundedi~essin tradition \\-ould make sense to artists \\hi>, after the structuriil breakthroughs of 1:nuvism and Analytic Cubism, m-ere thinking that all this \\ould have heen impossible without l"c3ussin, <:(>rot,and <:4zanne, and that mai-be the time was ripe to reexanline thew ancestors. Ballet presented a classical paradigm that couldn't be un~ierstoodif all
you saR-\\ere toe shoes and elegant poses. The ciisiipline of the ciancer, \\-h0 submits to the stricte\t kincl of daily regimen in the hope of finally bursting onto the stage a\ n unique individual. \\as the perfect metaphcir fcx artistic c,riginalit\-. (:liissicism in ballet \\-as groun~iedin the logic of the body. So \\-as classicism in Kestern painting. The painters saw- the connection. After R r l d Khr I. \\-hen Matisse \\;is designing LP Cliulrr rill rt~srrgw~l for D~aghilev,he \\-as also mtering upon \\hat \\;is arguably to be the closest, mo\t exacting studv of the nude in his entire career. I-le was taking his 011-n kind of daily class. In 1919. Matisse sitid, "I \\-ant to ciepirt the typical and the unkers~tlat the same time." He might have heen describing \\hat a cianccr does. The m!-stery of ballet \\-as that an impersonal discipline could reveal personalitv. Matisse's pitintings of the '20s-in
\vhich the figure is more and more the
form that, tlirc.lugh the complexity of its muscular articulation, makes t ~ s understand the space-ma\-
present a distant analogue to \\hat Raliinchine
began to do \\-ith the body a few- \-ears later. hncl it roulci be that the riot of
red and green in Matis,e's ocialisques of the mid-'20s \\-as, among many
other things, a comment on S~hr;hir~~;~lile, m-ith Ni jinskv's t~ncoilingsla-e replaced by n vt~luptuousm-oman.
In l"rc~tuc??h~~ttrl., the I-test boi>k ever n-ritten about the painters and the Bailets ttusses, Douglas C:oi-tper says that working \\-ith dancers "gave Picasso a unique opportunitv to csbserve the human body in action, to draw freely from live models, and to take note of expressive paws and gestures." Both Matisse and I3erain drew from the nude on a more regular basis, yet they \\-ere also kiscinated by the intmsely specialized nature of dance movement. B\- the early '20s, the idea of dancers a* people who create out of the very essence of their being. =which is their physizality~eemsto have been on painter', minds, at least if m-e can trust <:octeau. Kriting of Rraque's decor for
Lu5
Fii-hpux, C:t?cteau speaks of Hraque as if he \\ere a dancer: "He enters
naked, an athlete sure of his beautv after twelve years in the stadium. Me hides his c-alculations under firm flesh, He does not she\%- his skeleton, \I-hich in an artist must be considered the only offcnse aprtinst n~odesty*"
Picasso. Derain. and Matisse. \vho for a time \\ere the Big Three of Parisian art. each had a distinct yet overl~ippingrelation to the ballet. Picasso had been there first, and his five Diaghilev commissions probably had the most liisting impact on popular perceptic~nsof the modern artist and the ballet. Yet it may hilve been .%ncir(.Ilerain, in the cliiritv and the sheer craft of his \\-ork. who suggeaed that a large pictorial imagination could achieve theatrical professionalism. In his own work L3erain had already explored n vast range of historic-al st\-les. and as the Parisian master \\-h() had the drepe,t c o m i t m e n t to stylistic pluralisnl a* a modern revelation, he was inttinctively attracted to the kaleidoscopic nature of a Ballets Russes kind of theatrical imagination. Picasscs and Ilerain immersed themselves in the tlteater,
In his tmok 17iu 13iaflhriu1*Buller in Lt,nriilit9 <:yril Deaunlont recounts that I3erain
\I-ould create little drawings of faces, 11-hichthe dancers kept in their drcssing r00n1s to use in putting on their makeup. t
the premier of LP 7i.riijnrp.
Picasso appeared on stage "accompitnied by a stage-hand carrying a tray of grea\e paint." and the great Spaniarii did some of the dancer's makeup himself; the face \\-as a new canvas.
In Picasso", hfatissc's, and Derain's encotlnters 11-ith the Ballets Kusses you see different kinds of clarsicism. Picasso's is ironic and historicist, a matter not of essences but of surfaces. For Picasso at the time of h m d e , as Douglas Ct~operexplains, stagecraft was a way of dealing \vith "the connection t3etween Cutist reality. visible rcali ty and the accepted pictorial reality of the naturaiistic illusion." The curtain that Picasso painted for P i d r ~ t d ~a,
nab-ely classical scene of cirrus people at a table. inaugurated a whole tradition of Ballets Rushes curtains that raised illusion-and-realit\ questions even before the action haci begun. These pitinted curtains \\ere hiddm be-
hind tlie ordinary ttleatrkd curtain, wbile the auciirnce was coming into the thrater. As the music- began, the first curtain \\-em up, revealing another curtain. m-hich, in the case of P~ruiiij,\\-as almost hut not quite traditionally illusionistic. And then th;tt curtain \\-as raisecl to reveal the paradox of a 11-orld that was three-dimensional. hut not necessarily in a normatively naturalistic wa\= For Picasso, ballet \\as a dkjii-vu-all-over-again experience. since the Spaniard, now m-ell into middle age. \\-as seeing phantom\ of the circus perfc3rmers of his already phnntom-like Rose Period, but phantoms gro&-n \\-orlilly, complicated. ironic, dangerously ambitious. (Ince the boys and girls ancl old men had rna~irup a ragtag troupe seen at dusk on a tiny square in Montmartre. You- the old man \\;is Picasso's not-so-tild friend I)iaghile\-, and Pica\ro had married one of the girls. who \\-as named ( Ilga, and the boys standing at the bar were self-conscious young men who knew everphing there \\;is to knoll- and then some. No \\-on~lrrthere's such a no\\--you-see-
it-no\\--you-dm't an~l-tiguitv to the l ~ r e s y u eline that Picasso nses to &&v portraits of Stravinskv. 1)iaphilev. Ma*rine, Bakst, <:octeau, nncl Satie. As for hfatisse's cfassicism, it is more abstract than Picasso%+cfoser in some respects to the root-cause Neoclassicism that Strayinsky and Balanchine m-ould consolidate m-ith .?pollot, Muiqirp in 1928. Matisse's pale di.cor for LP Cliillrr da
it~ulgte~l evoked
not only a misty chinoiserie hut also the siher
and ivory universe of the nineteenth-zentu~hallet. On displiry at Hartford \I-as the famous pencil sketcl~for the curtain, with its chinoiserie dogs, and a costume for a charnl-terlain, of thin satin material 11-ith clelicate flo~b-ers painted hy Matisse himself. Matisse \\-as a kir more private personality than either Picasso or ISerain, so it's not really a surprise that after Li.
Cliilrlr
iitr
fi~utfiat~i he designed only once more fcjr the stage. For Rrjr!qu et .iVi?!r, the 19.19
birliet \\-ith L-hnreigraphybj- hfassine itnd music by Shosta.kovir:h, Matisse created some dazzlingly hard-edged costumes and dkcor and reportedly scored an enormotxs success. The ballet, abotx t a cosn~icbattle het\\-een nlateriaf and spiritual forces, must have made perfect sense to Matisse, m-ho in the late '30s \\-anted to give stripped-iiolvn forms an explosive impart. He \\-as reaching for the kinds of effects that \ve k n m - from nonobjective artfr~m Brancusi, Arp, and Mondrian-and
the cutout techniques that he
used originally for some of the costume, fcjr LP Cliillir ds it)ss~gnilland then incorpxated in his m-ork fcjr R o u g ~et X~rrherald the paper cutouts of his last years. But then all of 1M;ltisse's ballet clr\igns h;we a clistilled power that prefigures his last and grandest meclitation on a drama that takes place in real time ancl space: the (:hapel of the Rosary at Lrence. Picasso's classii:ism is layered and evasive. hfatissc" is abstract itnd speculative.
,%S
for ISerain, he's a pragmatic <:lassii:ist. His stt~liie,for the-pik-
~n-tiitp-Bo\ costumes. \\-ith their flat folk-art color, may strike us as having
, realize that little to do \\-ith ballet trad~ticsn.A miiment later, t h o u g l ~n-e Derain is that rarest of artists 1vh0 has actually thought at-tout his designs
in terms of the arm, hand. leg, and foot placements of classic-a1clance. I)erain \\-as a man of paradoxes. He valued equally surface and structure. fantasy and reality: and in the theater his paradoxes could work, becat~se here paradox \\-a\ an everyilay reality. fili-l;-in-ihp-Utr%, the second of his Diaghilev ballet\, had only a handful of performance\, hut La Boirffylir Fmtusyrrt~n-as one of the most enduring works of I)iaghilev9scareer, a creation \\-ith choreography by Massine and nlusic arranged by Respighi after late piano pieces h\- Rossini that could still look "af r e h as ever" to Ed\%-in Denb!. in 1939. Llr Bolrt~ytrcF~lntaiqz~~ is set in a toy shop in a resort town at the edge of the Mediterranean. The time is 1865. It is a fantasy about dolls that rebel against the shoppers who are going to buy them and then separate them. ,"l1 cif this is the occasion for a seriel of character clances-a tarantella, a c-ancan,m d sci on. La Uoutrqrre Fiintusyrre is Victorians honed untit its quirks became essences. To theatergoers after the \v;ir, Ilerain offercci the style of their grandparmts' youth a\ a particular past that \\-as also every past---a hilarious!\- \\-onderful lost \vorlii. The key is intensificiition through impersonalizaaon. Dolls are simplified people. The clances arc standard numbers, in\tantly recc3gnizahle. Respighi adapted Rossini's late pimo pieces. Lui Pvtfts Rtms. m-hich are the tiniest hits of music. The backdrop, a view of a bucolic Mediterranean port with a paddle \\heel t,oat, is the essence of a painting-painting redureci to the t33sic infc3rmati0n. a distillation of every scene of the south. The studit.\ that have surviveci bring to mind Stravinsky's saj-ing that \\-hen he and Picasso were in Naples in 1917, "N-e both had a pahsion for old gouarhes s h o ~ - i n views g of Naples or t y i r a l Neapolitan scenes, and on our many 11-alkswe raided the junk-shcips in search of these." And this, in turn. recalls (;ertrucie Stein's remark, in her essay "Pictures": "I like to look at anything painted in oil on a flat surface. . . . I like a false m-in~lo\\-or vista painted on a house a\ they do so much in Italy."
In the souvenir program for the London sear,on in INIO, Iliaghilev praised Derain ar, 'harenovator of the purest f renih classisal pziinting'hnd observed that "to the harchanali;in splendor of the Ruhsian ciecorators he has oppmed the classic harmc~nyof color." If you read accounts by Adrim Stokes in his the
Rlis~liltiAil/li'ts, or
iYc"w
by <:live Bell, reporting in July 1919. in the pages of
l i ~ ~ b b tyou s , realize that this dicor u-as just one element in the ex-
pansive clar,rical spirit of LQ litrtiilyar Ft~tirilsyur.K h a t is mo\t kiscinating about Bell's ohservatic,ns ithat he not only sees a connection berm-ern music, choreography. sets, and costumes: he also relates it nli to a ne\\- kind of dance personality---or impersonality. He \\-rites of I.viiia Lopokova, \\-h0 plzii-ed one cancan dancer (Massine \\-as the other), that she "is as little concerned with telling the public about herself as a painter, a poet or a musician shoulci be. In that smse she is impersonal. Rut. of course, she is personal too; all artists are." (In the same year, 7 . S. Eliot, in his e,sa)- "Tradition and the Individu;tl Talent." \\as supger,ting that impersonality \\-as an arti\tic ideal.) Lopclkova imntrt an ai:tress in the extrovert sense, like Karsavina, a dancer
\I-horn Bell had first seen half a decade earlier. Lopokova does not "express directly to the public." She "transmutrls personality into sofilething more precious." She pours herself "into \\-orks of art from =which the public may deduce \\-hat it can." She is as impersonal-as quinteshential-as
charming, as
Rossini's music. Marsine's dances, Derain's Mediter-
ranean vista.
( Irganizers
of exhibitions of old costume, and sets are sc~metime,put in the
curious position of emphasizing the least successful productions, since those are the ones k o n ~m-hich the nlort n~aterialst~rvives.K b e n E-taflets are repeated over and over, sets and co\tumer, get used up-thev
just disappear.
P Prrniuss, however, m-hich \\-as LI financial disaster The costumes for T ~SErlv~nfi in London. are still resplendent. Preparatory studies and later reconstrur-
tions can fill in the pir ture, t3u t any she\\- of this kind \\ill give a skened idea of \\hat audiences actually ,a\\-. Ancl there \\-asanother problem at Hartford. Since the core of the collection cime from I.ifnr----\\-h0 acquired much of it from Diaghilev or his heirs-the
exhibit reilected 1,ifar's workhorse view of
the Ballets Russes. rather than the more overtly experimental spirits of Nijinsky. Stravinsky. Picasso. and Balanchine. Thus the cover of the catalog sholvs Paul Colin's stud\- for a poster of Lihir as the Violin in L'Orihiistrd
6.n
Ltbvrti, 'iq-hichwas n~ountedin 1931, t\%-(-~) vcars
after L)iaghilev3sdeath. This tlim\\- design suggests that .School of Paris decor \\-as already slipping into decadence. Yet t\%-oyears later Derain \\-as again mgageci in immmsely fertile collaborations \vith Balanrhine, for Les Ballets
1933. T;_, understancf the trajectory of dance and cI&i-orafter Diaghilev, ytsu have to loo); to BitIanchine, 1)iaphilev's last hixeograpt~er.He was not a stfi-C)ngpresence in the sho\v, but he is a kind of mythical figure in the history of the \X:lrisn-orth t h e n e u m . The Lifar collection \\-as acquired for the nlusellrn by A. E-t-exert("C:hick") .2ustin, tlrbo was director bet\\-een f 927 and 1945. m-hen this oldest of .%merican museums \\-as the country's premier shovc-case not onlv for modern art but for rn~rsicand dance ar well. It \\-as a place, in short. where you could feel the 1)iaghilevian unit\- of the arts at \\-ork. It \\-as ,%ustinwho, in 1933, not only bought the Lifar collection but also, together m-ith his fello\\- Harvard graduate. Lincoln Kirstein, helped to bring Balanchine from Europe to Hartford, \\-here he haci first hopeci to create the schciol and the company that would later become New Yt~rk'sgreate\t c~rlturalin4titutions. Rajanchine \\-as a behind-the-scene5 figure in the she\\-. He's the man
\\-h0 had to contend with a lot cif the later School cif Paris decor, some of \I-hich was truly overbearing. But he also seems to have found in Derain's transcendent pmfersionalism-the?;
\\-orkeci together four times---a paral-
lel to his ovc-n evolving method. L)erain gave a lightness, a buoyancy. n clnr-
it\- of contour to the stage picture. lvhich \\-as perfect for Balanchine. During some of the earliest seasons in Nem- York, Balanchine used Ilerain's costumes for
Li.5
S a r ~ g ~(1933). s And
Ld
Boutrytr~ Funrilq.~ \\as part of a
Victorian-revival element in Ballets Russes 3kc0r t h ; ~ had t echoer years later at Nem- York City Ballet---in
nlu 1Virti:rirck~rand I f d r i ~ y u i n ~ dthciugh r, the tran-
scendent silliness of Derain's designs \I-ould, in the t.ranJs of E-Loraiei2rmistead and Itouben =r-Arutt~nian, I-tei-<,memerely adeyt~ate.But that jq-as prohahly h o Balanchine ~ wanted it. In .4merica he continued, at least for n time, to cc~llahoratewith only one vi3ual artist from Ballets Russes days. This \I-as Pavel Tc helitc hem; u-t.ro had designed Oiie fcx Diaghilev (1%-ithchoreography by hlassine) in 1928. Although Tchelitchex- t33rely fig~lresin the Hitrtfc~riishm-, he loomecl hrgc at the "Ithenet~min Austin's dav, jq-hen stlme believed that Neoromanticism \\-as the next step after modernism. In 1936, .&ustin c o m m i sitrned him to decclrate the musetlms inner court for a h p e r Ball n-hich has gone do\\-n in high-bohemian party legend. T i helitchen- cle\igned r ostumes for Austin and his jq-ifc to wear to the hall: a cancan ditncer and an elegant eqtlertrian thzt m i p l ~ tbe tfe\iribed as sub-Derain. Tchelitchew, of course, 'iq-asa hero of Kirsteink, \;\-h0once described the IC~rssirtn'sd4cor fcjr the 1942 production of ilpoib~n.2furirglii. as that of "a contemporary Poussin." Yet \\-hen it ciirne to cie\cribing the origins of clarsickm, nothing less than the truth \I-ould do. Although Piciisso n-as never one of Rirstein's favorites, Rirstein argued, in his chronicle of the It'e\\- York City Ballet. that the "neoclassic turnabout" of il~~rrllarrwas a reaffirmation of "the importance of classicism
. . . that had already been procliiimed by Picarsc,'~renunciiition of Cubism and his attraction to Pomprtian jq-atI painting." The artists \\-h0 collaborated =with Balanchine in his early years in m e r ica tended to be It'coromantics such as Tchelitcl~ewand (:hristian B6rard, \\-h0 posecl no great threat to the conventions of the theater, since their en-
tire feeling for art and illusion \\;is derived from the stage. Speaking of Tchelitchew, Kirstein pointed out that his decor for Oiiu "usecl light instead of paint" and that his design for Balanchine's 1936 production of Gluck's Orftii at the Metropolitan (Ipera "was conceived m-ithout an element of paint." This may have been theatrical genius, but for a painter it also anlounted to setting aside his most euential toids, and it had little to do with the meeting of minds that L3i;lghilev had hciped for in his glory days. Perhaps E&%-in Denby \\-as thinking along thew lines \\-hen. recalling art in Ye\\-York in the '30s, he ot7serveci that "do\\-ntolvn everybody loveci Picasso then. and \vhy not. . . . For rn~self; something in his steady \\-ide light reminded me then of the light in the streets and lofts we lived in. &%t that time Tchelitchekk-n-as the upto%-nmaster, and he had a flickering light." liltimately, it \\-as n steadv wide light that dominated the stage of the New York Citv Bailet, tt~oughPicasso \\-asnowhere in evirtencc. ,d\lthougt~
the artists cio\\-ntonn were going to the ballet, they \\-oulii have no role t3;tckstage. If I)ml3~-never stoppeci believing, a\ he \\rote in the '40s. that "a i d l e t set has to stand up under steaciy scrutiny almost as an easel pitinting does." he \\-oulci mostly have had to go to modern cianrc collaborations, e\pecially .4lex Katr's work l\-ith Paul Tir\-lor, to see that idea put to the test. Isarnu Nogurhi, a longtime collaborator of Martha (;raham9s, ciid cio the designs for the Balanchine-Stravinskj- Ovhrms in 1948. Kcrhert liauschent3erg's ditppled sets for Merce (:unningham3s Siirnmi)rs~?ili-cappeared in a Nenh r k Citv Ballet revival in 1066, Yet Kirstein \;\-ascletern~inedto make the case against the t~nitvof the arts, and to make it in no uncertain terms. In
Kytnskv Dirlicing, he delivered these epigrammatic rulings: "An ideal partnership of all the arts is an imaginary concept that remain\ m!-thical in theatrical practice." "There is n pious fallacy that L3iaghilev \\-as n master commanding or adjudicating collaboration. Actually. he \\-as a genius at impro\is;ltion \\-ith the available talent." "The Rgnerian formula of com-
plete art was efbcient propaganda to promc~teconclitions under which the composctr-prodtlccr might reign supreme." Rirstein \\-as not wrong. Still, there had been a time n-hen audiences in London and Paris had not been miseken in I3elic~ingth;tt Picasso. Matisse, and Derain \\-ere engaged in a true partnership with choreographers, ciancers. and musiciilns. Of course the Ne\n York Schciol lnckrd artists on the Olympian scale of those School of Paris masters. Rut it must h;tve occurred to Ilenty th;tt the black-and-lvhite pai~~tings that his good friend cie Kooning \\-asdoing in the late '40s kvould have been the perfect backdrops for Balanchine's new E-ttack-ancl-U-t~ite leotard E-tallets, As for Balanchine, he had been there, dcine that, and would no% as Kirstein put it, "reign supwme."
ACROPOLIS
MOW
The C;ett\- (:enter, in the Santa Monica foothills \vith all of his .%ngelesat its feet, mai- be the biggest c-ulttlral c-omples to open in this ccjuntq since the Lincoln <:mter for the Performing Arts, and damned if it's not another heap of travertine. Richard Meier, =who designed t h i good-tnte extravapanzii. doesn't go in for classical colonnades in the manner of Lincoln <:enter, \\-here resurrecting Rome's <:apitoline Hill \\;is once presmted a\ the lateht in urban renewal, hut there are plenty of old-meets-nen metaphors at the C;etty <:enter. This is an acropolis 11-ith a multilevel parking lot. The people at the Getty Trust made n spec tacle of their hubris m-hen the)- lookcd to
Greece for n guiding architectural metiiphcir. Still, you can't wonder that they had Athens on their minds. This union cif museum, lilxarv, and research kcilities is about the importance of elite art in a democratic society, \\-hich brings you to the fc3ur-billion-iic~llarquestion (that's roughly the size of the Getty's endo\\-ment). Ho\v does an institution, even 11-ith all the money in the 11-orld, go about nurturing something a* m!-sterious a* peoples' feelings about art! ()hviously, the Getty Trust doem't have all the an,\\-er,. but they sure arc thinking big thoughts and spending big t3urk. and already you c m see that their succehses and their failures are going to be scaled to n~atch. For Richard Mrier, the Getty is the biggest architectural commission of his lifetime: it is probably also the l3iggest commission that anybody has received in our time. Meier has an eye fcjr drop-dead elegant detailing and interestingly elat3orated as\-mmetriciil facades. and the Gett\-'s bottomless coffers hilve all(>\\-edhim to indulge his every High Modern \\-him. Khat he has t3mught to the project is the aplomb of an international a%-ard-\\-inning architect, n \\a)- of regarding modernism as a deluxe signature style that gives the Gett\- the all's-\\-ell-in-the-\\-c~rldshimfiler that Hitrole1 \Xrilliamr,
\\-h0 \\;is president and chief executive of the trust ciuring the thirteen years that the center was being built, obviouhly had in mine{. Meier is unable to conceive of large spares in terms of the experiences of the people \\%c) are mtrving through them, but the pan-ers at the (ktty are making the be*t of this colossal failure of architectural vision. .&Ithough Meier's grieIs and circles and skylights are nothing but two-iiimensional d r i n g - d conreits. they have an ac1-campaign efficiency that seems to satish- people. at least amid the center' opening t3muhaha. Khen I visited the Getty in I)eremher. Los Angeles \\as smogless and the views from Meier's terrace$ and through his plate glass \vindo\vs stretched spectacularly from the \no\\-ciipped .San Gabriel Mountains to the sparkling Pi~cific.
livery one of the Gettv's half dozen t3uildings \\-as primeci for a photo shoot. This is not architecture that pulls you in. It's a stan~i-offishkind of architectake their dose-ups, Mr. ture. The buildings are there to ptrse, ttr vamp, t i ~ hfeier, Set in the citv that has built a multihillion-dcrlliir entertainment industry out of the certainty that the public is never n-rang, the Gettv Trust mai- fee! some embarrassment about its S\\-orng031, \\-hich is to teach people a thing or tkx-o. Museumgoers by nncl large want a cultural experience to go down easy, and that is where Mrier comes in. \vith his sleek effects. High-md architectural projects have built-in powers of persuasion. so it's no surprise that the Getty haci become an icon even before the public arrived. I suppo\e this is a case of the richest arts organization in m e r i c a inventing its own reality. Art is supposed to create its 01%-ntruth, of course: and there are certainly curators. scholars, and eciuiators at the Gettv \\-h0 know something about thrtt process. tinder the clirection ofJohn Kalsh, the musetlm has a;quired a small selection of ma\tern-orks that pmve the point. But \\hen it come, to the devilishly complicitted que,tion of how best to present art to the public---and of m-hose reality art is, anyway-there
are major disagree-
ments, and the Getty can't help hut send in its 01%-nspecially trained Taste Pcllice. The Gettv Center opens at a time \\hen museumgoing is nlorc of a national pastime than ever before, and =with the Getty's parking lots already btroked \\-ell into the spring, there can be n t r doubt that it is reaping the benefits. The Getty, though. is much more than a museum. The trust's cornnlitmrnts tir elementay-sr:l~crc>l art education, trr conservation worldn7ide. and to advanced art h i t o r i c d stildk\ have a particutar urgency niit\: The \\-hole question of public support for the arts is in a tailspin of confusion. provoked by the YEA controversies and then deepened by n decline in corporate m d public spenclinp in the 1990s. The Getty is asking what people
shoulci see ancl leam---and \\hen, ancl why. The problem \\-ith these qucstiom isn't so much t h t there are n t r ,imple anst\-er\, although that's surely the case, but that the most important ansn-ers are alrnmt inefhhle. \Vho's to say \vhy Rembranclt's S ~ l fBilrib/am~iv, ~r one of the greitteht paintings in the collection, become, a big experience for one vi\itor and not another! .4nd ho&-cio you mea\ure the surcehs of a pmgram that a hunLlreci school children attmd. \\-hen the hest imaginable result \\-oulci he that it chttnges a single kid's life! Atia Lc~uiseHuxtable, the critic \\-h0 \;\-asinvolved in the initial architcctural selection pmcehs at the Gettv, has pmduced an e\sa>-for ,llukir!q ~ l r i h f tuchrr. ibp
C Y I I I Yan ~ , in-house public;ttion, in lvhich she argues for
Meier' buildings. She believes that Mrier has indeeci given complex ideas of t3eauty a public &ice. "In a democracy," she \\rites, "excellence is supposed to be available to all." At a time \\-hen "excellence has been recirfineci ar privilege" t3j- politically correct thinking, Huxtal3le pleads for the seriouhne,~of the Gettv's attempt to reverse the trend. BroaJItl s p e a k i q , she is not \\-mng. But she is kvriting for the defense, and so she may give the Gettv's approach more credit for depth than it deserves. Meier, \Krilliam\.\i'alsh. and everybody else involved l;\-ith the Gettv like to emphasize h<>&many thouhands of meetings they httve all h3c1, a\ if excellence has something to do l;\-ith teamwork and consensus. Huxtahle @ides right past the thought that the problem-solving models of corporate culture. =which seem to have a lot to do m-ith hotv the Gettv operate*, might be responsible for turning "excellence" into a blandly correct label. It's too easy to blame the PC baddies for everything that goes \\-mng with culture, especially \\-hen the selfproclaimed defenders of the hest that high culture has to offer are on n slick marketing campaign of their own. Lampposts along the houle\-ards ancl avenues of Los n g e l e s have been hung with banners announcing "Your (;ett\- (:enter." n d ifvou can't resist
the thought that this \\-e-are-all-one vie\\- of museumgoing ha\ a philistine eclge. I clon't tdame you. Perhaps the people at the C;ett\- sometimes adopt this philistine-lite attitude because they're uncomfortable \vith the gap bet\\-een their populist aspirations and the old modern faith in art as an exhilaratingly complicitted private experience. Bv fr~cusingsome of its collecting energies on intimate \\-ork, such a\ illuminatecl manuscripts. drawings, photographs. and cabinet-scaled paintings and t,mnre\, the Getty has emphasired the value of one-on-one experience. Yet even as the renter \\-as crpening. Rarry Munitr, the incoming president and <:E( 1 of the trust, \\-as saying that part of what he brings to the C;etty from his previous job as chancellor of the <:alifornia State University system is the experience of \\-orkng in "a large pubIic instituticln w h o e r-rtilricln is socio-economit. mtrbilitv, urban outrear-11,global transk3rmation." I'm not sure that" quite \\-hat Huxtable has in m i d . Yet Munitz haa also said that "Q-elive in . . . an uncivil age." and that "mass rommuniciition makes it 11-orse, technologv, in man): ways makes it l\-orse." He's probably ,
\\-oniiering \\hat the person \vho come, to the C;ett\- after seeing the banners on Kilshire Boulevard is going to think about the illuminations in a Byzantine manuscript of the New Testament. Those illunlinated manuscripts are one of the glories of the collection. but they are alrnmt certainly not \vh;tt the public is coming to see. Can the folks at the C;ett\- live with this parailc~xl\Xrillthey try to clenv it! \Ell they try to do something about it! And what rnigfit that be?
Approaching the Getty (:enter along the San Iliego I'reenii!-, my first impression \\-as that the buildings sit too high on their mcruntaintop-th;lt there is something e\sentially artificial about the cle\ign. Reacling Btrlldlrrg r h ~
(;pti,,
the hook that Richard Meier has published about his thirteen-year
cnmprtign, you begin to see n-h? this might he. The Gettp has treated that hill like a piece of silly putt\-, moving earth amunci to make a more artfully shapeci mountain or to accommodate the demands of litigious neiphl>ors. atI the \\-lde t~csnorinpan agreement with the local h o m r o ~ n e r sassociation that not a tea*poanful of dirt ccluld leave the site.
c Ince you have parkrd your car and taken the couple-of-minute tram ride up the hill, you are confronteci \\-ith such a lab\-rinth of stairca\es and plaza* and balconie, and parapets that you mai- not have the hiintest idea \I-here earth ends and architecture begins. That may be Meier's idea of seamlessness, hut the site is so enveloped with architectural frills that it ends up feeling like the bionic peak. Meier can't miss lvith those eye-filling vistas. yet he rarely frames them lvith the assured simplicity that the\- deserve. The profiles of man)- of the buildings are so complicated that they fight the lan~iscape. Iccasicinally, thciugh. Meier pulls everything together. At the south end of the site. you arc confronteci by a simple rectangular portal, be-
of the museum, that gives the illusion of opening into t\\-een t \ % pavilions -~ thin air, and then leads to a lvonderful long parapet, from which you ran lock across to the ocean or do%-nto an elegant cactus garden. Meier has svcated half a dozen autonomous yet interrelated structures: the museum (kvhich itself consists of five pavilions set around a plaza). the Kesearch Institute, a building that combines the ecit~iationand conservation departmmts. an administration t3uilding. an auditorium. and a restaugive this ensemble the variousness that yclu rant. He must have \ \ - w e d t i ~ have at the cropolis. \\-here structures built over a century of rapid architectural change arc provorathely juxtaposed. Southern <:alifomia is a place \\-here Mediterranean allusions come to mind naturally. One precursor of the Gettv is the Iluntington Librarv in nearby San hfarint,,where separate library and gallery buildings are set in a fine Italianate setting 11-ithplunging
vista\. The Gettv is c u r r c n t l ~renovating its old home. a Roman-style villa in ftlafibu, \;\-herethe classical collections arc slated to be reinstalled in 2001. TCIbe sure, Mcier does not use c-tarsicaf ti>rn~\,but his reruns of the International Style are themselves a kind of establishment classicism. and in the various t3uilciings he mingles rectilinear grids ancl circles and c\-linders a\ if they \\ere his personal version of the rla\sical orders. Meier wants each building to contain ectloes of the others. The most ob\ious consistency is in materiitls. 4 plav of light beige metal ancl. rough travertine unifies the surhces of a11 the buildings and gives the renter its picture-perfect, milk-and-honey skin. Mrier has producecl at lea\t one rea\onably succcssf~llbuifding, the center for conservation and ed-t~cation,at the northeast encl. Herc the strong tlorizontal impact of the exterior, somplicated by a series of elegant grids, is set ngain\t the edge of the mc~untiiinin n 'iq-av that recalls the sleek <:alifornia rnodernisn~cif Kicharcl. Neutra and Ruclolph Schindler. Yet this is not a t3uilding th;tt t3ecomes more exciting as
you move in\ide, since the interior office spitces hil to produce the kind of inside-outside expansiveness that the exterior has led you to hope for. The name of Frank i.lo)-ii Kright has been invokecl l>\-Meier ancl others, sometimes in relation to the cylinilscal space that forms the entrance to the museum. li'hat this inert interior has to do m-ith the sc~aringforce of Ne\n Yt~rk's(iuggrnheim, I can't \a)-. Meier's entrance is more like n prefab grain silo \I-ith lots of cutouts. Scattered around the mtlseum are Meier-designed furnishings and bookstalls that suggest a \Xrright-inspireclarts-and-crafts\
mood. (Or mai-be the inspiration is Grecne and Grecne, m-hosegreate\t susviving h u s e is in I"a\adena.) But this is jr~stt r i ~ n n ~ i nNo%-here g. at the (iettv does Mrier make even a stab at the kind of p;trt-to-\\-hole rhythmic conviction that is li'right's glory. If Cdifornia offers a precedent for the sort of vast civic scheme that X/leier has attempted in l,o\ .Zngeles, it is Kright's ftlarin
<:aunty Civic <:enter, l;\-hichhas a lyric monumentality that reacts to and
reinvents the landsape. hleier's problem is that he i;innot L-on~pose in tirm and space; his architecture works only in coffee-table hooks. The museum's entrance rotunda should expand on the human scale and get your eyes moving. so that you're preparecl for \\-hat you're going to see in the galleries. Meier's spaces have no ilcnv. There's no gathering force. The courtyard at the heart csf the nltlseunl is I-tleak-a
No\;\-heresville.
Meier has strategies aplenty, and for a \\-hile a visitor's eyes are kept busy. I enjoyed studying the complicated orchestration of banisters and railings in lvhite or shinv or matte st;linless steel. I \;\-itsbeguiled by hyper-refined rletails. such as the dark marble insets in \\-hite marble steps, or the shallokv circular bird hath caved into a long stone slab behind the Research Institute. What all these touches suggeg is a ta\te for Mannerist elaboration that lurks l->eneathMcier's L-oolfacade. Mcier has said that one of the first l->uitdings he studied in prepitring for the Getty was Tohn Soane's L)ul\\-ich Picture Gallery, csutside London: and Soane is another ila\siiist with Mannerist tendencies. Meier has learned something from the clarity of the I)ul\vich galleries. hut he doesn't create a tlo&-of spaces that has any of Stsane's loopy 6clat. The arrangement of the Getty c ~ l l e c t i ~ in n s virtu~tllyfreestanding pavilions creates n confused, stop-ancl-start museumgoing experience. Ironicitlly enough, it recalls the clisastrous 1960s design of the Los n g e l e s
<:aunty Museum of Art, a plan that that museum, despite later remodeling, h3s yet to live down. Solne of Meier's subterranean eclecticism is a good thing. The main picture galleries-kvhich
\\-ere the result of an elaborate negotiating process
t-tetkx-eenarchitect. museum officia1s. ancl an interior designer-have
a re-
fined trarlitional character that is quite effective. They put me in mind of Louis Kahn. In other areas. Mrier evokes the '60%corporate glamour of architectural firms such n Skidmore, Owing"
Merrill ancl Kevin Roche.
Iohn Ilinkeloo. A luxurious small garden, \vith verdant ferns and palms,
snugglecl next to the administrative offices recalls the I'ord Foundation in New York. And a little fountain composed of three jets of water, natural rocks, and trayertine walls, near the southeast end of the museum, suggest" the kincl of thing that Nogurhi did for Chase Manhattan. But these are good tarte mtjments, not a ~ ~ l ~ i t e c t uideas, r a l For a complex s t ~ i has this to work, there has to he some immediate. unifj-ing image. Yt~uneed to feel that all the leitmotifs and variations add up-that
the slightert details are linked to
the t)ro;tciest charac teristic~.If you're looking for that kind of architer tural imagination. hfeier isn't your man. Meier and the Getty \\-orked together for thirteen long years, and ob\iou\l\- there were times \\-hen everybody felt that this \\as a marriage made in hell. After seeing the results of the battles that Meier lost, h<)\\-ever, I concIuded that once the C;etty had thrown in their lot \\-ith him, the\- should have let him have his \v;iv. A good deal of press attention has been focused on Meier's ciefeats. The design of the decorative arts galleries \\-asgiven to the Ne\\- York architect Thierry Despont. and the commission for the central garden. lvhich Meier was originally slated to do. went to the Environmental artist Robert Irwin, VYhen Irwin's willfully eisentrii garden has gronn up, its silly ah-Meierian gestures, such as the jagged switchbad path and the rusted metal elenlents, n-ill be muted; bw t there seerns little doubt that hfeier's clarsical Tuscan hillside would have been a better het. As for I)e\pont3speriod rooms, they are pure \regas kitsch. \\-hich is probat3lv all you coulil expect from a cieiorator \\h<) \\-ons cornp u t e ~ a g en~og~d<(arnong then1 BiII Gates) by proving that the super rich can custc~nlizereality. There is a certain anlount of anti-Mrier feeling that crops up here and there in the derign of the Gettv (:enter. I can t~nderstandthe sentiment, except that these hits of guerrilla theater don't seem to he about kvishing that Meier did \\-hat he doe, better; they seem to he ahou t lvishing that he ciidn't
d o this sort of modern thing at all. This bizarre in-house critique culminates in the restaurant, u-llicll is one of the m m t successfrxl buildings on the sitc, \\-it11 the cool d r a n ~ acif an ,"lt Dccc:, ocean liner and views to match. Into this lovely space the Gettv has invited Alexis Smith. a Los n g e l e s artist \\-ell-knokvn for her campv sensibility. to present some smart-alecky jokes on the t l ~ e n ~ofe taste. En~blazonedciver the m-alls of the restaurant are a cartoon silhouette of Adam and Eve, \\-h0 took the first taste, along with a <:hippendale chair, a classical vase, and a bottle of \vine. This create\ n sort of demented hillhoitr~1version of a Greek vase painang. n d it is just the \\-arm-up for a direct hit on Mrier. On one wall, Smith has s~rr0i1nde~1 a cartoon of a conventional modern-style living room of the 195h 'ivith k g letters that spell out M( )L)ERNISIhfO and liLEGANTE. Those show-ot%ishltspelled kvords may point to a problem with Meier' \\-ork. but \\-h\-doe, an institution that has s p a t a l3illion dollars to realize one man's idea of excellence feel the need to parody it! Are the\- scared to death by the very excellence in n-hiih they iIaim to believe? Or do they know that thevkrc billing short cif it?
livery move at the Getty has been closely considered, and none more so than the lengths to \\-hich John \Yalsh has gone to isolate the collections that \\-ere essentially formed by j'. Paul Getty himself, the oil millionaire ti~trndedthe rnLrseunl in the '50s, ti-cim the collections that Kafsh has built since he arrived at the Getty in 1983. This seems to be the very point of Desp:,nt'designs for the decorative arts galleries: to set them apart from the rest of the museum, as if m-ith a L);i\--Glo red highlighter. Ke're nleant to understand that whatever the unqiresti~nahlerefinement of the craftsmanship in (;etty's eighteenth-centuy furniture, this \\-ork exudes a gaudy
r i ~ ~ a l iaura s t that is no longer the museum\ style. 1. P~ILII Gettyk other major collecting specialty. classical art, is also being fenced off I,\- the current adminitration. There is n temporary she\\- from the cliissical collections, but all of it will ultimately he installed in the museum's Roman-stvle villa in Malihu. \%-hichis being renovated for that purpose. By setting the old man" personal obsessions in italics, John K'rrlsh distances himself from this Anglophile's historical-&nay vie&-of collecting. R l s h understands that although he has one of the Iarpe\t budgets in the museum m-orld,the masterpieces necessary to create n \\-orld-class survey of liuropean painting and sculpture are no longer available, and so he has \%-isel~ opted for a cletached connoisseur's approitch----an exemplary, notquite-of-this-\vc~rldkind of taste. R l s h \\-ants to use C;ett\-'s millions to create a hushed, almost monastic vision. He m-ants a musetlm \%-itha scholarly mien. He \\-ants to set art in a place apart. \\-here life's passions are diffuhed. transcended. This is a nluseum \%-hereevery detail seem, to exucie the collective n-isdoin of c-ountless po\tdois. The Gettv has the feel, on a rather large scale, of a great university museum. The holding can he compared far more usefully \\-it11 those at. \a)-. the Fogg Museum at Harvard than m-ith those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the National Gallery. livery selection has n point to make; the art-historical lan~lscapeis filled in with carefully selerteci vignettes. There is a great deal of perspicacious, enlightmeci acquisition going on here. The move from Neorla\sicism to Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has inspired an e*peciiillyintelligent group of p u ~ h a s e hIn . Pierre-lean David d3.4ngers's Mirry
Rrlhlniirn.
the suavely severe
treatment of the white marble ha\ an erotic pull. The gallery containing this and other Neoclassical sculptures make, one understand m-hy the Getty hoped for so long to acquire <:anova's 17irrr (;rili-~s, it \v0uIL1 have rapped an ambitious gathering of European meditations on the Greek experience.
\\-hich echo the Gettv's impressive ancient holdings. The painting galleries contiiin an Italian lnndbciipe by (:hristen K ~ ~ h kand e , several (Gkricault, inclucling a hscinating erotic scene n-ith a man and two women in a shadism\alcove bed. .4nd there have been some related decorative arts acquisitions, such as a magnifii-cnt, latr-eighteenth-century Neapolitan chair \\-ith almo\t Art Nouveau arm\, and paneling from n room by the eccentric French Neoclassicist (:laude-Nicolas Lecioux. lvhich unfc~rtunatelyhas heen given \\-hat amounts to a I)onalii Trump-style in\tallation by the awful Thierrv Despont. Khen it comes to acquisitions, the Gettv goes for the most interesting c,pportunities. ancl the museum should he given full credit for the singleminciedness =with m-hich it has pursued m-ork of quality even in area* that are not calculateci to excite the general public. The (Getty has acquired some ahsolutely extraordinary \\-orks on paper. Its very late (:kranne \vatercolor. a still life with blues and reds of alrno\t Limoges-like depth and brilliance. \\;is one of the highlights of the big (:txanne s h m - in Philadelphia in 1996, ancl it in the drakving giller) at the Gettv. There is also looks every bit as beautif~~l a magnificent Poussin \\-ash driiwing of a screen of trees, with long slim trunks overlapping and nlirroring one another to suggest a serpentine dance. The muheurn's deci,ion to focuh on illuminated manuhcripts is e\peciallv daring. This is an area of little interest to today's collectors, not to mention the general public. Khat ib no\\- a separate department in the museum \\-as begun with the purchase, in 1983, of the Z,t~d\x.ig(:ollection. It inclt~dessuch spectacular items as a tkx-elfth-century Ne\v Testament. \\-ith image\ of the four Evangelists on gold grc)unds that despite their slight ciimensions have some of the architectural monumentality of mo\aics in the grandest Rvrantine L-hurches.i i n ~ o n g~ncjrerecent 1nanuscript acquisitions, I especidy admired n mid-fifteenth-cent?
Rook of Hours m-ith a stupen~iousdouble
page hj- lean Fouyuet of Sfrniin t i p i j r i r
in
Pruyur Brfi~rrtilv 171rgtn unii Chrld This
miniature has a transcendent richness. elegance. and clarity. Looking at I'ouquct's compo\ition, I feel as if all the tremendouh oppo\ing force$ of a time in Eumpe \\-hen a chivalric feudalism \\;is giving \\-ay to a bourgeois lucidity have been put under the microscope. Fouquet renders the sparkling twautv of the Irirgjn's clress and Simon LIP Lrarie's armor as if these garments \\-ere the rarest t3utterfly's lvings. This Fouquet miniature is one of the greatest paintings in the Getty colk i t i o n , right t ~ pthere with Kembrandt's
.E.
Bcarthi~iotlz~~~', Maxtin Schon-
~ t r hu Czulm (U-hich the Gettv gauer's ikfilthrr ilrtd Chrld, a d Poussin's Ltrrrcisitl~~~ owns jointly 11-iththe Norton Simon). Others will cite Ma*aicio's St. iinllwrv, Mantegna's iiiiorutztla
t,ffiip
LMirfif.and
Pontormo's Pi~rlruitifil H ~ l h ~ l i lStill. l ~ r n-e
can probably all agree that there is not a single painting in the Getty collection \\-ithout lvhich \ve \voulcl feel that the history of pitinting \\-as incomplete-nothing
on the order of Bellini's St Friisi-ts in the Frick. or El (;reco9s
Iytru* of i;?iriii?in the Metropolitan, or Titian's R U ~tfP l'srtqjir in the (kidner. (I'm not sure there is a painting of that order in all of Lo\ Angeles. except, perhaph the Zurharin still life at the Norton Simc~n.)As anybody kvhci has fc,llo\\-ed the Getty's adventures in the art market over the past decade knows, it is not for \\-ant of trying that they do not own such paintings. Such works are simply not to be had. And in their stead, mostly \\-hat you find at the Gettv is admirable. even excellent, but the kind of thing that in the greatest muheurns fills up the spaces twtkx-een the masterpieces. Still, the Gettv doe, have it, stronger and it\ 11-eaker area*. The seventeenth- and eiphteenth-century galleries have a brilliant consistmry. A trio of m-orks by <:analetto, Rellotto, ancl Tiepolo, arranged on one wall, epitomize the virtuoso heights to 11-hich painting had rihen at the end of the Baroque age. In the later nineteenth-century galleries, though, the fr~cusis niit as sharp. The (ktty has made some very expensive purchases, such its
the Van Gogh Iwrs and Manrtk R11e :\fitct?rrr
wrtiz Flttgs, but taken together the,e
\\-orks don't give a very convincing picture of the later part of the century. 'I'heVan Gogh is ttro rfecorative t i suggest ~ his angular, wremhing spirit, and the Manet, although a peerless demonstration of the arti\tSsdevil-may-care casualne,~.doem't offer even a glimmer of his gonzo, hell-bent ambitions. At the Getty. you get the feeling that later-nineteenth-century French art \\-as getting hogged do\\-n in cleft small effects, \\-hen nothing could be h r ther from the truth. The Getty offers other versions of the nineteenth century. in its cira\ving collection, and in its extraordinarv phcitogrilphj- department. m-hich began in the t9SOt, 11-ith the prrrctlase of five of the most important private cc~llections in the \vorlci. (luite obviouslv the nluseunl is looking to these photographic holciings to provide a compelling portrait of the transition into the tjq-entieth L-cntury,since the museum n ~ a J ae decision in the '80s not t i col~ lect t~-entiePt1-centurypaintings, in p u t hecauri. the Trust \\-as worried about spreading thin \\-hat was then a much smaller endo&-ment. RV no\\almost everyhod\- m-ho \\-atche* the Gettv agrees that \\-hether or not the
cut-off date of 1900 is maintained in the painting collection, the museum is \\-illy-nilly mo\ing into t~-entieth-centuryart. Alexis Smith is one of a number of artists, iniiuding lid\%-ardRusiha, who h c e done commissions for various Getty t3uildings. The museum's holdings of work h\- \V;tlker livans, \vho is in my opinion the single greatest photographer of this rcntury, arc already the subject of a very imprcsshe t~ookand \\-ill he featured in an exhibition later this year. Ancl around the time of the opening of the Getty, much attention \\-as being paid to the purchase of David Hocknry's huge photo-collage of the <:aliforni;i cie\ert. Pi.irrhitrssi,ni Ilwy, 1 1 18 ~ l p n i .
I9(3'S(,..iil?2. \vhich anlounts to the museum's most substantial holiiing in contemporarv art. This panormic photr3grapbii: jq-ork by a t-i>ntemporaf\painter keeps from breaking the 1900 cut-off by n technicalitv.
The twentieth century ma!- he slipping into the Gettv by several hack doors. but in the pitinting and sculpture collection, which is by any defillition the heart of the museum. the end comes resoundingly-apocalyptically. all\--with
Tames Ensor's huge
Cilrlir? i n t r y inio
re-
Brrruris in 1~7t39(1888). It is not.
strictly speaking. the latest painting in the collection. but Ensor's fc3urteenfoot-\\-ide canvas, filled to o\-erflo\\-ing\\-ith the manic ghoul-kiccs of Mar& Gras revelers. does eclipse everything else in the final gallery of this survey of Eun~peanpainting. Ensor \\-as 28 \\-hen he painted his urban freak show, and the luridly renclered &icesthat fill practically every la\t inch of ciim-as, the masked one, and the unmasked ones. seem to he t,ut,hling up from a young man's self-congratulator!- pitranoia. Ensor is not an arti\t \\-h<)\\-ill leave \\-ell enough alone, and just in ca\e you might miss the point, he has apparently turned the Christ figure, astride a donkry in the middle distance, into a self-portrait. The claylit nightmare twcornes an allegory of the \voeful mistrerrtn~entof the sainted artist in modern tinle,. This painting is k ~ h nKhlsh's parting shot, and it cannot he ignoreci. B\prewnting museumgoers =with Ensor's raucously ntringent panorama of fin-de-si$cle pathologies. Khlsh ma!- nlean to supge\t that the public \\-ould not \\-ant to venture tocl far into an artist's vie&-of the nlodern 11-orltl.In the IX80b. many painters-among
fiiscinated
13~ men
them Van Gogh. Renoir, ancl Seurat---\-ere
and wonlen 'iq-ho lived lives very different from their
own. The painter \\-h0 observed a range of citizens at m-ork and at play could feel an expansive attachment to the most casu~tlacqu;tintilnce, but all that Ensor seenl\ to see is the 11-eirdotherncss of the cro\;\-J,\\-hick1bccon~e\a sea of creep=,- faces. one more self-ahsc~rhedand louthh than the other. This is Life \vith \\-horn the Getty chooses to claw the storv the Fainter of Mc>~lern of art. Could it he that some people at the Gettv find n personal significance
in the painting's us-against-them theme? Could Chrlir? Entry
tnttl
Bni~st~k
strike some curators, scholitrs, and offit-ialsas an en~blerncif the Gettv Center" entry into Los ,d\ngeIes! Richard Meier's Getty (:enter completes a cycle of American philanthropy that had its origins aroun~lthe time that linsor. an ocean a\\-a\-.\\-as painting his garish. srlf-congratul~itcirypicture.
1. Paul Getty \\-as horn in
1892, ancl the public-spiritedness that his Trust exemplifies today is distantly related to the ideas of .d\ndrex- (:arnegie. \\hose money came from steel rather than oil and \\-h0 \\;is cieciicated to public gi\ing along principles that
t b O t h ~ ri i r t i ~ 0 Fssilys, . n-hich appeared in he described in ?bu (;~'S~IPI of W ~ ~ l(11111 1889. At the turn of the century, there m-ere young rnen and m-omen all across the United States tlrhci knea- that culturat wperience \\-as a democratic birthright and a universal desire. You can read sclme of their stories in the fiction of \XrillaCather and Theodore Dreiser. This generation of true t-teliesers crolb-ded into the libraries and museums and concert halls that <:arnegie and other philanthropists built, and their live\ \\-ere forever changed. K h a t you discover in Cather" work is that atong n-it11 artistic iilumination could nlse, come tangled feeling of regret, dislociition, and loss. for to go to art \\-as to give yourself over to an experience that you loved pxciselv beciiuhe it \\-as so kir from ordinary life. The sc~cialsituation h a changed enormc~uslysince (:ather's day, hut the otherne\s of art is still n force to t-te reckoned \\-itheeven if arts organizations do not---and. indeed. shotrltl not-knoll-
\;\-hatto do about it.
In the 1990s, some philantl~ropiesare still btlildiq libraries and cclnzert halls ancl muheurn,, lvhich is good news. The technological deselopmmts that you see at the Gettv-the
computerizeci information centers adjacent
to the museum galleries, and ArtsEdNet, the support \\stem for art tearhers that is avnihble trn the lVe&are
in many respects the direct descendent
of the educatic~nalprograms of a hundred years ago. Rut the expectations
that they arouse ma!- he changing. In a hook called Iatrtriiaitlorr ro Imugtng. puhlished by the Gettv in 1906 in order to dexribe the digital techniques available "to display ancl link collections around the \vorld,'' Hokvard Resser and Iennifcr Trant explain that "the potential of reaching auclienres across social and economic hounciaries blurs the distinction between the privileged few and the general public." I m-ould have thought that in a democracy an)member of the general public i, given the opportunity to
b e i ~ ~ one ai~
of the
privileged few-. That description of blurring distinctic~nsma!- not represent official policv at the Getty, hut it does sound dangerously like dumhing dolvn. anci this \\-ould not he the first time that the museumgoing public had E-teen solcl short, 'I'he Gettv (;enter m-ears so man!; hats that it's no wonder that
it
visitor
can come a\\-;-a\-11-ith impressions of conflict, or at least of contrasting nttitudes and styles. Some of thew impressions supge\t a tension between artistic or scholar!\- probity and the rat3ble-rousing unpredictahilitv of the public. Rut in other instances the unpredictabilitv is that of art itself, 11-hich is counterecl bj- a scholar's preference-maybe mce-for
it's really a corporate prefer-
logical, quantifrel3lr experiences. Ensor's painting of a <:hrist-like
artist enveloped by the mob comes to mind immediately. S o does the sleek and serene travertine complex hovering above the rush-hour pulse of the San Diego Free\\-;-a\-.50 does the experience of seeing a painting as emotic~nally overx-helming as Rembrandt's Sr Bdrtholomrir in this cool, elegant museum. And \\-ith Harold \Xrilli;ims and his perfectionist vie\\- of the Getty no%-being replacecl bj- Barr~Munitz, \\-h0 might just give the Trust a more pa"pdIis tilt, you have;lnother smpshot to add to tbc Gettv story. The operating-room sensibility of Richard Meier's architer ture is just right for an organization that \\ants to micromanage every aspect of the p""blic's encounter \\-ith art.
it an)- surprise that the sihotars m-ho have
been invited to the Gettv Research Institute this year are being askecl to re-
ilect on "Represmting the F a \ ~ i ~ n sThose "i consideri~lglife's unruly emotions will d o so in a group of state-of-the-art offices located in a chaste t3uilding surmunded bj- lemon and olive trees ancl some of the most beautiful views in the \\-orld. Scholars \\-ill also be able to study t\\-o small sho&-*of item* from the Getty's spectac111ar research collections, both of ivhich foius on chaotic, uncontn?lIable forces. "Irresistible 1)eca:-." about the romance of ruins, is a rather predictable subject. The far more interesting show, organized by Revin Salatincl, is devoted to the history of fireworks, and it is \\inning!\- entitled "Incendiary Art." Salaano presents image after image in \\-hich crokvds gather to \\-atch the elaborately plotted ~lispla!-Sthat accompanied royal celebrations of births, marriage*, and the like, rno\tiy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thew extravaganzas offer the &iscination of fire being shaped into art, but in a brilliant catalog Saliitinci also takes the trouble to point out that the pmceedings o f t m fizzled and that the most sophisticated members of the audience \\-ere frequently bored.
All art is i n c e n d i a r y t h ; t t i the joke of Salatino's title. t the (Getty they are pliiying the role of the director in thew nncirn-regime celebrations, m-ho fences the pyrotechnics off, who tells the public \\-here to stand and \\-hat to see. The CGetty's (:onservcttioa Institute uses the most advanced scientific methods to stop and even to reverse deterioration in \\-orks ofart; they have major projects un~lerwayin Melico, in Italy, in China. Rut conservation is also an area of contemporar~museological and archeological studies where there are serious conflicts b e t ~ e e nhigh-tech solutions that promise to restore objects to a bright-a\-the-reprc>ductic~nglow and m~steriousstylistic yur5tic1m to v\-tlich a noninvasive, allmrst 1ear.e-it-as-it-is method may be the m-isest response. At the (Getty, they want to make sense of art, so there is an Education Institute that has spent the past decade taking a hard look at the old art-asself-expression idea. The\- \\-ant to teach school children at3out traditions
and formal systems: they m-ant to show kids how all the elements go together. This is a nationlvide program that encourages museumgoing through tecbniy~lesits simple as bringing high-y d i t y art reproductions into the classroom. So kir so gooci. But here. too, the Getty may be straining to control \\hat cannot be controlled and to rationalize the experience of art. Acccsrding to t)avid Perkin* $a professor at the Harvau~lGraduate School of Education \vhci has m-ritten one in a series of pamphlets published by the (Getty), looking at art provide* "an excellent setting for the development of better thinking. for the cultivation of what might be called the art of intelligence." Perkin* may he passionate ahout art, but \\-h? does he need to sell it a* n way of beefing up kid&'brains: At the Gettv you see '90s-style cultural philanthropv putting on its best face, and it turns out to be a high-end wrporate package with the requisite politically correct frills. Speaking of Richard Meier's buildings. Harold Kilfian~shas written that the (Getty \\-antelf arc hitecture that 11-ould "be timeless and a \\-ork of art in itself." There may he no architect in the \\-orld
\\-h0 could have delivered something like that: but considering the t3ureaucratic hell that Meier went tbrot~gh,his failures must be counted as the (Getty's kiilures, too. What Meier's 11-orklacks is heat. an organic ilcm-. He is trving to strategize and prioritize his \\-ay to gmatnfis. And so is the Grttv. Meier's buildings are a rase of lofty architectural ambiaons run amok. h d a Louisc Huxtahle is right \\hen she describes the architecture as a metaphor, except that what this ccintemptsrary acropdis silpgests it the impossibility of creating an organization that \\-ill cover every aspect of a person's experience of art, from childhood education to family museumgoing to postdoctoral studies. The departments-lvithin-a-citn~pt~s arrangement turns out to he a ne\\- kind of juggernaut: the 11-rongtemple in the wrong time in the \\-rong place. And yet there is this to be said for the Getty. If you lirten carefully you ran hear a shamelessly elitist heart
beating, even through all t h e layers of that something-for-everyE3c)dy glass and metal and traverane carapace. \Vhen you step inside the gallerie, of the museum. you are in the presence of the old-time religion of art, and I say more po\.ier to it.
1~x1-ARY 26, 1998
BRING IN THE AMATEURS
Museum people arc feeling cheerfully be\\-ildered as the 1990s come to a close. .4tten~iancehgures are climbing, and although nobody really under~ t h t there is no end stands m-hy this i\ happening, everybody seem4 t i agree in sight. It's impo\sible to be mrprised 13y the attentitrn paid to the (Gianni \rersarc retmspective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Ne\v York this \\-inter, an infcjmercial for art-and-hshion synergy. But there can still be some amazement at the general interest inspired by an event such a\ the s h o n of dra%-ingsl,\- Filippino Lippi and his fiftemth-century contemporaries, 11-hich has attrar-ted reascinahle numbers at the Met. By nom-, museum visitors m y be m-illing to have a look at a n p h i n g . More than a generation after museumgoing became a hot national piistime. the children of the people \\-hci stood in line for hours at the Met in 1961 to see the mu-
fhr Basi seum's 32.3 millicln painting. Rembrandt's /Insti)llr Ct~rir~m~iirrrr~~
(lf
Ilomri., are taking their children, and that does sav something impressive about c-ultural diffusion. But the crcjwds in the nltlsetrms can also mask a darker side cif the current scene. ByhenI talk to artists and dealers in contemporary art, I often find them reporting a steady emsion in the number of people \\-h0 are fc4-
loll-ing recent developments in art m-ith an\- curiosity or avidity. The museum audience may be exploding, t ~ even t the minuscule percentage of t h t audience that you might expect to be seeking out the best new work (\\~hichis h\- no means the most \iihle contemporary art) appears to he dhvindling into nothing. Muscum officials are in seventh heaven. Mean\I-hile, contemporary artists and the dealers who are most concerned with their \\-ork are in a quiet panic. The aucliencc that really matters to art may be evaporating-an4
\\-hen you consider the skyrocketing attendance fig-
ures at the musetlms, the contrast can seem truly bizarre. Many people \\-ill \\-ant to argue that the museumgoing and the gallerygoing audiences are inevitably going to he as different as night ancl dav. But if you look at history. you \\-ill see that for more than 100 years the taste of the museumgoer has been shaped
the \-isionar~reach of the gallerygoer.
Artists such as Ilegas, lienoir, and Monet-the
subjei-ts of exhiisitions that
mtlseums this seasonm%-ere origindy sl-rpported 13y have packed &%n~erii-a.n preciselv the kind of small, intensely engaged audience that many artists fear is extinct. Ironically enough, the blockbuster she\\-s of Impressionist \I-ork that h c e dominated mtlseums this past summer and fail have a lot to tell us atxrut how painters once managed, in the face of indifference and even hostility. to reinvent the expressive posbil3ilities of paint and to renew taste. In the ratalog of "The Private (:t?llection of Edgar I)egas,'\\-lhich \\;is at the Metropolitan, Ann Dumas \\-rites about n breed of men \\-h<)in the llineteenth century v\-ere described as trwdtpun and m - h o seem to have pro\ided a support system for artists-by
rejecting consensus thinking. by
trusting their trwn responses. The \\-hole subject of nineteenth-century taste is immenselv complicated. Prehcnt-da\- scholars. confronted h\- an art market that's always repackaging the rutting edge. are perhaps too inclinecl to focus on the various \\-a\-sin 11-hichartistic experimentiition affects the bottom line. .4nn I)u-
mas is surelf; correct in pointing out that by the t h e the hpressionists \\-ere making big money in the last cieca~le\of the nineteenth century, there \I-as a pokverfrxl aura of nostalgia around the very idea of the canaintrur, who could he seen n the battered symbol of a vanished golden age. L3umas i mostly interested in the \\-ealthier ~~trtint~zfrs, the ones m-hn b ~ ~ igreat l t collect i o n , and she has interesting things ttr say about
h\\their taste related ttr
that of Ilepas. Still, if there \\-as a generation of irniiltuurs \\h<) \\ere, as the painter ]acques-kmile Rlanche wrote in 1910, "crushed by the stampede of irresponsible American millionaires or the nem- induhtrial aristocracy from (Germany and Russia." there \\-as also a spirit to the d,aati.un that had nothing to do \\-ith the vagaries of the market. That spirit lived on deep into the tjq-entieth L-cntury.
The drridirrrr is a make-up-my-okvn-mind kind of person. Some irrncal~srs \\-ere aristocrats, and some were primarily focuseci on the glories of the pitst; but the independent-minc1ecinessthat \I-as their most essential trait was one trf the grand expes"i)nurf the soaring confidence of middle-cliiss culture. I \\-oulii define the tvpe bmadlv. I see its beginnings in the generation that supported \Xrattrau's astonishingly informal style in the early eighteenth century. .4nd long after Ilepas's friends had passed away. there appeared Feggy Guggenheim and Retty Parsons. drnat~ars\vho \\-ent professional and trpen"3 the gaileries in New Yc~rkthat gave the ithstract Expresxionists their first significant public presence. .?~ri~ii.arsprobably still exist, here and there. a\ isolated figures, hut I think everybody m-ill agree that their sense of shared purpcrx h'as not flourished in recent decades. Eccinomic dam-nsizing and shaken middle-class confidence have p l q e d a pitrt. for they have left even people \\-h0 are still doing just fine m-ith a sense that artistic experience is too risky. too unstable. to at3sorh a person's a t t e h o n . The sophisticiited public views art as one more product of a ralnpant consumer culture. They k n m - that caring too much could he seen as terribly uncool, and they are
inclined to leave the ciecisic~nsabout contempc~raryart to the experts (\\~hciseservices are yet another high-end consumer product). People still \\-ant to look at art, but they don't \\ant to make up their minds for themseh-es, or take a leap into the unknon-n. They are mntent with Andy R r h o l ' s quick-fix model, according to \vhich avant-gardism ancl hlockbusterism are more or less the same thing. ( ) u r biggest probiem is that bltsckbusterdom has become
ihri
art jq-orld
model. a mcxlel to 11-hich there no longer appears to he the kind of countervailing principle that elitism or avant-girdism or a roml?ination of the t\\-o has pnjiluced for the past several hundred years. There is no longer a small but vocal audience that resists the trumped-up ebullience of Robert Rauschenberg's (Guggenheim retrospective or the prepackaged sciindal of "Sensation." the s h m - of young British artists that \\-asat the Ro\-al.%cadem\in I;on~lonthis fall. For I-:~lglistlcritics, "'Sensation," \\-hi& set the latelt in galleries of the Royal .4cademv, parno-kitsch styles amid the fud~i\.-~iud(Iy t~ecamea &ice-off in a hall of mirrors. Byhateveryou said \\;is just more foilder for an advance-guarii-meets-rear-g~xarii happening that had been martermindeii by Charles Saatchi, the a~lvertisingmogul from \\hose collection all the m-ork \\-as d r a - n . \X'llen the most extreme adversarial airs fit so neatly into a PR campaign, you can't \\-on~ler\\h!
even the audience that knows
better is going to he too demoralized to go out and look for something better. Many artists twlieve that they are no\\- confronting the ultimate niphtmare-kvtlich
also happens to he the nightntare that the hpressiclnistz and
Postimpressionists confronted. \%%at if 2n artist make\ a breakthrough and there is no one \vho responds? Byhatif there are a few- people \\-h0 get the paint, hut ncihoily in the m-ider world cares how they feel? This seaaln, museumgoers \\-ere affc~rdeda rare insight into the mvhteries of independent taste \\-hen they visited the Metmpolitan's exhibition of "The Private (:ollection of Edgiir Degas." Lkgas \\-as a wealthy man m-ho
could inciulge on n vast scale the collector's mania that many nrti\ts can eupxsum"1\-by acculnulatinp the tiniest fragments. Yet the mixture of old and new m-ork that L)egas put together, mostly het\\-een 1890 and 1904, gave a good sense of the kind of creative tradition-buildi~lgthat al\\-ays ahsorh both artists and the ilrrui~ars\\-h0 follo&-artists' evolving views closely. In the catiilog of the shci&-,.4nn L)uma* ohsen-es that I)PR~~\'s collection of works t3j- his contemporaries and by earlier arti\ts %-as not widely known: outside his circle of friend$, dealers, and collectors, few knem-of its existence." 'fight it be
L~IOIC acc~lrateto
say that L)egas's collection \\-as knolvn to everybody
\\-h0 needed to k n m - it, to the sn~allgroup of artists and drnilt~nrs\\-h0 \\-ere trying to rethink the history of art in the light of \\-hat \\-as going on right there and then! Rv joining an impressive group of m-orks by Ingres. that exemplar of academic standards. 11-ithpaintings by Manet, (:assatt. (iauguin. <:branne. \ran Gogh, and himself, L)egas \\as suggesting an artistic- genealogy that broke the stranglehold of official taste. Me was shol1-ing hon- the insiders ,;l%-
the history, and it turned out to be a history in v\-llir-hEl Greio be-
came a precursor of (:4zanne, and in =which Ingres and L)elacroiu, far from being the <:lassie--versus-Rc~~nantic a~lversarie5that their supporters imagined them to be, were joined in their sense of color and line as expressions of an artist's free-flo~vingfeeling for the power of style. In Degas's collection \\-e see style less tethered tci subject nlatter than herctcifcjre. Ke see style becoming the transparent expression of artistic- personality. It took time for that idea to take hold. It is ge5tating in I)epas3scollection, and the mix can become quite complicated, as \\-hen Daumier's paphic hyperbole seems to move naturali\m one step ctclser to abstraction. &%nJ eventually, in the advancing decades of the tn-entieth century, as Manet. (:(.zanne. and (iauguin became almost universally beloved artists, these innovations became the statils quc,.
R\- now the Impressionists and Pcistimpressioni\ts are box office gold, nncl American museumgoers arc clrep into a run of shm-Sof their \vork that is going to extend into the spring and beyond. Many of these are kscinating esfiihitions, in ll-tlich particular aspects of an artist's career are dissected meticulously. Museum\ are to he applauded for supporting some adventuresome scholarship, though of course everybody know\ that a~lministrators \vouldn9t give a damn if they \\-eren't sure of the public's support. "Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age" icurrently at the Kilnhell in I'ort \Vorth. after stops in Ottalva and <:hicago. "Monet and the Mediterranean" \I-as at the Rimbell last sunlmer and went on to the Arooklyn Museum, \\-here it posted the largest attendance the museum had seen, at least since the Lran Gogh retrospective in 1971. iit the hfetropolitan, "The Private <:ollection of Edgar Degas" has just closed, but "Degas and the Little Dancer" hiis openeci at the F~slynr t Museum in Omaha, and the National Gallery, wliich n-ijl mount "Degas at the It;lces'Yn April, i also presenting "Manet. Monet and the Gare St. I_azr?ire"(which is currently in Piiris) later in the spring, a\ \\ell as a major Van Gogh retrospective in the kill. In truth. museumgoers have been pulled up a bit short by some of these sho&-sbecause they present aspects of 1)egas. Monet, ancl Renoir that can be difficult to jibe \vith the blithe spirits of pop Impressionist legend. \Xrhat\ve are seeing this seacln are the Impressionists of the
irlaiitnrrr
These painters
experience confusions and uncertainties; they explore blind alleys, and sometimes they move rather slowIy. '%firnet and the hfediterranean," \\-hich fc3rused on several cycles of paintings that Mcjnet did in the South of I'rance and Italy in 1884. 1888. and 1908. \\-a\ a disappointmmt for many museumgouh \vho came expecting a breezier side of this mo\t kmous Irnpressionist of af l, The s h m - emphasized Monet's cloggeiiness. Over and over again he attacked the same exceedingly prettv hut not necessarily compelling motif:
the small Italian seaside to\\-n of Hordighera. or the fort of hntibes. k~achim Fissarn, (a grcat-grandson of the artist). \\-h0 organizecl the s h o and ~ \\-rote its impressive ratalog, focused on Monet's no\e-to-the-grindstc3ne detemmination. The s h o n didn't have a seductive pace, yet if you lingered over Monet's considerations and reconsideratii)ns of a motif, you could begin to grasp his enormous difficulties in clearing out all his preconceptions about h m - nature looked. And only after Monet had \\-iped the slate clean did he surge fc)r\vard, into the miraculous purple-and-blue meltiio\vn of the views of the Palazxo <:ontarini in Lrenice. B\- the second half of the nineteenth century. painting had become such a pcyulau vehicle for c o n v e n t i o n a l i l emotions that even the mo\t in~iependent-minded artist could have a tough time getting hack to some t-teclmck of feeling. Monet and Renoir hacl to struggle mightily to find nen\\-ay\ of raturating the entire surface of a pitinting with heady exhilaration. Thew m m lived \\-ell into the twentieth century-long
enough. indeed, to
see many of their innovations turn into nem- form, of kitsch. But their extraordinary con1mercial success ought not blind us to the gamble that they had taken or to the desperately hard-u-on nature of their achievements. . 1 own truth by maintaining an absolute skepticism about all Monet f c ~ ~ xhis artistic conventic)ns. li'hile \\-orking in Venice, Pissarro tells us, he "appar, only ently only \\-ent to m e museum (presumablv the i i c a d e n ~ i a )and \\-ith reluctance ciid he accompany his \\-ifc to a Lrenetian churrh----on the con~iitionthat the\- not stay too long!" His close friend Renoir had almost the exact opposite approarh; for him the lessons of the ma\ters became a virtual obsession, so thzt he would sometime, bend to tradititrn 11-itha perverse \\-illfulness. In the 1880s. this supreme master of the feathery, \\-atercalory brushstroke spent years attempting to achieve an Ingresque hardness. It was as if all choices had to E-te c-onsidered-no, fcxe Kenoir cotrllt be sure o f ~ - hhe ~ )\;\-as.
en~brat-cd-l>e-
'I'he artist we sec in "Renoir" P~"ortraits" takes a zigzag iourse. Sometimrs his work ib lalsored ancl c-onventional, at other times alnlost arbitrary. And then, all of a sudden, he will come t h o u g h 11-ith scimett~ingso miraculouslv light and true ancl deft that y ~ can't u believe that he experienced n single c-onilia in his entire life. There is the n-hirling c-ouplein Dorzcr irt Br?~dg);lr-
v d (painted in the 1880s), one of
3
series of indelible visions of late-nine-
teenth-century bohemian youth in all their sunstruck, live-for-today glorv. And later there arc the portraits in \\-hich Renoir recaptures-an~l tain inrtances maybe even transcends-'f'itian.
in cer-
Among the \\-orks in this
shm-, I'm thinking in particular of the two portraits of Ambroise Vollard, one in -\l-hichthe dealer p l a p the superne irmat~lr:.,eramining a small scuipture by Mail101 (3908). ancl one in lvhich he \\ears a torcador costume (19 17). And then therc is the portrait of the actress Tilla I)urieux (1914). Ilurieux had the lt~sh,golden looks that lienoir adored, and a radiant artistic intelliofs Shm-, \Vilcie, gence that earned her starring roles in early p r ~ d t ~ c t i o n Hofmannsthal, Gorky. and \i't.ciekind. She inspired \\-hat iprobahlv the greatest of all portrait5 of an indomitable theatrical spirit. h half century later, ISurieux recalled that Renoir ha3 said to her, "I didn't want to paint an\- more portraits, hut I'm d a d that I agreed to do yours. I've made some p r o ~ e sdcln? , y o t ~think?" Kenoir's late style, with its massive figures and deep, saturated colors, can strike contemporaiy vie\\-ers a\ overwronght, hut it shontd be pointed out that both Matisse ancl Pica\ro saw in the aping Imprcssionibt's Renaissance recapitulations a very modern kind of density and \\-eight. And if Renoir \\-as able to express the full force of the pitinterly tradition only after going through a serious consideration of the antipainterly possibility. then puhaps the opening galleries of "The Private <:ollection of Edgar L)eg;~s." \\-ith their <:la\sic-versus-Ron~antic drama, arc not so strange after all. I)egas wanted to present those apparently opposing impulses through the
\\-ork of Ingres and I)elacroix as braided-together themes. as linked elements in the nineteenth century's increasing fcjcus on style as abstract value and a* the ultimate expression of artistic personality. Those first several galleries full of xvorks h\- Ingres and I)elacroix, so densely packecl \vith small, often relatively unkimiliar preparatory \\-orks, \\-ere the most thrillillg in this \\-on~lerfulshe\\-: they told you much of \\-hat you needed to know to understand Renoir's portrait of Durieux (--hich is in the Met's collection). Drgis had thought of leaving his collet tion illtact, as a museum that jq-o~lde,sentiall\- focus on nineteenth-centur~-art. and in the Metropolitan exhibit you could feel the logic of his planned presentation. As the show unfolded, ancl you realized that I)aun~ier$miling form, echoed Delacrois's rhythmic self-assurance, and that a magnificent cliptych of
\\-omm bathing by [Ttamaro \\-as positivel\- Ingresque. you began to enter ~ticln. into I)egas's m!-steriouslv cyclical vision of tl-ad' Degas \\-as a traditionali\t =with radical ambitions. Come to think of it. that is probably the only kind of arti\t \\-orth being at any time in histor\. and surely today. Ilegas \\-as radicalizing the past m-hen he g n ~ u n d e dhis account of the new French painting in Ingres. n director of the French .%cademy in Rome \\hose triumphantly idiosyncratic society portraits and nudes \\-ere pmilurccl alrnmt in spite of his 0%-nreverence for an ossified brand of traditional thinking. This approach of Degis's. which a\sumes that you \\-ill see the path to the future only \\-hen you have cliscovered a nem- perspective on the past, remains more controversial than many visitors to the Metropolitan could possibly have imagined. Ultimately, the artistic revolutions that &gas and his generation ushered in were subsumed in tlie h d a i s t maelstrom, 11-hichleft man\- artists ancl historims believing that the past is nothing hut a doormat. n c i no\\-, painters \\h<) \\ant to look hark don't find the past o\rified so much as evaporatecl. The\- are left \\-ith the over-
\\-helming job of resurrecting tradition before they ran begin to reshape it
or rchel ajiainst it. Evrryl-tody kntrws that each sucicssive artisrir. revolt~titrnspa\%-ns its own %cadem!-. hut now 11-rare confronting knokv-nothing academies, and their kno~--nothing assumptions have become so ingrilined that many people actually mistake them for artiitic ideas. When ta\te has sunk to this level of confusion, artists ciin't reall!; reform it. They have to walk a\\-i-a\-from it and start again. Ferhap\ contemporary artists are only confronting an everdeeper version of the crisis that led Drgastto dream up his museum. In that case, the\- would do well to join forces m-ith the Qmutuurs, as L3egas did n hundred years ago. .?~ri~ii.arshave all\-ay\ t-teen the people \\horn you call in \\-hen the professionals have failed. But \\-here arc the urn~irrrn! That is \\-hat contemporary artiits m-ant to kno\\-. hfiti~c;~~ c), 1998
BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER
I )ne di-17;in Kcivenll-ter 1945, the Finnish arc-k~itec-t Alvar Aatto, who had re-
to New York for the cently arrived in (:ambridge to teach nt MIT, i l e ~~dokvn crpening of a show of nem- work by his friend Alexander <:alder at the Buchholz Gallery. In a letter to his \vife hino. he reported that after the opening. Sandy (as everybody referred to <:alder) and "all our old friends glthered at a suburban Italian restaurilnt." The painter Leger \\-as there, .%altotold .4ino, "1%-itha nem- hlon~de."along m-ith dozens of other people \\-horn they knew. though a l t o \\-asn't sure about a lot of the names.
It's 11-onderfulto think of &%alto, (:alder, and liger, thuce arti,ts who had first twcome friends in the furiouslv experimental '30s, gathered in a familystvle Italian rertatrrant in Nevc-York in the vear that the \;\-ar\;\-asciver. Khen halto left the restaurant at midnight----he \\-as still suffering from the time change from Europe-the
partv was far from over. .4nd in spirit the party is
still going strong more than a half century later. Or at least it \\-as a month ago, m-hen the giddily ecbtatic (:alder retrospective opened at the National Gallery in Khshington m-hile, n short flight north in New York ( m d Aalto. 'iq-ho \\-as an afici~)naCfoof air travel, l;\-~uId d~fi~titely have taken the shut-
tle), halto's cfeliciou\ly complicated elegance filled one floor at the Museum of Modern .%rtand L(.ger3smodern-age cliissical wit filled another. The more I think about the convergence of these three shorn-S, the more I find that they resonate l;\-ith one another. .%alto met Leger and <:alder in Paris in the 'DO,, and from then on the)- kept turning up in one anotlter's lives, In 1937, Aaltcs organized a two-man she\\; of their m-csrk in the gallery of Artek. the Helsinki company that had been set up to produce Aalto's bentwoocf furnitt~re,The next year, n-hen (:alder had an exhibition in Springfield, Mnshachusetts, L6ger and Aalto were there and gave lectures. l s o in 1938, (:alder had the first show cfevoted excIusivel\to hi\ jell-elrv at Artek; Maire C;ullichsen-who
had helped establisll
Artek and cornn~issicinedAalto's n ~ o s ft a n ~ o t ~hot~se, s the Villa hfaireaseems to have bought more than a fc.w of Calder's fanciful necklac-es. In their published lvritings and their convers;ttions, I.4gcr and Aalto quote in the '50\, Ckldeu and one another and refer tci shared experiences. &%nd L6ger encouraged the Parisian art deafer I,ouis C:a.rrb, m-ho rel~rcscnted E-toth of them, to consicier "their n~iracrtlo~ts friend Aalto" for the commission to design his country house. This house, m-ith its dramatically pitched roof and \;\-all$lined l;\-ith L4gers, can he seen in a series of photographs in the Moclern's halto sho\v.
Kba.t brought these men together m-as much more than a mutual sociat3ilitv. They shared a similarly opm-hearteci and easygoing relationship with the grand adventure of modern art. in \\-hich the\- \\ere taking their places not as founders but as second-generation pioneers. Both halto and (Ader \\-ere born in 1898 and died in 1976; by the time they turned 20. abstract art \\-as an e\tahlished fact. Leger \\;is born a generation earlier, in 1881. lvhich makes him a contemporary of Picasso and Rrayue; hut his first great paintings, the hold Coatrust
(f
Fiinnr series. n-ith their black outlines and sxvaths of
primary color. are second-act Cubism, in that they take Picasso's and Braque's initial discoveries for grilnted. In much the same m-ay, .%altocame to prt>minence \\-ith some vnriatitrns on Le <:orbusier's and (Gropius's International Stvle, and (:alder found himself as a sculptor after a viGt to Mondrian's studio. In the late '20s and early 'JO,, these three men \\ere princes in the expanding kingdom of modern art. They were all involved in one \\-a\-or nniltl~erin the 19117 i~lternationdExposition in Paris, that last, glorious and desperate stand of inter\\-ar optimism: (:alder's ,Llurcrrry Ft~rrrrtrltn\\as in the Spanish Pavilion, not far from Picasso's (;rriiralra ,%ndafter the war \\-as over, <:alder, Ltger, and .%altofound that a new generatic~n\\-as looking to them to bring hack some of the olci utopian '30s
pia!-fulness.
No modern furniture is more m-arnlly elegant than Aalto's chtrirl and tat3les. no vision of modern man more hilariously seductive than \\-hat Leger offers m-ith his late construction m-orkers and circus performers, no sculpture more effc~rtle\slylyrical than some of Caliier's mobile\ of the 1940s. Still, for people m-ho are going this spring to see the 11-orkof these tremendous creative spirits, the experience is anything but umon~plicated.These are artists \vho come on ea\y, hut once they hilve pulled you in, they turn out to he delnanding seducers. That kind of deepening drama is m-hat gives the (:alder retrospective at the National (Gallery its gathering force. The
shm; \\-hich has heen organized brilliantly by Marla Prather, the curator of twentieth-century art at the Gallery. is in \Xrashington this summer and moves to San 1t:rancisc.o in the fall, <:alder is the most resc~lutelyyet sIyly Americiin of 311.4merican artists. and so he is a terrific choice fcjr n National Gallery shci&-.And the first phase of the retn~spective,11-hichis dominated by the ciiricatural \\-it of Calder's \\-ire figure sculptures. is great popular mtertainment----the perfect thing for \V;tshingt[,n3s casual museumgoerr. The audience responds immediately, unreservedly, and their reactions are right on tiirget. .&Ithough <:alder's Cfrrus. the efabcirate miniaturized universe 'iq-ith which he enchanted '20s Paris, no longer leave\ the Wrhitne\-Museum in Neu- York (where it ha* just heen splen~lidlyreinstalled), the National Gallerv does provide a remarkable film of <:alder putting his tov performers through their pitces. That nifty film (done by <:arlos Vilardel3o in 1961). together \vith the t,lithel\- confitlent hijinks of the early \\ire sculptures, h'rlves visitors <:nlder3sRuhe (ioldherg side. It's love at first sight. Anci \\-h? not? People are glad t i spend ~ somr time \\-ith an artist \\-horn the\- may be inclined to think of as n slightly mad hut enciearing relative. who dreams up nutty contrapt i o n in the garage. As the show pmgresses, ho&-ever,a lot of museumgoers ma!- fall out of love with (kider. (If course there is a feeling of drift-imd
plain tiredness-
that often cclmes over visitors in the middle of a long, wmplitated rctrclspective: but I think there is something else going on here. Initially, people \\-arm to (Ader's audience-friendly humor. f t e r a \\-hileethough. the\- begin to realize that most of his \vork is resolutely, purely abstract. And here the uneasiness come\ in. Although <:alcler is still offering balancing acts and no\\--you-see-it-m--you-iion't magic, this is all exprcsseci in terms of ah-
stract forces and absolt~tistdistillations. The artist \I-ho vi3itors first regarded a\ a 11-aikierversion of themselves turns ciut to be a highhro&--more Mon-
drian than Ruhe Goldherg. It mai- occur to people that (:alder isn't really such an all-American guy; he clid, after all, spend half his time in France. The lovable ragamuffin of the early galleries is actually an auhtere modern. His corned); is more aloof than earth\-. .4nd the audience. thciugh not exactly disappointed, is certainly bemused. A twentieth-century master \;\-h0 the rmm-ds expecteci to love unreservecily keeps his distance. That circus of (:alcler's is an ivcsry tower, too. This is not a time when Calder or a l t o or i.eger is likely to affect the \\-a\- we look at art. Their unrmbarrasred Olvmpian fun rubs people the \vfilng wit\-. They are too unaml3ivalent for the '90%;even their ironies are untrotrl->led,and \;\-hatare m-e to make of thatX:onsidcr the case of Fernand L6ger. 13-en as his ta\te for the silly kick of kitsch unnerves \\hatever is left of n tradition-minded au~iience,his suavely classical compositional gifts make his m-ork look antiquated to the hip cro\;\-dthat. incredible as it may seem, still hasn't u-ised up to leff Koons. (If course Ltger is s t ~ c han e%tablished figure in the history hooks that museumgoers are unlikely to reject him out of hand. Still, I can't help but feel that in the Modem's retrospective such ebullient paintings as Lil 16/11..nlri>r Kq~:~t>ri. Lu
C'Onstrui-t~lir5and Lil
(;r~tadu P~lririii.are bring prewnted and accepted as position papers in some
high-meets-lom- argument, rather than a\ the deliciously rontidmt juggling acts that Ltger ha3 in mind. Carolyn Lanchner. \v110 is n curator in the Modern's Department of Fainting and Sculpture and \vho organizecl the shorn; is partly to blame. l though she \\-rites convincingly in a catalog e\sa>-about L6ger's ra\ually varied painthandling. her in\titllation never e\tahlishes the rh\-thmic ilo\;\-from painting to painting that would pull us into Leger's l;\-orld.The totill exclusion of any of Ltger's pre-C:ul?ist landscapes robs the shom- of a real beginning. And Lzinchner presents mthralling summing-up lvorks such as LII l i i l p and ?lzwt. B7jtilrnc.n in cramped space,, so that there's no sense of occasion, not
to mention any space to look at them. Lanchner has squitndered valuable square fc3otage on oversized marginal \vorks, such as the \v;inly ornammtal Cotfj~?osirronw ~ hEvil Pdrfilt,t. 11-hich is nearly sixteen feet wide and gobbles up
the bigge\t room. (A much smaller retropective, mounted at the A41brightK,iox in BufEdlo in 1982. \\-as truer to i.@ger$spirit.) Lztnchner includes none of the poignant!\- lovely classical lanciscapes of the '20s. Her selection feels Like a recitation of L6ger" concerns. 1,anchner she\\-s t ~ the s influence of the movies; she shm-s us Ikger the Surrealist. Khat's missing is Leger's nwesomely confident mood. 1 didn't feel the full fcjrce of Leger's color, U-hicli, once he hits his stride in 1913, gives the work a sure, hrioj-ant tone straight thmugh to the mci, some forty years later. Surely visitors \\ant to he seduced by that exhilarating color of Leger's. There is no other artist who knows ho\;\-to set c~ffthe boldest l3lues and reds and greens ajiainst soft platinum grq-S,Those orchestrations arc heavenly. Rut a socir~logicalscourge lurks in the minds of ;l lot of museumgoers. and that devil tells people that they shoulci he skeptical about i.6ger. rust as they arc billing head over heels in love 11-ith the flamboyance of the nlreu b7imnr. that purit2nir.d demon may start them m-crndering why they're getting such a charge out of these sheet-metal babes. Right-thinking people may \\-orry that they are so amuseci by paintings that have such machine-age subject matter, so many robotic- or pneumatic or paper-doll fig"""
The
question is an olci one. considering that i.@ger,alrcadv in the early '205, \\-as explaining that "the mechanical element. like everything else, IS ira(\~d not cnla unLt
mi.dlr,
'l
L6ger \\-ants us to understand that he is a visual poet who is enthralled \\-ith popular subjects, not a social theorist or critic. He lover to give pop theme\ a magisterial-cla\siciil;ing-itura;
it's thttt simple. Yet even though
his smse of fun is infectious, people have a hard time accepting this imaginative freedom, probably t~ecause\ve are living at a time \vhm art that ciealr
\\-ith popular culture is generally left to F<:-bookkeeping rnint.1~.( If course, LCger also lived in a period of socially correct thinking. He \\;is an ardent Leftist and a nlenlher of the (:t?mmunity Party in France after R r l d \Var 11. Before everything else, hm-ever, he cared for visual poetry. ancl to those on the left \\-h0 \vould impose open-and-shut interpretations of his \vork he struggled to explain that he regardeci mechanical forms metaphorically. Me speaks of m-anting to create "the equil-alent of the 'beautiful object' somethat a beautiful times pro~iucedl,\- modern industry." He is not saying A
\I-oman is a macfiine. Me's saving that the sleekness of a macfiine is e x i t ing-3nclso
is the human body. Incleed, he's going further ancl arguing that
the unitv of ;t machine ancl the unitv of a masterpiece by Foussin are not totally different. "A picture organized, orchestrated, like a musical score." he \\-rote. "has geometric necessities exactly the same a\ those of every objective t ~ u m a ncreation (commercid or industrial achievement)."
L6ger has ideas. but he organizes them intuitively. So do halto ancl <:alcier. All three artists suggea a particularly between-the-jq-ars view of the unity of tradition and innovation. of high style and everyriay experience. There is a glamour, an i;dat,
it
utopia-no%-craziness to their elegant svntheses. The)-
I; had already seen the blazk do\\-nside of modern civilization in \*rEi>rld \*rErar L6ger had I-teen in the trenches. ,4114 so t h e ~ skepticitl, k~ hut in an imaginative \\-a\-that enables then1 to reshape their skepticism as intuitive freedom. An arc-hitect
studied 11-ith ,%altoat hf1T in the "00s recalled that he
\I-as 'kery nmt~chan intuitive aucl~itect.. . . He did not like to discuss architecture on any abstract or theoretical l33sis. . . . The \\-hole idea \\-as to rulti\ate the 'eye' for f ~ r nthere ~ , is no method for this." Aalto-and <:alder-use
L6ger and
older. artisan-like senhihilities to interpret the modern m-orld.
Yes, LCger is interested in the peiulirtv impersonality cif the machine, hut he's also enanmored with the It'coclassical tradition that runs konm Potrssin
to David. His big p a i h n g s are at least as much ahout the old-fashioned splendiferousness of French painting a\ the\- arc ahout the lvonders of the a\semazty line. Cafcter uses ordinary materials to create cit~t-of-this-wc~rfcl effects, and the National Gallery show catcher this exciting metamorphosis heautifull~. This is a big shcm-, hut each light-filleci room is so packed \\-ith beguiling compo"tions that I could happily have seen it gci on longer. (:alder first 'iq-cntto Paris in 1026.1111930 he saw-Mondrirtn's studio, and ti-cim then cin he \\-as unstoppahlr. The idea that sculpture might move-and
thereby in
some \\ay conquer the fourth climension---had been S\\-irlingaround in avant-garde circles even before Naum Gnhci and Antoine Pevsner nnnotrnced in their 1920 "Realistic Manifesto" that ""kinetic r h v t t ~ n ~wouICf \" have an e\sential place in the new art. <:alcler brought to that grand experimental spirit such a nothing-to-it, tjst-hrward ea4e that n-e are sometimes in clanger of forgetting how unique an artist he is. He is the onlv sculptor
\\-h0 gives kinetic art a t3oun~llesslyricism. In recent decade\. (:alcler's unahitshecily experimental work of the '30s has often been reckoned a more formidable achieven~entthan his bestk n o ~ - mobiles n of the '40s and '50s. In those early years, (kider used herkyjerky mechanicill structures and unequi~c)rallyrectilinear and circular fcjrms to create enchanted, toy-like variations cin themes that he had first seen in the art cif Mondrirtn and hfirci, There l;\-orkshave the aura cif madcap cosmologic31 fantasies: (:alder's circular configurations evoke n t r o nomicitl rnoclels. and his proscenium rectangles framing intergalactic mcounters sugge"
ta
plainspoken ahsurdist theatricalitv. <:alder's work of
the '30s is bursting \\-&h promise; I think tl~at's\\-hat peopie resl3ond to. There constructions reflect a young man's can-iio ingenuitv, hut considering that they are s u p p ~ s e dto be ahout movemmt, the\- clon't have much tlo.t;\-. Often the\-krc little nlore than tt~rce-din~ensionaf realizations of other
artists3ideas. And when they do actually rnilve, the m o v e m m is awkxard. For all its freshness and insoui-ianze, I don't think this work can compare \I-ith the unfurling drama that (:alder first ashievecl in the mobiles of the
'40%.Their sn-ooping- living-soaring forms easily-triumphantly-L-omm a d a space. <:alder giurs his metal-and-\\-ire mol,iles a seductiurly naturalistic ilo\\-*His mechanism\ are keyed to the infinitely subtle dynamics of the air. There is something of Leonariio in the \\-ay th;tt (:alder hiti-her his mol3iles to the ineff a h l c t o the mysteries of air currents and gravitational pull. His greatest mobiles, m-ith their liiting, meandering prijgress and their astoilnding asyn~metuies,have a roioi-o&isc.ination.I'm thinking of the black cascade of S-
J h ~ ~l;ittt? i t (1946), the tu-inkling n-hiteness of the imnlense Infrrrilrtronbil ,Moktlu (1949). the spiny redne\s of ,\s,izirr
LI (1952). and the unity in diurrsity of liiiri-k"
Fb~vi.rirnd Snoniuun (1959). These are peerle\sly carefree \\-ark\. <:alder's formsthose boomerangs and wing shapes and st\-lired flolvers-are
beautifully
\I-orked out; but his subject is not form, it is whitt air doe^ to h r n ~ . hfarla Prattler's installation of ttle 11-ork k o n ~the '40s and '50s has E-teen inspired by the profusion of form, that \ve see in phc)tographs of (:alcier's Itoxbtrry, (:onnecticut, studio; she also evc~kesmuseum installations that \\-ere done \\-Me Caider was dive. Prather overlaps the n~obiles,so that initially you take them in a\ a gaggle of undifferentiateci elements-a
sort of
mechanicitl hanging garden. Although the air in the galleries is stiller than one \vould like, there is some movement. and the plzii- of shadokvs on the \\-all\ is something to beholci. S you linger, you begin to pick out particular f,lvorites. liven if the cm&-iiingsuggests a slight do\\-ngrailing of this work. at least compared to the \\-ay that Prather has han~iledthe earlier g;llleries, it" a l ~ v einstallation. l~
I have only a few regrets about the shm-. Prather incI~~eies paintings and drawings, but she doesn't give spitce to the delicate side of (:alder's cirafts-
manship, to small works such as a wittv portrait of Sartre. 11-ith the smoke from his cigarette spelling his name, or the sketche, of the mol3iles ancl stat3iles that (:alder created for the ratalogs of his s h ~ \ \ -in \ the '40s ancl '50s. thereby turning these pamphlets into precious little illustrated t3noks. f rather include., some of <:alder's jekvelry, but I would have liked to see a se-
lection cif his household object$, too. As for the \\-csrk cif the '60s and '70s, we could have used more guidance than Prather gives. It would he an understatement to say that the gargantuan structures of those years-including the large mobile in the East Bring of the National Gallery---are among <:alder's less inspired works, but I think that the selection of late stabileit could have been better. Yet these are nlinor complaints. The shojq- has a glinting heautv that holds in the mind. This is the most grandly lighthear ted museumgoing experience of recent years.
In the gentle yet precipitous arabesques of the (Ader mol3iles. you feel the freedom that come\ \\hen an arti\t kno\vs h011 to plai- with the horizontal of the earth, the vertical of everything that rises heaven\\-ard, and the gravitational pull that brings it all t3ark cio~-n. (Ader ciances amund the basics; that's his \\-ay of raluting them, ancl that's \\-hat vou feel in i.6gt.r and Aalto, too. Each of thew artists has his o\vn teasingly loving relationship \vith the fundamentals. I.@ger,for example. doesn't limit himself to the primaries, as hfondrian did. Even in paintings that are essentiaiIy red, yeIIo~;and blue, he \\-ill permit himself a little vac;ltion and acid a bit of green or orange. This is L6ger's humorous \\-ay of she\\-ing his muscle. n d althcjugh Aalto first came to prominence with a number of buildings in the back-to-essentials International St>-lrof Le (:orbusier and (Grnpius, he gave these impersonal forms a quirk\- \\-armth. He regarded rectilinearit\- a\ one possi13ility in a vast democracy of possibilities.
No exhibition in recent memorv has represented a ionfidmtly undogmatic- modern spirit n-it11 such deep t~nderstandinga\ the AaIto retrospective that Peter Keed, associate curator in the Modern's Department of Architecture and I)esign, nlounteci this \\inter. halto has been admireci at the Mc>demfor more than half a century---the first hook devotecl to his \\-orl\ \\-as the iatalog of M( )MA's 19.18 rho\\-and
Reed has built on that in-
satutional history \vith an optimism that many of us had feared \\-as no longer possible at the Museum of Modern Art. \Krithc)utslipping into postmodern polemics or irclnii nostalgia, he has honorecf one of the mt~seum's old favorites even as he has demonstrated 'iq-hv that acbieven~entis still urgently appealing all these years later. Arcl~iteitureexhibitions are aln-q-sdifrjcult to do, and with &%alto, the majority of whose work is in f:inland (after KorlJ V7i1r 11 he also worked in (Germany a good cleal), the ta\k of giving American audiences a feeling for the itihievement may seen1 impossible. Yet this is exactty m-hat Itecd has done. Aalto's marrelous drawings are one of the wonders of this shou-. The5e---together \vith plans, photographs, architectural models, furniture. glasbn-;ire, full-scale mock-ups of architectural details. and some very impressive video \\-alk-through, of major projects-leave
you m-ith a strong
feeling for the atmosphere of this greatest of ilinnish arti\ts. The s h m - is magnificently laid out. halto is the most m>sterious of all the major architec ts. and Reeci's installation is true to the unprepo\sessing \\-ay that he \\-eaves his enfolding spell. I think that \\-hat first strikes a visitor to a l t o ' s buildings is the elegant refinement of individual part,--the \\-a)-blue tile is arranged on a \\-all, or the \\-avelike rhvthm, of a \\-ooden ceiling. Aalto al\vays gives you a lot to look at, hut initially you may feel that the many of these impressionnyour reactic~nto the ceiling, the 11-in~io\\-s, hardkvare-are
ciisirete and unrelateci. ( )nlv a\ I go from part to part to part
d o affinities and relationship\ emerge. The impressions begin to add up \\-ithout rnv reitliring that I'm cloing the aclciition. After a time I feel that the t3uilding has been grolving up-hlossominparc~t~ncl me. ancl in my mind. too.
I have never been to Finland, but the Baker E-iotrse c l o r n ~ i t o at r ~ LfIT, a key work of the '40s, is enough to give a firsthand feeling fcx .4alto3smagic. though a lot of the original cletail, are lost or in a dci\vn-at-the-he& state. K h a t mai- seem initially like just another red t3rirk (:ambridge t3uilding has man!- different mc~ocis.There is the intimacy of the entrance. 11-ithits doors pierced by port holes. Not fir in\ide. a fireplace 11-ith a m-ide. raised hearth suggcas "the \velcoming vision of a living room in a friend's house. Then there is the dining hall-with
its grandly miniaturized staircahe, \\-onclerfill
skylight" ancl slim, horizontal \\-indci\vs that turn the views of the Charles River into a rapitnese scroll. Even if you can't see the dorm moms upst;lirs---almo\t all of which have eccentric floor plans a d magnificent river vie\?-S, though mo\t of the original a l t o furniture is g o n e l o u can still enjoy the idiosyncratically meandering halls. Back outside, the btrilcling makes several different impressions. depending on =which side you see. The facade on the campus side, n-ith tm-o a n g ~ l l l r stairca\es rising in a V-shape from the mtranre, is a bit fc~rtress-like.Facing the river, Baker House becclrne., curvaceous, meandering-a
mirror of the
\\-atern-;$\-.And then there are the short ends of the domm. lvhich are alrno\t comically abbreviated. Later on, if you catch a sight of Baker from across the Charles, m-hat \\-ill impress you ithe astonibhing forceful chiaroscuro shaciokv play of the \\incling facade; that's something you're una%-areof up close. halto's t3uildings don't leave you fceling over%-helmed or spoiled for other architecture, the \\-a\-.say. some of Frank Llo\-LiByright'smasterpieces ' be uses all these elements ssattered do. LPger o w e wrote of (:alder that %
thmughout our daily life. . . . He has amalgamated and coordinateci everything." I.6gt.r might have said that about a l t o , too. halto gives us a heightened admiration for oriiinar\; materials-for
red brick m d inexpensive
t looked at \\-ood. His buildings reflect the sensil3ility of a man \vho n ~ u shave the mo\t rnode,t houses and streetscapes and seen details and elelnents that delighted him, that he figurcci he coulci bring into his suhtle\t compo\itions. It has ciften been cibserved that the Villa hfariea, in 'iq-hich ,%alto used a great variety of materials-different stucco-arhieves
\voods ancl stone and brick ancl tile and
an effcct akin to Cubist collage. I think that's right. The
subtle unity of halto's buildings is not unlike the unit\- of the greatest coll a g e d h a t Piciisso and Rraque did hefcjre \Xhrld \i:ir I. Even as the artist is achieving an overarching flo\\; the elements that go into the composition retain their indivi~inafitv.There is a Cubist transpuency to ,%alto's method-ii
sense of order so sure that it needn't he in\isted upon.
Peter Reed calls his exhil3ition ""Rtm-cen Hurnanisn~and hfaterik~lisn~," and what he hits done is to remind the architectural prot;.ssion, which is \\-racked with ideological strife. of an architect who rcgariieci the analytical process asa xnmc~ueexperience.I find it interesting that .%alto\\-as such an inspired ciesigner of libraries, both put4ic and private. He obviouslv responded immediately, intuitivelv, to the physii-al beauty of books, =which give rnmtal processes a mv\teriously mcoded concrete form. In the years \\hen Aalto \\-as a young man, both a self-consciously Northern Romanacism and a stripped-~io\\-nclassicism \\ere PO\\-erful forces in Scanclinavian architectural circles. and although early on halto \\;is a Neocla\ricist, it is obvious that he took from everywhere and everybody. furniture that \\-as his ; f 038, featured the l->ent'i"~-ood His first hfodern s h o ~ in inspirecl-ad
humanized-variation
on Marcel Areuer's tubular metal
furniture. a l t o \\-as not a man \\-h0 t3elieved that the n e n wiped a\v;i!- the old. li'hile teaching at MIT. he took his s t u d e n t into Boston to look at the
\\-ork of Charles Rulfinch. an American rla\sicist \vho cie\igned the Massachnsetts State House in the late eigbteenrh century. h part of \\-hat Aalto shared with <:alder and 1.6gt.r \\-as a genius for be-
ing lucidly romantic atmut modern experience. They \\ere gambling that the excitement of modern style might bring a nem- audience to art, But if they v\-ereoptimistic about this, they v\-ereby no nleans naive. iirclund 1950, halto tried to persuade the town of S;ivn;itsalo to include a painting
13)-
L6ger in the council chamber of the T<,wn Hall that he \\-as cie\igning, but he \\-as rebuffed. Still. Aalto ancl 1.6gt.r hoped that popular taste might expand. In the 50s. \\-hen Leger m-rote several e\sa)-Sabout the use of color in architecture, he reciilled a visit he haci made 11-ith Aalto to some housing that Aalto had design for \vorkcrr and engineerr. (I suppose this \\-as the Sunila Pulp Mill complex, which \\-a o\\-ned h\- the (;ullichsen fdmilv.) halto had painteci the \\-allsin strong rolors, anci Leger \\-rote that "our fine gentlemm, the engineers, put up \\;illpaper with parakeets \\-hile the workerr didn't touch anphing (cif course. perhaps the\- ciilln't ciare to)." 1.4ger \\-anted to argue that the architecture had a positive effect on the \\-orking man. He theorized that "the influence of color and light affected the work; their
clothing \\as better cared for." n d he quoted Aalto as sit)-ing.
"All in all, the people aren't bad." All of this ciin be dismissed as one more episode in the tkx-entieth-zentury intellectuitl's misbegotten mmance with the common man. Of course that is a part of the truth: but \\-hen L6ger mused that the lvorkers might not have changed anything because "they ciidn't dare." he shm-eci that he haci a sense of humor about his hopes. These artists knew that their love affkir with the public \\;is a rrazv gamble. The\- \\-ere up-for-anything spirits
\\-h0 realized that in order to expand taste they \\-ould have to go out and prove to the public that the modern style, m-hen presented m-ith wit, elegance. and agility. \\;is a magnificent spectacle. This. no ciouht. \\-as \\-h\-the
idea of the cirrus performer held such a kiscination for them. <:alder had established hinlself in Paris n-ith his playfully miniaturized jugglers and acrobats. Ltger's career closed 11-ith the same theme. In n series of autohiographical conversations, <:alcler recallec1 that \\-hen Maire (;ullichsen took him to see Aalto's pulp mill at Sunila, the "great \\heels in pairs, rolling on paper pulp in vats . . . lookrd like circus elephant doing a stunt." I do not \%-ouldhave disliked the analog\-. think &%alto These men lvanted to be ringmasters in the m o ~ l e r ncircus. They \\ere uncorr?fc?rtai>le11-ith the conventional boundaries betm-een the arts. Aalto painted and did bent\\-ood sculptures: I.Pger \\-as fascinated m-ith architectural decoration: (:alder's mobiles and stahiles sometimes approiich the sire of small buildings. Late in life, a l t o was asked b!- an intervie\\-er \\-hat he thought about the relittit~nshipbetween itn-hirecture, painting, and sculpture. and he responded h\- quoting L6ger's thought that "the arts form an orchestra, =which the architect ronductr." Yet a l t o was also skepticiil about collaboraticrn. sit)-ing. "I . . . think it better if three artists are hitirfen in one person," m - k h \\-oulct be ptrhsible, since "the three art forms of architecture. painting, and sculpture are linked to one another in that they are all manifestaticrns of the human spirit based on muiuriilv-on the c-oncrctene4s of n~ateriafs. These modern friends \vantell to create paradisal visions o u t of \\hat Aalto referred to ar the artist's confrontation 11-ith materialitv. Ancl that is precisely \%-hatyisu see them doing in the shcrtvuthi seahon: in tbc ecstatk
/~ in the scintilliiting red-hot vision of carnival spirit of L6gt.r'~( ; l - u s ~Pdruiiu, <:alcler$
Strrn~t.eII,
and in the heavenly l3luc-and-U-biteinterior cif Aalto's 1%-
sen ( Ipera House. L3espite some impressive attendance figures, ho\%-ever. none of these retrospective\ has been an unequivocal hit \vith the muheurngoing public. I \\-ould not conclude from this that people are unsympathetic or unkvilling to respond. To the contrary. museumgoers feel the tug of these
visionar~artists even \\-hen the\- don't knoll- quite \\-hat to make of them.
M\-guess is that people are feeling a bit he%-ildered as they leave these shm-S.liven our po\tmodern knolv-it-all, arc realizing that they have not yet fully grasped \\hat modern is. Jl;sl. r, 1998
THE
A R T
OF
S E E I N G
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The Time Elemc~tlt 13-er\ couple of months, I hear an artist or an art historian announce, in a voice suggesting 130th amazement ancl frustration, "Nobody knc,~-sho\\ to look anvmore." They inay be thinking of the nonplussed reactions of students \\horn they have taken to a museum, or of the smug theoretical proncluncemrnts of colleagues. or of the anxious uncertainty \vith \\-hich friends \\-h0 are not in the arts discuss the exl~ibitionsthat the\- see. These artists and art historians are not censoriot~sso n ~ u c has they are rattled. They beheve that a lot of people arc rohl3ing them,elve\ of a tremmdous expmience. I know exactly ho\\ the\- feel heciiuse there are many day, m-hen I go to the galleries in Nehv York and find rnvhelf concluding that none of the pe@e \\-h0 arc selecting and promoting ci>ntempilrary art know
ficijq-
to
look. I an1 sure that some artists arc doing m-ork tha.t is worth a seci-lnd or third look, but most of m-hat the galleries and museum, she\\- and most of m ~ ~ egoing l f through \\-hole \\-hat people talk about repels curiosity. I fi~d buildings and streets and neighborhoods full of prtlleries that arc operated and patronized by people 11-hci seem to care so little for seeing that they might a, \\-ell have shut their eves. (:t?nfronted \\-ith this situation. my initial reaction is to say that people have lost the ability to look. But the reatitv may be stranger still. I suspect that \\hat I am mcountering is not a generation that cioe,n3t know ho\\ to look, hut severat generatinns that have been train& to look in a particular \\-a=,-. If you make any effort to folio\\- the \v;$!- that art, e\pecially contemporary art, is discussed in the art magazine,. the museum,, and the universities. you \\-ill find it difficult to avoid the impression that there is a method to this u-idespread inattention. People hiwe an idea that to look at art in a
sophisticated and up-to-elate way means that vou do not look at it very long or very hard. There are late-modern and pasmodern variations on this approach. Some trace it hack t o L)uchamp, others all the \\-a\- t o L3iderot. Khatever the genealogy (and it ran get fairly complicateci) the result is an almost universal feeling that art ought to he taken in quickly. even instantaneouslv-that
a pitinting or sculpture should hit you \\-ith a l,;tng. After
\I-hich, of course, you can talk or theorize about it forever. Let's he absolutely clear about \\-hat kind of visual experience has been, if not yet lost, then marginalized. \%%at people arc no longer prepared for is s e e i q a\ an experience that takes place in time. They have cea\ed to believe that a painti~lgor sculpture is a structure \vith a meaning that unfc~lllsas \\-r look. This endangered experience is not a lnatter of imagining a narrative: it involves. rather, the more fundanlental acti\itv of relating part to part. \Ye need to see particular elements, and see that they add up in u-a\-\ that become more complex-and
sometimes simpler-as
m-e look and look some
more, The essential aspect of all the art that I admire the most, both csld a d new*is that it makes 1ne ?vant to keep loolting. A painting or a sculpturel,\- Sassetta, l,\- Corot, l,\- Brancusi-engages
the viewer l,\- means of a range
of particularities and unities. \Ye take in these elenlents and combination?, of elements in different \\-ay\, at ciifferent speeds. Sometime\ we take them in serially, somrtimes ar i>verl;ipping impressions, sometimes sirnultaneouslv. KC 1nay appmitch the same elemmt-a
tigurc, a curve-from
ciifferent di-
rections. h work of art ran reveal alternative, even in some \\-ay\ rontradictory, kinds of I o ~ ~ cAnd . logic ran collapse into illogic. from \\-hich a nenlogic can emerge. Of course the artist exerts considerable control; hut the greateht artists enable us to make our own way t h o u g h a composition, so that \\-C 611~1our own kind of freedom within the arti\t's sense of order. If I \\-ere asked to name one group of twentieth-century pitintings that epitomize* the shaped yet boundless experience that I am attempting to describe.
I \\-oulci point to Rraque's Srriilrtj paintings, those S\-mphoniccelebrations of the particularity of seeing, of the in\istence on unity a\ a delicious, foreverjust-heycjnd-our-grasp dream.
If there is so much to be said for particularity and parariox, \\-h? has the unit\- idea triumphed so totally? The first thought that comes to mind is that this is not really so strange, considering that we live in a \v~rlt.lwhere art markrting dominate* art, ancl m-here the m-ork that reveals its meaning instantaneously is pml7;thly going to he the ea\iest to sell. I mean sell in the l,rna~le\tsense-not
just to collectors, but also to r urators ancl museumgo-
ers and critics. There are kinds of ?X-ork.such as <:onceptual Art. that by definition ciefy extended looking (kvhile inviting endless discussion). Those \\-h0 have never much cared for theorv mai- \\ant to argue that \vith theory ascendant, there is simply less and less time left to look. Rut I would point out that the ideal of immediate, all-in-one impact has become a touchstone even for people \\-h0 l,\- and large reject theory. In 1982, \\-hen Peter Schjeldahl \\-anted to praise Ilavid Salle's canvases, lvhich \\-ere then at the forefront of ;t f,lshionahle return to painting. he cie\cribed Salle a\ "an arti\t \vho evoke\ virtual Rorschach readings of critics' pet tendencies." What 'ould provoke a quicker reaction than a Rorschach test! Ancl just this spring Lhve E-lickev-a
critic m-hn. like Schjeltfahi, has a reputation a\ a postmodern aes-
thete-saluted
some new pitintings l,\- Ells\vorth Kelly (in a catalog for the
Matthen Marks Gallery) a\ "an irrcvocahle h i t accompli." Hicke\- hastened to add that this "demand?, narrative,'"but his protracted "accounting of the contexts and proi-esses" belongs not to seeing hut to thinking ahou t seeing, \\-hich is something else. Seeing is not ea*y to tiilk nhout, heciiuse the talk ciin eahily shift attentic~n a\\-a\-from the primary experience, m-hich is by definition nonverbal. Ytju can talk yourself into distinctions m-here none exist. and you can end up confusing talking nhout seeing m-ith seeing. Recently, n I made my m-a\-
thmugh a number of hooks that cieal \vith how- art has been seen and understood in the pitst fifty years. what occurred to me \\;is that large areas of agreement among leading art theorists and historians are often masked by all the argument that have been \\-aged het\%-ernthe (Grernherg-type formalists, the advocates of French-st)-le theory, and several other varieties of late mc~dernsand postmoderns. I am %\\are that there are suhtantial matters of philosophy, taste, and outlook that separate Clement (;reenherg.
\\-h0 died in 1994 at the age of 85 and is no%; a few years later, the subject of Clpmunr (;rumbcg.-1 Life h)- Florence Rubenfeld; and Michael Fried, n-ho u-as much influenced by (ireenherg in the '60s \\-hen he wrote an influential set Oigucthtrtxi: ries of essays that he has finally made into a t,ook called ~ l r ilad
and Uve-Main Bois and ICosalind Krauss, whciw l3ook icr~rmltjss -4 l i s ~ r ' sC;erzd~ is a leading exanlplr of the French-style theory for \\-hich Fried does not care. Rut I would argue that the)- are all i n c l i n e d t o g e t h e r m-ith n poststructuralist such a\ Norman B r ~ s o nand a postmo~iemaesthete such as Dave Hiskey-to
use their eyes in the same \\-ye The people m-ho are now
regarded as the most sophisticateci interpreters of art are insanrtivel~dispmccl to believe that a great l\-ork of art is a work that they see totiillv at once, ancl this belief is prouncied in such a pre-analytical mix of old-line ncademic, antiformal I)ada. anci po\tn;ir high-modern a\sumptions that even the finest minds cannot exape from what amounts to a visual prejudice. The phenommon is complicated by the fact that immeciiate impact and seamless unity are legitimate and recognizable values in art. But the immediacv and the unity that non- ciominate hshionable taste are shallo\v. The n e n unit\- has neither \\-eight nor force; you feel no struggle. no resolution. And there is no surprise lurking in the immediitcy of a lot of recent art. Nothing mv\terious or submerged is being brought forth-in
the \v;i!-. say
that the near-symmetry of Mark Rothko's pitintings can be exciting t>eca~lse (as David Smith said about his 011-n m-ork) "the afterimage* of parts lie hack
on the hcirizon, very distant cousins to the image formed by the finished \%-ork."\Vhen, thirty years ago. Michael Fried praiseci painangs and sculpand "~TVSVII~III~SI"the italics helped to convey tures for their "tlistt~~~til~ieoz~st~rp?i~'~ the electric-shock quality that he \\-as after. By now, however, t~nitvand immediiicy have become uninflected, tvrannical experiences that rob art of all its ambiguous fascination. In offering a response to the 13ig-hang theory of seeing, I cannot enter an crngoing dialogue, because those of us \\-h<>believe that sreing-throughtime is simply how art \\-as. is. and \\-ill be experiencecl have b\- and large E-teen shut out cif the discussic>n.K h a t I can offer is an alternative view, a \iew that is grounded. I twlieve. in the very t3eginnings of modern art, as \I-ell as in earlier tra~iitions,Much more than a theoretic-al argument is at stake. The experts \vho cieny the time element in art so insistently have b r i ~ q h us t to a point \\-here i o n t e m p o r a r ~painting an3 scdpture t h t reyuifes concentrated, aclventuresome attention-~7herhc-r the \%-orkis representational or abstract or some\vherc in het\%-een-is regularl~shunted to the side. if not eclipsed. If there has been one sure rule in recent years it is this: the more that an artist asks us to look at a \I-ork over a period of time, the more a v\-orkdrops beneath the raclar screens that iriticisn~has set up ttr track the contemporary scene. So far a\ I am concerned, if you are looking for an all-in-one impitct. you're missing most of the important pitinting an3 scuIl3ture that itrti\ts are doing ti~day.
Iust to make sure that there is no confusion about the kincl of experience I am defending, let's conhider \\-hat happens \\hen 11-elook at a transcendentally great work of art. The painting I have in mind is a still life by <:hardin, Tizr
Brrilrhp.
from 1763, in the Louvre. This is a small painting-just
over a
foot ancl a half high and just under t\\-o feet \\-ide---and so you might expect to be able to take it in all at cince. But when I first look at ?bp Rrtoihr, it is <:hardin's \\-ay of differentiating one st~bstancefrom another that htslcls me. And I linger over his distinc tions. He gives us the exact r harar ter of cherries and peaches, of biscuit, and a crusty hrioche. of porcelain and glass. And even as this naturalistic virtuosity is astonishing me, I am also noticing (as people have noticed since the artist's day) (:hardin'\ habit of playing a hideand-seek game m-ith his 0%-npeerless illusionism by enriching his surfaces \\-ith strokes of strong. virtually unmixed color. I begin to be caught up in the poetic m o d that <:hardin spins, as he turns our attention back a d forth. between paint-as-paint and paint-as-illusion, t,et\\-een paint-a\-illu,ion and
paint-its-paint,
Initially. I am not especially caught up in the totality of C:harilin3scompa\ition, though I am &\\-areof the overall-ancl
on first glance, not e*pe-
cially daring---S)-mmetr\-. =which fans o u t from the grand spiral of the t3rioche that is topped \\-ith a sprig of orange blossom. There is something pleasing about the simplicity of the arrangement, about the \\-ay that <:hardin draws me into an almost childlike game of counting things. I notice that therc arc three cherries and three biscuits. but only two peaches. And then I find myself studying those three cherries to the exclusion of everything else. and that is the moment \\-hen the compo\ition really begins to kick in. I);imned if (:hardin hasn't turned these cherries into a sort of reeling circle dance. with their glealning fruit and curled stems creating a mesmerizing red-and-green m-hirlpool.That tiny cyclone might he the engine that powers the \\hole composition. The force of those cherries is certainly out of all proportion to the spitce that the\- orcup!-. but then this is a painting full of strange, alrno\t Manhattan-skyline-&
shifts in scale. So
no%-I mai- have found the key that unlocks nip Brztli-hr. I \\-ant to rompitrc objects in the extrelne i-;,regrcsunJ, such as the cherriet, with forms that
tower over them, such as the glass carafe full of liqueur and, of course, the t-triclct~e.
I 611d rq-self making lots of comparisons. I notice that the \vhirlpool of the cherries is echoed, in a slowed-
hind" the hriodie. (;ha.rclin\ symmetries are heginninp tii be interestingly echoed and reiteratecl. The still life is becoming landscape-like. I can think of the hrioche as a sort of Mont S;linte-I'ictoirc-surn~c~untecl by a flo\ver-tree. that is, the orange t,lossom\-that
I move a%-ayfrom and return to by sev-
eral different paths.
B\- no%-I feel the mt~ltiplyingc o m p l e x i ~of Chardink cc~mptssitionaiachitecture: the curves and curls of hrioche, cherries, peaches, patterned t,o\vl, all set in an inexhaustible counterpoint \\-ith the relative rcctilinearitv of the liqueur carafe, the shelf, the biscuits. (:hardin useh his lyrically theret,ut-not-quite-there handling of pitint to inter%-eaveepisodes of intense hue. earth-toned shadings, and diffused, gm!-ish atmorphere. And of course I am also considering the peculizrities of this particular arrangement of ohjects-the
Meissen ho%-lkvithout an accompitnying coffee or tea service: the
elegant liqueur t3c)ttle next to the biscuits that haven't even been set on a plate. The painting is about difkrentness ancl connectedness, and the relntionhhips are so thrillingly elahclrated that you never want the complications to come to a concl~ision. h picture by (:hardin is a dream of unity that \ve glimpse through an atmosphere saturated in particularities. ancl it is our feeling for those partics the tlrearn. I heularities, and for their connectedners, that carries t ~ into lieve that the same can he said for many, if not all, of the greatest \\-orks of
art. In the museum and in the gallery, I \\-ant the parts to add up----;in4 to m u l t i p l e n unexpected m-a=,-,. This is the process that gives art its rhythm. its tlo\\-, it\ mesmerizing time element. This is certainly \\-hat holds us in Analytical Cubist pitintings, those anatomical blueprints for the art of our century, =which often seem composed of the hones and sinews of <:hardin's still lifes. In one of the great Ficassos or Braques of l91 l or 1012. we will pick out n naturalistic detiiil ( 3 hit of rope or \v~t>Li. say) set next to a line that's suspnded in thin air. \Ye see shapes that are apparently solid at one end and fade off into nothingness a few- inches farther on. In Rraque's Milmug~ Bat-h. \I-ords, a musical instrument, and echoes of classical architecture plc- a fitscinating hide-and-seek m-ith one another, and m-e fc,llom-the clues. In his "C:reative (:redo" (1920), a ciassic test of moclern art, Paul Klee c,hserves that "space itself is a temporal concept." Klee f6,cuses on the narrative possibilities of C:ut,ist construcaon, and in doing so he insists on the indissoluble connection hetm-een modern struc ttlres and earlier European art. He asks: "And m-hat al-tot~tthe E-teholder:tloes he finish 'iq-ith a work all at once! (( Iften yes, unfortunately.)" Klee goes on to say that n painting is "first of all genehis." "In the m-ork of art. paths are laid o u t for the heholder'5 eye." These paths create movement. an opening-up sensation. The same idea is reframed, a generation later, in the lvritings of Hans Hofmann. the great teacher among the Abstract Expessionists. He argues that "movement is the expression of lifc. All movements are of a spatial nature. The continuation of movement through space is rhythmic." Hofmann also celebrates immediacy, hut he m-ants the imlnediate sensation to pull the viewer into an experience that expands as n-e look and look some more. And if you are susceptible to the rhythmic impulse that fuels those movements, you \\-ill find that manv of the conflicts between form and content that have peoccupied the thecsrists for decades ancl even generations hegin to vaniah.
If there is time to look, then there is no conflict between noticing the character of a smile in a portrait one moment, the way the tones of flesh vit3ratr again\t the distant landscape a little later. and the cut of the sitter's clothes later still. K b a t people tend to divide into form and content is jq-~syen together into the rhj-thmic movement of a visual experience.
Khy has this expitnsive \v;$!- of looking, =which is lodged so deep in our experience, been rejected? n d \\-h\-has this \v;$!- of looking oftm been said to be Familiarity is no doubt an element here: inevitably, anything hut mc~dern? ta\te is conditioned by the \\-ork that people knoll- best, ancl for years a great deal of the painting and sculpture that has been ciisplayed most prominently has not exactly mcouraged anybody to look long or hard. No matter \\-hat one's particular feelings about the \\-ork of i)uchamp, Pollock, j'uciii. R r h o l . and Stella happen to tw-and
these arc arti\ts of radically ciifferent
characters and values----R-e can probably agree that the audience that has gn,&-n up regarding this a\ stan~lardfare is going to believe that the\- should take art in quickly, instantaneously, all at once. Ancl many people \voulci argue that this speeci-rea~lingfits right in \\-ith the pare of contemporarv life. The obsession with unit\- mai- be grounded in a belief that today's artists nltlst create products that can compete in an environment in tlrtliih it sometimefieem, that nothing is left but brand identity. Many people are convinced that the modern l;\-orltl,'iq-ithits at-celeration, con~rner~ializatim, and cultural hcimogeneity, is alxx-ays hostile to particularity and idiosyncrasy. In scsrne parts cif the a t n-orlii it is
MO\\-
assumed thrtt no artist, no
matter h m - gifted, can hope any longer to establish n detailed, particular. extended relittionship \vith anybody in the auciienrc. Thew ideas, of course, are not all that new. Y t ~ ucan trace them back to the go-go mood of the
pmtkx-ar years, \"hen n hip triumphalism became the upscale m0od in New Ytxk City, and it didn't take any particuliir intelligence to see Color Field way painting and Pop and Minimal Art as spin-off, of a slam-right-throu~h~gh of lifk~.
I think I knoll- \\h!
(:lement CGreenberp's idea\ held such a kiscination
for many people. e\pecially in the early '60s. R! arguing that artirts. at least since the Renaissance, have sought a seamless, peremptory impact, he gave the slerklv uplwat painting of his o\\-n day a sophisticated traditionalist sheen. Greenl3erg \\;is kvithout a doubt the mo\t searching exponent of the idea that \ve take in great art all at once. (Ifall the critics \vho flourished in those years-I
am tl~inkingnot onlv of an art critic such a\ Harold Kosen-
berg, t3ut also of literary critics such a\ Philip Rahv and Lionel TrillingCGreenberp is surely the greatest prose stylist. He knew
to use his blunt
lucidity to put over his big idea. He could make people believe. as he helieved, that tkvrntieth-centur\- art \\-ail mo\ing to\\-ard its o\\-n kind of t3luntness---to\v;ird a \\-ay of treating "the whole of the surhce as a single undifferentiated field of interest
compels us to feel and
judge the picture more immeciiatel~in term, of its over-all unity." Therc is nii yueiltion that Geenbergk ideas arc grounded in the artirtic excitement of his early manhood. m-hen n new kind of stripped-~io\\-nahstractic~n\\-as the hot news in Ye\\-York. I suspect that \\-hat happeneci to CGreenherg \\-as that after a \\-hile he began to want to make that part of the truth into the \I-hole truth; he 11-antedto line up the \\-hole history of art behind the Pollocks that he adt~rccf.B\- the early 'MS, he ha3 turned 'Ynrrtantane~swunity" into his n~antra-a key to all m\thologier. When he announces that it \\-as the fifteenth-century Italian painters \vho discovered "that in\tantaneous, compact and monumental unity . . . to 11-hich Kkstern pictorial ta\te has oriented itself et-er since," I hhase to 11-onderif this isn't clo\er to a tfe,cription of a l3illboard than cif a Masaccio.
If there is anything to he learned from the tone of rnixeci henilderment. anger, and awe that marked the discussions of (ireenherg in many of the reviews of I'lorcnce Ruhenfeld's lvorkmanlike 1097 l>iography,it is that even non- nobody quite knom-S\\-hat to make of him. There are a number of reasons for this ambivalence. Greenl3erg had a flair for playing the art world game that is rare in a nlan of his refined intelligence, and he convinced many people who should have known better that taste \\-as n lnarketahle cornmodit\-. In the process he was not averse to stemrollering an)-body
\\-h0 did not get \\-ith the program. and those people have not al\\-a!-s been quiet, nor should they be. It \vould be a h u r d to argue that (Greenberg's <,pinions are directly nffcc ting the taste of yilllerygoers and museumgoers todav. The contemporary auciienre has only the vaguest hmiliaritv \vith his idea\. B\- the same token. Duch;tmp's thoughts (to the extent that one can determine \\-hat they are) remain the pur\ie&- of specialists: ancl the same
gee, for the idea\ of such contemporary \\-riters as Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Main Bois, and ?;orinan Bryson. But I do believe that the sophisticitted public is picking up on fraginents-inevitably frequently corrupteci-of
popularized and
all of these thinkers' ideas: and by now there is a
kind of theoretical gestalt that hangs heavy in the art world air. Iiveryhc,dy from the formalists and the Neo-I3;idaists through the poststructuralists and the at-adernic Marxists seenls to believe that for at least the past 100 years the artist ancl the public have been becoming increasingly alienated horn one antsthet.. This process is felt tcs have a historical inevital>ilit\-.lvhich in turn leads people to imagine that the kind of controlled journey that the artist might once have provoked in the vie&-eris nom- an irnpossil3ility. I3uchamp. reflecting on the situittion in a hmous staement made in Houston in 1957, said that "to all appearances the artist acts like n mediumistic being." For (ireenberg, the result of this hitorical development was an increasindy self-critical and inm-3rd-turning artist. I do not
nlean to saj-that the aesthetics of Duihamp and the aethetics cif C;ri.enberg are the same. hut their divergent \\ay* of thinking nhou t art do depend on a related asbumption that the arti\t ran no longer count on communicating complicated, expansive experiences in n detailed, lucidiv articulated \\a!-. The Museum of Mc>dernr t curator Rohert Storr. in a deeply unsympathetic account of (ireenberg's infl~lenrcthat he published at the time of the muscum's 1990-9 1 exhibition, "High and I_o?\-:Modern Art and Pc~pular <:uLture," remarked tm the convergence of a hrnlalism for \\-hich he did not care at all and a L3;idaism for \\-hich he cared a great deal. Storr argued that if (;reenl,erp's e4sential idea was th;tt modern art \\-as self-critical, then "junk assemhlngists, Neo-l)adaists, and Pop artists" m-ere continuing that p r ~ c e s "rice , they "wed the ciist~ffsof ma4s culture to criticize that culture from \I-ithin." NOM-self-criticism is at the heart of the unitv idea: you keep m-hittling things al\-i-a\-.The new unity is really a new simplicitv. The logic of Storr's argulnent may be a hit difficult to fc,dlo\\, hut I think it come* dolvn to the rudimentary thought that a rohns flag or a \Viirhol ,Llurr!yn is a distillation of the pop ethos. and as such is analogous to a Morris Louis stain painting, which (at least fcx (;reenherg) is a distillatic~nof the Kestern color tradition. The aim of art is distillation. In both case$ \\-hat's contemporary is unitary. Many people have made this connection. 4 s early as the '401, and frequently since the 'hO*, critics have observed, with varying ciegree, of comfort
OY
distress, that the abmIuteness 11-ith which DaJa rejected all
tradition& idea4 of iompo4ition and structure could seem to be leading in the sanle direction as Purist art cif one kind or another. El-en Michael 1t:ried-in
""Three An~ericanPainters,'-he
introduction to a 1965 sho'iq- of
'iq-ork E-tv Soland, OIitski, and Stefla, the abstract artists he admirecl and \\-antecl to isolate tfuon~what he called the literalisn~of hfinirnal Art-had to admit that "just a\ modernist painang had mabled one to see a blank
canvas, a sequence of ran~iomspatters, or n length of colored fabric as a picture. Lkda and Neo-Daria have equipped one to treat virtually any object as a work of art." Both modernist painting and Lkda. in other m-ords. m-ere allin-one experiences. B\- the end of the 'hOs, all the art that the tastemakers t3elieved \\;is worth talking about. \\hether they wantecl to praise it or iianln it, jq-as big-bang art. The unit\- idea is by no\\- accepted so jq-idely as to defy anal~sis.Marxists admire Ki~rholfor the same reason that the auctioneers at Sotfte13y's d o ; he makes n big. kist impact. .4nd if you are a historian. you may m-ant to wend your \\-a\-hack from Khrhol's gai--themecl all-overness to Pollock's macho version. At least that is m-hat Itosafind Kra~rsshas done in icr~rmltjss,\;\-henshe considers Karhol's oxidation paintings, the big metallic surhces on which he had friends urinate in order to get the pitint to change color. "Warhol's 'urinary' reading of Pollock's mark," she explain$, "niis insisting that the verticalitv of the phallic ciimension was itself being riven from within to rotate into the axis of a homoerotic challenge." The urinary, the unitary. Krams mes her newEang1eii theory like camouflage, hut if you peel it off you find that her eve is still seeking the all-in-one experience that she learned from Greenl3erg years ago.
So far as the asadem\- is ioncernecl, the jq-hole history of Western art, at least since the Itenaissance, is based csn instantaneot~st~nitv.In the '705, Michael Fried turned from art criticism to art history and began to study the Salon painting of anti-Rococo France in the late eighteenth century. (Maybe this wasn't such n reach after Color Field, m-hich \;\-asthe Salon painting of the '60s.) Fried believed that he had f r ~ u n ~ini , L)iden,t's defense of the narrative paintings of (;ruere. another critic m-ho sal\- "the essence of painting in terms of instantaneousness." Fried became immersed in oldguard main\trcam French art theory, lvhich insisted on a unity of time in classiiaf history painting. Never mind that some csf Poussink s ~ o sevtliative t
masterpieces are temporally ela*tic, if not temporally ambiguous. It sometime, seem, that contemporary theorists such a\ Fried ancl Ncwman Rrvson are determined to repeal the elements of paradox and nmbiguitv that are right there before our eyes in the (lid Masters. In his influential 1.lroa t~mi
Pdtntrng (1983). Rryson observes that \\-hat Titian-ancl
\Termerr-create
i
"a single mclment of presence. For the painter. the irreguliir and unfr~lciing discoveries of the glance are collected and fused into a single surface \\-how every square inch is in focus." This is a description that jibes with no experience that I have ever had 11-itha Titian or a \Ternleer. Fried is a ciisierning thinker; he is troubled mough l,\- the idea of instantaneousness to argue that you can look for a long time, just so that "at every moment the
ciilim
on the viewer of the modernist painting or sculp-
ture is renewed totally." n d Rryson is in fact oppo\ed to the monolithic vision of painting-that
Tyranny of the (;aze-that
he \vould like to reject in
favor of the ti-ecdom of the Glance. Krauss, too, in the discussion of C:ul>ist collage in her hook ihu Piiiis~oPdj~urs(1998). mai- be understood a* reim-enting an idea of reeing-thmugh-tin~ethat is really the most natural thing in the \\-orlii. But these historians are not necessarily in control of the ideas that they purvey. n d heciiuse they are inclined to l3elieve that they are close to the main*tream of taste. \\-hi& for that very reason they regard as never far from the truth, they have a \\-ay of ending up in cahoots with some of the l>ig-time museum and gallery people \\-h0 stuff the latest verour thmitts. sion of instant unity ~10%-n Khen Fried managed to demonstrate, at least to some people's satisfacof (;reuze's paintings were protomodtion, that the campy mel~~dramatics ernist, he perfc,rmed a great ser\ice for the postmo~iernists,and it hardly nlatters \\-hether he planned this or not. If (;reuze's overcron-Jeci narratives lead us to Manet. then m-hy can't that road just keep on going all the \\-a\-to the get-it-in-an-instant (:ihachmme surkces of Cinciy Sherman's po\tmoci-
ern (GreuAan allegories?As for Rryson. he has made it possible to see Greentwrg's celel3ration of instantaneous unity as a sinister ideological plot. and \\-hat could he more politically postmodern th;tn that! []nit\- hecome, the \\-hite male artist's \\-a\-of not letting the viewers make up their 0%-nminds. K h a t is lmt, once again, is the idea of looking as an extendeci, responsive. evolving. t3;tck-and-forth interaction.
There is no m!-stery as to \\-h\-unity exerts such a pull. \Ye dci go to art for clnritv. When you talk about a painting or sculpture. you say. "No\\- it's all coming together for me," or "I see how it adds up." \Kk all hope for cohermce. Rut there arc many ways for a \vork to come together, and the rharacter of even the most seamlessly cam-incing painting or sculpture is to he found in the unique confluence of elements and forces that makes up the \\-hole. This is the important point that Meyer Schapiro made in 1966 in the essa>-"(In Perfection. (:t?herence, and []nit\- of Form and (:ontent." In that understated \\-ay of his, Schapin~chose not to place his remarks in a contemporary context, hut I do not think it \\-as an accident that the e,say appeared in the mid-'60s. \\-hen (Greenherg's idea of instantiineouh unity \\-as at its mo\t influential. Surely Schapiro is lodging a proteht against the \\hole drift {of '60s aestl~etics\\-hen he \\-rites that ""tosee the work as it is cine n ~ t ~ s t be able to shift one's attitude in p;t\sing from part to part, from one aspect to another. and to enrich the \\-hole progressively in successive perceptic~ns." Like (Greenherg. Schapiro had been f,lscinatecl
the move toward all-in-
one expression in the paintings of the .4hstract Expressionists. Rut he nevertheless insists that \\-holene,~is at hest an eluhive thing. Schapiro shrewdly p a i n t out that we sometime, experience paintings that are in a fragmentiiry state a, magnificent whoIes. He insists that certain kinds of incompleteness
or irresolution can he precisely the element that give a work its life-giving mergy. lie bids us to renlenlher that there are many, many iiifferent \\-a\-\ in \\-hich a \\-ork of art ran satisfy us. and that in order to arrive at this feeling of glorious complicittion, m-e may find ourselves approitching a work from a number of radically different ciirections. Schapiro does not ask why this kind of peremptory unity might hilve hecome filch an ilbsessiort in tbc "60s. lie cisulcl \\-ell have pointed out that the idea of unity-if
not the unity of perception. then the unit\- of action in
painting---had heen a theme among the authcirs of treatises on aesthetics since the Renaissance. <:rrtainly, this idea has a \\ay of coming to the fore
\\-hen the general conversation about art has lo\t its vital connection \vith the hands-on experience of the stuciio. B\- the late '50s, many artists in Ne\v York feared that .4merican art's age of experimentiition \\-as mc~vingto\\-ard academicism. .4nd as Pop and Minimalism gave \\-a\-to (:onceptual ancl Environmental Art and then to postmodernism. the underlying pml7lem remained the same. Perhaps the mo\t recent guise that unity has taken is an chsessive narrative husyness, an image so saturated 11-ith small, frequently cartoonhh elelnents that although the\- pre\ent an idea of vaiety, they are \isually impenetrable-a
postmodern anti-unity unity.
leading prc)po-
nent of this approach is I.ari Pittman. the pitinter whose labyrinthine pop extravaganzas \\ere featured in three consecutive Khitney Biennials during the 1990s. From the '60s down to our day, fewer m d k w e r mainstream artists have heen committed to the kind of pragmatic studio practice that acts as a brake on theorists \;\-h0associate excellence 11-ith one or another h a n d cif n~onolithicunitv. A4nybi)dyseekng a countertraditiim in recent decades \\-ill m-ant ti) read the estraoriiinarily intelligent criticism that the painter Fairfield Porter \\-rote in the '60s. Porter was al\\-ays unequivocall\- dedicated to paradox, pa"icularit\-, and the ambiguities of looking. and he frrqurntlv grappled
\\-ith the difficult que\tion of xvhy taste was veering in such a ciifferent direction. Time and again, Porter camr to the c o d u s i o n that the m\-sterious pnxess ""flooking at n work of art was in some fundamental \\-ay at odds \\-ith the puhh to\\-ard standitrdiration that has ch;tracterizeci rnoclern times. "Standardization." he \\-rate in 1966. "is the victory of the mo\t probable; art is for the impml7;tble and again\t the standard." In a 1069 e\sa>-on "Art and Scientific Method," he ohserved that "with the arbitrary and the particular. there ran he no 'logcal' communication at all, for the arbitrariness of the c3riginal experience \\-ill not survive a generalization that is necessary f63r logical communication." If Porter is correct, this may explain \\-hi the quickie-unit\- of late-modern and postmodern art has been such a succehs alnong corporate collectors. K h a t , after all. m-ould captains of industry make cif the art that Porter preferred-rrn
art \\-hose aim, as Porter said,
quoting Wallace Stevens. was "W-ithoutimposing. kvithout reasoning at all, to h11d the eccentric at the base of design"? I d o not mean to suggest that corporate standarciiration is the same thing as t h e unity that (Greenberg wlehrated, or t h a t t h e unity that (Grrenherg \;I\\- in the masterpieces of the past is the same thing as the inscrutable self-sumciency of the found object. But I cio believe that in the minds of the majority of contemporary tastemakers all of t h i is related. And I cannot avoid the conclusion that a rigid concept of unit\- that is as old as academic art theory itself has now been resurrecteel in a particularly pernicious form, a form that fits the art m-orld's no-time-to-11-ait glohalized vision to a T. The peol~lem-k~cih a y e r-ontempc3rary taste are indined to believe that if a painter or sculptor pulls them in gradually, inirementall\-. t h e artist is prot7ahly not really doing much at all. An\-\\-ay, they have another appointment. liven a lively, unstuffy lvriter such as I)ave Hickev, the columnist for Art
Issuer. the hip 1.0s .4ngeles mapilzine. seems sc, pessimistic about hnding his
pwferred kind of quirky beauty in a painting or a sculpture that he ends up filling his essa>-S\vith comments on anything hut art. Hickev range\ from the Las Vegas show of Siegfried and Rov to old TV programs st~ctlas Pery :\f113o!l
to his feelings n-hile he "sat shivah for Chet Baker.'"
read Hiskey's
voice of unnervingly sweet sanity a\ a particularly clever and seductive response to the art \vorld3s closed-do&-nhorizons. h there any lvonder that people \\-h<)have lmt---or s~stematicitllydenied themselves----the citpacity to see shoulci no\\- talk in a \\-ay that is f,lncifull\ vague or theatrically overelaboratecl! Hiwing convinced themselves that the\- have nothing much to look at. how could the people who are most involved m-ith contemporary painting and sculpture not he in a state of perplexity-even
of dokvnright
self-disgust! Ha\\- could they not feel querulous and belligerent? n d if the professionals feel like this. ho\\ can we expect the wider audience that goes to galleries and museums to believe that your imagination opens up as the 'i\-ork unfcjfds in tin~el W'hat is so demoralizing about the situation in which n-e now find ourselves is that the very painters and sculptors \vho offer us works of art \vith complicated. multiple points of entry are often rejected n presenting poorly organized, incisherent experiences. Artists who aituatIy attentpt to communicate 11-ith the audience are no\\- generally the first one, to be dismissed a\ messy, a\ emoters-as
vulgarians. That may he how many people
regard Toan Snyiier, one of the very hest painters we have. I t h o u g h the steady stream cifvisitors to her shcin- at Hirschl & Atifer Modern in the spring of 1098 iiemonstratecl that there is still an audience that knm-s how to look long and hard, I had to lvonder \\-hen a work as absolutely extraordinarv as .? .$ud Story ?bki h ) ~iltr Optrfnrrr. the centerpiece of this exhil3ition. \\-as passecl over by the official art m-orld as n nonevent. This is a painting in m-hich Sny~lerrages apnint order an3 unity. It's a huge composition-more
than sixteen feet kvide---full of structures that
are shattered and reconstructed, just barely, hefcjre our eyes. This gorgeous three-part invention. \vith its overall o r c h e ~ r a t i o nof lemony greens and
cadmium-alirarin-and-17inkish reds. offered an experience so complicated. in so n~ltnyparts and passages, that a visitor couldn't take control of it: you just haci to go \vith it and see \\-hat happened. In the beginning, at the far left of the painting. Sn\:rier is literally tearing things up, as she unglues n corner of a collnged square. The vie\\-er is taken thmugh a series of metiimorphoses in this pitinting. from the dream of absoluteness that is a grid of colored squares. through a chttotic landscape scattered \\-ith skull-like rna\ks, and finally into a ilo\vering field. In the center. Snvder punches a hole in the can\-a\ and pulls us d t ~ n - n into a slit fiIled with dark, crushed fabric. There's so n ~ u c hto see. Yw.1 don? see it all at once. Much of the polver of the painting is in the \\-ay that you go through changes l\-ith Snyder and find things o u t in time. Inly after a while did I nc~tice.at the extreme lo\\-er right. in the midst of all her glorious orchestrations, this shockcr: a black handprint and the crudely scra\vled \vord
"hfoM." Here Sny&r is daringjy emotional. 1 would not have t h o u g l ~ t that an artist could get away \\-ith giving an elegy for a dead parent this crude immediacy; but it m-orks because you discover the \\-eight of Snvder's cry for her mother as an undercurrent. likc the soprano's last, low moan at the end of a grand aria. Snyder i an artist l\-ho m-ants to communicate on multiple levels. She goes into the \\-hole question of rememhering a person and remembering their suffering and their death. She is in search of lost time. And since she t3elieves in the time element in painting. she finds it. But \\-ill a put7lic that has been encouraged for decades to \v,-allow art in n single gulp find the time to look at a painting until it begins to reveal its secrets! To the extent that contemporary artists can make people look longer and harder, the\- must dare to give their l\-ork a complicated openne\s, n
surprising pitrticularitv. Arti\ts have to find ways to pull the auciienrc in, for
odt;jq-hen people come to mderstand that within a painting ilr a si:ulpt"'re they ran tird a time that is outside of time \\ill they \\-ant to keep looking. Only then \\-ill they see that althciug1.r nothing in n painting moves-at least in the sense that sotrnct rnoves in nlusiC or E-todie, move in danceeverything in a painting is alive. And then the surface opens up. and effccts multiply, and you see more and more. You enter into an intilnate imaginative collaboratic~nwith the artist. If the very idea of instantaneous t~nity come, out of a feeling that in the world things can happen with this much speeci, a more circuitouh and la!-ereci \v;$!- of looking suggests a release from the compressed, kist-for\vard pace of iiailv life. which has always troubled u unlock a moment. y ) u can enter a people, and surely doe, today. If y ~ can realm of freedom. &%rtists show the m-?-. Ti, look long is to feel free.
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
The critic \vho hopes to make a connection between artists and audiences doe, not \\-ork alone. Most of the material in this t m ~ kappeared originally. in some\?-hat different form, in 17iu Kuw Rq~ubiii-.Lean Kieseltier, the magazine's literary editor. has been unstinting in his support, as has Martin Feretx, the magazine's chairman and eciitor-in-chief. I ?vould like to thank tmth i.eon ancl Mart\- for creating an mvironment in which criticism can flourish. I \\-oulci also like to ackno\vledge the help at Tiw
R t ~ ~ ~ t bof lrc
Ann Hulbert, Mclanie Itehak, and Atian~Ktrsch.
I am glad that John1)tsnrttich brought me to Basic Books, \\-here he is publisher. Tiln Bartlett. my editor at Ra*ic, has brought his keen intelligence to this book. I'm appreciative of the \vork of Viinessa Moble~,editorial assistant at Basic. My agent. Irnnifer Lvons, has on more than one occasion gone E-tevoncl the call cif dtxtv. L)eh~rahRosenthal, tmth t h n ~ u g hher paintings and her thinking about p"nting. has deeply affecte~imy understanding of contemporary art. I believe that her canvlthes of the past ten years, e\pecially her variations on the tigure of the biblical E\-e. are an important part of the ,tor!- that is told in this hook.
h,\ve have twen married for more th;tn a quarter ofa centurv, I can't take the role of the critic in relation to her \I-ork, but I am glad to agree \I-ith the critic Lance lisplund. \vho recently \\-rote in the English qu;trterl\- ,llniern P ~ i n i ~ r s , thinking of the ntonishinp richness of these canvases, that "each painted 11-orld. . . suggests a myriiici of possil?iiities as \arious as 11-eare."
This page intentionally left blank
Angliou Wat, 231,232, 236,238.23M40,
AaIto, i2lno, 283 kalto, 411 ar, 293 295, 297,290, 302 308 "
fh,rract L xpressronnm and l andscapca"
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Amenc-an t'a illon ('Venrc-c),cY t - 82
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304
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AergJttrf-(;ctoJman, 153
262- 265 ISallctr 1933, 1 er, 262
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tS,tIIet\ Ru\\es. 251 265
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tS,tIkhu\, 57 68, 1 II, 133, 167, 170, 196, 198
13rrrj, ltuc de, L70
tS,tIkmmore hlu\eum ot Art, 132
13rrtrt1, jean \rrlctor,219
ffanana Itepublrc, 153
I3e\\er, t IOM ard. 28 1
Ifantea) Srer ( C :amht)dra). 236 238,239
I3ett: I'arwn.s (;aIlcrj (%V), 17,112
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liefzve~ntttr I,Lrd and rlzc Brd (fohn\), 146
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Ahattctchdrjrt, Kamdles\?tdr, 232
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Htrsehirll (ICtzdj), 63, A4
hla\c~rl~niry in 1 onremporarj
ffallyrrrar, jean k l ~ c h ~23, l , 157
American Art" (W'l~rtncj), 70
ffalltrcn I "page, ju1e\, 218
f3arhrvs ( C :61t;anne), 148,226
I3lach kli~untain(:c~llcpc,42 43, 46 47, 48.49
ISaudeld~re,I:l~drle\,10, 60,227
Ald~ne,Sell, 133
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ISctrol~uriur(It~ifonccll~t), 235, 236
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1Sct\c.l-t,t Zleron~,mucl, l97
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fftlnnard. I'lcrre., 222 fftlrges, jjorgi*Lun, 73
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260 261. 263 tStluerj t: ;aIlery (XI"), L 1, 44, 47,71,72, L 17, 157, 158, 169
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239,259,312 "Brancuu dnd 111s American (:ojlei*tor\" ( fernkin), L01
tSrdque, ( ~twrges,216,218,225,242 250,
25 L , 257,295,305, 3 13, D I X " " R r a q ~ I~be ~ : [,ate l&c~rli\" (("Llenrl C:ollc*ctlrln),242 2%) ff rallrai; t 55
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(:ara-t apple, Itl~chclangclohlerrsl da, 161, 1 65, 192
ISreuer, Itllarc.t.1. 3415
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I'arneg~e,Anifre=,\, 280
Hrlililr~ 7 h(C: ~ hardln), 315 317
I'arneg~eIcluseum oi .4rt (L"ttshurgh), 22
tSnt~i*h1 tjunzil, 82
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ff rxt~shI%a\/xl~cln (kenlcc), 77, X 1-82
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firtjaidtvcrj fitlc~greIk*itt~gle(("Llt~ndrian), h, 7
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ffrtli)ki?n kcademj of' hlu\rc, 94
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hlarj, 288
1Sroohlcn Zilu\eun~,220, 289
f,athnluc;rltits(Mr~net),246
1 S r o n~ Ilnrli c r w j , 70
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tSruegd, i'reter, LAfi, 170
faat ~91th,3/1trrt?r 111, T"h2 (IEaltl~u\),58, 59, 68
tSr)sr>n,?;orman, 314,324, 325
f,anrldrinr, 7 h(ISrdy ~ ue), 247
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( ' h a p l t , Iclarc-, 24.3
1 on\tahlr, John, 84
C /tiff!! du rt~ssrq(ni'ELP , ( ht\vIri\s~ue), 251, 256, 259
I tmsfntctrun, LP>(Ltger). 287
C:I~apc.lof. die ilosary (hlatlirlrc), 250
I,arzrr~r~rC ~ r m (LGger), s 293
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315 318
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(haurnan), 53
C:111xranr. Rlchard, 13
I,asturnr for u I-Ierulid(t ;xis), 252 253
C:111xrco, (;rtlrgrcj de, 187- 188, 254
(:c~ttcr,Holland, 21 1-21 2
C:hrjulCan, 4ng. 235
(:c~urhcr,(;usta\ e, 8% 1 113, 140, 158, 176,
(:f~rlrtchnrch( 1 tan h\rncror), 77 (
lzvfsr s I;ntsy trrto liuu,.cltEs rrr 18~79(Fnsor), 279 280. 281
"httrcfi, Fredenc Fdtl-111, L71 I t r us ~ j( :alder). 296 (
rg {l-bper,),108
187- 188, 192,218 227
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"C:rtj \cape" ((?Ylarjl~crrougi~ ( ;aller>), 172
(:unnrngham, hlerce, 264
(:la~r,jean, X1
I,up (l3ranru\r). 104
('lark, F-.)., 264, I65
(:utts, Sirnon, 182
('ltzmenre, F+rdncesztt,L36
(;U\eirer, EugPnc, 222
C Zevrzrijl I;rvrrrbilrfi '1 Life 13uhente1d), 314,
32 E
C:Ilntcln, ffill, 159 C:Iolrc, C:I~uch,t X l ~188, 195 196, t9Y
I )ahltlcrg, Erlw drd, 59 I )all, Salc ador, 158
1 l~deror,I)enli, 312, 323 Ilrsiastors rl/ tt2~ ({;O?J~), 82
lIanrp at Hratlgtt~~irl jl;Cent,ir), 291
It1 Suvero, Iclarb, 50
lIanrp ill llrrrtlz (Ldderman), 186, 189 192,
Ili5.j at
1% 199 tltjni r
o r I,lirr~isei ~ r trlrp
~ ! I PDoor
(Porter), I74
I)c>nahuciSr~srnIrk~ (NU), 157 I"i)rim~fer i,JU
S~E~L~N
I)cn e , krtIXur, 91
(Nauman), 52 Ikrnct~rsLW ti Plane ('ohn\), 146 I Jartmler, lonclr6, 10,288,292 I )a\ IJ J>Anger\, I3erre jean, 27.3 I )a! ILL< ;er'~rcf?197 I )a! id, f d ~ ~ L l ( rf.
I)rer\c.r, f hcodorc, 280
i Icpas, Edpair, 63, 2 f (1,285,286,287- 288,
I)ult%ichI'rcture ( ;aller> (Soanc), 272
291 293
l luchdnlp, Zilarcci, 8, l9,99, 100, 101, 106,
116, 142 143, 144. 149, 179, 182, 183, 192, 197,312,319,321 322 Itui:, ltdoul, 47 Iluta? E11>gt~s, Fhr ( Kilbe), 226
I)umas, knn, 28.5286,288
""fepa\ and rhc Lirtlc Ijanrcr"' (jr~sl)n Art Zilu\eum), 289 " " e p ctt the Itat-eh"'(qattondl (;dller! ),
289 I)e Jitrrlnirzg, 'lf'rfiem, 16, 18, 33, 38, 40,
42 43,45,92, 127, 144, 153, 173.265
I )elarrt~ix,F u g h e , 102, 188,288,292 i Iclapclrte, I oun, 230- 231,235 i Iclauna?, Itcjbclrt, 120 i Icnhk, k d ~ill, r 136, t 37,2MI, 264,265
I)e Xrro, Rol-rctrt, 133 IJerdrn, Antirk, 251 252,253,257- 263,265 "De)erign, l lance, dntri fLl~~"rc of the l3allrts
J
l lrelrel Rurnhctm I m h c r r . 27
I %l9 1929" (iX;ad\~ orth
Arheneum), 250 265
I )e\ponr, I hterr) ,273,274 275,276 iIctrort ln\trr~rteof. Arts, 213 i Ira Foundatlcln ( NV ), t 00, 153, 154 i Iraghilcv. Serge, 251- 265
Ilrlr$hitrc~li~tlletin lii1ni&iil1r, The (13ed~lmt)nt), 257 258 I)rcbtn\on, Fdtl- 111, 15L
I)unham, (:arrtlll, 44, 74 l liirer, AIi)rttc*ht,216 l lurteux, X rib, 291,242
Fich~ux.t r s (hrjmsba), 251,257
( .,ago\ran C ;aIlery
FaZ1 (f l c ~ m "'rcaitso), 147
( .,al
Faulds, W. iilo~i,204
( ,allatltl,
(XV),45 47, 193
220
AIhrrt, 111
Fauncc, Sarah, 220
( .,alltip, Ihcb,
59 klt*rrcr (?*V), 4.3.44
( ~attrs, 13tll, 273
FlnLcisteln, I our\. 25
( ;ate\,
Flr\t Street C ;aller) (UY), 153
(;auJt, Anton~o,151
1X5
1 fttnr:\.I outr, [fr.,204
FlscId, Ertc, 153
( ;aup~m".I"anl,2.34
Fh;f (john$), 9, 145,322
( ;eI-tr>,Frdn
F f ~ j r r ~rl/g I\/ltars~d> i-fit~an),243
(;"g",
Focillon, Ifenrr, 37 38
( ;enc
Fogg Itlureurn (Hark ard), 275
C;ersulrrt \ Jhtipst~n(\X7attedn),2 f 5
Fokmc, k l ~ c h ~299 l, Fondatxon klacghr (St. I'auJ de \icnrc), 249 Ftltd
235,255,288
h, 28
Iql-rrlrp,132, 1.39 141
iclttj, 1. I'aanl, 274- 275,280 (kttj
iliorn~(johns), I46
(:enter ( l or Angeles), 263 284 I:trn\rr\ ation Instttute, 270, 282
Force JP>~-hosrsfill (lieart\ olr 1, l l0
(kttj
I-ducdtrtrn Instttute, 270, 282 283
Fonf 1:oundation (%Y), 273
(kttj
Itese~ri.11Insrrrute, 270, 272,
Forlrzless A flsrr3 C ~ U I L ~( W~ Jo l \ and Krauilit), 3 14,323
Fouyuet, fean, 276 277 Four Stiusitns ( 1 1% omhl>),4 l
281 282 ( ;cttj
f rust, 26.%267
(;la~tlmcttl,kll~erto,4'7,8h, 1 1 1, t f 2, 133, 188, t96, 197- 1%
Frcillchcr, janc, 73
(irlbert and (;cxclrg~*, 78
French hlcademj ( ttome), 292
(;rotto, 294
Frenc1l-r I:trionral I xpostttons (1922, 1931,),
( ;luck,
(:hristclyh W~llrbalcf,264
( ;clher,
iilobcrt, 23, 158
23 1
Freud, I rrc-ran,81, 82, X.?, 85, 1.14
Fncdrlrh, (:aspar lI)a~xd,t 72
jean Luc, t (54 (,"o/d ~rndR l ~ i k#2 ( Karz), 136 (;oldhc.rg, Rubc, 296,297 (;oldrn, Nan, 1.50, 151, 153 157 ( .,oIcirnp,fohn, 243 ( .,olcirton, 't3111, 94
"horn l ondon" (Edrnhurgh), X2
( .,ot,cirteln, 13arb,ird,
Freud, hrgtnund, 83,226 Frir.1~I'oIIectlon (hl"),277 Frieci, M~chael,314, 315,321,322 324 Fncdliincier, hlax I., 169, 171
Fnlm
7rt~tJr to
Tri$rs(lScjl), 48
FucII~,Itu~lt,X5
( ;odard,
1 1 14,21,31,
117 ( .,orL??, ,i2r\hile, 92 ( .,orL??, hlclakurn,
291
(;osp~lof lfiulrlz wld O r h ~ -r r l t n ~ [Ess~ys ~ Fti~
(C:arneg~e),280
320. 323,325, 327 ( ;reene and ( ~reene, 271
I lrrrper lt fK#rk(.r'205 t 2ar.t.k). hjarsden, 91 f jar\ drd C irdd~idteSchool of ELIUCdtlon, 283 t.iav,li\rncjor, ?Irch<jla,s,77 !.IUJSEGL~S(hltinct). 240 t.ic~lrs~ann, Itfar!, 44 i .l&flon,Jean, 1117 118 i .lefmr, Jer\c., 111 FI~ritlJ7ilhrctzr. 1117 i .les\,FTl~
C ~ T ~ " P ~ Z M ' I C /tilJI~g~ I j EC~tdj),M
t 2e\se, Evd, 3 19
r ;regorj, Spencer, L3
t 2e\se, I: lermdnn, 235
(ircuzc, jean ffaptlrte, 323,1124
t Ze? u ortl.1, ( ;ecrltrej, 33
(ins, juan, 2 f (1,225,252-253 (ircjpiur, Walccr, 295,302
t 2lChe?,I)a\ e, 313, 314,327 .12X !.Irdi"-~rtlrl'-Setak ( f chclltchevr ), t 96
C ;riinei\ all$,Zilatl-r~,is,147, 148
" 'r lrgh and l ov. : Itlocfern krt and I'opular
C ;on rnp, I am rence, 8 9 86
r ;r)?a y Luciente\, F+ranznrofor6de, 82, 92,216
r ;ratlam and ,ton\ (Xl"), L72 (iraham, Itlartha, 264 I;rcr,tde i r ~ r ~ t ~LU l t *( L~ Cgcr), 297, Xf7 (ircco, kl, 277,288 C;ri.rk f;rr!, The. ( C ;orot), 225 Cireenberp, c Ilement, 32,(Ytl, l 16, 197.314.
C;trurrrricl (I$tcas\o), 295
( :uIcurcw(hlu\c.um c l f
C;ttggenl~rlm,Ikgeen, 31 1
322
r ;ciggenfieim, I'egg), 11 1,286 r ;ciggenI~eim,,tc\Ir)mon l<., 126 r ;ciggenI~eimRlu\eum (W~lh~~o), 28 (iuggcnhcim Itfuseurn (NU), 2% DO, 97-99. 118 121, 122, 129- 128, 151 t53, 203 2f4,2271,21(7 C;ttjftldut, Serge, 164- l65
klodern h wt).
FIzgh IYtnd tn l ~ f j l nA. (I f
i .lrne, I e u ~ \ L53 , i .lrr\cllI R Adler Modern (RV), 121, 122, 12%,328
t 21r\l-rhornZ i l ~ ~ ~(tVaahjnprcrn), um 49- SO, 360, 1 68, 198
C;ttllli.f?\rn iarnlly. 3%
t 2otltlerna. Zile~ndt~rt, 162 t 2oct*nej, I )a\ id, 278
C;ttll~i*f?\rn, Zilajrc*,294, 307
81, X2 t.io~tgkin,t Ii.~%\arci,
tlofmann, flans, 46,48,4(3, 125, 133.3t X tlofmann Scho~iL,4 , 4 7 I:lddt*nCittert, Anthon!, 358-159
t.iofmann\cbaI, t.iugci 5 on, 291
EIagttr 111 1hr4Ytlift3nr~js(f :orot). 219
i .loku\as, LA2 i .loHleirz, If an\, 190 i .lollander, fohn, 14 F I ~ ~ I I J ~ ~ ~ Q ~j LP;auman), S V Y I V S 52
""FlaH oi hlirror5: Art and 1.1lrn5rnce 1945" ",or i2ngelcc, R l u \ e ~ ~ ol^ nr C:cintempcjrar) Art). 160 Haring, Kcrtb, t57 f itrrlrqurfi~r&k*(13aIanchlnc ), 263
I linlwjtc~tidI/iik (I)Iracf~e), 3 1X t 2omer, L%in\ltm,205, 2116
Ifopper, Ijennn, 28
I Ki:illNor ;Titlrrrstr friluht~rdrr?L~frilrl I.fi~m'GIj
Ifopper, Fdtk drci, 196
f't>rsY(W~nbfield), 1X 3 Xru, Kenro, 23.5
f four 01 the Ili;r!fj fcmen), 94 f fousr i!f Ilr.trrtt and L$ ( la~te*rman), t (17, 1W
"Hoi? X l! rote / ( :crtain c l f k1v 13oi,k;," (l
ja~k-in-tlse-1itl.1, ( l3aIanchlnc), 251, 253, 255)- 260
l lugl~er,Rol-rctrt,30 l lun hen, 229,230,241 If~inl~tlgton 111313ry (San Msrrno),
270 271 If~ixta'kle,Ada !.oulw, 268 269,283
jat*hst~n, Martha, 17 jafrt.2, Shl rle!, l3 jan~t,S~Jtze?,16 J ~ ~ L I \ L c 'lfTaldenldr, L ~ ~ , 83
84
Ja\on RlrC o) ( ,aHCr! (h?), 192 Jaya.t'trman II, 232 !&L" t f i l l l jhrnlth), 101
ja>a%arman\i I f , 232
""Ient~t)and Alterit) "'(IY35 \.knit-t.
1' (:rcai%,153
ISlcrnnale), 8 l , 1017
""Ill 13r Your M~rrrtr"((Wl~ttney),155 !itzprt*~stttft
'Wt)r~lztzg((,or<)t 1, 224
""fnccndrar! krt" (( ;ctt) <:cnter), 2x2 IncohCrcnt\, 8
jenwn. 13111, 13, 3t,"t3,69, 87- 96 je\sup, f Zelen If)firtson, 235, 236 jaiih
("b'q~nrhc ), 255
jtrhns, jayer, 9, 141 149, 182, 195,322 John \f/ehrr C;nllc-rj(RV), 10.3 jones, I boma\, 221)
Ingre5, jean Augtrste I)om~n~cluc, 102,
Joxl?n Art Rlute~~nr (Xehrd\hd), 289
147,21 K, 288,292 "In I%ar\ccrl t land\" (il..oc.rllon),37- 38 Inrertlationdl Expo\rtlon 1937 (L'driil). 295 frilrnrillltnzlai .qilo/~l!v((,alder), 301 ""Ithe L~ghtoL^It;1l)"(Rat~ondlClalter)), 220
ji714ma1 d'rrfalwrPrtvr ( IIilllrjn), t f 0, 1 14, t f 5 judcl, OonaIJ, 23,511, 319 juijl~zrd.181, 182
Xiahn, l oun, 272
In ilse Siiu (Krraj), 63
Xiahnt?cilcr, i lanicl-id enry, t 7
Intrtt,;ir-l~trrato Irnqrt~gj l3c.sscr and I rant),
Xiamalcr~bart3hattacharya. 232
28 1
Kan, hjtc-hdel,213
(11s (Van (ic~gl~), 278
Kandtnsh!, %'ass1IIj, 76, 1 10, 120, 123, 126,
""lrrerrstrbie I )ecq " ((;ettj (:enter,), 2x2
Kanm ('11) Art Inrtitute, 25
Iru rn, ltt~brrt,273
Kaprt~u,Allan, 74
I\rt'keIld Stew art ( k d n e r M u s e ~ ~ n r
Kar\dv~na,Tamdrd, 261
(Ho\ton), 277
128
Katz, Alcx, i32, 135-137, i39, 174, i94,2M
Kedt3, fohn, 226
!.a IBre\t1,l
KeIly, EIl\\\orth, L5L 152, 154,313 Kendrlrh, hkl, 97, 105 106
turfit>f ,itt?~~>o,~lt~)tr w'ith I,Y~Ju' (Hitlkhu'i). 167 turfit>Gluu (llurhdmp), 179
Kerham, karl. 18
Lust fuiJN,t~~tzfof Fjtrr~gs( FikI~on),107,
Kerte,,, Xilnu\, 70 7 1.73- 77
tO8- 11o9113 118
fir\ in Rcrche, john t llnkeltro, 272
i,autr6arntint, C:cimtc de, t fit
Khmer Rouge, 224
Lctrrrrrii I-Ieblrs,nes, rn R~rrs(Rrlck
fileter, An\rlrn, 171, 193
bold
Xtdl
Ilrtimm~r;i(haurnan), 53
K~cnhoh,Ed\\ drd, 192
i,clrrun, C:harle\, 149
K~lrmnrk,Karen, 44
i,c (:c~rl-rusicr, 62,295, 302
KlmbdL Art hIu\e~~nr (Fort 'lf'ortl~),289
I ech>ux.t;Eaurit* XtcoI't4, 276
K~mm~Lman, kl~chacl,14% t 49
I eke\ re (;aller) ( l crndttn), 58
K~r\teln,i,rncoln, 262,263- 265
I Pger, Fernanti, 78, 10l , l OX, I 15, 126, 140,
K1taj, i,cIl1. 04
245,293 295,297 300,302,3OM- 308
Kltaj, It,R,, 57--t$r(,81,82.85, 1.14, 167
I Pger l"llureum (ISlrrt), 24%
Klec, I'aanl, 123, 125, 126,318
I erthnrtrer, Mark, 235
Klrifi
JItcrnfi T/~njcrgtrWEIII i t lIcit*nt~urg),
98 99
Kc4bke, 1 hrnten, 276 Korl~no,'t.it,rr\,253
!.ennon, 'lf'c*~nherg (Xl'), 157 !.eo I'iirteIll Cialler) j h l " ) , 145 !.eonardo dz Vincr, LOA, 147, 158,225,227. 30 1
Koons, jekt, 33, 297
!.e (&ulIez, 183
Korman, t Iarrtet, t57- 158
!.et rne, ,tberrre, 3
Ko\w)fk, Lccin, 12,77- 86, 1.34, 167
i,c\~n,on,hlndub, 251,253
Kxaraa\, Itcrsalrnd, 314, 321, 323, 324
n. [,c\ >,j u l ~ ~112
fixtans, 1homd\, 28 30, 127, 152
i,c~is,Stanlc>,11- 14,2f,31,71 72 i,rilcarman, Alexander, 242 " L~ilraryt)l l3abel, I hc" ( 130rgc\),73
La~te~rman, (;abncl, t 3,25, 167, t 86 193, 1%
199
Lad! (:haycl (lr,l> C:atI%edral),177
I ngrbe, I-rnc\t t lortclart dt*,230- 231 I nncI-tiner,(:arol? n, 297 298 ""Idnd4c~pe" (l?a~ntrz~g t;cnter), 172 ""Lndsraj-rea"r4h~tritct~on"(( ;raham and Son\), 172 Lanrlsrup~illtllz tl- I ulm (L'oL~\\IIz), 277 Luoi t~ii11, 239
idreberman,Wlllxarn, 82 I tar, Serge, 252,254,262
Lrfi, 9, 16 Lrfrrh (Sm~tl.~), 101 I ~md,Id&-ciucrl~ne, 13 I ~mhourgBrother$, 170 I ~lc-trln (;enter (YY), 265
!.1p1-ri, iFllljsp~no,284 !.lp1-rmdnn, \f/alker, 65 L~JCUSSLIIMS. 182, 183
Long, Iltchdrd, 121
hlarrhel Jdcb\on r ;allery (Xl"), 17
Lopokot it, l \, drd, 261
hlrirr~n,=Igne\,73, L20
L'( lrmge, H .l'., 208
Itlart~n,joIln, t 7 1
L<)\ 4 n ~ ; ~ lC10unt~ ~ " r hlu\c.um c j f hlrt,
Itfar) 13zjrjnc (;allcr% (NU), 10, X8 91,
272
153
I oti, I'lrrre, 2.34 I ourr, Zilorn\. 197, 322 I ourr XfV, 252 Lout re (L%ri\),216, 315 Lucinrp ('oLIectrt~n(C,rtt>), 276 Lyon\, Jlan, 13, L53
MMYRo27tnstm (I, )avid c1',4nger\), 275
Itllasdc-cio,277,320 Itllasrac-l-trtsettrStdte 1 louse (Rulfinch), 306 hlri\s~ue,LGonide, 251,2,59,260, 261, 263 hlatllci.~t\,kfarrj, LXI, 182 ftlarlssc., Ilenn, 23, 102, 10.3, 141,212, 216, 218,223,251,253,255 257,259,265,
1.fndtzm~tic Sir& (fensrn), 94
29 1
{R rar~c+u s ), I OS
S
Pi~ptc
klatrt-reu Zildrhi, (;dllerc ("it"),3t 3
C2ujjx i!utr Ihr (lZergn2dn), 95
Itllatrt~lascitttttr,I ouna, 13,32, I29 135,
Zilagratte, RenP, 75 ."14~ha/1har~ift~, 237
;l.lmiru I;lrrdl>t! f,lt~~rr, 7Ru ilZrdq~e),
137- 141, 176, I89
Msillof, i2nstide, 281 .V!aktrr,y /lirihtl~cluri. r h r~; p l r \ I
248 Ptztilr,
268
hlalevlrh, Xiatmmrr. 125
"%lasItSecknldnn 111 Fx11cr" (( ;uggenhcim), 152, t 53
hlalraux, 4ndub. 237
Itletcr, Rlchard, 265 274,280,281,283
hlalraux, ( : h a . 237
Itlemllng, Hans, 197
Zilanet, Ccitauelrc~,167, 216,278,288, 324
"urrmoiri.dr lu ch~rnbrcjlrzrfrr (t fbl~on),1 13
"kl~tnet,Ziloncrt, and the (idre St. I mare"
"Allemor!:
(Uarrtrndl C ;aller! ), 289 .V!atz r n u Furhirtr (1a n F? ck), 1I)'?
I ubn Art and the h$akinp of
ll\ror? " (ihlureurn Iitr Alncdn Art), 212
Msnrrgna, Andre,, 197,277
hlenil, Ijom~nlquede, 249
Mayj-rlethorpr, itohert, 25,M 1.fnp ( fohns}, 142, 140
hlenil l'oflectron (Fiou\ton), 242, 244,
hlarcfesn,ff rrcc, 43, '73, t 33
Vrnttrtrs 111s ( \ ~ c I ~ z ~ L ~2 c15z ~ ,
1.fnrrtyn j Warhc)l), 322
4 J I r ~ ~ t rkilt4nttlrpr j ( C :alder), 293
Zilar~nt:orrnty
( :I\
rc (:enter (jxi'rrght 1,
271- 272 Zilarhr, &$atthe\%,153 154 Msrlht,rotrgh r ;aller) jhl"),172 hIsrquet, i2fl>crt, 170
249 250
Mrrrnctlcli I'irc~er~p, Thr
khrld), 183
Itllerrlfi, fan-rer,225 226 Itllerrager, Annette, 160 RletropoIit~nh l u \ e ~ ~otmArt (hl"), 42, 43,,58,Q, 83, 134,
20,5,21S 218,
219,222 224,225,227,275,277,284. 285,287 2M, 289,291 293 hletrtipolrtan
(NU), 264
hllchallon, kchlllc l rna, 219 hllchelangc*lo,92, 103, 106,208, 239
Mrlk (tVaiil), 163 164 Zillliet, jedn Fr~nc;clrr, 223
Ldnil
Zillli\ l:oliiepe, 153 .b!fntduur . 1 4 r ~ t j gEIzr EItlmsu (I"lcd\\r,),
I unctrd (Hranc-~trr), 103
Ldttrm,
147
M~rti,foan, 40, 123, 196, XNI Mnhima, Yuhio, 94
17
SarrtrnaI Fndoumenr lor the Art\* 111,24,
267 SarronaI r ;aIlery ot Art (F'arhmgtttn),
hl f 1 , 299, 304,305
97, 1 19,205,220,226,22% 24 1,275,
hllrchelt, joan, 4 l , 45, 125, t 33, 172 173
289,294,293- 296, Xf l - D02
l.f,tLir.rn P~inrrrs,110, 65 h8
M I I List4 ~ ~( I condrdtt Ja b'rncj), 148, 225 ZilonJr~dn,het, 6,7,67, l 10, 1 1 1, 115, 120, 136, l "to. 188, 259,296 297,300, 302 Monet, "laucie,236,216,246,285,
289 290 "klonet and the hled~terrane~~n" (t"tcjolilr, n klu\curnj. 289 290
Natlrjnal C ;aller> of. ( Ianada ( c Ittav. a).
216 Ldttrrf~d! C;~.i;tjmp/rzr,I46
?.;anman,ISrucc., 49 57,74, 160, 192 ?won ;Tnf?~j!ldalrsi ~ f t h vL p J t EIuZ/ itf,bIj
fZt~i[j
-raketi ul kn-fnzlr fnlerzrul~(Kauman), 52
Seutra, ltlr-hard,271 Nclx,man, I{arnctt, t 25, 136
hlcirandl. ( ;rrjrpio, 175
Yrw Rrpflhlci, 261
hlcirns, Robcrt, 101
"'Nclx, Sp~rittln Ikalntlng, h"' (ltojal
Zilorn\. lVtllldn7, 178
M~~thar anif 1 hrM Qlstchclnganer), 277
hc-adem?), 107 ?.;ev. York (;IQ ISaller, 26.3 265
Zilount Meru, 232
Lrrv Kirk RCL'IV~V r t f I j i ~ k 30 ~,
Moyn~han,Ilodrrgo, 81, 1.1.1
%"\i~lt*
M unitz, tS,trry, 269,281
.%W Ktuk
Ktuk fimrs, 17,27, 14X 149,211,24 1 firnrs z.2.11rga:rn~,197
.b!~rd&rmtii Its ( ~ m S ~(Laderman), ~ ~ ~ ~ 190 i ~ > Sem York Ilntverur?, 111
hlusge d"()r\aj (l%rr\),218, 227
Nrt.ix, ald, Wllhur, 25
hlusge (;uimCt (i'ari\j, 220,235,237
Nrjlnsba, t3rcjnirIa.i a, 251
h l u ~ e u mfor hlfrrcan krr (NU), 212
Nrjlnsli.y, \ ) a s h , 251,253,255,257,262
Zilu\eun~of. (:trntemporar> Art (l,o\
" G / z u sIjct~lit~tg ~~ (Kir\tt*111)264
Anpele\), 160 Zilu\eun~of. hf4r)clern Art (%Y), 16, 17- 19,
?.;ogur-hl,Isamrt, 264,273 Xojand, (;ad), 51
28,3X, 3") 4 1, 42,45,49, 50, 1111, 104,
Soland, Kenneth, 322
133, 141, 145, 149, 152, 153, 186, 188,
Sorodom i<'~ndrlddh,229, 230
Index Norton Simon Museum (I’asadena), 277 Niitcracker, The (Ralanchine), 263
Ode (Massine), 263,264
Odysseus, 180 Oldenburg, Claes, 97-99,100,181, 182 Olitsh, Jules, 322 One Hundred h v e and Die (Nauman), 53 “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content” (Schapiro), 32.5-326
Oppenheim, Meret, 100 Orchestra en Lilrurti, L’ (Lifar), 262 Orfeo (Balanchine), 264
Orpheus (Ralanchine), 264 Outburst (Wall), 163 Over the Garden und Through to the Rums (Bell),
169-170 Oxfird A ttjuumal, 107
PaceWildenstein Gallery (NY), 97,100 Padgett, Ron, 185 P u p n (Jensen), W,89 Park, Nam June, .W Painter und His Muse, The (Winkfield), 179-180 Painter’s Studin, The (Courbet), 113,227 Painting Center (NY), 43, 172 Palazzo Contarini (Venice), 290 Pantazzi, Michael, 2 16,217 Paper Ball (Wadsworth Atheneum), 263 Parade (Massine), 251,252,2.% Paris sunsfin (Ciacometti), 112 Park Giielf (Gaudi), 151
344
fhrktt,% . Parrish, Maxfield, 223 Parsons, Betty, 17,32,286 Parthenon frieze, 224 Partisun Review, 17 Pasqe du Commerce Saint-Andri, The (Balthus), 61,62,67, 11 1-1 12 Peurblussim Hwy, 11-18 April, 1986, No. 2 (Hockney), 278 Pearlstein, Philip, 24, 194 Perkins, Ihvid, 283 “Perry Mason,” 328 Petits Reins, Les (Rossini), 2 0 Pevsner, Antoine, 300 Phaidon Press, 164 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 98, 101-102,104 PhilIips Collection (Washington), 14,245, 249 PhilIips,Tom, 213 Piano, Renzo, 249 Picasso, Olga, 258 Picasso, Pahlo, 23, 102, 103, 123, 143, 144, 147, 148, l.%, 216,218,225, 226,242, 243,245,251-253,25.S-256,257-259,
260,262,263-26S,291,295,305,318 Piusso Papers, The (Krauss), 324 Piusso Theater (Cooper), 257 PictuRfor W m e n (Wall), 167-168 Piero della Francesca, 227 Pierre Matisse Gallery (NY), 133 Pieti (Goodstein), 12 Pinckney, Darryl, 150, 135, 157 Piranesi, Giambattista, 72 Pissarro, Joachim, 290 Pittman, Lari, 71,326 “Planar Dimension, The” (Guggen heim), 203
i'lanrkj, I'arl, 13, "I,172
lteh,ic, i.lilIa, 126, 127
Pot>tf-\;(Lonihtrr), 184
lteed, l'eter, X),?,303
i'ollrrb, fazkson,9, 16, 18 19,91.92, 120,
ltelnhardr, =Id, 16.24, 1%
133, 144,319,320,323 I'ol I'r)t, 22%237, 24 1 i+t,mdrCde,i'lnt-enr, 216,217 t'ompeu, 4'7 I'omprdou (kntcr (i'aris ). 160 t'ontcrrmtr, jat-trpo Ja, 277
Ite~lancf~r, Orcar C;., t6f Itemhrandt. lz, '7, %5,216,268,277,281,284 Itenti~r,I'rcrre. Aupuste, 108, 279, 28.7, 289, 290.29 1- 292 " lItencxr\ 1'1xtrartr: Imprers~c~nr of dn
Age" {Klmhcil),289,290,291
I'ortcr, Fairfield, 19,23,%0,173 174, 175, 182, 189,326 327
""ltepuerent~ngthe l%rslonrV(t;t"tty),282
Poutudrr ofu: flirlherillrr jl\trntornio), 277
lterpig111. (Ittctnnt,, 251, 260
P~~srcer~lsjrr~rn f utrkl( f cnsen), 90, 93 W "Port I f uman" (I.auil,inne), 160
/
I'ound, L zra. h4 i'ou\\in, SEC-oIail, 79 80, 204, 244, 252, 2.76,
Ite\ cLci, ham. 73
2fi3,276,277,299,323 324 I'rarIxer, Itlarla, 296, 301 302 P"rrtnilc1 f,olitr$(r\nt,n?mo~~\). 15% L50
Ithoadei. jaron, 74 lt~chardirtjn,john, 244
Pnjoni~rW'lthotit ir Lirvnr. ( eII tytthaur il 2 111111vr
lt~lkr,it'11ner hlrina, 57,226
( frmrrman), 56
""rn dte t;c~llectlonof E~igdrI leg&%, The'' (hletrclpohtan), 285,287- 288,289, 281 283 t'ur! edr, Zilarttn, 10.5
lteuka, I'aul, 44
ald), t 47 /
ltt~btnrcjn,i .lenr) I'ertch, 161 Itcjdrn, hlugustc, t 02,208, 23 E Itcjlke, Frcdcrtch Wlllram, 184 Romcmct~i;fthr
I'inr, The, 1713
Itcrsrntlerg, t 2arold, 320 Itosrnthdl, Zilarh, 1 l8 121, 126 128 ltt,rr, I)a\ rd, 70 ltt~rr~rzt, r ;~odchino,2.7L , 260, 261 ltt~th,i'hll~p,63 Itcjrtxko, hlark, 19,24,84,3E4-3t5
Rat-~trfiF!try~flhi$(jofins). 148
Itcjrtxko C:I~apel,249 ( M a s r ~ ~ ~239 e),
f < d f ~ \lVi111p, , 320
/
R~tpri!fkrrntj?t~ j f man), 277 itc~pfieI, 12, 234
Itcrurrrl, Racmond, 182 183, l84
f
Itcr) &I Ac-ddem) i l crndttn), I(M, 203, 2114,
" RedI~irtlchlrinifc""t.tl"(C,itb<~ and
t'e\ sner), 300
Itcr~leil.Itllarglt, 101, 2113 213,243,287 lttq aI ('ambodlan dancer\, 231
R t y l tt2~F ~ I (IL;lsIraux), P 237
,tct~ndheI,jril~an,4, 10, 23, 90, 157
ituhenietd, FEorence, 314,322
,tct~neder,lkrre, 188
iilubcns, I'ctcr I'aul, 170
SchrlelE*opl,Robert, tit
Ru? .bl.losnlr.r trrth f"h$s (?vlanct),2723 iilundael, Jacob .Y an, 161, 162, t 76
Schrlnga,ucr,klartln, 277
!
Schrt! ler, lame\, 23, 181, 185
!
SCh\nltterr, Kurt, 100
I'iuuwn Bullet3 (StoLc\), 26 l
,Ic~&~/J. 19
it) cler, .?lIherr i'rnkhdm, 91, L75 it) man, ltt~brrr,38, 42,43, 121, 233, 195
"Sculpture oi .?lngborand Ancient
Schrluk al01f. hlloxancfe*r,253
1 amhod~d:Icllllennlum ot C;Ior)
"
(har~ona),( ;aller:,), 228 241 Scuola dl San I'asqualc (dle*nrci.},X2 Sartrch~,C:harle\, 287
Stiusitns ( f o h s } , 142, 147
h i r e ih I'rrprterfips, l c ( Nilrnskc ), 259
St#!f-l'ortrcrtt trlth (;rc.~nShitrs
S i d S r o r ~Edd
Qn Ol~t~t?nsf A (Sn! tier), 7,
328 329
(Xlatth~d\cic~trrr), 137 "Sensdtrtrn" ( (lio\i
dl
Ac-acfenl>), 287
SI ,4atfrrrw (Xlailac.i.ro),277
Scrtrdt, ( ;ecrrge\, 102, 108, 278
Sf IZ~rrthrlltrrn~w(Remhrandt). 268, 277, 281
S P I I P SPQI ~ Z ~(Hergman), ~ 95, ZYI) 191
Sf Frrstlcls rn Ecslu!y (IHeIlrni),277
,thau, ( ieorgtc"13rrndrii.281
Sf k r e s u (13ernrnl). 236
,therman, 1 uid?, 3 5, X, 23, 1641, LAI,
Salander-( )'lteill> ( ;allerrcs ( NV 2,444, 107, 109. t 17, 171 172 Salat~ncj,Xicvln, 282 ?iaMe, t I,t\ IJ, 4, 21.90, 95, 157,313
1124- 325 Shth, Sruart, t71. 174- 175 Shrt I P ~Kluv Jlr?l
Jlrud era cr C.l~t~rr
(haumdn), 50,545
Sijltlmhctriqui~~ ( l$ti.as\o), 226
Sho\taho\ lCh,l Ixm~rrr,259
?iandt~ac.k, Freci, l54
,Iiddhitrthc~jf Je~(rt"), 235
Sander, .?lug~lsr,155
,t~ddl-~drrhd C;autama, 234
Sanre, Iuc, L50
51egtned and Ilo?,328
Sarrrt, jean l%ul,302
Slrniptr
Sas\i*tta,3 t 2
dc f/unv r n I%frtj~rIZ~jive!he t i l ~ l t i(d l
I,hrld (FouquCt),277
Sarle, L rrk, 251,2553
Sn a, 232,233,234,239
SYcnf t\&l f (3% n Hall j: ,$alto), 306
Skrdmtlre, ( hli ~ n gi?l \ hlerrxll, 272
Scrnt (jof~ns),l46
,Ilil.vrs (Xl~~heiangeitr X, 103
?ic*hapjro,\le> er, 107- 108,329 326
,Ilerplrrg lir~rrtj, The. ( I he S l r g r r ~Princt~,,c)
Sctri!ti~rt.as~~f(~ (l:trklne), 255, 257
(Petrpd), 253,261
Schl~zdlc-r, ituciolph, 271
,tmaH, Ned, 23
Schjeldahf, ikerer, 54,56,212,213,313
Srt1a1Zb\~n~yhincl: jr9r lYbn~c"tl( tSn>der), 2 23
S m ~ t lAlexr\. ~, 274,278 Smrrh, I)rt\ id, 314 315 Smrrh, K~kl,51,97,I(N1 l0l Smrrh\on, ltobert, L71 Sncdesr, (;ar), t (39 Sncder, loan, 7,13,3t,44, t2f-125, 126,
128,328-,129
Storr, Itobert, 194 195,322 F ~ I(~(JH ~ ~ L I247 cI~), 5rrztl ttlmb,Igor, 2,51,2,55,259,2&), 262,264 Sruc~rrI,? I I p l j l (ti'ermeer), 221 Strrrh, jercrnj, 220 Stu&itf 7 k~ ( M mhhclcf), 71.75-76 .\row.
Stu&itfs ( ~ " ~ T B ~242 u c )244, , 245,247,313
Soanc, john, 272 "Sohot~d,X Ise"' ( I tughe\), 30 Siln$.fl(rs, lies jRalan~-l~jne), 263
Srltlclen C;trsr if"Wjnd (iffitjr Iloku~al).A (\Vall ),
Salner. 185,186
Sunjmrnpuir (C:unnmghdm), 264
Sotheh>'\, 323 Soutlz A tljrrlrirt~Fr'rrarr8lp(Naurnan), 53 Soutine, (:harm, W Silur~ntrt,J ; l f o u t ~ r((:orot), i 223 224 Spanish I'avllrcln ( l%ra),293 .$jr~"ctre dt ~ I I Iro.se, Le (Fobtne), 253
hundd, 238 5un1l'i I ) U IM111 ~ (,?\c~Iro), XMi. 307 S~1rta-t arrnan XI. 232 S~~r,,rnan, Elt\ahc.th, 70 S$\ ester, I)avxd, 8 5 86 S) nlonr,, A.j.A,, 18+ 185 S) nlonr,, juij~an,18+ 185
Spencer, Stdnle!, 198 .$jrfutrlJ r t t j (Sm~thstrn),171 S-;jhap~rpdVznr ({:alder), 301 S Z L EjTarko\ Z ~ ~ ~ ~'.rky),94 Stdnlord Ilntverr,it>,71) Starn, i loug, 3 Stdrn, zillkc, 3 Stetleirjk &$useurnj&nlrtercJanl), 82.85 Stern, jan, 211% 2116 Stein, ( .,ertrtrde, 17,260 Stein, Leo, 17 Steinb,it-h, Ilaim, 27 Stclla, Frank, t93,319,322 Stcttbcimcr, Florrnc, 184,185 Stc-tcnr, l&alfacc,1127 Slrll L$;> pith Iirilnr 71rhle clnif filur f'litth (Mattl1rarr30rttr), 131 Stocbholcit~r,jeswd, 31, 97,100 Stoker,, =Idrran,2AI Store, F-l-re(()ldenhuug), 98
162-l h3 Srnntic I I (C:alcler'), 301,307
f aa tie, I'Ix~lxp,74 f aeuber Arp, Sophrc, 120 f amhrmuttu, tX4,185
Tdplrn, Rol-rctrt,13,192 l93 Eqet (jol-rns), 145 Eqet ~plrhPIGS~~JY f'ast, (jotlns), 14Fi F-arbot\is>.Andrr~,94 95 F-ate C;nltc-rj (London), 58,50,82 F-ati~tchetf:~n~l('o. (RV), 132.130,L89 f a) low, I'aaul, 264 f ~ h ~ l ~ t c h eI'avel, v r , 1%. 263-264 f emkin, h n n , tlll Tentt~~ed~ I hr j'rnrrn), 95 Tentcfrlirn, ib kr li~cq2ur, (%ijlnr,ka) 253 T'r Arn tunjdn, Rortben, 26.3 ;Trrrlici~ 7 h (~ ~ " ~ T ~ L248 IcI~),
-f"h.:, ShlalZ "\\iot f Suvr .V!P (1161ron), L I I
Ftittrlck Kitit&, 'Glt3nntrfi(Ka t L), 135 L36
""'Tl~rnking l ' r i ~ ~'t.it,cjks t: to 't.irlIhoard\, 198tb 93'' (hlu\eum cif klodern Art), 205 7 krvtj-bix l'lrws
Mt Full (t-tohu\ar),
1h2 1horeara, I: Ienr? l Iaclc3, l h9 ""7ree A n ~ e n c ~I%arnterrW n (Frleci), 322 323 Ftir~i(;~uc(J> ((,ant,\ a), 275 Ftir~i(;~uc(J> (Croodstein), L2
7 knbp bittnrn ( l t5gc.r). 297,298 X rhor de Xag? ( ;aller> (SV), 151, t71.
174, t75
1lrpolo, (;K)\ dnnr Aartt\ra, 277 1ltfan!, 153 Tlllnn, hrcfncj. 23 firnr, LA X mmernlan, jacobo, 56
\'an I3rugpen. (:c>osjc, 98
7rmrs (Ltlndon), 83- X4
\'an l>rle\burg, I hco, 1 10
X mtercjt?, (;ar!, 2 16 21X, 222 224,227
\'an E>ck,jan, t97- 193,208
1ltldn, 86, 215, 222, 243, 277, 291, 324 Torre\ i;ari.Fa, joacjuin, 110 1ouloure I aratrei., 1 fenn, 63 ""'Trdd~tit~n and the Jndl-\lrduc~I Talent" (E11ot). 261 Trdkf, ( ieorg, 90, 93 7 vmms~i?nncrt~r~n, Ih
Yan ( ;ogh, b'rnc.cn t, 125,27X,279,2Z"i8,289
X rans kitxciat~n(%V), 193
\'cr\alllc\, 293
X rant, jeonrfcr, 281
l'r(1pprtz8 lirrds iinrt firo (1%)~nhfiejd ), I83
t zrttrrr (AalrIiu\), t 93 I~'teu1if 7;tle~Ii~ (S31 (;xei.tr), 277
l'rr~trsri r r ~P~rntitzfi(l-conarcioJa Ylncr), 106
Y~Idrc.fet>r,, ( Iarlor, 296
l'ncorrw, I,t (Xlass~nc),2.38
I"tll08t l/i)lir~, 54, 2 12 VllIa Msireii ( AdIttt), 2(34,305 Vzll~,tit (leger), 287 VloLa, tSll1, 81, 1641, L97 198 \'&nu, 232 234,238,239
FTr~lImg, Lionel, 320 Fry1ti"lr(N'mkbeld), I83 Fr11rtjq14(>du llragi~tg( FiGl~on),1 12 X rcn a, Erncsr. 53
Yarnecfoe, filrk, 39, 42, 142, 143, 149 klkzquez, 1 I ~ ~ g149,214,215 o,
f i t ! et Ilndergrt~und,L53 b'enlce 13renndle, 16, 77,XI 84. L07 i:emmeer, jan, LAfi, 18.3, 184.206.22 1,324
\'er\arc, ( ilannr. 284
\Y'lI\on, i iefen Rliranda, 13, 1% 193 \Y'lnktieId, Irevor, 13, 71,74 776, 1.57, 158, t77- 185 b'rttter Ltghr (jcnsen), 8% 89,94 Winter,, f err\. 44
Wlttenborn put>l~~herr, 38 'lfTadrnortfi =It h e n e ~ ~ (ni riarttord), 25L, 252,259,262,263 'lf'agne~lt~chdrd,251 l!talker
:\rt <:enter (hlrnncapcjlrr), 50
W'crfn~nrn Sfrtiv flirf (l\cdnso), 147 W'crfn~nI ' i r ~ ~ ! l t ~Af i (CItrrot-1, , 225
tt$?n~on w'ith ~hrQ~"clurl( C Iortlt), 225 tt$?n~rrr and .14~rr( Klt a)), A4
litall. jekf, 73, 155). t6X
tt$?rldif' I rf , 254
litalrlh. jtihn, 267,268,274 275, 279
\Vorrx~~gcr, \V~lhclm.208
LQarhcll,Ancfj, 20. 2 1. 2% 26, 157, 287, 319,
Ik.'rrbtlers (t:an~hcjdran),239
322,323 LQarbl-rurn c ;aller> ( 5Y ), 92 'lf'ar tertu, Antoine, 9, 2 15,227,233,286
I
Wrrgfir , Frank I loj d, 28,5)8, 120, t 27 - f 28, 151,204,27 1 272,304
%7)et11,Andre%, 211.3
IYrddlr~,7 h(Krtdj), ~ 63 'lf'c*dekind,Frdnk, 291 l&ot.(:c~rncl,204 l i t h~tne)t31~nnial i t 9931, 70,205, 326 l i t h~tne)t31~nnial i t 993). 34) 3t , ($9 7 1,
7 3 77, IhO,32h LQhrtne) R~~nnldl ( 1997), 326 LQhrtne) &$useurnof An~enc'tnArt
(XI"),LA, 22, 146, 150, 155, 188, 197, 286
Larrca, Andre, 43
'lf'rlde, ( )tc-ar,28 L
LGphir, I hierr), 235
Iitrll~amrl,Harold, 266, 268, 281.283
Lbou i laguan, 233
Iitrll~amrl,Sue, 44
Ltmmer, t.icrnrrrh, 238
litrll~arnrlburgI'aalnt, 43 44
Lurbarin, I-ranrr\co de, 277
LQilir\,1hornton, 1.3
LWerling, I m , 13
