Eye On Art

My “Eye On Art” column appears monthly in the Sag Harbor Express

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A Fine Show at Spanierman Modern

05-02-13

When Willem de Kooning visited Perle Fine’s Springs studio in the late 1950s, he remarked that her abstract imagery “is what you see out here, isn’t it? You know, through a big studio window.” Not wanting to hurt her old friend’s feelings, Fine replied “well yes, I guess so, if you say so,” while silently contradicting him. As she later told an interviewer, “of course it wasn’t.” Yet she also admitted that living in the country—literally off the beaten path on Red Dirt Road, which wasn’t even cut through until 1954, when she and her husband Maurice Berezov bought land there and had the town bulldoze a right-of-way to it—did have a subtle, even subliminal, effect on her work. As she saw it, her city paintings tended to be more “cerebral,” while the country paintings seemed “more open and more relaxed.” You can judge the merits of this observation at Spanierman Modern in Manhattan, where “Perle Fine: 30 Years of Painting,” is on view through May 24.

The exhibition’s earliest pieces date from the 1940s, when Fine was transitioning from a geometric style to a more organic approach to abstraction. Her previous works were heavily indebted to the Cubist principles of her teacher, Hans Hofmann, and the strict Neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian, whom she befriended in New York and considered the most important influence on her art. Her admiration for him was so deep and well known that in 1947 she was commissioned to make an exact copy of his final masterpiece, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” She once said of his philosophy, “in everything I’ve ever done you see a trace of that, in some more strongly than others.”

Again the show allows you to decide whether or not that’s true, as it runs the gamut from “End of Day,” a pictographic composition from 1945, to “Sunscape,” a minimalist 1975 canvas. It also includes a couple of the works made soon after her move to Springs, notably the major 1959 diptych, “Tournament,” and several paintings from her Cool series of the 1960s. I think Fine was right to insist that Mondrian’s grid underpins even her most exuberant abstractions, and it evidently informs the rectangular structure of the Cool canvases, which are far from chilly or detached in mood. Their vibrant color and sensuous finish argue against any such reading. Cool can have so many meanings, and in this case I see it as denoting the transcendent restraint, filtered through Mondrian, Albers and Rothko, that characterizes these canvases.

After many years of summering in Provincetown, where she painted in the Days Lumber Yard studios cheek by jowl with her fellow artists, Fine chose Springs as a permanent home at the urging of Lee Krasner, a close friend from their Hofmann School years. Like Krasner, Pollock and the other artists flocking to the East End after World War II, Fine enjoyed the benefits of country living with easy access to the New York art scene. Her relative isolation apparently freed her from the constraints she felt in the city and allowed her to respond indirectly to her surroundings. As she later  acknowledged, the rural environment contributed in some measure to her imagery. Some of her paintings allude indirectly to natural forms, like the dark forms of trees in a snowy landscape, water rippling in a shallow pool, or a summer afternoon’s radiant atmosphere—which may be why she titled a 1960 painting “Winter,” a 1974 composition “A Criss-Cross of Currents,” and her golden 1975 canvas “Sunscape.”

While continuing to exhibit regularly in Manhattan, Fine operated outside the art-world mainstream, yet her work reflects some of the major trends of the era. Her collage paintings of the 1950s, including “Tournament” and “Billet Doux,” are Abstract Expressionist classics, and her Cool series, begun in 1961, looks like textbook Color Field painting, but you won’t find her mentioned in the standard histories of either movement. This may be due in part to her reticence; her colleague Robert Richenburg described her as “quiet and remote, off in her own cloud.” She hated the rough and tumble of self-promotion. And let’s face it, female artists of her generation—she lived from 1905 to 1988—were long neglected by both the chroniclers and the marketplace. I trust we’re now enlightened enough to judge Fine’s work on its merits, not by the artist’s sex.

Gutai at the Guggenheim

4-4-2013

Geographically, Ashiya, Japan is a long way from East Hampton, New York—roughly 10,000 miles—but artistically those two towns are closer than you might imagine. The connection is the feeling of kinship with Jackson Pollock that was felt by members of the Gutai Art Association, established in Ashiya in 1954. In the words of its founder, Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s aim was to “pursue enthusiastically the possibilities of pure creativity.” The group’s name means “concreteness,” and its manifesto scorned traditional illusionistic art as fraudulent because the material it’s made of—paint, cloth, metal, stone—represents something other than itself. “Gutai Art does not alter matter,” Yoshihara declared, “Gutai Art imparts life to matter.” It’s easy to see why the group related to Pollock.

The fruits of this iconoclastic attitude are on full dress parade in Gutai: Splendid Playground, a truly marvelous exhibition on view through May 8 at the Guggenheim Museum. It’s billed as the first North American museum show devoted to Gutai, but strictly speaking that’s not true. It was actually inspired by a 2009 exhibition, Under Each Other’s Spell: Gutai and New York, at the Pollock-Krasner House. Organized by Ming Tiampo, co-curator of the Guggenheim show, Under Each Other’s Spell explored the direct connections between the Japanese and New York avant-gardes, especially the Gutai-Pollock link. It was narrowly focused and of course far smaller than the extravaganza that now occupies Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fifth Avenue landmark, but it set the stage, so to speak.

Theater is an appropriate metaphor for much of Gutai art, which often involved performance and audience participation. In many cases the action was as important as the product, which is one reason why artists like Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson and Allan Kaprow, father of the Happening, were Gutai fans. It’s fascinating to see examples, some of them re-created for this show, that prefigure process art, conceptual art, installations and New Realism in the US and Europe. Gutai artists painted with their feet, used a motorized toy car to draw, hurled jars of paint at canvas and exploded it from a cannon, and made sculptures of plastic sheeting filled with colored water, among other antics. Occasionally their work was downright dangerous, like Atsuko Tanaka’s so-called “electric dress,” a wearable sculpture made of light bulbs, and Saburo Murakami’s performance piece at the first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo, where he crashed through a series of paper screens and landed with a concussion.

Murakami’s literal breakthrough symbolizes the essence of their philosophy. As Yoshihara summarized it, “Gutai places an utmost premium on daring advance into the unknown world.” It’s clear why, in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II, such a challenge would appeal to creative thinkers. The old orthodoxies were crumbling as the whole society underwent radical transformation. In that atmosphere, vanguard artists had to look beyond their own culture for direction. Well aware of their Dada and Surrealist predecessors, as well as Abstract Expressionism’s postwar innovations, they reached out through their publication, Gutai, which they sent to interested parties abroad, including Pollock. The Pollock-Krasner House still has the copies he received in 1956, shortly before his death; one of them is in the Guggenheim show.

Gutai not only broke with conventional Japanese art, it also renounced the gravity of that heritage and opted for novelty and creative play. Judging by the evidence at the Guggenheim they had plenty of fun, but it was serious fun, not just amusement for its own sake. Gutai’s playfulness was an effort to engage people by intriguing them, drawing them in, getting them to let down their guard. It didn’t really work very well, at least not on a popular level. Much of the public remained skeptical, if not confused and even alienated by Gutai antics—all the more reason to cultivate an overseas audience that might be more familiar with, and receptive to, such methods. But Western critics didn’t get the joke, or appreciate the important cultural impetus behind it. Unable to see beyond its superficial resemblance to Dada, they largely dismissed Gutai art as derivative. Thanks to the Guggenheim’s long-overdue reappraisal, we can now appreciate the error of that judgment, as well as the full range of Gutai’s contribution to international modernism.

 

 

 

 

An Armory Show Homage to Duchamp

3-7-2013

A hundred years ago today, New Yorkers were flocking to the 69^th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue to gawk, giggle and gasp at the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Of the roughly 1300 works by more than 300 European and American artists, one painting seemed to epitomize all that was aberrant in modernism: Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier No. 2. Ridiculed by the press as “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)” and “Explosion in a Shingle Factory,” Duchamp’s 1912 canvas quickly became the symbol of how the European “fakers” and “madmen” were trying to corrupt sane and sensible America. But the harder the critics knocked it the more the public clamored to see it, with as many as 12,000 piling in on March 15, the show’s closing day.

Today another Armory Show opens in New York, and although this international art fair did occupy the actual armory for two years, it’s now housed in piers on the Hudson. Unlike its predecessor, this update is a showcase for commercial dealers, one of whom, Francis M. Naumann, has mounted a tribute to Duchamp’s masterpiece. Naumann, a respected scholar and author of books on Duchamp and Dada, assembled a selection of responses, several of them created especially for the occasion. They range from direct quotes, including a couple by Duchamp himself, to flights of fancy (pun intended). “Nude Descending a Staircase: An Homage,” opened at Naumann’s 57^th Street gallery on February 15. It will be on view at Pier 94 through Sunday, after which it will move back to the gallery through the end of the month.

Two multiple-exposure motion studies by Muybridge—although not his 1887 woman walking down stairs, which you can see animated on YouTube—introduce the concept of capturing movement in a static medium. The photographer Gjon Mili made a time-lapse version in 1942, and Duchamp was similarly photographed, albeit fully clothed, by Eliot Elisofon for a 1952 Life magazine article. A 21^st century variant by D. James Dee uses a spiral staircase and a corpulent model who is billed as naked instead of nude, shifting the focus from the world of art to the real world. Similarly, Mel Ramos’ 1987 canvas is literally a painting of a naked young woman coming downstairs, looking directly and somewhat seductively at the viewer as if to say I’m here, I’m real, and I’m yours. In 75 Years Later Revisited, his reprise of a theme he first explored in 1988, Larry Rivers set his real-life lover, Daria Deshuk, in a cubistically fragmented space, making her the calm center of a gyrating environment.

The staircase rather than the nude gets top billing in Thomas Shannon’s Slinky Descendant un Escalier, where, as the title suggests, the toy substitutes for the figure, and Tetsuya Yamada’s Endless Staircase (Double Helix version), which channels both Duchamp and Brancusi. In Sophie Matisse’s canvas, the staircase seems to climb down itself, and Wim Delvoye re-imagines it as a cross between a twisted dump truck and a spiral of Gothic architecture.

Among the direct quotes, Mike Bidlo and Sherrie Levine bring their appropriationist sensibilities to bear on Duchamp’s icon. Bidlo’s handmade versions are meant to simulate studies by the master, while Levine’s group of identical postcards of the painting illustrates how a unique work of art becomes a “readymade” through mechanical reproduction. Examples of Duchamp’s own manipulated reproductions, in the form of pochoir multiples, indicate that he was equally capable of capitalizing on the painting’s fame.

Indeed, on the Armory Show’s 50^th anniversary in 1963, Duchamp collaborated with the graphic designer Herbert Matter on a poster [left] for a reincarnation of the exhibition, which was held at the original venue. An example, signed by the artist, is included in the current show. At the time Duchamp was criticized for hogging the limelight, but the painting had by then become such a talisman of the Armory Show phenomenon that it’s hardly surprising the organizers chose to use it as the literal poster child. As a college art major I visited the anniversary exhibition a few times—I still have the 1913 button replicas they gave away—and could have bought one of those posters for $25. I almost did, but in those days that was a lot of money for a student to shell out, so I passed it up. A copy in good condition now sells for as much as $7,500.

 

Redefining Abstraction at MoMA

2-7-2013

The premise of “Inventing Abstraction,” the current blockbuster survey at the Museum of Modern Art through April 15, is that “traditional art was wholly reinvented” in the early twentieth century. While I question the logic of that argument, since the Western art tradition was basically thrown under the bus, the exhibition itself is amazing, if inaccurately titled. (More on that later.) It not only musters a formidable array of paintings and sculptures from the breakthrough years 1910-1925, drawn from MoMA’s own stellar collection and many other sources, but it ranges across the arts to include innovations in music, poetry, dance, photography and cinema in Europe and the United States. Art luminaries share billing with lesser known, even obscure, colleagues, and while some critics have quibbled about individual exclusions the territory is thoroughly mapped—literally so in the show’s lobby, where a huge wall chart traces the multiple connections among the key players.

In this cavalcade of isms, starting with Cubism and proliferating into Futurism, Synchromism, Orphism, Rayonism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Neo-Plasticism, Vorticism, etc., etc., the show presents convincing evidence that modern artists were responding to radical advances in philosophy, science and technology, as well as shifting social and political conditions. To call the era revolutionary is an understatement, with World War I epitomizing the upheaval that led to the rejection of traditional values, not only in the arts.

The modernists’ manifestos proclaimed iconoclastic attitudes that were promoted in their publications and performances. Exhibitions like the Salon de la Section d’Or in Paris, Futurist shows in Rome and London,“0.10” in Petrograd, Salon 2 in Odessa and the Armory Show in New York, Boston and Chicago (celebrating its centenary this year) foisted their aberrations on a puzzled public, whose ears and sensibilities were assaulted by concerts of dissonant music and grotesque dances. Those were the days when such high jinx really could shock, and MoMA’s curators have assembled the proof of just how rapidly and widely the shock waves spread, with Paris as the seismic epicenter.

Notwithstanding the exhibition’s wealth of first-rate examples from this singular era, as well as its admirable inclusiveness, its title is hopelessly misleading. These artists did not invent abstraction, and some of them weren’t even abstractionists.

All cultures practice abstraction in one form or another, and have done so for millennia. Alphabets, numbers, musical notation, money—all are abstractions that have no inherent meaning outside their cultural context. They represent the essentials of communication, just as abstract art communicates essential qualities of aesthetic experience. Picasso’s contention that “you always have to begin with something” is often cited as proof that his art was never completely abstract, but in fact that’s exactly what abstraction is: it starts with something as a point of reference or inspiration and refines it to its essence.

As the European and American modernists were well aware, abstract art had been around for a long time before they got wise to it. The so-called primitive cultures proved to be gold mines of significant abstract forms that inspired Cubists and Surrealists alike. Folk art and tribal art were especially fruitful. These precedents may be acknowledged in the exhibition catalogue, which I haven’t read, but they are completely ignored in the copious gallery labels, which reinforce the wrongheaded notion that abstract art is a twentieth-century Eurocentric phenomenon.

The show also errs in applying the abstract label to work that clearly derives from a different impulse—not to essentialize, but to conceptualize. Pure chromatic and formal compositions and constructions are properly classed as non-objective art because they contain no tangible outside references, however minimal or disguised. To the non-objectivists, abstract art was the bastard offspring of representation. This pure-versus-impure debate has been going on for decades and deserves a fair hearing in an exhibition that aims to analyze “the language of the modern” in all its variety and complexity.

 

 

Artists in Love

1-10-2013

According to the Symbolist poet Remy de Gourmont, “art is the accomplice of love.” In his essay, “Decadence,” he wrote: “Take love away and there is no longer art.” If only that were true! For proof that it isn’t, leaf through Veronica Kavass’ gorgeous new coffee-table book, Artists in Love, where you’ll find scant evidence of the creative flame dying when passion cools or the loved one departs. Among the 29 couples she profiles, in only one case does it appear that the loss of love triggered artistic stasis, and then only temporarily. After Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s accidental death, her grief-stricken husband paused then resumed a career that lasted another twenty years.

The book ranges widely through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, starting with Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, who went their separate ways after a tumultuous affair, and ending with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a married couple who collaborate on installations. It includes a few with local associations—like the Kabakovs, who live on the North Fork, and Susan Rothenberg, who had a house in Sag Harbor before moving to New Mexico when she married Bruce Nauman, as well as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne, and of course Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, whose photograph came from the Pollock-Krasner House collection. When Kavass contacted me to ask for it I was glad to comply, since I could hardly imagine a book on the subject that didn’t include them.

In addition to the other obvious candidates, like Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Rivera and Kahlo, Picasso and Gilot, etc., there are some less famous but no less deserving inclusions: Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight (the only artists of color), Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, for example. Naturally there are omissions. In her introduction, Kavass explains that she was forced to leave out Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta when permission to reproduce their work was refused—not surprising, given the still-controversial nature of Mendieta’s death. (Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder.) Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz are also absent, as are the Starn Twins (brotherly love), and Newton and Helen (not this one) Harrison. The most unfortunate exclusion is Gilbert and George, the British duo who have created art jointly for more than 40 years. To her credit, Kavass does include two other gay couples, but if ever there were an argument for art, love and life merging, that pair makes it. Their work is unthinkable without their relationship.

Like Gilbert and George, some of the featured couples are known for collaborative ventures, notably Bernd and Hilla Becher, McDermott & McGough, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brugen. In the latter two instances, Kavass points out that the female member of the team is (or was, as Jeanne-Claude died in 2009) more of a facilitator than an artist in her own right, and she’s positively catty in describing the Oldenburg-van Bruggen pairing: “Artist falls head over heels and wants to charm curator. He recreates his sculptures to her liking, under the same title, adding her name to it. Curator falls for him, marries artist, and takes over his career. What did he lose in this equation? Perhaps some pride. But otherwise, he had a ball.”

Kavass’ breezy text is peppered with occasional brickbats like that one. Her informal tone sometimes veers into snark, as when she dismisses the wealthy Surrealist painter Kay Sage as a “sugar mama” who was “completely gooey-eyed” over her husband Yves Tanguy, and describes Krasner as “Pollock’s ball-and-chain, someone [Peggy Guggenheim] had to talk through to get to Pollock.” Yes, these couples had troubled relationships, but they were also mutually supportive, often through tough times—Sage literally rescued Tanguy from the Nazis. But Kavass also comes up with some telling observations, as when Dorothea Tanning’s autobiography prompts her to imagine the artist as “a woman wrapped in velvet, resting supine on the grass, taking drags from a long ivory cigarette holder, letting the smoke shape the words.”

Interestingly, although not surprisingly, in only two cases is the female partner better known than the male, although you could argue that Kahlo has now pulled ahead of Rivera, at least in terms of critical opinion. The two in question are Eva Hesse, whose short, stormy marriage to sculptor Tom Doyle propelled her from painting to sculpture, and Marina Abramovic, the performance artist who credited her partnership with the mononymic Ulay for saving her from self-destruction. But even when the partnership was creative as well as romantic, the man is almost always the dominant figure. People who admire the designs of Charles and Ray Eames often assume that both were men, possibly brothers, rather than husband and wife.

In Artists in Love, however, the work of both sexes gets equally beautiful reproductions, many of them full page and in color, and expansively captioned. Each essay begins with a photograph of the couple, ranging from the stiff formality of the Kandinsky-Münter portrait, taken years after their affair ended, to Josef and Anni Albers’ affectionate embrace and Rothenberg and Nauman’s sweet smooching. Where they are concerned, you might agree with Gourmont that love and art are accomplices.

 

A Bellows Bonanza at the Met                                                                                                                                     

12-13-2012

George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925) was one of the most acclaimed American artists of his generation, yet there has not been a major retrospective of his work since 1966. Happily that situation has been remedied by the National Gallery of Art, which organized the outstanding show on view through February 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where Bellows was known to haunt the galleries during his student days and where his memorial show was held in 1925. For the first time in decades we can see the full range of Bellows’ stellar career, which was cut short by his premature death from peritonitis when he was 42.

Renowned as a painter of urban life, especially the gritty tenements, teeming streets and seedy prize-fighting clubs of New York City, the Columbus, Ohio native had Eastern Long Island roots. His father’s people came from Good Ground (Hampton Bays), and a relative, Daniel Bellows, owned a cooperage on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor in the 1840s. His mother was the daughter and granddaughter of Sag Harbor whaling captains, and the family often summered at Captain Davis’ house on Amity Street, where young George’s Aunt Fannie encouraged his artistic endeavors. Her faith was well placed.

In 1910 Bellows and his bride honeymooned in Montauk, where he sketched the lonely dwelling on the bluff in “Shore House.” The canvas was painted the following year, when he became one of the youngest artists in the Met’s collection. He was only 29 when the museum acquired his 1908 oil, “Up the Hudson,” which unaccountably is not in the exhibition. The show does include several other views of the Hudson River and Palisades, as well as scenes of strollers in Central Park and a fascinating series documenting the construction of Penn Station. Also on display are the famous oils and drawings of urchins swimming in the East River, brawling on the Lower East Side and generally living up to the popular image of urban riffraff. But while Bellows’ character studies sometimes cloy into stereotypes they are always vibrant, and handled with the skilful draftsmanship and painterly panache that earned him early election to the National Academy—at age 27, the youngest associate in its history.

Bellows was adept at traditional portraiture and landscape painting, but he is most celebrated as a member of the so-called Ashcan School—whose subjects were dismissed as vulgar, even borderline immoral, by genteel critics—yet somehow he managed to move with ease in respectable social circles. He contributed Daumier-like drawings to the socialist magazine The Masses, and produced a gruesome series of prints (in the spirit of Goya) based on accounts of German atrocities during World War I, while painting tender portraits of his wife and daughters in their comfortably bourgeois surroundings. He was on the planning committee for the 1913 Armory Show, a modernist extravaganza that challenged everything the Academy held dear, at the same time producing Winslow Homer-inspired studies of the rugged Maine coast. In short, Bellows was a walking contradiction, and apparently he knew it. He thought an artist should “Be deliberate. Be spontaneous. Be thoughtful and painstaking. Be abandoned and impulsive.”

For many Bellows fans, the paintings of boxers are his signature works, and three of them are here: “Club Night,” “Stag at Sharkey’s,” and “Dempsey and Firpo,” his last major oil, as well as related works on paper. But where is the National Gallery’s “Both Members of This Club,” a masterpiece of what might be termed realist action painting? Its slashing brushwork is perfectly suited to the scene of brutal combat between a white fighter and an African American. Why the National Gallery didn’t send it to New York is as curious at the Met’s failure to show “Up the Hudson.” [NOTE: the Met tells me that Chester Dale, the donor of "Both Members of This Club," gave the painting to the National Gallery with the stipulation that it never be loaned. No explanation about "Up the Hudson."] In any case, it’s interesting to compare the dynamism of the early prize-fighting scenes to “Dempsey and Firpo,” with its rather wooden treatment of the boxers’ figures. There’s actually a film of this legendary fight on YouTube, where you can watch Luis Firpo, known as the “Bull of the Pampas,” send Jack Dempsey through the ropes in Round 1. (Dempsey climbed back into the ring and won the bout.) Bellows was there at ringside, and he worked a self-portrait into the painting. Maybe a sharp-eyed viewer can spot him in the film.

 

At the Parrish, The Real Thing

11-15-2012

When you visit the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, where selections from the permanent collection are (finally!) on display, you can be sure that the paintings signed “Wm. M. Chase” really are by William Merritt Chase. They were checked six ways from Sunday by Ronald G. Pisano, the museum’s former director and Chase curator. Until his untimely death in 2000, Ron studied Chase for nearly 30 years. He was both a connoisseur with an eye for quality and a scholar whose meticulous research is apparent in his posthumously published Chase catalogue raisonné, which records all the artist’s known works.

Ron’s task of separating the bona fide from the bogus was made harder by the fact that some contenders were painted by Chase’s students, who were trying to imitate him and often succeeded. And he had hundreds of students. At some point down the road, an unscrupulous owner or dealer would occasionally remove a student’s signature and replace it with Chase’s, or add his name to an unsigned painting. So the style would be right, the age of the canvas and paints correct, but the master himself never touched the picture.

Authentication issues have been much in the news lately, making us more aware than ever that as market values rise, so does the number of fakes. The problem is complicated when, as with Chase, a popular artist is widely copied during his or her lifetime. It became such a problem for Thomas Moran, whose Yellowstone paintings were much in demand, that late in life he took to adding a thumbprint to his signature. (Guild Hall owns a fine 1917 example.) Many artists keep inventories, but they may be incomplete or ambiguous, and dealers’ records can be frustratingly vague as well. It sometimes takes years of painstaking sleuthing to come up with authoritative documentation of an artist’s complete output, and there are always a few things that get missed. Fakers just love to fill in those gaps.

Sometimes it’s true that the owners simply aren’t aware of what they have or how valuable it is. Take the case of the Wisconsin couple who thought their van Gogh flower painting (at left) was a reproduction, but it turned out to be an original. Or the guy on a recent episode of Antiques Road Show who learned that a painting he’d bought for $2.50 at a farm auction is worth upwards of $75,000. It’s still possible to score big at a yard sale or flea market, and lost works do occasionally emerge from the shadows.

The widely publicized case of Knoedler Gallery’s cache of discredited paintings by some of the biggest names in 20^th century American art—including Pollock, Motherwell, de Kooning and Rothko—illustrates how previously unrecorded works can acquire an elaborate explanation of why they were missing for so long. The story went that a collector had bought them from a gallery employee behind the dealer’s back, and they were squirreled away until his heirs discovered them after his death. Suspended disbelief and wishful thinking, coupled with the blinding prospect of lots of cash, resulted in sales that were disputed when the paintings’ authenticity was questioned. The venerable Knoedler & Co., in business since 1852, was crushed under the weight of lawsuits and settlements, compounded by devastating press.

One reason the whole sorry business got as far as it did is the reluctance of experts to authenticate discoveries and to speak out about questionable works of art. Threatened with legal action if the owners don’t like their opinions, many of them just keep quiet. So it’s hard to get a credible judgment about a probable piece, much less a clear dismissal of a fake, even one that’s obvious to an expert. Nowadays it’s often left to scientific analysis to prove that the canvas is wrong, the paint is too new, and other so-called objective tests. Ironically, a recognized authority like Ron Pisano can spend a lifetime developing expertise that may land him in court when he uses it. Like the genuine paintings that can’t be acknowledged for fear of reprisal, connoisseurship like Ron’s is becoming a lost art.

Mike Solomon Makes His Mark

10-18-2012

Mike Solomon’s art is, in his words, “rooted in materials and what they can do.” This means not only the physical properties and capabilities of his media, but how they can function to express his concepts in tangible form. Over the past six years, his two- and three-dimensional work—featured in a solo show that opens today at Salomon Contemporary in Chelsea—has explored the potential of wax, watercolor and resin as vehicles for a deeper understanding of the phenomena that fascinate him.

His longstanding devotion to watercolor, which he uses to record his observations of the ocean, with its rhythmic tides and translucent reflective surface, has evolved into an independent entity—a material in its own right, rather than a mimetic device. The ocean also inspired his series of wave-shaped fiberglass sculptures, which echo the flowing curves of surf without literally imitating them. It isn’t the wave per se, but the arching form that folds in on itself, the translucence of a curtain of water, and the dynamic forces that give the wave its structure, that Mike translates into art.

The shapes are made on armatures overlaid with netting that serves to measure and define those forces. Pulled this way and that, the netting’s grid pattern illustrates the wave’s twist and torque without losing its own fundamental character; Mike describes it as “a way of visualizing that energy.” It also illustrates how, in art as in nature, large complex structures are made of small building blocks. In fact the finished sculptures are pieces of larger shapes that the artist has edited, implying that they could continue to evolve the way a wave rolls along the shore.

This kind of conceptual momentum—animating art that is inherently static—is also fundamental to Mike’s watercolor and resin works. Exploring chromatic relationships through layering, he applies watercolor in horizontal and vertical strokes to mulberry paper (one translucent material on another) and saturates the paper with resin, which makes it nearly transparent. Then another sheet with another color is added, and the process is repeated until a sandwich of multiple layers is created. It’s an additive method, in which each new color interacts with those underneath, subtly changing its character without masking it.

The remarkable vibrancy and spatial ambiguity of Mike’s layered watercolors are functions of the media he has chosen. But those media are only tools. He uses them not for their own sake, but for the effects they allow him to achieve. They create optical blending while keeping the pigments separate, and the process itself enables him to be both spontaneous and deliberate as he develops his compositions. As the colors aggregate, the inherent grid structure becomes more apparent. The luminosity of the resin-saturated paper further emphasizes the color shifts that occur when brushstrokes overlap. “I’m not hiding what I did before,” Mike explains, “but I have a chance to make a new decision with each layer.”

These recent works are rooted in Mike’s earlier muslin paintings, with their interactive surfaces that simultaneously mask and expose what lies beneath. Like the resin watercolors, they combine two seemingly disparate techniques. “Putting the opposites together was what was so interesting to me,” he says. The underlying canvas is unstructured and free-flowing, painted wet on wet with poured pigment, while the muslin overlay is a grid-based wax drawing enlarged from a small study. Wax makes the drawing translucent, so the random color underneath peeks through the surface, and the regular pattern gives coherence to the composition.

Whatever the medium, all of Mike’s work invites contemplation and reflection. Some of it is literally reflective—light bounces off shiny resin and shimmering wax—and colors are activated by illumination that penetrates shallow but perceptible space. But these physical properties alone don’t account for its fascination. It is that extra, intangible element, going beyond the material’s sensuous appeal—what Mike calls “taking it to the next level”—that sets it apart. His art embodies fundamental qualities that he perceives in nature, for which he creates aesthetic analogies. Without imitating those qualities he captures their essence, pins it down and offers it as a gift to those who take the time to receive it.

Space Lessons at the Lyceum

10-04-2012

“Shaping Space,” a selection of Hans Van de Bovenkamp’s bronze and steel sculptures, is on view through October 20 at the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern campus in Riverhead, newly relocated to the Montaukett Learning Resource Center. Although the pieces are made of metal, Hans calls them menhirs—the Breton word for standing stones—linking them conceptually to ancient megaliths like Stonehenge. The original purpose of those monuments is lost to history, but whatever their ritual or commemorative function, they are made of natural rock rooted in the earth. Much of their power and mystery derives from that relationship.

Anyone who has seen Hans’s steel sculptures peppered along Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton or visited his Sagaponack Sculpture Farm, where many of his large-scale pieces are installed on the grounds, will appreciate their kinship with their prehistoric forbears. Like the ancient menhirs, they frame and define the spaces around them. Yet there is a fundamental difference. As Hans interprets them, the menhirs are not earthbound. They seem to defy gravity and contradict the character of their material. Heavy metal is made to appear light, ponderous shapes cavort playfully, and what looks solid is mostly hollow.

One typical example occupies the lawn in front of the Montaukett building. “Siv’s Tiara,” a nine-foot piece in brushed stainless steel, is dedicated to Hans’s late wife, the poet and artist Siv Cedering who died in 2007. A gracefully curving stalk supports a slightly lopsided crown of eccentric letter-like shapes. From the ground it’s hard to tell, but I suspect they are melted versions of L-O-V-E. On the day I visited, brilliant sunshine animated the surface with flashing reflections, enhancing the effect of a jeweled corona. Although it’s consistent with Hans’s other steel monoliths, its memorial association sets it apart as a deeply personal statement. Inside the Lyceum Gallery, “Letter to my Mother,” is a more intimate tribute with a similar aim. It also uses calligraphic references to suggest communication with a loved one, preserving the heartfelt message in durable bronze.

The room’s centerpiece is “Oracle,” an eight-foot bronze roughly elliptical in shape, like the earth’s navel (omphalos) of ancient Greece. It’s composed of boxy elements, loosely analogous to the grid on the Delphic omphalos, that appear to jostle for position, as if trying to cohere into a proper ellipse. The tension that holds them in place symbolizes the oracle’s dynamic energy. But the slightly off-kilter balance suggests that the whole thing might just as easily fly apart as stick together. Whereas prehistoric menhirs appear inert, Hans’s modern interpretations seem to have been arrested in the act of morphing into something else.

The gallery also contains several small-scale pieces, some of which Hans has made in much larger versions. The tabletop size “Sagg Portal #10 Landscape,” for example, includes a bronze miniature of an 11-foot tall steel structure at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey. It also proposes an environment that complements the portal or gateway, a landscaped setting in which the terrain and plantings are sculptural elements in their own right. It recalls Isamu Noguchi’s playground designs, with their combination of whimsical forms and interactive spaces, but in a more contemplative mood. By shaping not only the spatial presence of the sculpture itself but also that of the surrounding area, the artist seeks to create a unified experience.

Unfortunately the artist had no control over the space in the gallery. Its tall windows admit plenty of natural light, but that’s the most appealing feature of a room that is not well adapted as an exhibition space. In addition to intrusive furniture, it contains an ugly snack bar, inviting visitors to treat it as a lounge in which art is the décor rather than the raison d’être. A lyceum is a place of learning, and there’s a lesson here: art deserves more respect.

Mike Kelley’s Theater of the Absurd

8-23-2012

For the current exhibition, “Mike Kelley 1954-2012,” which pays tribute to an artist who made his reputation as a self-described anarchist and hippie in the 1980s, the entire south wing of the Watermill Center has been transformed into a venue for Kelley’s video and installation art. In contrast to the cool formalism of Robert Wilson, the center’s founder and artistic director, Kelley’s is an art of excess, deliberately piling on the visual and auditory stimuli, physical and emotional obsessions, social and political critiques, not to mention heavy applications of postmodern irony and slapstick humor.

Selected by the German art collector Harald Falckenberg, the show surveys Kelley’s career from his days at CalArts, where he and his fellow students made performance videos and played together in rock bands, to the project he was working on at the time of his death (an apparent suicide) in January. Four galleries featuring videos are filled with overlapping soundtracks and thumping music by The Poetics, a band he formed in the late 1970s with Tony Oursler, his frequent collaborator. There are also earphones for specific sound tracks, which helps cut down on the aural confusion, but then sensory overload is all part of the package. You just have to go with it. There’s plenty of narrative content, but don’t expect a coherent story line.

Much of the content deals with social, sexual, religious and political themes, treated with mockery and theatrical exaggeration. In “Family Tyranny,” for example, Kelley and fellow artist Paul McCarthy engage in a parody of parental control and infantile rebellion that also refers to institutionalized force-feeding and torture. Lots and lots of unappetizing food, broken furniture, toys and old clothes come into play—there can’t have been a dumpster in Los Angeles that Kelley didn’t dive into. In “Heidi,” also made with McCarthy, masks and dolls play roles that blur the lines between love and hate, affection and aggression.

Far from being innovative, much of this anti-establishment nose-thumbing has its roots in Dada and Surrealist performance, codified in Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and its post-World War II offspring, the Theater of the Absurd. Kelley’s final video project—the short title, “Vice Anglais,” refers to the English penchant for erotic spanking—could be the background action in Peter Weiss’s 1963 play “Marat/Sade.” There’s even a direct acknowledgment of Surrealist precedent in “Kappa,” a 1986 video collaboration that includes a clip from Buñuel and Dalí’s film,“Un Chien Andalou,” a classic made 57 years earlier. Kelley piles it on with more panache, overloads the special effects and does it in garish color, but his aesthetic is straight out of an avant-garde that led the countercultural charge a quarter century before he was born.

Kelley’s Kandor Project, on the other hand, is a genuine act of radical imagination, equal parts obsession, analysis and creative play. In the twelve years before his death, Kelley interpreted the fictional city of Kandor–capitol of the planet Krypton, the birthplace of Kal-El (a.k.a. Superman)–which was miniaturized and preserved in a bell jar. The project began with a 1999 video of an actor in a Superman costume reciting selections from Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” as he contemplates a model of Kandor. Other aspects involved growing crystals, making architectural models, and commissioning what are said to be the largest bell jars ever made, in which various chemicals bubble and seethe.

The two galleries devoted to elements of the Kandor Project are both visually engaging and conceptually fascinating. Not only do they illustrate the power of pop culture to inspire and impel the imagination, they also acknowledge the absurdity of Kelley’s endeavor, which envisioned, among other fantasies, an international Kandor-themed convention modeled on Comic-Con. A banner detailing the convention’s budget contrasts the original $17,000 outlay with projected costs topping $10 billion, showing that Kelley was not afraid to turn a mocking eye on himself.

The exhibition, which will be on view through September 16, may be visited by appointment. For timed admission, go to http://watermillcenter.org/events/mikekelley19542012. A $20 donation is suggested.

 

The Power of Sculpture at Hayground School

7-26-2012

When it comes to art, the power of playfulness is often discounted. Art should be serious, and we should approach it with respect and even reverence. Well, gravitas has its place, but sometimes art, even great art, can be fun. Alexander Calder may be the best-known artist whose sculpture is both sophisticated and whimsical, and Red Grooms certainly elicits a chuckle with his 3-D caricatures of urban life.

“Powerplay,” the current sculpture installation at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, aims to take that attitude one step further by engaging children with sculptures peppered around the school’s 13-acre campus. Organized by The City Firm, a Chelsea-based art advisory service with connections to the East End, the project features work by 28 artists working with diverse materials. On opening day, July 14, a series of events and performances enhanced the overall theme of questioning “the value system of power and how it is interpreted within the American psyche.” For those who, like me, missed the occasion, there’s a YouTube video showing some of the day’s happenings. Apparently the idea was to have serious fun, mixing participatory activities with teaching and learning experiences.

Now that the dust has settled, what remains is a mixed bag of outdoor sculptures, some of which have not weathered well. When I visited, only a week after the official opening, several of the more ephemeral works were no longer in evidence. Matt Stone’s “Xithform” had lost its embellishments, “Pinwheel Park and Whirligigs,” an ambitious installation by Grant Haffner, Carly Haffner and Scott Gibbons (assisted by the Hayground Campers) was in disarray, with several pinwheels broken and other parts missing, and Matt Jones’ “Obelisk #1” had suffered the fate of some of its Egyptian forebears. But Mr. Jones’ other piece, “A Ruin,” a skeletal art gallery with a single painting on each wall, is anything but ruined. I take it as an ironic comment on art’s place in modern life, at the mercy of the elements and with little visible support.

The works that have stood up well are those made of durable materials, like welded metal. Joining Bill King’s family group on the main lawn are some witty entries, like Steve Heller’s “Fintasia,” a whacky rocket ship with a car tail light for a nose cone. (Mr. Heller’s “Cadillac,” a miniaturized version of the vintage tail-finned confection, is appropriately placed in the parking lot.) Also on the lawn are Willy Neumann’s “15 Minutes of Frame,” in which visitors can create their own tableaux vivant, Michael Chairello’s “Split Differences,” a linear interplay of calligraphic curves, and Gloria Kisch’s spidery constructions, “Copper Fusion” and “Golden Fusion,” that appear both organic and metallic at the same time. Jason Peters’ “When There Was Nothing, Now There is Something” makes clever use of plastic, a substance that’s all too durable in the environment. It’s a snaking loop of red and white paint buckets that unfortunately needs a lot of support to keep its shape. The crutches and guy wires detract from its graceful form, but the piece nevertheless makes the point that the artist’s imagination can transform even the most unpromising material.

Many of the “Powerplay” works use recycled or found objects, perhaps as a way of highlighting the exhibition’s theme of critiquing American values. What most people discard with impunity, artists often rescue and rehabilitate. But it seems to me that this high-minded purpose is not the project’s most important message. Regardless of what art is made of, what style it is or what idea it expresses, it should be part of everyday life, an essential element of our experience. Rather than teaching about art from secondary sources like books or slides, sculpture on the school grounds allows youngsters and adults alike to interact with it directly, question its meaning and purpose, and play with it in the most rewarding sense.

# # # #

Memory is the theme of the Summer 2012 issue of Voyeur, the Sag Harbor Express’ annual art and literary magazine, which features the following article:

Remembering Pollock

Imagining the Man on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth

What color were his eyes? Jeffrey Potter couldn’t remember, and it bothered him. Not being able to recall such a fundamental thing about someone he observed closely over a period of several years was frustrating. It became a recurring question Potter asked many of the more than 150 people he interviewed for his 1985 book, “To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock.” Armed with a cassette recorder and a strong sense of purpose, Potter was determined to document as many reminiscences as he could before it was too late. He encouraged each person—whether a family member, close friend, neighbor, fellow artist or casual acquaintance—to describe the Pollock he or she knew. His aim was to do with words what Pollock did with paint: to create “memories arrested in space.”

For his own part, Potter had an advantage. He didn’t have to rely on memory alone, since he had actually taken notes of some of his conversations with Pollock. His small blue notebooks, as well as his interview tapes, comprise a precious trove of first-person testimony about the artist whose volatile personality and controversial painting technique have become the stuff of myth. Among the gems Potter jotted down refers to a comment by George Sid Miller, a scion of Springs’ oldest family, that got back to Pollock, and rang true. “He told someone I had a lot of noise in me and I got to let it out. Now, there is one smart Bonacker!”

Some people felt that Pollock let out his noise too often and too loudly, while others saw him as quiet and withdrawn.  In many cases, their memories were colored by his condition. His dual nature was nicely summed up by Betty Parsons, an artist whose gallery represented Pollock from 1948-51: “Jackson was a very shy man when he wasn’t drinking, hardly opened his mouth; when he was drinking, he hardly ever closed it.” Echoing Miller, she observed, “he had a power, a force inside, that disturbed him.”

Potter’s oral history archive, preserved in the Pollock-Krasner Study Center, contains many such revealing recollections, far more than made it into his book. His tapes are now being digitized by Stony Brook University’s Media Lab. As extensive as they are, however, they aren’t the Study Center’s only sources of personal remembrances. From time to time, someone comes forward with information that adds a new dimension to the picture. One of my favorites is a written statement by Lillian Meyer Emanuel, sent in by her daughter in 2001. She was Pollock’s girlfriend in 1933, when they were in an art class at the Henry Street Settlement. Sixty-seven years later, she described their brief relationship:

“Jackson and I would walk hand in hand all over Greenwich Village, silently looking at buildings and birds flying up above. Sometimes he would take me to exhibits.” One of their dates was a visit to the New Workers’ School, to watch Diego Rivera paint fresco panels. She particularly remembered Pollock’s disheveled appearance. “He had two shirts and pants he would alternate wearing every day,” she recalled. “They were washed, never ironed, and always wrinkled.” Their romance ended when she snubbed him in front of friends (“I was frankly ashamed of his wrinkled clothing”), and he became angry. Nostalgically, she concluded, “I remember him well, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He was a western man and I was an easterner from Brooklyn. He did attract and fascinate me.”

Another favorite came from a Pollock-Krasner House visitor, Joan Schreder, who was a student at the City and Country School in 1934, when Pollock worked there. Received wisdom has him as a janitor, but Ms. Schreder remembers him as “a special teacher of drawing and painting” who worked with the 8^th grade class on “a series of murals to be sketched and painted on large brown paper, depicting the opening of the U.S. Western states to settlement.” This revelation, which she contributed to the Study Center in 2006, casts the 22 year-old fledgling artist in a whole new light:

“Pollock, as a teacher, commanded respect and undivided attention—dressed casually as he was in cowboy jeans and boots.” Fresh from his training with the muralist Thomas Hart Benton, he “demonstrated how to create three dimensional shapes using shading with charcoal. Next step: extending the process with dark to light poster paint colors. The effects were impressive. Pollock’s teaching transformed our school’s drab walls.”

Recollections like these illustrate how important it is to gather and preserve personal accounts, intangible evidence that enriches the historical record. Verifiable facts and hard documentation are essential, but as the scholar Carl Becker observed, “history is the memory of things said and done.” Also, I would add, of things seen—in this case, one man seen through the eyes of those who knew him. And speaking of eyes, what color were Pollock’s? Here’s where the documents come in handy when memory fails. According to his passport (issued in 1955 but never used), they were hazel.

 

July is a Fair Month for Art

06-28-2012

Summer is the slow season for New York City art galleries. They generally hang a selection from the inventory and go on autopilot. Next month, many of them will be heading to the Hamptons, but not on vacation. Together with colleagues from Europe, Asia and several other cities in the U.S., they’ll be manning booths at no fewer than three art fairs.

The first (also the oldest and, with 75 international dealers in modern and contemporary art, the largest) is ArtHamptons, opening its fifth season on July 13, at Nova’s Ark in Bridgehampton. The following week, on July 20, a spinoff venture known as artMRKT Hamptons is back for a second season at the Bridge Hampton Historical Society, with 40 galleries specializing in contemporary American art. A week later, on July 27, Art Southampton premiers on the grounds of the Elks Lodge, where 50 modern and contemporary art galleries from several countries will hang out their shingles.

In addition to their mercantile function, these extravaganzas also have a charitable side. Each one will hold a Thursday evening preview party to benefit a local non-profit. ArtHamptons will raise funds for LongHouse Reserve, artMRKT Hamptons for the Parrish Art Museum, and Art Southampton for Southampton Hospital. Other non-profits—including my own organization—will also reap rewards from the various VIP receptions, celebrity photo ops, award ceremonies, and other special events. Each fair’s calendar is brimming over with enough activities to keep your dance card filled for the duration.

Participants from London, Paris, Munich, Helsinki, Beijing, Seoul and Tel Aviv will camp out with colleagues hailing from Massachusetts to California, as well as scores of New Yorkers. Among the dealers with local addresses are Karen Boltax on Shelter Island, Kathryn Markel in Bridgehampton, and Eric Firestone from East Hampton. There are even a few overlaps, as if one fair in the Hamptons weren’t enough for some dealers. For example, two Florida galleries, Mindy Solomon from St. Petersburg and 101/Miami, are at artMRKT Hamptons and Art Southampton; New York’s Anita Shapolsky Gallery is at ArtHamptons and Art Southampton; and Richard J. Demato Fine Art, a Sag Harbor gallery, will show at ArtHamptons and artMRKT Hamptons.

It’s obvious why galleries from Manhattan and farther afield might want exposure to the well-heeled Hamptons clientele, but why would locals participate? The art business out here is notoriously spotty, with far more browsers than buyers. By taking the goods to an art supermarket, you’d hope to attract purposeful shoppers. Like the gallery district in Chelsea, there’s an advantage to clustering with the competition. And since the setup is temporary, the competitive element is enhanced—not to the spine-tingling pitch of an auction, but well above the leisurely pace of most gallery-goers in the Hamptons. If you spot a bargain, you should grab it before someone else does. If you want to snap up a cutting-edge trophy, you’d better hurry because the tent folds in three days.

Come July, however, you’ll have a few chances to find that bargain or snag that trophy. No sooner does one fair end than another begins, and not only in this neighborhood. The new normal has some dealers on the road virtually year-round, taking their wares to the customers in a less formal (that is, less intimidating) atmosphere. The fairs are also see-and-be-seen social occasions, complete with live entertainment and the frisson of excitement generated by a crowd. According to The Art Newspaper, there are now more than 190 art expos worldwide, nearly triple the number only seven years ago. This proliferation, as the article puts it, is “the most significant change in the market since the turn of the century,” partly in answer to the explosive growth of auction sales, and also as “a way of extending a gallery’s global reach” in an increasingly international market. Such outreach can account for as much as 50% of a gallery’s annual sales.

So what’s happening here next month is a microcosm of a trend that’s changing the way art is marketed. The gallery has become a road show, and acquisition is now a spectator sport.

 

Van Gogh: The Life—Not a Beach Book

05-31-2012

More than a decade in the making, “Van Gogh: The Life,” (Random House, 2011) by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith is the antithesis of light reading, at least in terms of bulk. Weighing in at three pounds and running to 950 pages, the book aims to probe more deeply than ever before into the troubled personality and transcendent achievements of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), the 19^th century’s stereotypical crazy artist. Their previous heavyweight biography, “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990, tackled the 20^th century’s poster boy for that category. Comparisons are inevitable, and in fact the authors themselves made them at Stony Brook Southampton in 2008, when they discussed their research methods for both books and outlined the similarities and differences between their two subjects.

As for the differences, whereas Naifeh and Smith were able to interview numerous people who knew Pollock, there were no survivors among Vincent’s contemporaries. And while Pollock left few written or oral statements, Vincent was a prolific and eloquent letter writer whose correspondence provides the backbone of their book. In their talk, they noted that a new edition of the letters was forthcoming from the Van Gogh Museum, and that it would include much previously unpublished material. Drawing on this resource, and employing a team of researchers who scoured archives in several countries, they were confident that they could shed new light on an artist whose reputation, like Pollock’s, had been distorted into a pop-culture cliché.

As they did with Pollock, Naifeh and Smith have uncovered, scrutinized and evaluated an enormous amount of material, ranging far more broadly than previous van Gogh biographers. You might expect the result to be a reading experience as heavy as the book itself. On the contrary, the story is engaging, well paced and beautifully told, with much more perceptive attention to Vincent’s art than was devoted to Pollock’s. The pages are peppered with drawings, and 32 color reproductions survey the late masterpieces, which are discussed in depth. But the book is first and foremost the story of Vincent’s life, which began in provincial Holland and ended in Auvers-sur-Oise in France, where he died from a gunshot wound that may or may not have been self-inflicted. Questions surrounding his death are raised in the book’s appendix, and have assumed disproportionate prominence in media coverage. Suffice it to say that Naifeh and Smith make a good lawyerly case for an accidental killing rather than suicide, although other authorities maintain that, 120 years after the fact, the jury is likely to remain permanently out.

For all the detail the authors have mustered, there is one curious omission. Early on it was clear that Vincent was an unstable character, a misfit who veered from one enthusiasm to another in a painful effort to find meaning and purpose in life. The extent to which his problems were psychological, medical, or a combination of the two, is a primary theme, but although Naifeh and Smith mention that he was diagnosed with syphilis, and describe in detail how that disease destroyed his younger brother Theo, they do not discuss its contribution to Vincent’s mental and physical decline.

Four years Vincent’s junior, Theo was his brother’s financial and emotional supporter from 1880 on, which made for a problematic and sometimes volatile relationship. Naifeh and Smith quote extensively from their correspondence, harping on Vincent’s demands for money and complaints about Theo’s stinginess. They also put a negative spin on many statements that could be interpreted more favorably. For example, they read Vincent’s desire for financial success—surely a positive attitude, in light of his dependence on Theo’s handouts—as “mercenary,” and his disappointment at Gauguin’s reluctance to join him in Arles as childish petulance instead of the understandable frustration of a thwarted longing for creative stimulation. It seems that, as with Pollock, the more Naifeh and Smith learned about Vincent the less they sympathized with him. Apart from size, that may be what the two biographies have most in common.

Déjà vu at the Whitney

05-03-2012

Every two years the Whitney Museum of American Art fills its galleries with what’s billed as a survey of current trends, including work by established and emerging artists. This is a show that’s routinely scorned by the critics, but not this time around. Encouraged by Roberta Smith’s rave review in The New York Times, as well as a favorable writeup in New York magazine by her husband, Jerry Saltz, I approached the current Whitney biennial optimistically. I came away wondering if I’d stumbled into the wrong museum.

Anyone hoping for something fresh and original will be sadly disappointed. Not that art has to be fresh and original to be good, but after reading descriptions like “new and exhilarating”  (Smith), “a forest of good signs” (Saltz) and  “visually entertaining as well as thought provoking” (Emily Nathan on Artnet), one might expect some innovations. Instead, to me at least, the show is more like a demonstration of how to reinvent the wheel. A stroll through the galleries is a walk down memory lane. Tom Thayer’s video reprises Len Lye’s experimental films from the 1930s, and Luther Price’s hand-manipulated 35mm slides hark back to Ibram Lassaw’s similar experiments in the 1940s. Richard Hawkins goes straight to the art history books for his collages  (based on Tatsumi Hijikata’s butoh-fu notebooks), which quote everyone from Gustave Moreau to Francis Bacon. Joanna Malinowska’s cryptically titled From the Canyons to the Stars is a large-scale reworking, in faux ivory and horn, of Duchamp’s bottle-rack readymade, as if such a droll commentary on originality in art needed further elaboration. Lutz Bacher dispenses with creativity altogether by framing up pages from a book of celestial formations. Her randomly-played Yamaha organ is a shade more interesting, although the shade is that of John Cage.

I confess that I didn’t sit through all the video and performance pieces—the “open rehearsal” by Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players that occupied most of the fourth floor on the day I was there was all I could take. It was about as interesting as watching paint dry, which you can do on the third floor, where electric fans are gradually evaporating Sam Lewitt’s “Fluid Employment.” I did stop in to see Werner Herzog’s Hearsay of the Soul. A leader of the New German Cinema who now lives in Los Angeles, Herzog has made a bombastic tribute to Hercules Segers, a very minor 16^th century Dutch landscapist, whose work he presents in slide form with dramatic musical accompaniment. According to Herzog, Segers is an unrecognized genius and pioneering modernist, but I think he’s kidding. At least I hope so. A little humor is welcome in this otherwise very earnest show.

Narcissism is a sub-theme, nowhere more so than in Dawn Kasper’s installation, This Could Be Something If I Let It. The artist has moved all her stuff into the museum, and her artwork is herself spending time with it. Similarly, on the fifth floor mezzanine, Georgia Sagri has assembled a bunch of self-referential objects that have little interest to anyone but Sagri. This type of navel-gazing has been done before, and better, by performance artists like Marina Abramovic and Colette, whose tableau-vivant environments comment more broadly on gender roles, not just on first-person issues.

Call me reactionary, but the work I actually enjoyed is pretty conventional, which is not to say that it isn’t original. Nicole Eisenman’s monotype portraits don’t break any new ground technically, but each one is a singular examination of a particular subject. Eisenman is an abstract artist in the literal meaning of that term, probing the essence of what she observes. In a more formalist vein, Andrew Massulo’s small paintings follow a traditional     path, using strong colors, eccentric shapes and stark contrasts to create lively, intriguing images. Both artists have managed to make novel work within established guidelines.  But if you want something really subjective, go into the second floor room devoted to Forrest Bess. Not surprisingly, Massulo is a fan and a collector of his work. In a mini-retrospective assembled by the artist Robert Gober, this supremely odd painter expressed an inner vision that is at once familiarly “primitive” and totally unique. Bess, who died 35 years ago, seems more avant-garde than most of the Whitney’s live ones.

What’s Public is Private

04-05-2012

While Larry Rivers’ legs continue to dance around the question of what is and isn’t art, I got to thinking about what is and isn’t public art. When you take a look around the East End, almost all the sculpture on public display is in fact privately owned and, like the legs, located on private property. In a region that’s world famous for its arts community, it’s odd that there are no officially sponsored public art programs.

Both the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall display sculpture in their gardens, but neither is a municipal museum. In the Parrish’s case, Southampton village owns the real estate, but the museum’s governance is private. You could argue that, as part of the original Parrish collection that was donated with the building, the colonnade of Roman emperors gracing the east garden, as well as the della Robbia knockoffs on the outside walls, are village owned artworks on public display, but that could hardly be considered public art patronage. In the west garden, Mel Kendrick’s jacks, a temporary sculpture installation sponsored by the Mary Boone Gallery, is a private project, as was Guild Hall’s display of a Willem de Kooning bronze, which sat on the East Hampton museum’s front lawn for several years, replacing a Tony Rosenthal cube that Guild Hall commissioned in 1972.

If you want to see a de Kooning bronze in East Hampton today, you won’t find it on town or village property. But if you go to LongHouse Reserve on Hands Creek Road (open by appointment at this time of year), you’ll get a whopper of a de Kooning reclining figure, and a wealth of sculpture by such luminaries as Lynda Benglis, Carl Andre, Dale Chihuli, Eric Fischl, Sol LeWitt and Yoko Ono as well. To enjoy the dynamic engineering of a signature Mark di Suvero, visit the Ross School campus on Goodfriend Drive and head for the tennis center, where his 32-foot tall steel sculpture was installed in 2009. You can also catch a glimpse of a smaller di Suvero on the lawn of the Riggio estate—private, of course—on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, which also boasts Richard Serra’s Sidewinder, an amazing double wall of Cor-ten steel

that reportedly weighs in at 300 tons but curves as gracefully as ribbon.

From internationally renowned artists like de Kooning, di Suvero and Serra to Theophilus A. Brouwer, Jr. is, I admit, a long stretch, as is the drive from Sag Harbor to Westhampton on a summer afternoon. But the off-season is a good time to check out Casa Basso, the restaurant that has occupied Brouwer’s eccentric property, Pine-Wold Park, since 1928. Drive down that section of Montauk Highway and you’ll be confronted by a mock castle, which was Brouwer’s pottery studio in the early 20^th century. Out front are a rearing white stallion, a golden lion, and a pair of 12-foot tall costumed swordsmen that would look at home in Disney World. Brouwer created all this and more in carved and painted cement, and his fantasy is lovingly maintained by the restaurant—yet another instance of privately owned public art.

Of course the most conspicuous example is Linda Scott’s Stargazer, the unofficial gateway to the Hamptons, which was erected in a field off County Route 111 in 1991. The bright red, 70 by 50 foot stylized head of an antlered deer looking up at the sky was commissioned for the entrance to the Animal Rescue Fund’s headquarters near East Hampton airport. When the town, citing safety concerns, failed to give permission for its installation there, the artist found a home for it on Harvey Pollock’s Manorville farm. For the past couple of years, the Hampton Jitney has sponsored the steel, plywood and stucco icon, featuring Stargazer on two bus wraps. Unfortunately, like many outdoor sculptures it’s a bird magnet, and their droppings don’t exactly improve its aesthetic appeal, so Sherwin Williams has donated paint to keep it looking fresh. Once again, private patrons have taken responsibility for a work of art that enhances our shared environment.

So to those deciding the fate of Larry’s legs I say, if our local government isn’t willing to sponsor public art, it should at least encourage those who are.

Choice Chamberlains at the Guggenheim

03-08-2012

If Larry Rivers hadn’t bought welding equipment and started fooling around with scrap metal sculpture in 1957, if there hadn’t been a rusting jalopy in Larry’s yard in Southampton, and if John Chamberlain hadn’t visited Larry’s place that summer, there would not be a retrospective exhibition of Chamberlain’s sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum right now. It goes to show how circumstances—in this case, three happy coincidences—sometimes change the course of an artist’s career.

By the time he settled into a huge studio on Shelter Island in 2000, Chamberlain was internationally renowned as the sculptor whose art looked like the aftermath of a demolition derby, although he insisted that his work had nothing to do with car wrecks. He was already working with welded scrap metal when he flattened a couple of fenders from Larry’s 1929 Ford and added some twisted steel rods to create “Shortstop.” That was his first use of the automobile components that became his signature material. Like his earlier sculpture, “Shortstop” pays homage to David Smith, but it also joins the ranks of three-dimensional art made of utilitarian found objects that hark back to Duchamp and Schwitters. When two of Chamberlain’s pieces were included in MoMA’s 1961 survey, “The Art of Assemblage,” they fit right in with their Dada predecessors.

But the crushed automobiles, which implied a commentary on American car culture, pigeonholed Chamberlain with the Pop artists of his generation. The current exhibition, on view through May 13, shows that to have been misguided. He was, above all, a formalist whose main preoccupation was with the plastic and chromatic potential of the material at hand. As he once said, “I’m more interested in seeing what the material tells me than in imposing my will on it.” The fact that it was prefabricated and often prefinished seems to have challenged him to deconstruct and reconstruct whatever it might be, from vintage cars to kitchen cabinets, Tonka toys, cookie tins and urethane foam padding.

The Guggenheim’s notoriously problematic inclined ramp is remarkably sympathetic to Chamberlain’s sculptures—all the more so because, even on a flat surface, they often seem to be precariously balanced. The tension created by the incongruity of spritely forms made of heavy metallic components is one of his work’s chief delights. And the variety of colors and textures, with gleaming chromed bumpers accenting towers of cracked and crumpled bodywork, sometimes embellished with splashed and dripped enamel paint, reinforces the notion that the materials’ automotive implications are beside the point. It also has led to another misconception, that he was a sort of abstract expressionist painter who happened to work in three dimensions. On the contrary, his work is inherently sculptural, defined by mass and volume rather than surface. If there is a kinship, it’s with abstract expressionism’s improvisational character. And the Dada affinity is at play in his titles, many of them taken from his random collection of words he found intriguing.

The roughly one hundred examples have been picked very judiciously to show off Chamberlain’s versatility and inventiveness. The centerpiece is SPHINXGRIN TWO, a six-legged, 16-foot tall structure of twisted aluminum, based on a tiny 1986 foil maquette, that does the cha-cha in the rotunda. It wasn’t until 2010—a year before his death—that he found the technical means to fabricate the towering piece he envisioned. His digressions into photography and film making are absent, and the repetitious rut into which he slipped in the 1980s is not in evidence. The exhibition’s title, “John Chamberlain: Choices,” refers to the artist’s decision-making tactics, but it’s just as applicable to the Guggenheim’s shrewd selection process.

Digging for Gold in the Archives

02-11-2012

When the Archives of American Art invited me to be the guest curator of a show celebrating Jackson Pollock’s 100^th birthday, I jumped at the chance to dig into the original documents. His personal papers, which were donated to the Archives by his widow, Lee Krasner, have been digitized and are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but the exhibition’s purpose is to display the actual stuff. There’s nothing like the real things to take you into the artist’s world—the family snapshots, the personal notes, the scrapbooks, the mementoes of a short but enormously influential life and career. There was one drawback, however: the collection is in Washington, DC, quite a curatorial commute from Sag Harbor. But by traveling to the material on line, I was able to make a preliminary selection, so I knew what I was looking for when I got to the Archives and hit the boxes.

I was eager to find one particular document that’s often been reproduced and quoted. The original is filed under “Photographs” instead of where it belongs, in “Notes by Pollock,” because it’s pasted on the back of a Hans Namuth portrait of the artist. It’s a handwritten statement, actually a series of phrases summarizing his intentions, which probably dates from 1950. One phrase, “memories arrested in space,” gave me the exhibition’s title; another, “energy and motion made visible,” was used by B.H. Friedman to subtitle his Pollock biography. The paper is good quality, the words are elegantly arranged on the page, and the document is signed, as if Pollock meant it to be official. It neatly and concisely says, “this is what I’m trying to do, this is what my art is about.” Pollock was said to be inarticulate regarding his work, but this piece of paper contradicts that notion.

In a file labeled “Fan Mail to Pollock,” I spotted a letter from a woman named Helen K. Sellers of Charleston, SC, written on August 8, 1949. That was the publication date of the now-famous Life magazine article on Pollock, headlined, “Is he the greatest living

painter in the United States?” Mrs. Sellers wrote on behalf of her seven year-old son Manning, who loved one of the paintings in the Life color spread, the long canvas identified as Number Nine. (It’s now called Summertime: Number 9A, 1948, and it’s in the Tate Modern in London.) Manning asked her to tell Pollock that he’d put it in his scrapbook, “the first painting that he has ever cut out,” and that he wanted the artist to have his picture in exchange—not a painting, but a photograph of him with his cocker spaniel, Snafu. I’ll bet Pollock never had a more heartfelt and sincere tribute. He kept the letter and the photo, and there they were, 63 years later, in the fan mail file.

Well, Manning may have fallen in love with Number Nine, but I fell in love with Manning and Snafu. Not only did I want the documents in the show, but I thought that Manning would like to know about it. Again thanks to the Internet I was able to track him down in Florida. He was surprised to hear from me, and thrilled to learn that his fan letter has survived—although Snafu has long since gone to that great dog park in the sky.

“Memories Arrested in Space: a centennial tribute to Jackson Pollock from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art,” opened on January 28, the 100^th anniversary of Pollock’s birth, and will be on view through May 15 in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery, Donald W. Reynolds Center, 8th and F Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Sample the exhibition at: www.aaa.si.edu/exhibitions/memories-arrested.

Still Controversial After All These Years

01-12-2012

Denver’s new Clyfford Still Museum [right] has been praised for its sympathetic design and its inaugural exhibition, which places Still in the forefront of Abstract Expressionism—all the more intriguing because much of his work has never before been exhibited publicly. After turning his back on the New York art world in 1961, he hoarded more than 90% of his total output, which remained in his Maryland home at the time of his death in 1980. Owing to the stipulations in his will, it’s taken more than 30 years to bring his estate to light. But the achievement is fraught with compromises that no doubt would have outraged that most uncompromising of artists.

Still, who spent two summers working in East Hampton in the mid 1950s, had very specific ideas about how and where his art should be shown, as well as a cynical view of the art world’s motives and machinations. He considered painting to be an act of social defiance and spiritual liberation—not so much the creation of an image as the expression of “freedom, intrinsic and absolute,” devoid of any mundane similes or analogies. In 1959, when Dorothy Seiberling wrote a Life magazine article that compared his jagged motifs to flickering flames, she received a scathing letter from Still denouncing her interpretation in highly unflattering terms. Alienating Life’s art editor was not a good career move, but alienation was Still’s default mode.

A couple of years earlier, he had turned on his friend and fellow artist Alfonso Ossorio, who was also a major collector of his work. In 1953 and 1955, Still had summered at Ossorio’s Georgica estate, The Creeks, where seven of his paintings resided. For reasons that remain unclear, Still demanded one of them back. (The report was that Ossorio had agreed to lend it to an exhibition he disapproved of.) When Ossorio refused to hand over the painting, Still showed up at The Creeks, cut it out of its frame with a knife, stuffed it under his coat and made his escape in a waiting taxi.

It surprised no one that Still wanted to control his legacy from beyond the grave. His will offered the collection to any city that agreed to create a museum for it, “with the explicit requirement that none of these works of art will be sold, given, or exchanged.” There were to be no loans, no works by other artists, no cafeteria and no gift shop. In spite of these severe restrictions, several cities courted his widow, Patricia, who finally chose Denver in 2004. When she died the following year, she left her own collection of Still paintings and archives to the proposed museum, evidently believing that Denver would honor both the logistical limitations and the injunction to keep the estate intact.

But building a museum is one thing, and running it is another. In order to establish an endowment, four paintings from the bequest were auctioned off, raising more than $100 million. As reported by ARTnews, the sale was made possible by a Maryland court ruling that opens the door for future deaccessioning if operating funds run low. Also, to make up for the lack of income from a café and shop, the entire museum is available for party rentals. The sales pitch is:  “Some events beg for somewhere different. Somewhere refined and intimate. Somewhere unlike any other place in the world.” The Web site shows guests socializing in the galleries, as oblivious to the paintings as the boozers and schmoozers at Chelsea openings. Still, who considered museums the “gas chambers of culture,” might want to revise that opinion regarding his eponymous shrine. The catering hall of culture would be more accurate.

Rivera’s New York Winter Returns

12-08-2011

Eighty years ago this month, the fledgling Museum of Modern Art opened a solo show devoted to Diego Rivera [right], described in the New York Sun as “the most talked about artist on this side of the Atlantic.” To commemorate that occasion, MoMA has reassembled a selection of the frescoes he painted for the exhibition, together with supporting material. Although it’s far from complete—only five of the eight so-called portable murals are on view—the current show (through May 14) and its excellent catalogue make it clear why Rivera and his art were so notorious, as well as illustrating his relevance today.

Celebrated for acres of murals in his native Mexico, Rivera was a supersize personality with a talent for self-promotion that rivaled his artistic gifts. By the time he arrived in Gotham in November 1931 to prepare for his MoMA exhibition, he had generated more ink than a giant squid. His recent expulsion from the Communist Party (he took money from capitalist patrons, and even worse, dared to criticize Stalin) made him a cause célèbre on the left, and his announcement that he would paint fresco panels at the museum sparked the general public’s interest. They had read about his marvelous murals in Mexico City, Cuernavaca and San Francisco, where people could watch him at work on the scaffold like an American incarnation of Michelangelo, and wanted to see the performance for themselves.

For its part, MoMA was looking for a crowd-pleaser. Opened only two weeks after the 1929 stock market crash, and already viewed as a plaything of those we now call the 1%, the museum was still struggling to find its audience. Rivera’s international renown and devotion to “art for the masses,” plus the popularity of Mexican folk art and crafts, helped redirect traffic that normally bypassed the museum’s first home in the Heckscher Building.

Notwithstanding the disappointment that Rivera painted his frescoes in a makeshift studio that was closed to the public, the show was a hit. He completed five panels in time for the December 23^rd opening, and finished three more during the exhibition’s run. Four of them are details of his Mexican murals, and one is an original composition dealing with the repression of workers during the recent Mexican revolution. The last three were inspired by his impressions of New York City, where, in spite of the worsening economy, a building boom was in progress. The Empire State, Irving Trust, McGraw-Hill and Chrysler Buildings were brand new, and Rockefeller Center was under construction. These and other American Century landmarks found their way into “Frozen Assets” [right], the most famous of his MoMA frescoes. (Since the Rockefellers, major MoMA patrons, were paying Rivera’s bills, it’s hardly surprising that Rock Center is prominently featured.) The painting now belongs to the museum in the former home of one of his Mexican mistresses, Dolores Olmedo, but for this occasion it has returned to the city of its birth.

It’s a timely visit, to be sure. The three-tiered composition—monolithic skyscrapers looming over a human warehouse of homeless people laid out like corpses on a municipal pier, below which a wealthy few visit their heavily guarded safe deposit boxes—could be, as they say, ripped from today’s headlines. Compared to Rivera’s colorful slices of Mexican life, filled with vivid personalities and drama, this fresco is dull and static, but that’s in keeping with the elaborate visual metaphor. Construction cranes abound, straphangers crowd the el, but the city is strangely paralyzed. Even the plutocrat—who, patronage be damned, looks a lot like a Rockefeller—waiting to count his stash seems to be in a trance. It’s as if everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it did the following July, when the stock market hit bottom.

Whether Rivera actually said “I paint what I see,” a quote famously ascribed to him by E.B. White, from today’s perspective his vision of “Frozen Assets” was 20-20. In the winter of 1931-32, the economic temperature was low and falling. Eight decades on, we’re in the grip of another cold spell.

Jackson in Japan

11-10-2011

Today I find myself in the port city of Nagoya, Japan, capital of Aichi Prefecture. Seaweed for breakfast, smart toilets—I’m definitely not in Sag Harbor anymore. Fascinating as it may be, Nagoya isn’t one of the country`s top tourist destinations. Japan’s third largest city, it was heavily bombed during World War II and built back up along strictly practical lines, without much of an eye to architectural distinction. People who aren’t headed here on business usually pass through on the way from Tokyo to Kyoto. But from now until January 22, Nagoya will be a premier attraction for modern art enthusiasts from around the world. They’ll be headed to the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art to see “Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Retrospective,” the largest exhibition of his work ever mounted in Asia.

The occasion is the one hundredth anniversary of Pollock’s birth, which actually falls on January 28, 2012, but Nagoya has kicked off the celebrations a bit early. For the actual birth year, the show will travel to Tokyo. Organized by Aichi Museum curator Tetsuya Oshima, it includes over 60 paintings and works on paper, as well as Pollock’s only mosaic, personal memorabilia, and a full-scale replica of his Springs studio (which will not travel to Tokyo), complete with a photographic reproduction of his paint-spattered floor.

I’m here because the Pollock-Krasner House is lending the only Pollock painting we own, an early work that shows the influence of Native American art, the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and Picasso. We’re also lending artifacts from the studio—paint cans, strips of colored glass left over from the mosaic, the human skull he reportedly stole from the Art Students League prop cabinet—and the Hans Namuth films of him at work. The idea is to amplify the art by pairing it with evidence of the creative process. In New York, the Springs studio and the paintings in MoMA and the Met that were made there are a hundred miles apart, but here in Nagoya they’re in adjoining rooms.

Tetsuya, who got his doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center with a dissertation on Pollock, has scored major loans from those and other US collections, from several other countries, including Australia, Switzerland, Germany and England, and from collections here in Japan. Star of the show is one of Pollock’s two mural commissions, a masterpiece painted in 1950 for a house designed by Marcel Breuer in Lawrence, Long Island, and now in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Acquired in the 1970s under the Shah’s regime, the 6 by 8 foot canvas hasn’t been seen outside Iran since the revolution. Getting it here was a real curatorial and diplomatic coup. Needless to say, it won’t be coming to the US any time soon, so if you want to see it you’d better book your flight to Japan.

In fact no American museum will be mounting such a wide-ranging survey in honor of Pollock’s centenary. (Our own show, opening next August, will focus on his kinship with Orozco.) But considering the high regard in which Pollock is held in Japan and his influence on the development of modern art here, you could hardly ask for a more appropriate place to hold his 100^th birthday party.

East End Abstractionists Take New York

10-13-2011

Just a few blocks from each other in midtown Manhattan, two galleries are currently showcasing abstract paintings and sculpture by members of the eastern Long Island artists’ community. At 724 Fifth Avenue, David Findlay Jr. Gallery’s new location, “East End: Artists of the Hamptons” focuses on nine of them, while Spanierman Gallery, at 45 East 58^th Street, is showing eleven painters, several with local addresses, under the rubric “Abstract Expressionism and Its Legacy.”

Among them are Mary Abbott, Herman Cherry, Perle Fine, Gertrude Greene, Ibram Lassaw, John Little, Kyle Morris, John Opper, Alfonso Ossorio, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Philip Pavia, Robert Richenburg and David Slivka. One, the painter John Ferren, is in both shows. Sadly, most are now permanent residents of Springs—in Green River Cemetery.

As I noted in my essay for the Findlay catalogue, by the 1960s the East End art colony included a sizable number of the postwar New York vanguard. They came for a respite from the pace and pressure of city life, and also to enjoy one another’s companionship in cordial surroundings. But not all the contentious energy that fueled the heated debates at The Club and the Cedar Bar was left behind in Greenwich Village. It animated the summer softball games that began as early as 1948, with two renowned scrappers, Pavia and Cherry, as regular players. Those who didn’t care for sports might be found at the beach, where hot tempers could be cooled by a dip in the ocean. In the evening there were house parties and cookouts, and perhaps an exhibition opening at Guild Hall. This sense of community was far more attractive than the scenery.

If the surroundings had an impact on the abstract expressionists, it was oblique. A color or shape glimpsed in the landscape, the quality of morning or evening light, the atmosphere of a certain moment might all play a part, but the outcome of those experiences would be subjectively interpreted rather than literally recorded. The unifying creative principle was a devotion to responsive expression. Pavia spoke for them all when he championed “the artist’s own personal experience as the basis for communication and definition.”

Many of the works in these exhibitions reflect such a process of assimilation. Fine—whose 1949 canvas, The Forest, is on view at Spanierman—once told me that her spare linear imagery was indirectly influenced by the winter landscape, in which the dark verticals of tree trunks are foiled against the snow’s whiteness. Parsons’ ambiguously titled Blue Field, also at Spanierman,could refer to a farm field like the ones near her Southold home, or to the background that supports her abstract motifs. In the Findlay show, the gnarled forms in Slivka’s energetic ink drawings have their counterparts in chunks of driftwood, and in tree roots exposed by erosion on the coastal bluffs. Similarly, Pavia’s late 1940s bronzes suggest fragments of structures weathered by wind, sand and sea. The celestial allusions in Lassaw’s open-space sculptures—like Callisto [right], named for one of Jupiter’s moons—became more frequent after he began summering in Springs, where the night sky was not obscured by the city’s lights.

As these two shows demonstrate, it isn’t only landscape painters who are inspired by the East End environment. For abstract artists, it may be a mood, a feeling, a sensation that makes the creative juices flow, prompting responses to natural phenomena that are all the more evocative for being abstract.

Glimpsing de Kooning at MoMA

09-22-2011

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) [left] famously referred to himself as “a slipping glimpser,” a painter who paradoxically felt most comfortable when he was off balance. “When I’m falling,” he said, “I am doing all right. And when I am slipping, I say, ‘Hey, this is very interesting.’” He made that remark in 1960, roughly midway through a seven-decade career that is now the subject of a long-overdue survey at the Museum of Modern Art. To paraphrase the artist, it’s very interesting that for decades he slipped past the glimpse of the normally eagle-eyed MoMA curators, who focused instead on his contemporaries among the New York School vanguard. This show (on view through January 9) redresses that imbalance.

Balance is a metaphor for the exhibition itself, and (notwithstanding his disclaimer) for de Kooning’s artistic enterprise. The show maintains its equilibrium by presenting his seesaw shifts from representation to abstraction in parallel rather than divergent courses. The earliest works, from his native Holland and soon after his emigration in 1926, make it clear that even when he was working as a commercial artist and decorator he was simultaneously a skillful academic draftsman and a keen observer of modern art trends. With equal assurance he could render a still life accurately, or abstract it à la Matisse.

In the 1930s the WPA Federal Art Project enabled de Kooning to quit his day job and concentrate on fine art. Alternating between figure study and non-objective formalism, his paintings, mural studies and drawings of the period continue a dialogue that aims to resolve this dichotomy—an endeavor that fortunately never succeeded. At a time when purists insisted on an either-or approach, he was unwilling to take sides. In 1947-48, when the argument was at its most intense, he was painting stark black and white abstractions like Orestes [1947, right] and Dark Pond while also coming out with his second Woman series, represented here by Pink Lady, Woman and several works on paper.

I’m far from alone in believing that 1948-1955 marks the high point of de Kooning’s achievement, and this exhibition hasn’t changed my mind. The masterpieces from those years are here in force, including Excavation, Attic and Asheville, supreme demonstrations of his ability to combine observation, sensation and invention, and six of the monstrous (and monstrously controversial) Woman paintings that to this day divide de Kooning’s admirers and detractors. Volumes have already been written about these grotesques; suffice it to say that they’ve never looked better than they do here, lined up like beauty pageant contestants from Hell.

For whatever psychological or aesthetic reasons, the distorted female figure continued to preoccupy de Kooning for decades, but in tandem with compositions that lack overt figurative references. Not that the real world was excluded from canvases like Gotham News and Easter Monday, in which he retained offset text and photos from the newspapers he used to blot the surface. As with the Women, where schematic but recognizable body parts give coherence to what otherwise would look like disorganized explosions of paint, these fragments anchor the abstractions in familiar imagery.

It seems to me that de Kooning’s entire career was a balancing act. Or maybe a pendulum, with its regular alternation from one extreme to the other, is a better analogy. As visitors progress through the selection of some 200 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints in MoMA’s brilliantly installed sixth-floor galleries, the artist’s clock winds down and the swings become less pronounced, until they resolve in a series of biomorphic abstractions that distill the essence of his vision. Toward the end, his glimpse slipped ever more inward. But this exhibition doesn’t tell the whole story of that interior journey. The curator, John Elderfield, chose to exclude work from 1988-90, the last three years of de Kooning’s productive life, when he painted more than 50 canvases while succumbing to senile dementia. A full retrospective assessment won’t be possible until those paintings are seen.

Sol LeWitt at Mass MoCA: Worth the Trip

08-18-2011

At this point in the summer we could all use a break from the seasonal craziness of The Hamptons. I suggest you hop in the car and take the ferry to New London. Then breeze through The Other Hamptons (Southampton, Easthampton and Northampton, MA, that is) en route to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, better known as Mass MoCA, in North Adams. There you’ll find an extraordinary installation celebrating the life work of Sol LeWitt, one of the pioneers of conceptual art.

LeWitt [right] made his first wall drawing more than forty years ago at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan—his first, and in a sense, his last, because after that he no longer drew them himself. Instead he produced sets of instructions for other people to follow, like scores that a composer writes for other musicians to play. When collectors buy his work, they buy the visual-art equivalent of sheet music. He was less interested in the art object than in the idea behind it, which he called “a machine that makes the art,” although in truth it takes a lot of hand labor to create the finished product.

For his Mass MoCA retrospective, scores of drafters spent months executing nearly ninety of them on all three floors of a specially renovated 27,000 square-foot former factory building. This extremely ambitious project is a collaboration among Mass MoCA, the Yale University Art Gallery and Williams College Museum of Art. Teams of students from both schools filled acres of custom-built walls according to LeWitt’s instructions. Sadly, the artist who dreamed up this prodigious body of work didn’t live to see the ensemble completed. He died in 2007, so the exhibition is a memorial that spans his entire conceptual output.

It’s inevitable, given the wide scope of his imagination, that some examples are more appealing than others. I’m partial to the early work, with its spare geometry, muted colors and formal rigor. Those pieces are on the first floor, and they include the fascinating Wall Drawing 51 [left], first drawn in 1970 and made entirely of blue lines created by snapping chalked string that was stretched between all the architectural points on the wall—from the corner of a window to the corner of a door, for example. The result is a complex web of linear marks that articulates the wall surface in surprising, and surprisingly beautiful, ways. And it would be completely different on different walls. The instructions don’t vary, but the results on each wall are unique.

This floor also features another of my favorites [right, during the remaking process], Wall Drawing 797, a 1995 piece that starts with a meandering horizontal line near the top of the wall, drawn by one person using a black marker. Then another person draws a parallel line just below it, using a red marker. Then another person draws a parallel yellow line below the red one. The next line is blue, then red again, then yellow, and so on. Eventually the wall is filled with an undulating curtain of colored stripes, because the freehand lines don’t follow the preceding ones exactly.

The upper floors are a riot of color, and to my taste the drawings lose some of their interest as they become ever more like hard-edged super graphics. They kind of hit you in the eye, rather than seducing you with subtlety, but if you prefer jazzy colors, bold shapes and decorative effects, you have them in abundance. The late works, however, go back to simple graphite pencil lines on white walls, re-emphasizing the hand-made quality that’s so attractive in the earlier pieces. At the end of his life, Sol LeWitt returned to first principles.

Theft: A Love Story

07-21-2011

As a summer read for those who believe that the art world is less than scrupulous, I recommend Peter Carey’s wickedly entertaining novel, Theft, subtitled A Love Story, in which everyone is a crook. The primary narrator, a washed-up Australian painter named Michael Boone (alias Butcher Bones) steals from his patron, who has stolen Michael’s wife. The ex-wife, Michael believes, has stolen his paintings, as well as their son, in the divorce settlement. Michael, in turn, steals someone else’s wife, Marlene Liebowitz, who steals anything that isn’t nailed down. Even the detective who pursues her reveals himself as a petty thief. Dealers steal from artists, collectors steal from dealers, and so it goes, right down to the New York taxi drivers who rob Butcher of his equilibrium, or at least give him someone else to blame for his agitation and clouded judgment.

Michael’s mentally retarded brother Hugh—or Slow, as his nickname has it—steals more benignly, almost by default. His is the other narrative voice, a dark, distorted echo of his brother’s. He reminds me of John Steinbeck’s Lenny in Of Mice and Men: large, strong and volatile, a protector and an avenger. His crime is to witness the fraud and deception all around him, which makes him potentially even more dangerous. In a sense, you might say that he steals the truth and stores it away in his poor, addled brain. Occasionally it comes spilling out, and that’s always messy.

This larcenous tale is set in the art world of the early 1980s, when Michael’s star is most definitely on the wane. Now in his late 30s, he’s already a has-been in the insular Australian art market, where he was a big noise ten years earlier. In fact this son of a provincial butcher had a phenomenal run of luck—escaping the family business, which his rough-hewn father was grooming him to inherit (hence his nickname), then actually achieving some measure of success as an artist, even if only in his homeland. But Michael is mordantly bitter, self-flagellating and comically hapless, a cross between Kurt Vonnegut’s Rabo Karabekian and Gulley Jimson, the charming scoundrel who stars in The Horse’s Mouth, by the Irish novelist Joyce Cary—related to Peter Carey only in his gift for brilliantly capturing his central character’s foibles.

The plot hinges on the theft of a very valuable painting by Marlene’s long-dead father-in-law—a cubist ranked right up there with Picasso and Braque—and the disappearance of another of his masterpieces. It has a couple of unlikely twists, which I won’t give away, although I will say that the ending is a bit too pat for my taste. The book’s real rewards are in the reading itself, in Carey’s use of language, although much of it is unquotable here. The text is heavily larded with vulgarity and profanity, an earthy tone that suits the characters perfectly. It also cleverly masks the quicksilver turns of phrase and the dead-on aperçus that give Carey’s writing its punch.

When Marlene wangles a solo exhibition for Michael in Tokyo, he fantasizes that it will be the ticket to his ultimate destination, the top of the New York art heap. In fact, the show is not so much his comeback as his payback for the enormous favor he’s about to do for Marlene, who has a vested interest in, shall we say, his success. In the end, the artist is nothing more than a hired gun, producing to order what he thinks, or knows, will please his client. That his client happens to have stolen his heart is a minor complication.

In their odyssey from Sydney to SoHo, Michael discovers the true extent of Marlene’s thievery, but along the way he accumulates a raft of insights—none of which are of any use to him. Time, the greatest thief of all, teaches him nothing.

Abstract Expressionism Lives On

06-23-2011

Last month a panel was convened in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, to discuss the current state of the art world in general, and in particular whether the approach known as Abstract Expressionism is still relevant in the 21^st century. The hosts, Tom and Marika Herskovic, are art collectors who specialize in that genre and have published three books on the subject. They asked me to moderate the discussion, which ranged from nostalgia for the good old days 60 years ago, when Ab Ex reigned supreme, to despair over the emotional vacancy of much contemporary art, but was not without a hopeful outlook for the future.

The pioneering Abstract Expressionists are no longer with us, but the Museum of Modern Art’s recent blockbuster collection show signaled that they’re definitely not forgotten, as well as proving that they had successors. Panelists George Ortman and Sonia Gechtoff, both born in 1926, represented the next generation. They were just coming of age when The New Yorker’s art critic, Robert Coates, decided that Abstract Expressionism was a more polite label for what others had derisively called “the spatter-and-daub school.” Attacking a bone of contention that was first chewed on back in the day, neither veteran could come up with a clear definition of the term. Ortman emphasized the fact that, although it’s often hailed as a purely American phenomenon, Ab Ex was really an outgrowth of European Surrealism, with all its literary and narrative baggage, while Gechtoff maintained that its most important characteristic was a total lack of representational content. It was, she insisted, “about nothing but the painting itself.”

Other panelists, including relatives of deceased artists like Nicolas Carone, John Hultberg and Michael Goldberg—members of the sizeable Ab Ex contingent that frequented the Hamptons in the 1950s—gamely weighed in but failed to arrive at a consensus. If there was agreement, it was that while there’s no such thing as an Abstract Expressionist style, the common denominators are subjectivity, improvisation and inner vision. Hultberg’s partner, Elaine Weschler, called it “emotional shorthand,” and Christian Carone pointed out that his father, a former Springs resident who died last year, relied on imagination rather than observation for his imagery, even when faces or figures appeared [see example below]. To the artist Rudy Ernst (no relation to Max, Jimmy and Eric), Abstract Expressionism is the “rendering of personality.”

Several panelists complained about the superficiality of current gallery fare, but I saw the prospect of a resurgence of individuality and feeling. During the week or so before the panel, I had encountered artists from Finland, Hungary and China who enthusiastically self-identified as Abstract Expressionists. It struck me that one of the movement’s original aims—the invention of what the artist Alfonso Ossorio described as “an international language of the brush”—had been fulfilled. And far from being a historical phenomenon that went out with tail fins and transistor radios, Ab Ex seems to me to have staying power.

Among the younger generation of artists, Sam Rivers—Larry Rivers’ youngest son and, at age 25, the youngest panelist—believes that the spirit is alive and well among artists for whom emotion and experimentation are paramount. While allowing that it’s no longer mainstream, he and Anki King, a 40 year old Norwegian-American painter whose symbolic figures embody “feelings that can’t accurately be described in words,” agreed that Abstract Expressionism is still valid, and that it offers a rewarding alternative to the slick merchandise that dominates today’s art market.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicolas Carone, Shadow Dance, 2007, Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 119-3/4 inches. Courtesy Washburn Gallery, New York.

 

Imago ad Absurdum

05-26-2011

Not so long ago, the idea of a photograph selling for a million dollars seemed absurd. Why would anyone pay that much for a reproduction? But, for the sake of argument, if someone did, what sort of picture would it be? Well, a rare vintage print, maybe one of a kind, personally made in the darkroom by a master like Alfred Stieglitz or Ansel Adams, of course. At least that was the prediction, which just goes to show that you can’t trust the ol’ crystal ball.

In fact, the first million-dollar photo was anything but a unique vintage masterpiece. It was one of Richard Prince’s “Cowboy’ series—a so-called rephotograph of a Marlboro cigarette ad [left]—that hit the million-point-two mark in a 2005 auction. Prince, who will be having a solo exhibition at Guild Hall Museum this summer, takes pictures of other people’s pictures and passes them off as his own work. If I did that with other people’s words it would be called plagiarism, but in the art world there’s a long tradition of this kind of unauthorized and uncredited borrowing. Heck, Andy Warhol made a fortune doing it, and Prince is on the same career path, although he suffered a detour in March, when a U.S. District judge ruled against him and his dealer, Larry Gagosian, in a copyright infringement suit brought by a French photographer, Patrick Cariou, whose pictures were “appropriated” by Prince without permission.

In the pricey photographs market, however, no one tops Cindy Sherman. Two weeks ago at Christie’s New York, one of her role-playing self-portraits sold for an astonishing $3.9 million, reportedly the highest price ever paid for a photograph. And, even more amazing, it’s one of ten prints of the same image. The owners of the other nine must be in hog heaven. Sherman, who has a home in Sag Harbor, made her name over 30 years ago with a series of 8 x 10 black and white photos that mimicked stills from B movies, all featuring herself playing the Central Casting characters. They’re basically costume pieces, and their interest is in how they comment on pop-culture female stereotypes.

Her next move, in the early 1980s, was to make them bigger and do them in color—the 1981 record-breaker [below] is an early example. If we wanted to be here all day, we could debate the artistic merits of this picture, we could discuss its crossover from low to high culture status, and we could consider what its high price says about the current state of the art market. But none of those issues addresses its monetary value. I’m hardly the first person to point out that, as far as intrinsic value is concerned, art has none. It’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Unfortunately all those dollar signs form a barrier that blocks the view and make it hard to draw a distinction between the photograph as an image of significance and as an object of acquisitive desire.

There was a time when originality and innovation were major indicators of art’s value, but those days are long gone. When copying went from being a training exercise to an end in itself, uniqueness lost traction. I don’t want to sound grumpy—as a matter of fact, I agree with Marcel Duchamp that art is whatever the artist says it is—but I begin to have a problem when price eclipses merit as a benchmark of quality. Still, it’s good to put everything in perspective. Lots of yesterday’s overpriced trophies are now languishing in museum basements, and we may live to see the day when, like the housing bubble, the photography bubble bursts and (if you’ll forgive the pun) Sherman tanks.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981. Color coupler print, 24 x 48 inches.

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Protest Art: China vs. America

04-28-2011

A few days ago I got an email from my friend Gail Pellett, a documentary film maker who has a house on Three Mile Harbor, about the plight of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. He was arrested at Beijing airport on April 3 and is being held incommunicado on charges that range from tax evasion to bigamy. Gail met Ai in China in 1980, when she was working as an editor for Radio Beijing. He was then a young rebel affiliated with an avant-garde group called Star Star, which rose and fell with the New Democracy movement. The following year he moved to New York, where several Star Star alumni had migrated. He lived in the East Village, enrolled in Parsons School of Design, and met up with Gail again. In an article she wrote about the expats for The Village Voice in 1985, she quoted Ai as describing them as “the scorched flowers of China.”

Since then, Ai has become an internationally celebrated figure, known for his outspoken cultural critiques, provocative installations, and running around with no clothes on. He delights in disparaging authority and saluting power with his middle finger, yet he was invited to design the National Stadium, famous as the Bird’s Nest, for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. His apparent endorsement by the Chinese government seemed to augur well for a new era of openness, but over the past few years they’ve been clamping down on him and other artists who have stepped over the so-called red line of official tolerance.

The recent unrest in the Middle East has accelerated efforts to stifle freedom of expression in China. Ai’s high status on the global art stage didn’t insulate him against what everyone from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Václav Havel and the European Union has condemned as a blatant attempt to muzzle dissent. His arrest, following earlier incidences of police brutality, detention, and the demolition of his Shanghai studio, appears to be related to calls for a “jasmine revolution” inspired by regime change in Egypt and Tunisia. Fearful of his potential endorsement of such a movement, the authorities are holding him at an undisclosed location. In a cynical effort to disguise their true motives, they accuse him of “economic crimes” and deny charges of censorship. Since creativity has yet to be criminalized in China (wait for it), they came up with something illegal to charge him with.

In the United States, by contrast, even art that is in fact illegal gets the official stamp of approval. I was amused to read an article in last Sunday’s New York Times about a show of graffiti at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, organized by the museum’s controversial director, former art dealer Jeffrey Deitch. Although he looks like a Harvard MBA—which he is—Deitch is no strait-laced suit. Known for his promotion of street art at his now-defunct New York gallery, Deitch Projects, he delights in the outrageous, like exhibiting a burned-out meth lab as a sculpture installation. Other people get arrested for having a meth lab, but Deitch gets reviewed in the art press.

Wall-tagging and subway-car defacement—quintessential expressions of urban protest—are also frowned on by law enforcement, but when they’re enshrined in LACMA they’re more than just sanctioned, they’re defanged. They become, as the LA Times aptly put it, “eye-candy.” In the art world and the real world, if the powers that be embrace transgression, it loses its power to threaten. For a while it seemed as if the Chinese authorities had learned that lesson, but apparently not.

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Cézanne’s Card Players: Asleep at the Deal

03-31-2011

If you take a right turn off the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman galleries, you’ll find three small rooms devoted to focused temporary exhibitions. The current show, on view through May 8, brings together many of the paintings and drawings of card players by Paul Cézanne, whose fans included just about every pioneer of 20th century modernism. Made in the 1890s on his family’s estate near Aix-en-Provence, the series illustrates his fascination with the timeless character of peasant life. He once said, “I love above all else the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs,” an odd sentiment for someone who broke with nearly all the old customs in painting’s rulebook.

For those who are interested in how the curatorial mind works, this show is an object lesson, both positive and negative. First the bad news. Operating on the premise that everyone is dying to know the order in which each painting or drawing may have been produced, which one may be a study for, or tracing of, another, as well as other conjectures, the organizers have written mind-numbing label copy. Playing that guessing game may be fun for hair-splitting scholars, but it contributes nothing to an appreciation of the art itself. Nor it is helpful that the two largest paintings from the series are missing. (In The New York Times, Karen Rosenberg quipped that the show is an “incomplete deck.”) Even the Met’s formidable leverage wasn’t enough to pry loose the Barnes Foundation’s example—which will only travel when that fabled collection moves from Merion to Fairmont Park next year—and a sibling canvas from a private collection. So they’re reproduced at full size, but in dull black and white. Evidently the curators think we can’t tell the difference between a color print of a painting and the real thing.

In spite of these shortcomings, the exhibition illuminates certain aspects of Cézanne’s achievement and offers a revealing look into his aims. A selection of prints from the Met’s collection shows how his Dutch, French and English predecessors depicted card playing—an inspired curatorial decision that underscores how different Cézanne’s approach was. Instead of scenes of rowdy gamblers in taverns, often with implicit moralistic messages, he gives us straightforward studies of rustic workers, presumably relaxing after a day’s hard labor on the estate. He was well aware of the genre tradition, but he wasn’t aiming for social critique or satire. His subjects were the salt of the earth—he admired their peasant simplicity (perhaps a bit condescendingly) and their stoicism, which are evident in his treatment of their figures.

Each man is presented as a solitary, self-contained individual, absorbed in studying his hand and ignoring his companions. They’re sitting so still that they might be asleep, and even the guy watching the game in a couple of the versions looks like he’s in a trance. It seems that they aren’t even gambling—there are no stakes on the table. This preternatural stillness robs the figures of vitality and forces you to see them as objects rather than subjects. Apparently Cézanne was more interested in studying and organizing their forms, and the space around them, than in either their personalities or what they were doing. His statement about loving the appearance of people is telling; he loved what they looked like, not who they were. He was intrigued by the way one man’s sleeve folded at the elbow and by the pleats in his smock, by how another man’s hat brim curled, by the contrast of a bent knee’s roundness with the sharp angle of a table leg. All this analyzing led to paintings that are neither genre scenes nor portraits. They’re about solving the formal problems of painting itself, which is what makes them so modern.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), The Card Players, ca. 1890–92. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Stephen C. Clark.

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The Watchcase Factory—Think Creative

02-03-2011

Four years ago, Cape Advisors, a Manhattan real estate developer, unveiled the latest of several plans to come down the pike—East Hampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, that is—for renovation of the former Bulova watchcase factory [left], the once-proud 19th century industrial building in the heart of the village that’s now a crumbling eyesore. The proposal, which called for 63 luxury condominium apartments and 18 town house units, was approved by the zoning board in August 2008. But the venture ground to a halt when the real estate bubble burst and the sponsoring group, now known as Sag Development Partners, lost steam. Maybe that’s just as well, since there was considerable public dissent during the review process, focusing on the lack of affordable housing units mandated by the Suffolk County Planning Commission. So let’s rethink the project, this time a bit more creatively—and I mean that literally.

Last week I attended a forum, with the catchy title “Promoting the Arts, Cultural Institutions and Historic Sites,” sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s office. Representatives from arts organizations all around the Island met at the Patchogue Theatre to learn how we can take advantage of public funding opportunities. Those of us who till the creative fields know how much the arts contribute to the regional economy, as well as the less tangible quality-of-life benefits. But you can’t have a thriving, diverse arts community without affordable places for artists to live and work. That’s an issue the Village of Patchogue is addressing, and the Village of Sag Harbor just might want to listen up.

The forum’s afternoon session featured a presentation by Shawn McLearen, representing Artspace, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit real estate developer for the arts. Artspace owns and operates 27 projects in 19 cities, from Seattle to Bridgeport. Twenty-one of them are live/work projects, mostly in renovated buildings like factories, schools, warehouses, and even an old army base, with a total of nearly a thousand residential units. Many also include offices for arts organizations, rehearsal and performance venues, and commercial space for arts-friendly businesses.

A few years ago, Artspace partnered with the Patchogue Village Community Development Agency, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Improvement District, the Patchogue Arts Council (yes, the village has its own arts council) and other groups to create affordable residential workspaces for artists and their families. The fruit of that labor—Artspace Patchogue Lofts, a five-story, 45-unit complex on Terry Street—is due to open this spring. Unlike most Artspace projects it’s new construction, a sleek modern building with an $18 million price tag financed by a combination of corporate, foundation and government grants, loans, gifts, and economic development funds. If you don’t want to drive the 50 miles to Patchogue to check it out, you can see it on their website, www.artspace.org.

Interestingly, although preference is given to applicants who “participate in and are committed to the arts,” anyone who qualifies for affordable housing may apply. So while Artspace is focused on serving artists, it doesn’t exclude others. The Patchogue project has had 75 applications so far, and is still accepting them, so if you can’t wait for the watchcase factory to become an Artspace project, you can download the application form.

While you’re on the website, take a look at some of the industrial and commercial rehab projects, like the Northern Warehouse in St. Paul, the Harvester Lofts in Council Bluffs, and especially the Switching Station in Chicago [right], and see if they remind you of a building closer to home—on Hampton Street, in fact. Sag Harbor may not have an arts council, but it does have a Community Housing Trust that could work with Artspace, the Long Island Housing Partnership, the Suffolk County Office of Economic Development and Workforce Housing, CONPOSH, Save Sag Harbor and other interested parties to rescue the watchcase factory and transform it into a hive of creative activity, as well as a monument to creative thinking.

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Hot Books for Cold Weekends

01-06-2011

On a cold winter weekend, what could be better than a hot book? The two I have in mind aren’t hot in the best-seller sense, since they’ve been around for a while. You’ll have to call the John Jermain Library and order them through inter-library loan, or you can find them for sale on the Internet, in either the original hardcover editions or paperback reissues. These books are hot in the other metaphorical sense, dealing as they do with the sex lives of two of the art world’s most colorful female characters. No bodices are ripped—these gals willingly shed their garments.

The gals in question are the celebrated art collector Peggy Guggenheim, whose memoir, Out of This Century, with a jacket design by Jackson Pollock, was published by Dial Press in 1946, and Ruth Kligman, mistress to the stars and author of Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, published in 1974 by William Morrow. Kligman added a preface in 1999, when her book was republished in paperback by Cooper Square Press. Guggenheim updated hers in 1960 and again in 1979, when Macmillan brought it out as Confessions of an Art Addict.

Guggenheim has been the subject of three biographies, but no one tells her story with the verve and candor that she brings to the saga of her scandalous escapades as an expatriate heiress in interwar Europe, where her modest fortune went much further than in her native New York City. It financed a bibulous social life, complete with a cast of world-class eccentrics, adulterous liaisons, verbal (and sometimes physical) conflict, and whirlwind travels punctuated by the acquisition of a fabulous collection of modern art. Peggy chronicles it all breathlessly, often at her own expense. When the book was first published, her horrified family reportedly said it should have been titled Out of Her Mind, and tried to buy up all the copies.

She came into her inheritance at the age of 21, just as World War I ended, and within a year was in Paris, where she lost her virginity to Laurence Vail, a neurotic, alcoholic would-be writer and artist whom she called the King of Bohemia. In the original 1946 edition, she identifies him by the pseudonym “Florenz,” an odd conceit considering that he was well known as her first husband and the father of her two children. Some of her other lovers who were then living are discreetly disguised—Samuel Beckett as “Oblomov,” Douglas Garman as “Sherman” and Marcel Duchamp as “Luigi,” for example—while others, even those inconveniently married to other women, are allowed to sail under their own colors.

During World War II, people named Guggenheim were not welcome in Hitler’s domain, so Peggy returned to New York with her art collection and a retinue that included her current lover (soon to be husband number two), the Surrealist painter Max Ernst. In New York she opened a gallery, Art of This Century, which showcased her treasure trove of abstract and Surrealist art, as well as local talent of the vanguard persuasion. Among her discoveries was the then-unknown Jackson Pollock, who became her protégé. The Pollock biopic, starring Ed Harris as the artist and his off-screen wife, Amy Madigan, as Peggy, gives them an abortive love scene, but if such an encounter did occur the memoir is uncharacteristically silent on the matter. Indeed, in the expanded version, written after Pollock’s death, Peggy describes their relationship as “purely that of artist and patron.” Whether that implies any extracurricular duties on his part is left to the reader’s imagination—just about the only thing in this tell-all that is.

Kligman’s book, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that her knowledge of Pollock was carnal; the title alone makes that clear. By turns gushingly romantic, deeply delusional and painfully conflicted, it describes her brief, turbulent involvement with the artist at the end of his career—in fact, at the end of his life. They met in the spring of 1956 at the Cedar Bar, the artists’ hangout in Greenwich Village, where a drunken Pollock would bait his colleagues and make passes at their dates. Even though, mired in alcoholism, he was no longer painting, he was still top dog among the abstract expressionists. An aspiring artist herself, Ruth (18 years his junior) was star-struck. She threw herself at him, and to no one’s surprise—except maybe Pollock’s—he caught her. After a steamy encounter in her apartment, they declared their mutual love, and the affair was off and running.

That summer Ruth wangled a job at the Abraham Rattner School of Art in Sag Harbor (the former Baptist church that now hosts Larry Rivers’ legs sculpture), handily close to Pollock’s home in Springs. No longer would their trysting require a Long Island Rail Road commute. Inevitably Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, noticed that something was up, especially when she caught the errant couple sneaking out of his studio the morning after. This led to the predictable ultimatum. To her credit, Ruth is frank about her doubts that the relationship had a future, although she had a habit of jumping back into the deep end in spite of her misgivings. When Lee took off for Europe, she moved into the Springs house, where she fantasized about reviving Pollock’s creativity and despaired over his black moods and violent temper.

It all builds to a climax on an August night, when a drunken driver, a misjudged curve and an overturned convertible spelled serious injury for Ruth and death for Pollock and another passenger. This section of the memoir is both cinematically vivid and melodramatic to the point of bathos, including a flashback to her rejection by a judgmental father. And by the time the book appeared in 1974, her pledge of enduring devotion: “That great romantic love. It can never come again,” was sounding a little hollow. Pollock’s body was barely cold when she took up with his great rival, Willem de Kooning, followed by a veritable Who’s Who of male art-world luminaries. Nevertheless, for the rest of her life—she died last March at the age of 80—Ruth dined out on Pollock, and I don’t mean the fish.

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Three Cheers for MoMA

12-02-2010

It’s a perennial complaint that, no matter how big the Museum of Modern Art gets, it never has enough room to do justice to its permanent collection. This problem is hardly unique to MoMA—most of the well-stocked museums are in the same boat. So much space is occupied by temporary loan shows designed to draw crowds eager for novelty that most of the stuff they own languishes in storage. It takes an economic downturn to make them rummage around the vault for material that they don’t have to truck in and are already insuring. That’s just what MoMA did for “Abstract Expressionist New York,” a three-part extravaganza, on view through next April, which fills the museum’s fourth floor and spills over onto two other floors.

So how come everyone isn’t cheering? Delighted? Thanking MoMA for giving us a long-overdue look at treasures usually squirreled away, some of them never before out of the warehouse? Of course they always display a good selection of New York School paintings, sculpture and works on paper, but this is the first time they’ve devoted so much space to them, and explored the topic in such depth. Yet the critical response has ranged from tepid to downright hostile. It seems that MoMA can’t win for losing. Why is that?

The chief objection is that the show doesn’t challenge the orthodox view of Abstract Expressionism—America’s greatest contribution to world art—as a boy’s club dominated by a few superstars. In The New York Times, Roberta Smith hurled the first brickbat, calling its focus “myopic,” while The New Republic’s Jed Perl heaped it with scorn, labeling it “uninspired and predictable.” To Ariella Budick of The Financial Times, it “re-tells the same saga,” and in The Huffington Post Sharon Butler huffed that, in spite of the inclusion of some lesser-knowns, “the familiar easily outmuscled the newly anointed.”

None of these complaints take into consideration an important fact. An exhibition drawn entirely from a museum’s collection comprises, you guessed it, only what belongs to the museum, so there are bound to be gaps. Without loans, MoMA couldn’t show some New York artists who deserve to be included—for example, Kyle Morris, Wilfrid Zogbaum and Perle Fine—because the museum doesn’t own their work. And speaking of Perle Fine, she is indeed one of the deserving women who have often been left out or overlooked, but several of the other female New York School artists are present and well accounted for. There are excellent pieces by Hedda Sterne, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Dorothy Dehner and Grace Hartigan, refuting the contention that women need not apply for membership in the Ab Ex club. True, as Sharon Butler noticed, the only Helen Frankenthaler painting on view is not the best of the several MoMA owns. But neither is Jack Tworkov well represented by his solitary painting, one of only two in the collection and not the better one. And alas, only four de Kooning paintings made the cut. His famous Woman I is front and center, but where is Woman II?

Above: Installation view of “Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture,” with Gaea, by Lee Krasner, at left and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I at right. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Curatorial quibbles aside, another fact must be faced. While there were quite a few Ab Ex painters and sculptors active in New York in the movement’s heyday—the historian Irving Sandler estimates that some 200 artists would qualify for inclusion—there aren’t that many whose work has stood the test of time. A comprehensive survey would be as much of a mishmash as a group show in one of the period’s Tenth Street co-ops. Do we really want something like that at MoMA? I sure don’t.

I want to see the cream of the crop, and there’s cream aplenty in “Abstract Expressionist New York.” Paintings that invite you to dive in and swim around, others that dare you to get anywhere near them. Sculpture that looms majestically, barks and snaps like a junkyard dog, or seduces you with its sensual appeal. Drawings that show you what the artist was thinking. And so many of them! In spite of the gaps, the collection is huge. What a treat to see how, over the decades, curators and donors recognized the importance of Ab Ex and saw to it that the museum got its share, including many first-rate examples that are rarely seen. Ibram Lassaw’s spidery sculpture, Kwanon, James Brook’s Qualm, an outstanding stain painting, and dynamite canvases by Bradley Walker Tomlin, Richard Pousette-Dart, Alfred Leslie and Norman Lewis enlarge the canon without diluting its quality. Yes, the show is dominated by the so-called usual suspects, but what’s wrong with roomfuls of Pollocks, Klines, Newmans and Rothkos? As far as I’m concerned, the more the better, and more power to MoMA for giving this aspect of its collection such a splendid airing.

Installation view of “Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture,” paintings by Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Jobs for Artists? Don’t Hold Your Breath

11-04-2010

Jobs, jobs, jobs—the three top issues in Tuesday’s Congressional elections. Will the 112th Congress do anything to lower the unemployment rate? Even if they do, it’s not likely to benefit artists. Heck, there’s already a federal jobs program for them on the books. So why aren’t artists all across the country cashing government paychecks right now? I’ll get to that.

In the years since the Great Depression, when the New Deal put artists on Uncle Sam’s payroll, what part has the federal government played in support for individual artists? A very small one. The National Endowment for the Arts, created under the Johnson administration, offered competitive grants, but they evaporated in the 1990s when the NEA became the demagogue’s delight—an easy target for budget-cutters whipping up outrage over controversial exhibitions. Like most federal agencies, the NEA relies on Congressional appropriations, and politicians are naturally sensitive to charges of spending your tax dollars on smut.

Fortunately there’s a way around Congress that allows the government to patronize contemporary artists. Under the longstanding percent-for-art clause in capital projects, the General Services Administration’s Arts in Architecture Program commissions works of art for new federal buildings. But the artists must conform to rigid standards and regulations that may well be at odds with creative expression. And commissions awarded at the federal level may not please the locals. Perhaps the most famous example is a 1981 GSA Arts in Architecture project, Tilted Arc, a 120-foot long, 12-foot tall Cor-Ten steel wall that loomed menacingly in front of the federal office building in downtown Manhattan. Richard Serra, the artist who designed it, was quoted as saying: “Art is not democratic. It is not for the people”—a sentiment with which the denizens of Federal Plaza clearly agreed. Many people who worked there hated the thing, and after a contentious process of hearings and appeals it was removed in 1989.

On the other hand, some communities have come to admire and embrace government-sponsored art that was initially greeted with skepticism or hostility. Both the NEA and the GSA have been responsible for public sculpture installations designed to bolster civic pride and signal that their host communities were “progressive”—that’s a code word for willing to accept modern abstract art.

The NEA’s Art in Public Places Program began in 1969 with Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse, a bright red, 43-foot tall stabile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which had its share of vocal critics. Flamingo [right], an even larger scarlet stabile by Calder, was commissioned by the GSA and installed in Chicago’s Federal Plaza in 1974. At first the City of the Big Shoulders was perplexed by the queer bird that had landed in the Loop, but it wasn’t long before Chicagoans were won over by its whimsicality, and today both La Grande Vitesse and Flamingo are beloved civic landmarks.

The closest we’ve come to federal jobs for individual artists since the New Deal was the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, which provided block grants for unemployment relief to state and local governments. Although it was phased out by the Reagan administration in 1982, the CETA project serves as a model for decentralized federal support for artists. While focusing on community service, it directly subsidized creative development by paying artists a living wage. It also reinforced the notion that they’re workers, not self-indulgent idlers or hobbists.

During the Obama campaign, there was talk of an Artists Corps, a public service project that would employ artists in educational and community settings—not in their own studios, but at least, like CETA, it would pay them to do work that benefits the community and makes use of their creative talents. What happened to that plan?

Politifact dot com reports that the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which President Obama signed into law in April 2009, authorizes federal funding for “skilled musicians and artists to . . . work in the public domain with citizens of all ages.” On that basis, Politifact rates the President’s campaign pledge as a promise kept. But so far only $277,000 has been spent on such a project—the Maryland Institute’s Community Art Corps—and the prospects for an appropriation from the 112th Congress look pretty dim. I think it would take another New Deal to get artists back on the job, and I’m not holding my breath for that.

 

President Barack Obama signs H.R. 1388, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, at The SEED School of Washington, D.C., April 21, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

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The Parrish: what have you got when it’s gone?

10-07-2010

The thump of Governor Paterson’s shovel breaking ground on July 19 for the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill must have sounded to the Southampton village elders like a wake-up call. The very next day, they announced the creation of an “arts district” in beautiful downtown Southampton, embracing the Cultural Center, the Rogers Memorial Library, Peconic Public Broadcasting, the Historical Museums and the Parrish, which is its anchor and raison d’etre. The district’s first annual fall festival, billed as its “coming-out party” and dubbed Arts Harvest Southampton, is now underway, and not a moment too soon. That line, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” from the old Joni Mitchell song, comes to mind. What happens to the arts district when its chief attraction leaves town?

As reported in July, the arts district is a key element of the village’s so-called vision plan, which recommends making art “a defining characteristic” of Southampton. So now the planners and officials are scrambling to figure out what to do with the building when the Parrish vacates it in 2012. They should have thought of that back in 1998, at the time of the museum’s centenary, when ambitious expansion plans were unveiled. That proposal, which called for an aggressively modern glass pavilion and demolition of part of the Job’s Lane garden wall, was met with hostility from several quarters, including the village board. No construction could be done without their approval, and not only because of zoning restrictions.

The village actually owns the Parrish’s building [left]. Originally called the Southampton Art Museum, it was deeded to the village in 1941 by Mrs. Samuel Longstreth Parrish, the widow of the museum’s founder. In short order the collections of art and antique furniture were relegated to the basement and the galleries were used to store plumbing fixtures (the mayor at the time was a plumber). When it was learned that the next step was to demolish the building and replace it with a parking lot—shades of Joni Mitchell again—a group of concerned citizens formed a private non-profit board of trustees and revitalized the museum, which had been renamed in Parrish’s honor, in 1952.

But although the collections, governance and funding are private, the trustees can’t touch the building without the village’s say-so, and that wasn’t forthcoming. Hence the decision to move, first to the Southampton College campus, and when that fell through, to the Water Mill location.

On a smaller scale, this echoes the struggle to relocate the Barnes Foundation from its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania to Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, although in the opposite direction—from in town to the outskirts, whereas the Barnes will move from the suburbs to downtown. If you’ve seen the film, “The Art of the Steal,” you know that this plan has caused a titanic controversy, fueled in part by charges of mismanagement that bear no resemblance to the Parrish’s situation. But what strikes me as similar is the turnaround of the good people of Merion. For decades they wished the place would disappear, prevented it from expanding, and resented its parking problems, litterbug visitors and annoying tour bus traffic. Now that it’s leaving, however, they’re wringing their hands, howling in protest and passing resolutions demanding that it stay. Too little, and way too late.

Like Merion, Southampton is soon going to have a big, beautiful but very vacant building in the heart of town—not exactly a tourist attraction. Mayor Mark Epley has acknowledged that the Parrish’s departure will “leave a hole for a long time,” unless some alternative is found, preferably one that’s compatible with the arts-district concept. One proposal is to make it a multi-use facility for visual and performing arts, a kind of village cultural center. Oops, wait a minute, isn’t there already one of those just down the block? Let’s think again.

Remember the Long Island Automotive Museum that used to be on the highway, next door to the tombstone shop? That was so cool. Why not revive it, and put it into the Parrish building? I think it could work. They had an Avanti in the transept gallery not long ago, and it looked pretty good in there. Roll in a few dream boats and cream puffs for visitors to drool over, show car-chase movies in the concert hall, and problem solved. Not a good fit for the arts district? Anyone who thinks cars can’t be works of art didn’t see that Avanti.

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Let’s See Your Legs, Larry

08-26-2010

The oversize legs striding along Henry Street have prompted some spirited debate in these pages. Clad only in old-fashioned nylons (sans garter belt), they add a dash of spice to the village’s architectural streetscape. Passers-by, not knowing the backstory, may well wonder where they came from and how they got here. Surely they didn’t walk to Sag Harbor on their own.

Their journey began in Lake Grove, Long Island, home of the Smith Haven Mall. When it opened in 1969 it was one of the nation’s largest shopping complexes, according to The New York Times, which also reported that it contained an unprecedented mixture of “high art and low commerce,” thanks to commissions arranged by Leonard Holzer, an executive with the mall’s developer. As it happened, Holzer’s wife, Jane, was something of an art-world personality. An uptown girl with downtown inclinations, Baby Jane, as she was known, was one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars,” appearing in several of his films, including Soap Opera, Batman Dracula and Ciao Manhattan. She persuaded her husband that the mall should feature site-specific work by contemporary artists, and got him to earmark $350,000 for the project. Among the pieces she convinced Holzer to commission—oddly, none by Warhol—were a stabile with a mobile top by Alexander Calder (dubbed Janey Waney in her honor) and a mural by Larry Rivers, 40 feet long and 15 feet tall, titled Forty Feet of Fashion [above].

Heavily into his assemblage phase at the time, and influenced by his friendship with the Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, Rivers delighted in using vinyl, Plexiglas and recycled material to make dimensional mixed-media constructions, sometimes with moving parts. His recently completed The History of the Russian Revolution, for example, featured storm windows, plumbing pipes and real military weapons. Like Warhol and the other Pop artists, Rivers embraced the iconography of mass-market culture. His concept for the mall included references to some of the consumer products available in the surrounding shops: cosmetics (floating lips, à la Man Ray), bathing suits (somersaulting swimmers), appliances (including a clock with Leonard Holzer’s portrait as the face) and hosiery, represented by a pair of disembodied mannequin legs modeling sexy black stockings. There was also an automatic slide show, which broke down not long after the mural was installed. It was never repaired.

That was only the first step in the gradual deterioration of the mall and its art. The Calder lost its moving top section, and the base was insensitively relocated outside, where it graced the parking lot. Other pieces simply disappeared. Forty Feet of Fashion remained in place until another developer took over the mall in 1985 and did a major renovation. Rivers’ mural didn’t gibe with the new look, themed around the restored Calder, so the developer suggested donating it to a museum. But Rivers insisted on its restoration first. When they couldn’t come to terms, the mural was disassembled. Rivers got a few of the elements, including one of the swimmers, which is on view through August 31 at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton, as part of the exhibition, “Larry Rivers: Pop Icons.” He also got the legs, slightly reworked and repainted them, and planted them on the lawn outside his house on Little Plains Road in Southampton, where they disquieted the neighbors until his death in 2002. He later made a duplicate set, which gallery owner Ruth Vered and her partner Janet Lehr acquired and installed on their Sag Harbor property, the former Bethel Baptist Church, two years ago.

Opinion seems to be divided on their appropriateness, and not only because they’re out of character with their surroundings. As the work of an artist whose controversial video portrait of his daughters’ sexual development is the subject of a tug of war between his younger daughter Emma and his estate, they are viewed less than sympathetically by those who see the artist as a degenerate who exploited his children in pursuit of his own agenda. That argument will be settled by the interested parties, and really has no bearing on the merits of the legs as a work of public art in a prominent village location.

Considering the paradoxical dearth of public art in a village notable for the many artist who live and work here, I think it’s about time we got a monument by a prominent local artist that’s livelier and more noteworthy than the generic Civil War statue at the intersection of Main and Madison. Rivers was a member of the East End art community for more than half a century. To be sure, he didn’t live in Sag Harbor, but he is buried in our Jewish cemetery, so he’s truly a permanent resident. The former church is also a fitting location for his sculpture. It became an art center when Abraham and Esther Rattner bought it in the 1950s—it’s where Jackson Pollock’s girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, worked briefly during the summer of 1956—so what could be a more suitable spot for showing off Larry’s shapely legs?

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Artists Don’t Get No Respect

07-29-2010

Artists need to get over themselves. That was the blunt message from Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic, to his artist-dominated audience at Guild Hall on July 18th, when he delivered the Annual Pollock-Krasner Lecture. Funny, irreverent, self-deprecating and voluble, Jerry is the art world’s answer to Rodney Dangerfield. His monologue, provocatively titled “The Good, The Bad and the Very Bad: An art critic talks about art, demons, and other things that have to do with making art today,” focused on how artists’ expectations often outstrip achievement. And he was just as frank about unrealistic notions of the critic’s power and influence as he was about the artist’s misguided visions of fame and fortune.

Having been a journalistic art critic for more than 30 years, first for The New York Times’ now-defunct Long Island section and then for WLIU radio, I was delighted to hear Jerry discredit the image of the critic as a tastemaker whose judgments can make or break an artist’s career. On the contrary, he maintained, critics play a limited role in the rise and fall of artists’ reputations, and virtually none in determining the market for their work. It’s only natural to want a rave review, but I agree with Jerry’s contention that it has very little influence on an artist’s ultimate success.

“Artists want everyone to love them,” Jerry declared. That’s an overstatement for effect, but it does highlight some of the demons that haunt the studio, where the artist labors in isolation and struggles to give tangible form to intangible concepts or feelings. Having the idea is one thing, finding a way to express it so others can get the message is something else again. Remember Edison’s assertion that genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration? Well, it may be a cliché, but it’s true. Then, having expended all that energy on an artistic labor of love, the demon of self-doubt pokes you with its pitchfork. Is my work good enough? Will anyone else get it? Then another demon takes a stab. What if no gallery will show it? Suppose it does get shown, but no one buys it? And even worse, what if it gets a bad review?

As far as Jerry is concerned, that should be the least of an artist’s worries, and I concur. Andy Warhol, the world’s most famous and successful modern artist, never got a favorable review in his life. Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel and other contemporary art stars do have their critical champions, but they’re regularly pilloried by others. What makes the market, according to Jerry, is marketing.

Before he spoke, Jerry mentioned to me that a poll by Art Review magazine had named him the fifty-fifth most important person in the art world—hardly a top draft pick. When I introduced him I included that statistic, which got a hearty laugh from the audience. Who was number one, they wanted to know. The answer: the art dealer Larry Gagosian. If what you want is commercial success, Jerry told them, find a dealer who will promote your work, an enthusiast to write about it and a few collectors who will invest in it, and don’t worry about whether critics or the general public love you or what you do.

If you think that sounds cynical, Jerry would be the first to agree with you. He has a pretty jaundiced view of the high-powered contemporary art scene. But even as he admonished artists to stop complaining that they don’t get enough recognition and to scale back their expectations of stardom, he encouraged them to remain true to themselves and to follow their inner necessity. Far from suggesting that they compromise themselves or just give up, he advised them to stay with it and keep it authentic. That’s the only way to be credible, and it holds true for art criticism as well. Both processes, he believes, should be intuitive, not calculated or formulaic, or they become mannered, shallow and pretentious.

In the end, credibility is the defining factor that both artists and critics need to embrace. Although they speak different languages—as Jerry put it, critics are dog-like in their direct communication with their audience, while artists are like cats, which express themselves indirectly—if they aren’t honest, they aren’t worth paying attention to. Authenticity, he insisted, is the true measure of success.

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Art’s a Bargain

07-01-2010

I don’t know about you, but with the economy the way it is, I’m on the lookout for bargains. More than ever, we want value for our money, and when it comes to great deals we can’t do better than our museums or historic sites. They’re popular destinations for locals and out-of-towners alike, but not everyone realizes what bargains they are.

These places are called non-profits for a reason. There’s a huge gap between what you pay at the door and what it actually costs to let you in.

At the museum where I work, the increasing number of requests for discounts prompted me to calculate that differential, and to ask some of my colleagues to do the same. The results of my informal survey bear out my contention that cultural attractions are among the best buys in town.

My museum—the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, where the artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived and worked—belongs to Stony Brook University’s non-profit foundation. It has beautiful grounds overlooking Accabonac Creek and a charming 19th century house full of their stuff, but the main draw is Pollock’s studio floor, covered with colorful remnants of his controversial paint-pouring technique. We’re open three days a week from May through October, and last year we had about 6,500 visitors.

We charge $5 for general admission and $10 for a one-hour guided tour. Members get in for free, and so do children under 12, as well as New York state and city university students, faculty and staff. When everything is factored in—salaries and benefits, utilities, insurance, supplies, advertising, and all the other expenses—each pair of feet on the floor in 2009 cost us $48.84. Admissions amounted to a little over $51,000, which averages out to $7.84 a person. So where did we get the other forty-one bucks?

Like most cultural organizations, we rely on several sources of income to make up the difference. We have no endowment, but our two staff positions are state-funded. The rest comes from memberships, museum store sales and other earnings, government and foundation grants, individual donations and fundraising events—the traditional non-profit strategy.

Zach Studenroth, director of the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum, which is also open seasonally, says that’s his formula too. Last year he had about the same number of visitors as we did. They paid $5 each, with discounts for seniors, students and groups, but the real cost of admission was $28. Your ticket gets you into one of the village’s grandest architectural confections, and once inside you see fascinating art and artifacts from Sag Harbor’s glory days as a whaling port. It’s an eccentric, eclectic and authentic tribute to a bygone era, all for about one-sixth of its actual value.

In Bridgehampton, the Children’s Museum of the East End [right] charges $9 for admission to a wonderland of interactive educational exhibits, where youngsters and grownups can have fun while they learn about the local community. The array of imaginative programming is staggering. There are classes, workshops, performances and special events, which help with the bottom line. They have the lowest differential among the five museums in the survey, but there’s still an $11 gap between the admission price and the $20 cost per capita. The executive director, Steve Long, tells me that they get a third of their money from earned income, a third from grants and gifts, and a third from fundraising activities. That’s a good balance, in line with what most unendowed non-profits aim for.

At the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, a small endowment helps underwrite curatorial positions, but the bulk of the budget must be raised annually. The museum, which had about 26,500 visitors last year, boasts a fine permanent collection of 19th and 20th century American art and runs a lively year-round program of temporary exhibitions, lectures, films, concerts and classes. This is one of the biggest bargains on the South Fork. You pay $5 to get in—only $3 if you’re a student or senior, and free if you’re 18 or under—but if you paid what it costs you’d pony up a whopping $106. Admissions cover only about 1% of their general operating expenses.

Similar numbers are reported by East Hampton’s cultural center, Guild Hall, with the John Drew Theater and an art museum devoted to artists of the region, past and present, under the same roof. The museum asks only for a suggested donation, which makes a negligible contribution to the bottom line. Calculating its per capita cost is problematic, since the galleries are often open before performances and during intermissions, when audience members can see the exhibitions at no extra charge. Taken as a whole, each of the roughly 39,000 bodies that entered the building last year cost $88.71.

Why do museums routinely subsidize admissions so heavily? Because we can, thanks to those alternative sources of income. Also because we believe it’s the right way to serve our community. Guild Hall’s executive director, Ruth Appelhof, sums it up succinctly. “Our mission,” she says, “is about supporting the arts and artists on the East End, and inviting and providing access for all is paramount.”