Eyewitness: Reports From An Art World In Crisis

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E Y E W I T N E S S

A L S O BY J E D P E R 1

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Gallery Cioing

E Y E W

T N E S S

R E P O R T S

A N

A R T

WORLD

J E D

F R O M

I N

C R I S I S

P E R L

BASIC B O O K S A N i - W IZt PLJHL I C B O O K

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C O N T E N T S

ARTISTS A N D AUDIENCES

C O N T E M P O R A W DEVELOPMENTS

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A R O U N D THE M U S E U M S

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Impressionist exhihitions

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T H E A R T OF S E E I N G

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Index

33.3

E Y E W I T N E S S

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A R T I S T S

A N D

AUDIENCES

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About a ciecacie ago, \\-hen Cindy Sherman started she\\-ing her big rrnedin the artists' private art world. The &ime that dc Kooning and Follock achieved in those years \\;is an outgrowth of their downto%-nreputaticrns. 1do not mean ttr suggest that there \\-as ever a time \vhm everything \vent right. Far from it. The gonrr, careerism that \\-e think of as characteri,tic of the '80s had its origins in the '501, ancl there were all\-ays reputations that were largely shapeii by the public art \\-orid. Rut the fact is that, e,pecially in the '50s and '601, a great deal of the art that made its \\-a\-uptonn had its origins 40%-ntonn,in a culture in lvhich public reno%-n, although desirable, \\-as not a formative value, not the litrntlh test it n-ould he once iontextualism was king. lPhtls in the '51)s, and to a lebser extent all the \\-a\-into the '70s, the public art \\-orlci could he said to be an imperfect but still pretty reliable mirror of the artists' art world. \\-here \\-hat really mattered u-as tlie freestanding value of a \\-ark of art. hforc tha.n that, there \\-as a sense among artists, and among those v\-tlo fc,ilo\\-eciart clo,ely, that a public reputation was of value only to the extent that it \\-as seconded by artists. Many of the painters and sculptors \\-h0 crowdeci into the Cedar Ta-ern, the Cireenwkh Village hangout that the Abstract 1:xpressionists made famous in the 19Sf)s,took it for granted that even those \\-h0 had succcedeii upto%-n\\-ould ultimately be jucigeci dolvntown. Some of this was lip service, but rnt~shof it was not. There n-as a story that circulated about how cieliphtell Tackson Follork \\as \\hen Earl Kerkam, a marvelouh painter of figures and still lifes who had an archetypal artists' art world reputation, let him tinon- that some recent \\-ork n-as "'not

t3itci." The point of the anecdote is that Follock. cie\pite his public ktrne. hungereci for a kincl of appmval that only the arti\tsSart \vorlci could provide. In the criticism that the pitinter Fairfield Porter \\;is \\-riting in the early

'hOs, the ktrnous ancl the not-$0-kmous and the barely knolvn are discussed next to one another, and they are judged bitsicallt- not in term, of their success in the big public m-csrltf but in terms of the value thrtt their n-ork has for their peers. No matter how \\-ell-kno\vn an artist became, the jucignlents of fellow arti\ts continued to be extremelt- important, Mark Rothko's depression in the 1060s cannot he separated from his alvareness that many artists and m-riters believed--and

this belief %-asreflected in e5sa)-s in little maga-

zines such as Scrup and E\.ergmi.rr Rerrart.

that he hrtd fallen into a formula,

\\-hich his spectacular success, including a retrospective at the Museum of hfodern Art, son~ehovconly uncierscored. Rothko conlmitted suicide in 1970, dying in a pool of blood in his stuciio. and there is probably more than n kernel of truth to the luridly elaborate hngiograph\- that has gro\\-n up around that terrible event. There \\ere surely many kctors that fueled his nlassive depression. But \\-h0 can deny that Rothko \\-as at lea\t in part unclone t3j- a ktme thttt, ho\ve\-er much he haci hungered for it, dissolveci the very values that had once sustained him? In Rothko's later years, the public art \vorlci and the private art \\-orld \\ere less and less able to i'unctii~neffectively as two sides of a single, relatively \\-ell-integrated organism. n d if this tkx-o-part organism has continucci to operate at all since the '701, it is only heciiuse it's no\\- operating in reverse, \\-ith the public art \\-orld ciictating the term, of the private one. The growing prestige of .%meriran art gave the freestanding value of art a new context. Artists of Rothko's generation t3enefiteci. Then the c o n t n t devoured the art, If 1%-econsider I3uchamp's gnomic observation. made in 1957, to the effect that the spectator "a~iiishis contribution to the rreathe act." \ve may

begin t o sce that this reversal has a kind of I3adaist logic. Certainly, the Dariaists have done their ciamnecie\t to undermine the stand-alone integwty of art. Rut their authority probably originateh in their hilving been the first people to see the m-riting on the \\-all and to how to m-hat they \\-ere not sorry to believe \\as an inevitability. Ry now, in any event. \\-e are all, Datfaists and anti-Dadaists alike, at the mercy of developments that we are at hest ill-equipped to control. And although l\-e can dexribe these develc,pment =with a gciod deal of accuracy, we may never come up l\-ith a theory that explain5 them entirely to our satiskiction. \%%at m-e do knoll- is that in the nineteenth century the collapse of the old system of Salons and academies set the stage for an increasingly improvi3;ltional interaction between artist and atxdience-and

h r the incandescent excitement of the avant-

garde. Rut apparently a creatWe relationship het\\-een the artist ancl the audience coulci also turn into a collusive relationship t3etiveen avant-gardism and populism. liltimately, t h i increasingly compromised alliance endangercci the arti\t's hard-\\-on modern st;ltuh a\ the person \\-h0 makes private expe"ienr-es public. The t3eginning of the end came \\-ith the explosion of Pop r t in the early 1060s. Rut if I am rorrcc t in t3elieving that the hostilitv to art's standalone poll-er has a long history, then Pop Art \\-as less a catiilyzing force than a neat conclusion. Pop Art's subject lnatter dramatized the shift from a private to a public avant-garde because so many of those Fop image$ and motifs \\ere drawn from material that had no private nleaning for the artists. hndy W~rhol.who came out of the \vorld of adverti\ing, defi~leda nem- kind of art world career-the e .t

career that \\-as conciucteci entirely in the public

that point the public art \\-orld became self-perpetuittinp; or at least

it \\-as then tha.t want-garde art came to be tied to market values rather than to arti\tic valtre\.

A whole culture has g r o ~ - nup in Karhol" 11-ake,a L-nlturethat h!- now include\ its c,\;\-neducational institutions, such ar the nortium.Writh lirens, the public art \vorlci twcornes the multinational art \\-orld. Dennis Hopper. \vho \\-as motorcycle crazy long before he directeci

Rz~itar,ot,serveci in the exhibition catalog that \\-hat had first attracted him to bikers \\;is their not being "corporate tie-\\-ielciing execs from R l l Street." Rut of course a great many of the hikes at the (;uggenheim m-ere nlway, rich men's toys, and there is no way this show ever m-ould have played the (Guggenheim if n lot of the "corporate tie-11-ielding execr" \\-h0 support Krens had not likcci the 13ike-as-art equittion. Krens is telling the new museum tvcoons that they don't have to like pitintings and sculptures much in ilrder to get into this erctusive club. ".Zn art museum's special est~ibitions programming should fit into n strategic plan." Krens expliiined of "The .4rt of the Motorcycle." And \\-hat better strategic plan could Krens have offered his pittrons than one that began by gi\ing them the opportunity to trade in their rep ties for black leather jackets! Perhaps the deepest irony of Krens's tenure at the (Guggenheim is th;tt he has raised this mega-public institution on the foundations of a museum that \\-as originally iiedicated to some of the least popular of all modern art. In its first incarnation, as the Museum of Non-Objective Fainting, the (Guggenheim opened on East 54th Street in 19.19 and fcatureci abstract paintings by Kandinsky and others that \\-ere still less than beloveci at the Museunl of Modern Art, \\here the audience haci only recently made its peace \vith the Fc)\timpressionists. The Museum of Non-Objective Fainting \\;is meant to bring the put,lic up to speed \vith what the mo\t aloofly experimental artists \\-ere doing; non-objective pitinting still remain\ a reach for many museum-

goers. Yet the very idea of cultural aspiration, lvhich once fueleci the public's strtlgple tii grasp an artiilt's nmcist private expressions, is nom- regaded as fuddv-iiuddy stuff, at least by Thorn%\Krens. Krens has become the cheerfully clark prophet of museological pragmatism. Small-as

the Guggenheiru once m-as-is

not o d y no longer consid-

ercci beautiful; it's seen a\ stupid. Krens claims to face hard facts that other museum directors avoid. m-hen he argue* that he need, glnmc~rousinternational partnerships to pa\- the bills and that he must turn the nluseum into an art lnultiplex in order to bring in the crokvds. Rut \\hat some call h o ~ - ing to the inevitable mai- in fact be a tragic lark of imagination that turn5 our \\-orst-ca\e sc-cnariointo our o d y option.

In the '805. criticism5 of the art lvorld status quo had a certain cachet. Rut in their 0%-n\\-a\-the brilliant critiques--7hich

reached a peak of comic mis-

chevotlsness in "The Sohoiad,'Yffobert Hughes's "Satire in Heroic uplets Drawn from Life," published in the ~YPW York Rniint t j f B i l i l k ~in 1984----co~lclhe a* destructive as the hype. li'hen n m-itty 11-ritcr turns the art 11-orld into n grotesque carnival, we have another, cleverer form of contextualiration. and the result may he that people give up on contemporary art entirely. And \\-hen that happens, brilliant. dedicated artists arc in clanger of being ignorcci along \\-ith the hype artists. In the '80s. it was all too easy to mock the big money and the glamour; anti-hjpe could become another kind of hype. In the '90s, though. a nlilder tone of bemused acceptance has come into kivor, mai-he because critics are &\\;ire that nothing the\- say makes much of a difference. When the 1995 li'hitnev Biennial opened, three major critics \\-horn one \\-ould not have expecteci to agree about much of an)thing came out m-ith the phrases "I like thi, one" or "I like it." This was said 11-ithn cer-

tain archness, with a sort of sigh. "Like" is s t ~ c ha bland word, and it \I-as used for its blandne,~.I think that critics \\-ere struggling to find a \\-ay to re\pond to the Age of the Deal Makers. They knew that if they tried to argue with the art. or with the curator's underlying assumptions, they \\-ould get no\\-here. The deal had been cut. The case m-as clo\ed, But of course the case is not closed. The artists are still working, and there is an eciurated auciience that \\-ants to understand why things have gone so \\-rang. The only experience I find more depressing than \\-alking thmugh the \XrhitneyBiennials is reading the critics \\-h0 say. "Yes, it's had. but this is \\hat there is." Khen I go thmugh those Biennials, m!- reaction is different. "Yes, this is bad," I ttt~ink,"and it's bad bemuse it excludes everything vital and exciting in m t e r n p o r a r v art." I'm wondering \\-h? Rafbara (Goodstein and Strtnle~Le\;\-isand tlozens of other artists haven't E-teen included--and

among the artists m-e haven't seen in these she\\-s in recent

years are pitinters as \\ell-kno\vn a, Rill lensen and loitn Snvder. Ti.,iia)- the mo\t radical thing an artist can do is paint a tightly structured and internally coherent painting, yet e v m if there is a single major curator in this c o r n a y who ha.s the brains to recisgnize such \\-ork, there is not a single one

\\-h0 has the guts to give that \vork institutional support. The real artists are still \\-orking. The tragedy is that they have no \\;I!-

of making contact with

the audience that really cares. K h a t is to E-te done? The only solution is for people to E-tegin to put E-titck together the structures that have histt~ricallysuppc~rtedthe artists' art 'i\-orld in the ITnited State\. lye need dealers, c-ollectors, critics, and curators

\\-h0 \\-ill stand up for the freestanding value of art-day

by dav. case by raw.

(Given h m - far matters have gone. I am not sure this renekved support is any longer fea,ihle, but there is nothing to do hut give it n try. I can understand

\\-h\ the big museum, are unable to respond to all the cliss;ttisfidction out therc: they're basically in thrall to the money interests. to the deal makers.

Rut I do \\-oncler 11-hywe aren't seeing more innovative programming in the smaller museums. where there may still be some independent curators and trustees left. And \\-h3t about the college\ and t~niversities,u-hich have their own net\%-orkof galleries and small collections? People \\-h0 still t,elie\-e in a private art \vorld must pool their resources. The effort has txgun. One example is the small retrospective of work by Louisa Matthiasdottir. the grandest still life painter of recent cleca~le\.\\-hich tourcc1 roughly a dozen colleges and unkersities in the mid-'90s. \Ye need n ~ o r cshon-s like this, I am also looking for a new gemration of art ~lealers \\-ho, beginning slo\vl\- and building on that tremendous stock of gifted artists no\\ in their 30s and 40s and 505, create galleries m-here, as Clement C;reenberp once m-rote of the Retty Pi~rsonsGallery. "art gee, on and is not just s h i i ~ - n and sold." To he sure, it's harder to operate such a gallery tha.n it \\;is for Retty Farsons or j'ulien I.ev\-: it costs so n ~ u c hmore to run a dignified operation th;tn it did forty or fifty years ago. But our hest hope may still rest \\-ith the rise of a n e n gmeration of gallery 0%-ners\\-h0 are independent and committed--\\-h0

carry on in the great tradition of early-

twentieth-century Paris and mid-century S e w York, n-hen dealers knell\\-hat it nleant to cast their lot with a community of artists. The greate" danger is the sense of hopelessness among the artists. They desprately need a ne\\ \\aye of dedicated cle;tlrrs; more eager, infcjrmed collectors: n determination on the part of smaller museums to exhibit. document. and preserve uncompromisingly independent contemporary art: an upsurge of serious critical kvritinp; ad~iitionalforums m-here nrti\t\ can get together and talk. The public art world has t~ecomesuch an over%-helmingl\- oppressive force in arti\ts9lives that many painters and sculptors have already given up hope that the reveliitions that sustain them in the studio \\-ill ever again have a public presence. Once upon a time a major arti\t \\;is a person like \Yillem de Kooning, who came up through the ranks and

never forgot that he \\;is a part of a community of artists. Ti.,iia\- a major artist is a person like Jeff Koons, who has oversized knickknacks manuhctured by hired hands and doesn't knoll- that there is a cornmunit\- of artists and is proud of his ignorance. So kir as Knons is concerned, the deal nxiliers are the only artists left standing. Koons is one of them. K h a t y ) u see \\hen

you compare de Kclnning and Koons is not a difference in quality or degree. It's a difference in kind. The art \\-orld has become the most glamomus \vilderness imaginable, be\\-itdling and nurnl-ting at the samr time. it ma?. he overstating the case to say that the future of art is in the t3;tlanrc. But most of the artists to \\horn I talk believe that \ve are Lising in \er>-ciark time,. If arti\ts and audiences can confront the full extent of their alienation, ma\-be then people can hegin to shake off that smse of hopelessness and things can start to turn around. If this is going to happen, it \\-ill involve a lot of small arts of courage, all of them animatecl t3j- a \\-illingness to reject r o n v e h o n a l taste and ronventional 11-isdom all along the Line. The artists \I-ho are most deeply cc~mmitteci to \\hat they're cioing in the studio have to reestablish contact with the audience that hates the hype.

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CONTEMPORARY

DEVELOPMENTS

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TWOMBLV TIME

The idea that art began \\hen somehodv impulsively scratched something on a \\-all \\-ill do just fine as a creation myth for painters, Why that first artiit made thrtt first mark, however, is subject to as many different interpretatic~nsa* there are time* \\hen artists have thought about the origins of art. In the late 1700s. \\hen European painters were on the verge of a century of realist revolutions, some artists were attracted to a Greek legend that stated that the inventor of painting \I-asa woman, a (:orinthian maiden \I-ho decided to trace the profile of her soon-to-be-departed lover on a \I-all, This storv, U-fiiclicombined a clrt\siial setting, a romantic sentiment, and a realist impulse, suited an age that occasionally could \velci such apparently divergent sensibilities into bold historical drama. But in more recent t i m e , \\-hen abstraction rather than imitation has been the artiit's ciefini~lgexperience, the origin m!-ths that have interesteci people have had a less clearcat narrative. Henri Focillon, the French writer \\-hose 1936 e,say "In Praise of Hands" came out of the Expressionist impulses of early-tm-entieth-century European art. pudied the beginning hack from Corinth to the Age of the Titans. He suggesteel that \\-hat was essential \\-as not han~i-eyecoordination, hut the tiand's inherent capacities-its

delicate yet forceful musculauitv and its

tactile sensitivity. Focillon imagined a centaur in a forest, ancl how, while moving along on his four hooves. the mythological heaht would be "inhaling the \\-orld thmugh his hands, stretching his fingers into a web to catch the imponderable." "The hand's trial,. experiments and divinations." I'orilIon believed. were still going on in artists' studio\ in the twentieth century. And \\-hen I'orillon's essay appeareci in Nen York in 1948, under the imprint

of the art book pt~hlistterKittenborn, there \\-as a

Korld atldience that

\\-asprimed to receive the melsitge thzt the magic is in the making. It has been just at-tout fift!- years since Focillon's essay appeared here. That is both a very long time and a very short time so far as art is concerned. And even though the idea of the artist as a magician has been attacked fi-om every imaginable angle in the past severat years, this remains the only- m\-th t-tj- =which anybody who gee, into a studio and gets clown to work on a regu-

lar basis can seem tts live. Artists stiII bef~evethat the inlplrlse t o make marks predates the impulse to represent, nncl the\- have made painterliness the hfanhattan version of naturalness-a naturalness that can E-te turned to contradictory ends and that often seems, even \\-hen it iignorecl or attacked, to be honored in the breach. In the pit\t fen- years we have seen a number of museum retrospecthes in lvhich contemporary artists are illtent on demonstrating that in the beginning and in the end there is nothing hut the mark. The5e shc3\vs-devotecl and, no%-,

Tkl-omhly-have

to Rohert Ryman. Killem d r Kooning.

underlined both the potency of a great ori-

gin myth and the clangers in store for any artist \vho expects a limited definition of painting t o he relevant t~ the Fir-from-limited number of situittions that present themselves over a lifetime of v.-ork.

Cy Tm~ornhly,\\-hose retrospective is at the Museum of Modern Art this fall, likes a classical a\sociation, ancl he probably \voulLln't mind our imagining that in nlore than a few- of his canva\es a centaur has clone some ti11ger painting. That Tuomhly has often made his painterly marks m-ith pencil or crayon doesn't s ~ g g e \at rejection of the painterly gesture so much as the relevance of that mark to a range of unconventional situittions. T\\-omhly is saying that he's painting even \\-hen he's not pitinting. There are classical titles and inscriptions clerived from Greek and Roman lvriters scattered through the \\-ork of this artist \\-h0 has made his home in Italy since the late 1950s (he's 65). These antique allusions give his late modern improvisa-

tional manner, \\-ith its big expanses of emptv lvhite canvas. a feeling of heing groundeci in the lvhite marble lan~lscapeof classical legend. T\%-o~-r,mbl\gives the impression that he's a contemporary artist with fi11e premodem credentials. The T\\-omhly sho\v. \\-hich \\-as organized bj- I-presmts a careful, chronological vie&-of the career. the show sugge\t"that

the \\-a\- to understan~iTm~omhlyis in terms

of a cyclical, rather than a linear, development.

rZ small repertoire of

themes and motih, almost all of them in place very near the t3eginning. have been reappearing for more than forty years. T\~ombly'smost ardent fans may leave the retrospective feeling that they \vould like to see more. \\-hich is not the \\-orst feeling to have at the end of a big sho\v. Those \vho don? care fcjr the jq-ork \\-ill find that thei-ke reactled the end cif the show t3efore they've reached the end of their mpe. T~x~ornbly knm-s hen- to maximize his gift for deft, elegant effects, or at lea\t he used to know hm-, in the first piirt of his career. up until the mid1960s. Looking at these sand- and $no%--and ivory- ancl slate-colored paintings, a mtlsetlmgoer takes in one incident and then another incident, and there's plea\urc to he derived from the smsiti\itv with lvhich T\\-omhly engraves a pencil line into thick pitint or tkx-irls together little puffs of pigment. His work can he interpreted as n textbook e x m p l e of late modern Expressionism; the living painters v\-hoend up \\-it11 rctrclspectives at the hfuse~rrn of Modern Art are often the ones whose work appears to have an educational purpose. T\~omblypresmts self-conscious a\vku;irdne,s as virtuosity. He uses substructures a\ surfaces. He asks the part to stand in for the m-hole.

All of thew arc familiar, and in some cases do\.\-nright venerable, modern

techniques. Especially in the paintings of the mid-1950s. T\%-omblymakes good use of an image that is cleriveci from de Kooning: the stroke that turns abruptly at a ninety-degree angle. and in the act of "bending over" creates n hairpin t u r n in space. In space-malijng terms, this is the m i s t that T\t~omblyever manage\ to do. The pitintings are full of small, t3eguiling effccts. T\\-omhly sees a canvas a\ an idic~s)-ncraticalkornamented surface. This sort of surEace. somewhere t,etv,-een a notel3ook page and a graffiti-scarreci \\-all, \\-as already in clanger of becoming overlv self-conscious \\-hen Miri, \\-as doing h i emptied-out picture poem\ in the 1920s. T\vomhly's rectangle of canvah, with the m-eave of the fabric either she\\-ing or covered over by n thick layer of kihite or gray paint, in bulletin hoard on =which the artist posts lots of messages. (The gray paintings with white lines from the 1960s have been referred to as chalkhoards or blackboards, for ohvic~usreasons.) Although T~\~ombl\may insl-ribe more \\-ords in his hrd-to-past;" klancfkx7riting tha.n most people are going to \\-ant to take the time to reacl, these bits of poetry and verbid graffiti do add another dimension to his \crawled and siratshed abstract images.

Among the cryptic and not-so-cryptic messages that T\vombly includes are clnsicitl place names ancl pornogriiphic squiggles. A11 announcements, he seems to suggest, are equal. There's taste and intelligence and wit to these canva\es, but there is no heedlessness. T\\-ombl\-knows h o ~to- scatter bits across a big surkize, he understands ho\\ to rnxvd things for an effect. and he knm-s how to adjust the rhythms. Yet the experience of the pitintings remains additive-that's

the

t3ipgeg ppml?lem \vith the \\-ork. The pitinters \vho give us an experience of magical amplitude find \\-a=,-, to make their effccts expiincl almost geometricall\-; they convince us that the world they've created is some\\-hat beyond their rontn,l, that two plus t\\-o equals a lot more than fi~ur.T\\-ombly never manages to make that happen. His painting are designed, not composed.

It doesn't help that T\\-omhly is no colorist. There is some varietv to his palette. and he's certiiinly attuned to the individualitv of the patches of pigment that he arrange* on n canva*, hut he doem't knoll- how to orchestrate colors. For most of the show, he makes a virtue of this liability; only in the last few room, doe, he attempt some color coml-tinatic~nsthat are really beyond him. In the recent Four

Suilsi~ricycle.

T\%-omblyseem, to be trying to

learn n thing or two from the late Toan Mitchell, hut his juxtapositions of yello\v and blue and purple and green have no impact. The work doe\n3t take off. The key to T\\-omhly's small poetic originality rests in the \\-a\-that he isolates each element. 13-en\\hen he overlaps things---a crahl-t~scra\vl, a doodle of paint-eac

h l-tit retains its cool. stand-alone personality. The self-

consciousness of this m-csrk rnakes a museumgoer feel self-conscious. rZ day or two after y s u see the Tm~omhlyshci&-,\\-hat you mai- recall is all the careful looking that you clid, rather than an)thing that you artu:tlly saw.

l r i s i t ~ r sto the Tw/-t>n~hlv ehihititrn at the Modern-and been reaJifig al-tout Tlrc-ornbly in the press-\\-ill

anyhoJ!. v\-ho's

quite n a t u r a v \\-oncler

\I%\- it ib that so much attention is focused on a partiiulau arti\t at a partii-

ular time. The retrospective provide, an occasion, but of course some retrocase, the aviditv spective~garner more attentian t h n others. In T\"r-omb1~'s \\-ith \\-hich he ancl his \\-ork are being examineif suggests something about the m!-sterious movements of artistic sensil-tility.Transformations in taste may appear to be shaf-ted by the peiipie in the museilrns and the auction houses and the t3lue-chip galleries. Rut as often as not, taste percolates up\\-ard, \vith ideas and apprehensions that first take hold in the stuciios of a considerable nulnber of artists someho\v finding their way into the wider \\-orld. Although hshion can be a crucir but useful barometer of evolutionary trends and gecilogicitl shifts in the thinking of arti\ts, there are transfr~rmaticjns that occur over periods of years and even decades jq-ith

3

sIo%--movingforce that the audience, if it's overly concerned with \\hat's happening this m o n t t ~or this season, \\-ill be ha.rd put to compreknd.

In T\x7omhly, Kirk Iiarnedoe ha4 surely found a big-name artist kvhose ability to he both unabashedly lyricid and dryly ironic about his 0%-nlyrici\m defines, thmugh its very paradox. haute taste in 19%; you might say that T\~ombly'scharm rests in his not resolving a paradc~xso much as he enshrines it. Historically speaking. T\vombly's brand of painterline\* comes a g e n ~ a t i o nor two after de Kooning's (\vhose retrospective icurrently plzii-ing opposite T\\-ombl~'sat the Metropolitan Museum of .4rt) and perhaps half

3

generation before Rolxrt Ryman's (whose retmspective \\;is at

the Mc>derna year ago). T\vombly certainly offers a muheurngoer a lot more than that painterlv M i n i m a l i ~Robert Ryman. whose lvhite brushstrokes are so evenly inflected that every mark is canceled out by every other oneand a viewer is left feeling hi-almed. An artist who marshals his slim painterly resources as rigidly as R\-man must have some inkling of the numbing effect that his j\-ork is going to have on many museumgoers. Rut the off-p~lttingregularity of some of the later galleries in the de Kooning retmspective suggests that even an arti\t of infinitely greater gifts than Rynlan. when his essential subject is the individualism of the hushstroke j\-ithin the pluralism of the painang. cannot expect the most t3eautiful pasxsof the brush to sustain our interest over the course of a long career.

De Kooning, \vho at 90 is no longer painting. used to handle a paint-saturated hruhh with more wit and elegance than anybody else in .4mericit. No lifeu7ork based on the cult cif the brushstroke rivals the l->rilIianceand fkscination of iie Kooning's. Still. by the late '50s, the preoccupation lvith passagework over bro;.tJ cor7tlpositionai movelnents led to a diminishment in de Kooning's work, and at that point T~x~ornbly kicked in \I-ith his 0%-ntake on de Kooningecyue diminishment. T\\-ombly didn't study 11-ith de Kooning, hut cie Kc~nninghad taught at Black Mc>untainCollege in North Car-

olina before Tkx7ombly got there, a d the 1)utchman's \\-ark m-as,cif ccsurse, a nlajisr inflt~enceat the school. T\x-omblv join\ a studied severity that is not unlike Ryman's to a giddy painterliness that is not unlike de Kooning's, and brings o u t a strain of coolly nihilisac painterliness that runs straight thmugh hit\- years of the Sihool of Ne\v York. Kc cfidn't neeci a T\\-omhly retrospective or a dc Kclnning retmspective to demonstrate that these veteran artists arc on a lot of \-cjunger artists' minds. liven kvithout the shm-S,it's abundantly apparent that '50s--style painterliness is resurgent. often \vith an ironic edge. In part this is a generational thing. Arti\ts in their 40s arc kiscinated by the mid-century years; they feel an almo\t lnagnetic pull hack to the world as it \\-as\\hen they \\-ere young. There have been rncinths in New York \"Y-hen-between the shcikvs at the Fainting Center. Andre Zarre. 55 Mercer. and a number of other LION-ntokvn gallrries-it's

been clear that the impact of de Kooning's bravura brush-

\\-ork on Twomhlv and countless artists \vho were exhibiting along 10th Street in the 1950s has reappeared, phoenixlfke, in the SoHo of the ttr)c)l)s. Solne of this may he cop\-cat stuff; a lot of it is much more than that. Fainthanclling has t3ecorne such an issue among the artists that for the first time in anybody's memory Ne\\- York has a hometo%-nbrand of pigments that rivals the hest produced in Fun~pe.And make no mistake about it: \\-hen artists arc going bark to t3;tsics in the stuciio. the repercussions are going to be felt \\ay t3eyond the studio. Materials matter. and even nonartists knov\-it. itt the de Kclcining retrospective at tbc X/letropcilitan, museurngoers arc tiiking a long, hard look at a color phcitogrilph of dr Kncining's paint tiible that has been installed in the galleries: they m-ant to see ho\\ it's done. Today a lot of artists are cioing it \vith \XrilliamsburgFaint. the brand that's h o r c c i l>\-Bill rensen and Rrice Marden ancl that is no\\- solci from a street-level store on Eliral3eth just t>elo\vHouston. This is the kind of spare, unprepossessing retail shop-1%-ith artists' exhibition announcements

pmted all nrouncl on the m-alls-that

people don't believe can make a go of

it anvnlore. The entreprenrur behind Wif liarnsburg Pi~intis a painter n a m d Carl Plansky, n-hose first show at 55 Mercer in 1992 contained some tttiskly \\-orked landscape-t33sed abstractions of

2

\I-ho'd seen Plansky's debut shokv-together

fairly high ralibcr.

gallerygoer

with a number of other distin-

guisheci exhil?itions, most recently Temma Bell's at the Ro&-er\-Gallery and Faul ReGka's at Salander-( I'Reilly-could

\\-ell ask \\-h\- anybody imagines

that virtuoso painthandling is not alive and \\-ell. Fainthandling has al\v;i!-s defined the Ne\v York School. much a\ rolor \\-as the defining experience for Venice and composition was for Paris. Rut for artists the que\tion isn't how pitinterly pitinting looks in the gallery; it's \\-hat they can do with it in the stuciio. T\~ombl\.'s\\-a\-of treating the ran\-a., as

a page in an aesthete's journal is something that artists can pi":

up

on. His version of ilatne*s gain* unexpected implicatic~nsin the l\-ork of loan Sn\-der, jq-fio gives diaristic pzinting a rncire exyloiive, heart-on-the-sleeve character. .4ncl Carroll L3unham.s paintings-in

which comic-hook-bright

color and psychedelic imagery achieve some elegance and 11-eight-are rather like TR-omhl\-'s Delphic pronouncements translated into NeuYt~rkese.Terrific painthandling is a l i ~ eand \\-ell. But there is reason for concem. For every painter \\-h0 handles a brush eloquently there is no\\- another painter \\-h0 is glad to make a joke of that kincl of virtuosity. There is a new kincl of painterlv painting that's sci arch and jejune that it de\erves to he taken no more seriously than the beatnik stvles thzt are st~rfacingin the tfo\vnton-n c-lubs. In some cases ttte mishievousness is right out in the open. a\ is the case \vith the cartoonish stvles of Karen Kilirt~nikor Sue lVitlian~\,In other cares-hfarv Kinters come to mincl-the

Heiln~annand Terrv

po\e is subtler, so that you may not even be

sure if the artists themselves understand that they're slyly clistanring themselves from the past. I suspect that some of today's T\\-omhl\--\\-atcherr~l?ly-kviitcliers

aren't all that different from today's archeologists of the Beat mtivement: some mai- even regard T\\-omhly as the Paul Bo&-lesof the visual arts. Today's painters have one fundanlental choice: their brush\\-ork can be hiinrlt or their brusliwork Gin be ironic. Yct \\-hen Tc\-mbly,m-ho is being granted old modern master status, creates paintings that seem to sweep aGde the concept of choice in kivor of the possihilitv of being all things to all people, he's hailed for giving do\vntom-n plurali,m an aristocratic sheen. The hip auiiience regards painting \vith such aml3ivalent skepticism that it can hardly tell the difference between the ambiguities and in~niesthat are built into a painting and the one, that they project onto a painting. Gatlerygoers mav read the ebullient passage5 in the canvases of Toan Mitchell as ironic high spirits. and perhaps there is something to this interpretation of the \\-ork of the Abstract Expressionist \\-h0 died in 1092 \\-ith her reputation soaring. It's also possible to discern an elenlent of ironv in middle-perioii de Kooning, where he occasionally appears to be gently satirizing the heaviness of his own earlier m-ork. Rut \\hen 11-e talk about Mitchell and de Kncining \\-e're talking about the gambles of arti\ts kvho. whatever their limitation\. can construct a p i n t i n g in \\-hich iron\. is cine element in an emotjonal equation. T\vombly, unlike many of the Young Turk, \vho take him for their old master. knom-s how to expresh di\passic>n with a little painterlv pahion. Khen he evokes Mitchell in some of his p;t\sages of f~lllcolor. he ma!- not make the allusion work fcjr him, hut he is ackno&-ledgingthat a painter has some options, iis an accompaniment to tlie Modern shorn-, the (Gagoian G d e r y , in its elegmt made-over garage csn 1Yooster Street, is presenting an enormous three-part painting by TR-c~mhly.He lvorkeri on this untitlrii fifty-tkx-o-foot-\&

painting for fifteen years and finished la\t spring. It's an

mgaging composition-a

sort of guide to T\vombl\.'s predilection\. Moving

from left to right \ve pas5 through a landscape of choice$. There's the land of

no color: there's a broad plain crossed by thickets of lines and in\cribed lvith the \voriis "The Anatomy of Melancholy": and there's a grand burst of fire\\-orks in orange and \iolet and vello\v. This painting embrace$ several different moods, yet it's so large and spare a \\-ork that each mood is \\-rapped in its o\vn aureole of skepticism. T\vombly's triptych reminds us that the use of a painterly mark to shatter the illusions kvithout =which painting cannot live isn't something that \\-as cireamed up by toclay's juht-out-of-artschool skeptics. There are olci skeptics. too.

Much of =what is best and worst in this old skegtic-'Smature aihievement can he traced hack to Tu-omhlv's Black Mountain College experience. I shoulci say that \\hen I speak of Black Mountain, I am not necessitrily thinking of the experimental North Carolina college as it flourished in the '40s and 300s and is descril-ted t-ty historians, but as it lives on in the after all, \\-as there for not more than a imaginations of artists. T\%-c~-ombly, year. Black Mountain, no matter ho\\- long ago it rloseci its doors. endures as a tradition-a

myth, if you will-h\-

=which artists live. .4t Black Moun-

tain, painting had less to d o \\-ith an immersion in the stuciio than with a painter's effcrts to synthesize all kinds of avant-garde activity and in general open up the studio to the world: some people still t-telieve that's \\-hat a painter eioes. There's another, alternative tradition that also contint~ei, to have a kind of ~nt-thicstatus; it's the one that held S&-ayin the 20s and '50s at the Hofmann School in Nen- York m d Pro\-incetokvn. Klhen you stuiiied lvith Hans Hofmann. you were on a completely ciifferent \\-ave length than you \\-ere at Black Mountain. Hofmann shcikved young artists h o n to go into the studio and express anything and everything that they knell- about the 11-orld through the dynamism of the composition, the \\-eight of the rolor, the livelinei,~of the hruhh. Some people still believe in that, too.

T\vombly3sattitucie to\v;ird the rla\sical past----his creation rn\th. if you \I-ill-has

everything to do n-ith Black Mountain relativism. Me is st~relyca-

pable of uncierstanciing antiquity as n hirly solid arrangement of literarj- and artistic monunlents, but wh;tt attracts him about those montrments is the extent to lvhich time has \\-reakeci change\ on them rather than the extent to 'iq-hich they have rernained the same. There are no absoltrtes in this view of history. The mo\t beautiful line of poetry can he a f r a g m e n t q r p h a n e d \\-ords. The most beautifully painted passage on the \\;ills of Pompeii is hscinnting because it has been ravaged bj- time. 'lh he interested in the patness of the pa\t is a perfectly natural attitude fcjr an artist. hut it is by no means the oniv viable m-?- to apprtjach the pa\t, and it is certainly a view that's irreconcilable \\-ith Mofinann's belief in the immediac\- of painterly expresis alive for other kinds of arti\ts as u-ell, Six sitrn. Pompeii, alive for T\x-ombl~, months ago, a fen- steps from \\-here T ~ ~ - o m hi l yno\\- shokving his mural painting at rnlism and an art-forart's-sake feverishness about BaIthus and Kitaj that pauadouically links them all the \\a\- hack to the nc~nconformirtt3epinnings of the modern movement against 11-hichthey're often said to be in revolt. The painters and \I-riters n-ho revere Aalthus as a (:lassicist in spite of his sometimes incendiary erotic subject matter may ncit cotlntemnce Kitaj, who is an idicrsyrtcratic Expressionht in spite of his obvious reverence for the modern canon. Rut for those \vhci keep close tabs on \\-hat both painters are up to, Balthus and Ritaj can look like the true inheritors of earlv-twentiettt-century revo-

lution. The tm-o artists paint paintings that pokr holes in the modern pieties. and m-herever and m-henever the\- exhibit, polemics fly. These artists are not easy to place: that9\kej- to their appeal. They paint appitrendy p c ~ ~ dsubject ar matter-a

hiond girl in Itattht~s'sI & f Cat mrlr ,Mrrri?r

LII, a street scene in Kitnj's Cued C~urt(198.%84), the dazzling melange of figures that \\-as platered all over Lon~lon'sUndergnjun~llast summer on the posters ~ Ralthus ancl Kitnj have such insistently personal advertising the Tate s h o Yet ought to be put together that the\- transform the ideas about how a pai~~ting

' t~r bare realist hcts into enveloping formal puzzle\, so that realit!. itself L K" ~Fins seem son~ehowal->strac t. Their l;\-orkleaves the cild debates alxru t abstraction versus representation where they ought to he, m-kch is in tatters. With the trit evolution of Krstem art to\\-ard ever umph of abstraction, =which h n ~ u g hthe greitter verisimilitude to such a startling conclusion. the possil?ilit>-opmeii up of beginning all over again, with realism as just n choice among choices. Looking at the \\-orl, of Balthus and Ktaj, \vho have made that choice, you

mq be-

gin ttr have tbr impression that the eilsentid polarity in twentieth-L-entuqat-t isn? between realism and abatractian, but bet=-een the public and the private-I>et\\-ecn the extent to l;\-hichan artist makes use of farms and struttures that are already \\-idely understood and the extent to \\-hich an artist invents a language th;tt is entirely his own.

Kitaj, \\-h0 \\-rote much of the text for the catalog of his retrospective, has been extremely forthcoming about how it feels to live at a time when, a\ far a\ art is concerned, a ~ t h i n goer. g He has a conversational prose style that's slangv. erudite, and hold, and that sometime\ recalls the lvriting of an earlier idiosyncratic .4merican mvthmakrr. Ed\\-ard L3ahlherg. Kitaj \\-rites of "the cram drama of painting," and of being "a painter \\-h0 snips offa length of picture from the flaw-ed scroll l\-hich is ever depicting the train of his interest." Although Kitaj's insistmce on explaining himself to his audience is

rather unusuai fcir an artist, 1 don? think that he" smistaken in believing that an artist \\-h0 goes his ojq-n \v;$)- \\ill cio \\ell to t3lon- his own horn. "Some people." he observes, "live out their lives in places they don't come from, assigning themselves to a strange race and an alien sense of land and city. K h o is to $a)-\\-h\- they do what they do with their lives, or for that matter. \\-h? painters do m-hat they do 11-ith their painting lives?" Rv no\\tjq-entieth-century art is such a maze of iiepersonalized "isms" that an artist has to insist on esac tlt. how he does or doer not fit in. Could it he that even Balthus, \\-h0 h a for most of his sixty-odd-year career taken the position that the work should speak for itself, is t3eginning to suspect that those \vho remain silent are condemned to being misunderstood! In recent years Balthus has exouraged his literary friends, u-ho u-ere once instructett not even to n~entionthe date of his birth, to examine the ills and out, of his hiopaphy. And he has himself been doing something he never diii-granting

interview-S.The most extensive of these. put>lishetiin the lin-

glish quarterlv .Mi~di.rnP d t j l t r n this past fall, is a conversation that Balthus had over the course of an afternoon with the rcsck strtt. David Bowie (1%-hois a serious collector of contemporary English art and has lately hegun to s h o ~his C N - ~

pai~lti~lgs), This interview is an essential addition to the Balthus archives,

a great old pitinter's most sustzuned effort to tell us \\-hat he helin-es. Kben Baftlius and lCitaj speak out, they present contemporary .;aria.ticln on a theme that got.\ aiI the way hack to Rat~deiaire.'They I-relieve that in order to k n m - himrelf, the artist must know his public. And they t3elieve th;tt if the artist's imagination is powerful mough it can goad, skekver. refute. ignore. correct. and in rare instances even transform public perception. Balthus a d Kitrtj take this cisrnplex relationship n-ith the pul-rlii in .;er)- different tiirections. In the , L I d ~ r ePd1t11e1.sinterview; Balthus observes that "pmbably . . . \.;hiit people hate so much in m!- \\-ark is harmony. Everything is so contrary to harmony today." If you examine this statement for n moment,

you realize that here \ve have our preenlinent figure painter asserting that the reality he presents in his paintings is a reality that rontrariicts the Edits of Life. Ktrtj, on the other hand, can sound like an eccentric populist when he sets out his ideas. He has kvwttrn that his paintings are "picture\ of an imperileci \\-0rlc1 YOU may knoll- only as imperfectly as I iio, if at all." In Kitaj's lvriting, the line bet\\-ren \\hat's within the studio and \\-h;tt's heyon~1the studio is never clraj\-n very clearly. He argues against the ivtjry t m - r r by suggesting that public experience is a magnification of private experience. Yet in his o\vn rounditbout \\-ay he arrives at an attituiie that is, a\ much as Balthus's magi\terial isolaticln, a version of the Bat~defrtireanstance-the

artist is tiirever ru-

minating on his troubled relationship =with the public. The tvpical Balthus pitinting is of a person alone-the

solitary girl in the

t3;trcly furnished room. The t y i c a l Kitaj is a crowd scene. But Ktaj has also painted retreats: there are some canvases of deserted interiors, especiallv bedrooms, that he has described as his recollections of time spent with friends and lovers. And Balthus ha\ paintrci street scene, full of strangers

\\-ho, unbekno\vnst to trne another, are taking their places in what amount to surreal urh;tn pantomime,. In fact one of the grande\t images of modern public life comes from Balthus, 11-ho completed his final salute t o the

f arisian streets, T ~ Pilssagii P dtl Colntrt~ri~ Sar~t-~4lz(lrP, in f 994, just before he moved his studio from the city that fcxrned him a* an artist. Kitaj saw the Pd\sirge----in =which Balthus appears as the figure carrying n baguette-at

the

Baithus retrospectke in 1983 in Paris, and it inspired \\-hat is certainly Kitaj's best painting so h r . the phantasmagoria on the subject of i*,n~lonstreet life.

~ Lc'tl~lilti B7C2 jlkv Rtyigp~s) \\-ith the meandering title: C P ICt~tlri, Cecil Court is a real place-a c,ff very thick-the

artist's equivalent of a geologic-a1build-u p--suggests

mucidle

rather than depth. Most of the recent heads are too thickly painted; it's mun~mifiedflesh. Part of =-hat\ exciting about some of the recent Ifindon views is that Kossoffis stopping before the surEace closes do\\-n, so that you feel i l u i d i ~as \veil as \\-eightine,~in the handing of the pitint.

All of Ko\soff's figures have some\\-hat oversizeci features and a \\ear) look in their eyes. I've come to think of Knssc~ff'speople a* his lovable. superannuated munchkins. That's not necessarily n bad thing: Poussin did munchkins, too. The comparison ciccilrs to me hecituse it ciccilrred to Kix-,soff. \vho did loose copie5 of a Foushin painting. Cq~hilitrdoil ilerorir. some the s starring roles; f'le years ago. But then Youssin rarely gives his ~ n t ~ n c h k i n sees them as toy people set in over%-helming landscapes. In Knshoff's

cityscapes, the figures have an echo of that toylike charm that we know from Potrssin. I can sec that all the hard 'i\-ork that Kossoff has devoted to the studio nudes pa\-Soff in the rityzcapes. where the little people who scurri- through a Idondondo\\-npour or hurry home from the Undergroun~istation are rendered lvith such summary force. In the (:hristchurch paintings, the figures moving along the side\\-;ilk don't look at the church, and m-e find ourselves follolving their glances even a\ lve look both at them and at the architecture; it makes for a satisfyingly ]a!-ereci experience. Kossoff pia!-S lvith an interesting idea of likeness-in-unlikenw by describing the architecture and the figures \\-ith the same dark lines. There's an equivalence created. so that the building becomes a living, anthropomorphic presence that presses dolvn against the people even as they're pounding the pavement. Kossc~fftakes the exact mea\ure of C:hristchurch3sgrandeur, hut he also like, to bring out the beauty-in-ugliness of a kind of urban architecture t h t ' s grown up a h o s t by accident. The BmbiTtnkn~entStation and M t ~ q e r ford Bridge paintings, with their veritable collage of cla\hing volume, and textures, are as much about the weird kiscination of an unplanned myironment as are the paintings of New York Citv's I h i o n Square and 56th Street that Fairfielii Porter ciid in the '70s. (That won't surprise people \\-ho've found them,elves thinking that there are more than a few similarities bet\\-een today's sprakvling multicultural London and our sprakvling multic ultural Ne\v York.) Kossofi's color is at its best in his cityscapes. more varied and open-encied than in the figures. but even here he sometimes depends too much on surface design. The chilciren's-illustratic~nflatne,s gives the citvscapes a nice element of surprise; I feel that Kossoff is allolving himself to have immediate, unromplicitted reactions to n complicated em-in~nment.The citvscapes aren't ever t,landl\- reductive. hut there's not all\-ays enough spare to breathe. When

Kossoff paints a shade\\-y area that's supposed to supge\t some depth, the color can go dead on him. He likes to squash his perspective, so that dingonals turn into concavities and the plane, that are meant to go bark in space lean to\\-ard the surface. This spatial indecision. 11-hichmight he a painterly equivalent of the feeling that moviemakers achieve \vith their hand-held cameras, is something that Kossoff occasionally overplays. His pulsating city is sometimes jr~sta \\-01~E3lycity.

Kossc~ffisg f i ~ x i n gas a painter; the recent cityscapes seem to be the work of an artist who is breathing more easily. m-ho's not so tense, so clutched. In the newer canva,es, the surfaces have a welcc~meopenness and t l t ~ i d i tso ~ , that I begin to feel that everything is changing. evolving. expanding, right t3efore

m!- eyes. Ihfortunately, though. in Venice, \\-here the British Pavilion happened to he just about the onlv place where contemporary painting \\-as pwentecl as a gamble \\-orthy of

;I

large talent. most people seemed to re-

gard Kc?ssoff's \vork as a take-it-or-leave-it pmposition. He was a painterly painter, and that \\-as all there was to say. For some Yen- Yorkers 11-hci've \\-atched in recent years as London painters have received a surprisingly large nmclunt of a t t e n t i r ~ n l naddition to Ko\soff I'm thinking of Lucian , Frank AtlerFreud, R. B. Kitaj, H()%-ardHodgkin, Rodrigo M o ~ n i h a nand t33ch-the

British presence in Venice roulci look like more of the same. This

year's big theme show in \renice. which the Biennale's director. rean Clair. devoted to the figure in t\\-entieth-century art ancl gave the title "Identity and .41teritC3(that's their English), included work by Knssc~ffasm-ell a, Franci, Bacon, Freud, and Kitaj. Kitaj, on the basis of his paintings in "Identity and .2tteritv,'\\-as a\ccaidedthe Bienmle's grand prize.

In Lrenice, \\here the American Pavilion \\-as devoted to a group of video installations by Bill Viola called Brrrri.il .$ri:rrfr,you roulci see an nglo-.%merican face-off betm-een mind-n~~mbing traditionalism and healthy innovation

or bet\\-ern healthy traditionalism and mind-numbing i n n o v a t i r ~ n l all t depended on your point of vieu: Yet the Engliskl situation was more complicated than the British Pi~vilionmight have led one to imagine, for the British choice was deepl\- resented by those \vho regard them\elves as being on I.on~ion'scutting edge. The)- had their 011-n Biennale shm-. m-hich fentured video and installation art, in the Scuola cii San Fa\quale. a twenty-orso-minute walk from the Biennale grounds. (Like Ko\roff's exhihiaon, it \\-as under the auspices of the British (:ouncil.) Ilinos and Take (:hapman \\-ere the stars of the Scuola. lvith their three-tiimmsional appropriation of the "Great deeds-against

(lf W U I'm ~ ~ the dead!" plate from Goys's DISIISIPTS

not really sure if the nal net-

\\-ork." H;t\enSt\\-e already had enough mumho jumbo rna~ieout of the fkct that there's a lot of paint on somebody's canvases! Sylvester. \vho knew (2acometti and has recently published n book on him, is so into the eustentialisrn of process that he miis up confusing Kcjssoff's fine painangs \\-ith C;iacometti's sublime ones. Rut then literary types have all\-a\-,mistakrn Giacometti for n process-oriented artist. as if his greatness had to do 11-ith his changing t h i n g so much and not 11-ith the perfect accuracy and eloquence of his fillistled canvases. (If incfecision made masterpieces, there would he a lot more of them.) The point is not more paint or l e s paint. or more subject matter or less subject matter: it's the appnjpriateness of what's there. I think Kossoff ~vould agree, Even as he's being hypecl as the art \\-iirIClt3slatest anti-star, tljs piiintitngs are becoming less mannered. more direct. There have been times. especi~tlly in the '60s and '70s, \I-hen Kossoff was into paint far its own sake, and the results \\-ere overly impastoeif surkizes, clotted dark color, and a ciisturl,inglv \\-eM>\-overlay of pray-kvhite drips. In recent years he's twen simplifying his painthandling. and the result. especially in the nrm-er (:hristchurch and Emt3ankment floner-stall paintings. is an admirable openness and lightness. 'Ihese are just libout the best canvaws that he has ever done. Khen he paints the flo\ver stall, Kossoff is declaring his interest in the pan-er of pure color. .4lthough he's not giving up his grily-and-tan \ision of London. he is alloning more and more brightness to seep into the moist atmosphere, and the result is a glinting richnesh. a huc)v;~nc)-.Kossoff is moving from not-enough-color to no-color color. This is something that

you can learn all about in Venice, \\here Titian filled big canvases \\-ith raint>o\v-richgraj-s. Kc?ssoffwon't bear comparison \\-ith that ultimate Iienetian master, but I think it says a gciod deal about this Englishman" sn-ork that it does not look ridiculous in the Iienetirtn context-. SEPTEMBER 4,1995

BORN UNDER SATURN

The j\-ork that Bill Iensen has heen doing in the pitst several years is as exciting as any painting that has ever heen done by an .4mrricitn. This 49-yearold arti,t is a master of inchoate, muffled-yet-fierce emotions, and ncs other arti\t alive has given us sc, many haunting impressions of the loll-ering, saturnine side of the artist's spirit. Bv contemporarj- standards rensen's abstract cam-ases are small-enerally

tkx-o or three feet high----and this fc~cuhesuh

on the autographic force of the surEace. 11-hichhe builds up and rubs down and then builds up again m-ith a concentrated lyricism that's so intense that it can be a little scary. lensen has an alchemist's gift for turning piled-high brushstrokes and flotsam-like bits of pigment into the st~bstanceof a mvt hical natural \vorlci. It's an ugly-beau tiful unkerse, where the vistas are eerie, the color is febrile. and every landmark has a scintillating allegorical po&-er. i of meanderThe poetry of imsen's work is n matter of hints n n ~flashes, unfurlings. There's a marvelous slo\vness to these painti n g ~ unfoldings. , ings: you feel rensm's contemplative pitce. ( h e \\-ay to explain \\-hat rensen doe, is l,\- explaining \\hat he does not do. He never employ\ an end-to-md structure that takes its essential logic from the rectangular shape of the cam-as. Thatk the French n-a>--compcssition as a discipline that leads to a revelation---ancl it has nothing to do with lensen's piece-l3y-piece. questing approach. Although there are many Iensen painting, that contain a singular, looming image. he arrives at that all-in-one impact indirectly, incrementally. Ys~uget the feeling that he's begun each painting by fs~cusingon some tin\ element-the

color of a brushstroke. the weight of a line. the

thrust of a curve---and that for him the process of making a painting is the px~cess""fvatching that first mark or gesture gn~m-.In Iensen's m-ork.

grim-th is gradual, uneven. surprising-like

bits of moss and lichen appear-

ing on drc;i\-ing branches and then spreading unpreciictahly, creating romantically irregular patterns. There are six piiintings in the Bill Iensen show at the Marv Boone Gallery in Nrv. York. ancl in order evm to bepin to look at them a gallerygorr has to t - n o t h i q mood. Tk-o tune in to the artis t's quietert, slo\vest, dc~ing-almo\ paintings. Gbssas ancl Pirijirn, are \er!- impressive. Both are vertical, a hit over three feet high, with a horizon line ciividing the surface into nearly equal parts and summoning up, m-ith almost diagrammatic abruptness. n view of sky , cold blue hrushstn~kesspread above and earth or ocean below. f i b s ~ a r m-ith out before the orange-yello~-haze of the sun, is the primordial. Hclmeric sea. In Pdgira, clouds of that same cool blue scutter armss a greenish sky, a s h that's as unins-iltiw as the n ~ u g hred-ad-black , terrain belt~v. These s~rnhnliclandscapes contain no trace of a human presence; no path cuts through the gloom of

Pagirtr,

no boat could navigilte the danger-

ous \\-ater, of Ct?iirssus. In the lower portions of the painting. rensen curves his elements to give just a suggestion of perspectival depth. hut he's not invoking a particular place so much as summoning a harshly sublime mood. He', an ultra-sophisticated artist creating barbaric scran-ls. And the painthanclling. 11-ithits complete lack of charm. underline the peremptorv spirit of these works. When I look at the pitintings close up, I feel the chill of the palette knife rather than the softne5s of the brush. The roughed-up paint has some of the quality of Eastern calligriiphj-, of those complicated. iconic gestures that seem to emerge almost involuntarily out of an artist's reserves of calm. These landscapes, n-hich feel both 11-orn-out m J tlntouched. are ahnut mapping unmappable experiences, about being in a place that has no beginning and no end. ~ a third painting, ralleci Wlf:turL~fiht,that does a In the Roone s h o there's remarkable job of evoking frozen desolation by means of a fe\v t > r n ~ -marks n

set on a beautifully distressed surfiice. But after Cnlnsus, Pirgerr, a d B7fflbpr

Light, the quality of the 11-orkdrops precipitouslv; the three other paintings are so understated that in each case I can c-onclude cinly that lensen has left some essential part of the story inside his head. 4 s I moved around the gallery. every other painting clre\\- a blank. n d since f e n s e f i dominant theme here is the fascination of near emptiness, the outright enlptiness of one half of the selections can't but t~ndercctteven his subdest efforts. The shc)n-is sunk 1zv all this weak work. It's an out-otrfc~cusexhilzition, cine that conveys no sense of the v a r i e ~ of Jensen's recent pAnting, and I can't see how people leaving Boone \\ill understand \\-hat kind of an artist lensen redly is. This show is a verv disturl3ing event. In the 1940s. Clement (;reenlzerg often complainecl in print that the best American painting \\-as to be seen in the artists' studios rather than in the galleries. This fall Bill fensen confcluncfs us \\-ith the rase of a remarkable artist \\-h0 is showing at \\-hat is generally regiiriieii as one of the most prestigiclous galleries anjunc1. but has left the majori y of his strongest \\ark a few mile\ a%-ay.in his studio in Bmoklyn.

I realize that by compat.inp the shi)w at hfary Boom m-ith the much larger group of paintings I ,a\\- in lensen's studio some six months ago, I'm making a value judgment that's based on in\ider informatic~n.I'm loath to take advantape of such information, but the mismatch betm-een \I-hat fensen has been cioing in his stuclio ancl \\-hat's on display at Boone does such a disservice to the gallerygoer that a critic cannot hut offer a behind-the-scenes view. This is o d y fensen's second ,bm-at Boone, and the gap between his authenticity and her st\-Iishness is wider than it \\-as two \-ears ago, \\-hen he first exhibited on \Vest Bm;td\va\-. There is no excuse for his not shokving at lea\t a half-dozen more paintings, including some of his recent underx-ater universes and fiery nightscapes. There's certainly enough room at Boone to demonstrate that lensen is ntw.- able to present cimplicated embiematic subject nlatter with intuitive ease.

At the t3eginning of the '80s Mary Roone pioneereci, almost single-handedly, an overbearingly austere. Zen-Fascist style in gallery ciesign, and I,\now it ciominates the upscale scene. Boone's space at 417 \Vest Broadnay gave the slob-job work of Julian Schnahel and L);ivid Salle the VIP send-off that it so desperately needed, but this gallery flzttens out paintings that are discreetly emotional. The Mar\ Boone Gallery turns Jensen's pitintings into postage "amp"

even his strongest cam-ases look underpo\vered. The real

stars are Boone's perfectly smooth, nearlv empty gallery \\;ills. This is a hell of a spackle-ancl-paint job, but it doesn't make for an artist-friendly environment, At the very least, Roone coulci have let gallerygoers in on \\-hat Jensen is up to by presenting, in one of the other room\ in her capacious building, the suite of intaglio prints that he completecl in the spring of 1994 for an artist's h ~ o ktitled Pt~stcilnisFlrn Truhl. This collah~rationn-ith the poet John Yan is an homage to the Awtrian poet Geclrg Tt-akl, \\-h-to help us see the masters in a c ~ n t e n ~ p o r a r v

\\-ay. and it's no surprise that a generation of artists trained to think in t e r n s of context and environment has looked at the \\-ay that Rrancusi set streamlined volumes on rouph-and-ready \vood bases and has frequently been more interested in the bases than in \\-hat they support. These bases do raise

kscinating questions that lend themselves to traditional art-historical treittment. Brancuhi tried different sculptures on difkrent bases and documented his thinking in the t3rautiful photographs th;tt he took of his studio and its contents. He also frequently sold sculptures m-ithout bases. At the Philiidelphi3 Museum of .4rt even the most peculiar in*tallation decisic~ns,such a\ the v\-oojen

that is mounted atop a Glrtnrn, i;rn be supported by Bran-

cusi's 0%-nphotographic record. But which f-tt~citcigraphis one to believe, \%-henBranrusi often arranged the sanle work\ differently at different times?

If you think about Brancusi's t3ases long and hard mough. you may find yourself getting into all sorts of subversive thoughts. \Vas Rrancusi hiphlighting the pedestal because he was afraid that sculpture was losing its pedestals: Are the bases the kev to a more ci>ntemporaf\-)Ilrancusi, a man

\%-h0is tmuhled. in\erure, maybe even t3;tffled about ho%-to position sc~llpturei It \\;is Scott Burton, the artist who made a reputation for himself in the '80s \%-ithfurniture that \%-asnleant to double as sculpture and became a staple in public spares, \vho t3mught thew questions into the open. In IOXO, the year of his t~ntimelvdeath, Brirton organized a S ~ O M at - the Museum of hfodern ,"lt called " h r t o n on Brancusi." Given that Brancusi had done twnches ancl tables and stool$---many of them for a site in his native Romania-Rurton

\\;is certainly justified in pointing to him as an ancehtor. Yet

apparently Burton could not accept the possihilitv that for Brancuhi, making a table or an arch \\;is no stranger than it had twen for Bernini to make a fountain or a stair\%-a\-three centt~riesearlier. In the brochure for the Modern shm; Burton in\isteci on renaming the bases of Rranrusi's sculptures "pecie\t;ll-tabler." The "pecie\t;ll-table." he said, is "an object simultaneously prrfcjrming a function and acting as its own sign. It is a

irrirhlip

meditation on utilitarian form." Burton's thinking is fairly deft. if you like the \\hen-is-a-table-not-ii-tiiE>Ie?kind of que5tion. But does this really tell us anything alx~uttables or about art?

Modern art \\-as born amid a lot of W-oollymetaphv\irs. and it seems to be dying surrounded l>\-more of the same. The ciifference is that whereas the early moderns tended to phiIo\opfiize about the transcendent and the ideal, contemporary artists tend to philosophize ahout the kvorking process. about \\-hat you'd think are the most bitsic facts of what they do. Therc is a kind of contemporar\- sculpture-I'm Kichard Ileacon-that

thinking of W-orksby Martin Puryear and

in its all-in-one sense of form and its emphasis on

the abstract value of natural materials might be thought to be Brancusian. but artists such as Puryear and Deacon bring to craft itself the same kind of \\-illful complication that Scott Burton brought to the t3itse. These artists are so intent on demonstrating their fascination with materiajs that they highLight every detail of joining and construction, sci that the work Lmes whatever formal wtierence it migfit have h3d. Mel Kendrick, some%-hatless \\ell-knokvn than Puryear or Ileacon. is caught in the same confusions, nnci I mentic~nhi, 11-ork because Kenclrick has from time to time demonstrated a strong sculptural feeling that makes his chaotic s h m - at the John Kkber (;allpry this fall all the more ciisturl3ing. In his last exhil3ition at Kctxx, Kendrirk sent a roll- of jagged wooden constructions that \\-ere raiseci off the floor on pieces of pipe straight clown the center of the gallery, nnci the\- added up to n zany, engilgingly rough-hewn futuristic Flntasy. There's one lvork in the current shon-a raiseci aloft on more metal poles-that

tree trunk

does have something of that gangly,

gravim-defying feel, but the rest of the show is just theorizing ahout sculpture. with tree trunks doublecl by rubber castings of tree trunks, and castings turneci inside out to shall- us how it's done. Me1 Kendrick has taken m o ~ l e msculpture apart, and I see no \v;iy on earth that he" going to be able to put it I-tack together. The Kranc.usia.n themes that are Lo+ed someu-tiere in the depths of his mind have a lot to do \\-ith his occasional t3ursts of energy, but mostly he seems to \\-ant to de-

construct Rrancusi. Apparentlv Rrancusi is of no help to anybody right no\%-;he's thorouphlv n~isunderstood.In 1989, Sccitt Brlrttrn m-rote that "Rrancusi's enlargelnent of the nature of the art object is as original as Duihamp's n e n kind of object. the Read\-macle." This is the kind of ludjcrous ctsmplin~entthat is now being paid to a supremely intuitive artist. Rurton is telling uh that \\-hat Rrancuhi did 11-ith a piece of oak hears comp;"iam \\-it11 a store-bought sniw shi,\-d. Rurtrrn i n ' t pr;lising Brmcusihe's giving him the third degree. MO\\-long is it going to take people to get over the idea that every three-clirnensirsnrtt cibjeit that's set in a galler)- has to have a tl~eoreticalsubtext? Lecinardo cia Vinci, perhaps the mo\t inte1lectu;tl artist \\-hckcfcllci iunii I'hotogiaph The hf~isetirr)o f Mudeiri A r t , Net\ 5'01 k

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A N U N K N O W N MASTERPIECE

Iean Helion's Lilsi fud~tlivrtt ihings, a t\x-ent\--seven-foot-lt>ngtriptych that is one of the fen sure ma\terpieces painteci an\-\\-herein the pa\t tjq-enty years, is being seen in New York for the first time this spring, at the SalanderO'Reilly Galleries. (:ompleted in 1970, \\-hen the arti\t \\;is 75, 17iu Lilsi f u 4 oimt is an allegory of endings and renejq-als that takes the jq-oncierfully uncomplicated form of

2

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an element in jq-relcly markets all over I'rnnw-m-here

sort of sight that's young r ~ ~ and en

\\-omen are poking around amidst the merchan~iise,trying on n thing or t\x-o, carrying a\%-aya hulk-\-purchase. This is a jq-ork of magisterial informalitv, in m-hick1the n ~ o s acute t naturalistic oE>servationsare recorded in clncet~ver-lightlylayers of gidtiil\- bright acrylic color. Beginning jq-ith an end-to-end orchestration of graved-do\\-n oranges and saturated greens, Helion has unfurled an ordinary jq-orld that's also an extraordinarv explosion of telegraphic abstract signs. Helion, u-ho died in 1987, has received a number of major European retrospective~in the past couple of decade* and has been included in such key exhibitions as "A New Spirit in Painting," at the Royal .%cadem\-in London in 1981, and "Identity and .4lterit\-." at la*t summer's Venice Biennale. He's by no means an unknown artist; in fkct, he ma!- be the most grievously underestimated \\-ell-knoll-nartist of our time. Thirty-five years ago, kvriting in the international edition of the Ifi~raidIkbtttru. the poet Iohn Ashhery remarked that "Helion is not just one of the great figurative painters; he is one of the gmatest painters of any kind today." Five years ago, in an interview that u-as published in the Oxfirii . l r t \orinlul. the late Mever Schapirc), who {m-necia rityscape by Hklion, spoke of his having been a "good friend" and

gave a svmpitthetic account of the work. Yet the complexity of H6lir)n's career, \\-t.rich includes pure absrradon and nnturatistic poaraiture and a lot in twtkx-een. often leaves even interesteci viewers feeling m~stified.The internal logic and overarching originality of this \\-onderfully unpreciictable achievement ialmost invariably misread n n serie, of reactions to other people's ideas. Through most of his career. Helion \\-asso much at odds l\-ith mainstream thinking that there's probably little chance that even an event a\ impcirtant a\ the arrival of ihr Ldsi-\uiiqmunt

$l7lmi(s

in New York City u-ill

have much resonance beyon~la fen rontemporarv artists and writers \\-h0 are a\ clued in as Ashher\- \\-as in the '60%ancl Schapin, \\-as in the '40s. Yet the pitinting has finally arrived here, and for those \\-ith eyes to see, it may be it

experience.

In almost every generation there's at least one painter who brings a novelist's thematic intriclicy to the \isual description of the modern \vorlii. Renoir and Seurat did this in the late nineteenth century with their paintings of Parisians at play: Ltger's Cl(\) defined the situation after \Xrorld\Xhr I: and Helion has done something along the same line, for our own time. Standing in front of

nlu Ldsi fuii~ninrt. I'm enveloped by its stirring nrchitec-

tural dimensions, and there's so much to look at that the experience hecomes supremely active. The story unf6,lds ns it might on an enormous (Iriental screen. Helion include* a baker's dozen of figures ancl a va\t array of buyahles that are strewn across n table. n bench, and the ground. In the left panel, clothes shopping is the main event. ( Ine man has gone into a tent to try on a pair of pants, another holds up a suit jacket. while a \\-Oman looks for just the right pair of shin): black high heels. There's so much going on that it may takr y ~ au minute to notice the pair of lovers embracing in the shacio\v\- depths of the t m t . (Iutside, a \\-oman is examining some ranvares and a man carries ciff a tal3le.

Htlion \\-rests n ca*ually iconic impact from acts a* ordinary a* shopping for shoes, ancl then \\-ithout missing a beat he shifts to an interlude of cheerful Surrealist enigma in the center panel. \\-here two dressmaker's mannequin\ arc making love. % rather unusual aspect of nip L i l t

\u~i$ni~tiris

the

sire of the panels. Khercas most triptychs contain pitnels of equal size or a larger central panel, Htlion has joined tm-obroad hcirirontal side ciim-ases to a much narro\\-er central canvas. This may he his way of expressing a nonhierarchical view, of ruggeating that the flea market experience is one of instability-that

the rcnter doesn't hold. The abl3revi;ited central panel is a

mysteriotls intulude-like evening ballet-after

the drcam sequence in the middle cif a full-

=which. in the right panel, Helion once again pursues

\\-hat at first may appear to be more mundane matters. There's a big table holding a tuba ancl a record plaj-er, and lots of other stuff is arranged \\ill\nilly on the ground. A man is examining some candesticks, a \\-()man looks into a t~ook,\\-hile all the \v;$!- to the right we see a mv\terious circular staircase. Scattered near the base of the stairciise are a kvoman's high-heel shoe and n man's hat ancl p a n t : obviouhly. m-e're meant to understand that nnother pair of lovers has juht disappeared upstairs.

The Salander-( I'Reilly show inclucie\, in a~liiitionto 17iu Ldsi

[u~i$ni~tir. some

tjq-o dozen m-arks r a v i n g aiross the artist's career. People who haven't seen the scattered gallery shows cievoted to H6lion in Ne\\ York over the pitst t\\-enty years \\-ill get a glimpse of his early Purist abstraction but hardly any sense of the almost lt:len~ishrealism of the nlid-'50s. Khile the density and variety of M6lion's career does not lend itself to a brief overview, the Salander-t )'Reill\- s h m - may enable gallerygoers to see ho&-17iu Lils(fei!qwi.nr pulls together themes from all through the lvork. I think it's immediate!\- apparent that a picture of people rummaging around in a flea market is about see-

ing neu- life in old formr, and the more you knon- ahout Helion the more you'll understand ho&-this process \vorks. H6lic)n al\vavs \\-rote ahout m-hat he \\-a\ doing, and a tm-o-volumeselection from his notebooks, titleiifillrnrirld'irrr pplntp. \\-as published h- Maeght in Piiris in 1992. (;oing t h n ~ u g hthe sections that cover the years \\-hen Tlr Lu~r\ir{qm~rri

\\-ason Hklion's mind. it's evident that he's reflecting on events that go all the \I-al; bask to the '20s. The Jo~mbtlincludes some references to '7~1npsrtpfrt)uvi. "

\\-hich \\as at one time \vh;tt H6lion \\-a\ planning to call the painting. The French title, Lr Jugorrt~rrril~rntrrJtyr

C ~ ( ? S P S ,also

suggests more than m t e r i a l

thing" Mnion pn,h;thly means us to understand

ihdrspr

as having some of the

same implications that it has in the title of the third volume of Sirnone cir Beauvoir's autobic3graphy. Lu fire tk, ilii~ro.u-hich n-a\ publishell in 1963. Ihr

Lust fui%(munr if i%rn(qsisn't just ahout seeing things, it's a l o about thinking ahout things. Another title might have been Ihu Fled Murkrts tfl\fy

Mdyv

&lion \\-as horn in Yommandy in 1 904. He arrived in Paris in 1921 t i ~ apprentice to he an architect, hut bj- the late 220s he was already an accomplished painter. The IJruguayan artist roitquin Tc~rres-Ciarcia.m-horn Htlion met in 1927, had a great and in some rerpec ts lasting ilnpac t on the young painter: there are echoes of Tc~rres-(;arcia3scanvases, 11-ith their mysteriously effective fusion of tenderly fcjlkloric and purely nhtract elements, all thmugh Htlion's career. It \\-as also Ti3rres-Garcia \\-h0 introducecl Melion to a Parisian zivant-garde that by the '30s included such expatriates n Mondrian and Kandinskj-. M4llon. \\-h0 always had a gift for friendship. soon joined forces \vith van Doerburg to form the hstraction-(:rkation group, \\-hich providecl a rallying point for nonol,jective artists at a time \\-hen mo\t sophistic-ated Parisian painters accepteci semial3rtraraon t3ut not total abstraction. Melion acquired an excellent grasp of English, and in trips to England and n l e r i c a in the '30s he rnacie the case for his o\vn severely cool compo"tions even as he talked and \\-rote about the full range of recent

nonol,jective work. In Nem- York he helpeci Albert Gallatin put together a significant group of paintings. \%-hich\%-asexhibited in the '30%at Nen York ti~~iversity-it was the first pi_ll,fSicollection in which Nen- York artists could see a Mondrim on permanent displiiy. B\- the time \Krorld\Khr I1 was approitching, H6lion \\-as living in .4merica \%-ithan American \vife. He was already juxtaposing impersonal. silvery-coloreJ fc)rr?i~s to create figure-like configurations, and after a while he \%-as painting men in hats, a sort of mid-century Everyman. (In the eve of the \%-are Hklirsn returned to France to fight. He was taken prisoner by the (;ermans, spent many months \\-orking on a prison farm on the Polish border, ultilnately e5caped ancl made his \\-a\-hack to Paris and then to the IJllited State$. Before returning to his easel, he m-rote an excellent hook in English about his 11-arexperiences, 171yy Silirll h i l t ilmr .Mu. which hecime a hest-seller. The E-took contains a nun~l-terofaccotrnts of the frenzied l-tlack-market activit\- in the prison camps, ancl thew fc~reshado\\the series of market paintings of thirty years later, 11-hichinclude studies of vegetable and lobster vendors a* \\-ell as the flea market triptych.

In 1943, M4lion exhibited at Pegpv . . Guggenheim's Art of This viouslyadmires the ralligraphic, exuberantlv imaginative spirit of some hvelfth-centur>-m-all piiinting5, in m-hich people seem to m-hirl along on the currents of life, exuberance. In a way, it's st~rprising Htlion's Last fuliijrnent has a ycsuthf~~ll to realize that this frieze full of young adults is the work of a 75-year-old man. hut of course part of the expliination is that Helion is recalling his own earlier davs. The \\-hite soup tureen in the left pitnel \\ill be hmiliar to admirers of HOlicsn's earliest still Liks. Writing in the Jcrtrrt~rrlat the time that he Helion recalled that he bought that tureen \\-as \\-orking on the Ldsi [u~iijni~tir, in the Saint-Ouen flea market in the ' 2 0 . So in a sense lbv LlnsiJuiiigme~atis a recollection of Hi.lic~n'sfirst decade as an artist. Helion goes on to explain that in 1929 he smaheci the tureen. and looking bark on that smash-up he csherves that it seemed to S\-mholizeboth the break-up of a marriage and the t3reak-up of his first realist style into his early abstracaons. In lliv

Lilst

[uiiijrnenl the tureen is hack in one piece, m-hich is surely n demonstration of tr~npswtri7rn.i; Yet there's even mtrre gtrinp trn tiere, because the unbroken ceramic is non- broken up formally.

lines that run all the \\-a!- from top to

txsttorn and turn its flo\\-ing curvilinear volume into a series of elegantly s y n ~ m e t r i dery remarking, in a 1960 e5say for Artnpivs, that Hi.lion's ing to fi~d stvllistic shift \~j-ouldhrtve occasioned fewer shock 11-avesin S e w York than it

did after the \v;ir in Paris. because in Nem-York you coulci count on a "peareful coexistence l-tetkx-eenal-tstraction ancl realism." Of course, even ar Ashl-tery made that remark. the olii '50s-style Neu- York heterogeneity \\as collapsing in the face of an academic abstraction thrtt jects.she just opens up their possil->ilities. and the decisiveness of her painthandling, m-hich m-eaves together simplification and complicittion, makes the multiplicity of meanings seem naturill. inevitable. Kith a tablecloth she ran do anything. Pulled tight, the cloth sets up a q ~ a c ea u x d ~ l yas a qunttrocento piazza; rumpled, it's the \l-orliI in confusicin. m-ith space colliipsing in on itself and objects teetering on the brink of ol->li.i-ion. ()\-er the t\\-entv-five years that I've heen seeing Mntthinsdottir's plctures. her work has movecl closer and closer to the center of ;tn imaginary map of contempor;lrv art that I carry around in my head. Mntthiasdottir has alliays heen a first-rate artist. and if \\-hat she's doing no\\- seems especially important. it's t3ecause her optimistic pragmatism is set in high relief \\-hen

so much of the strong ne\\- \\-ork that we're seeing in the galleries is producecl by arti\ts \\-h0 arc circumspect about their emoaons. She's a virtuoso \\-ith pitint \\-h0 can suggest the softness of a tablecloth or the cold gleam of a knife blade 11-ith n few passes of the brush, yet there's never anything shcm-v about her painter!!- effects. Matthiasiiottir depends on a dramatic juxtaparition of color shapes to build a spare, and then her giddy interluclrs of naturalistic extravagilnce saturate the space m-ith life. Strangely enough, it's often the more sophisticated gallerygoers who feel that Matthiasdclttir's realism is a little bland. Cclrrld it be that the seamlessness of a naturalistic image. especially if the illusion doesn't call attention to itself, appears naive to people m-ho are all\-a\-, looking for a subtext! If only they knrm-: Matthiadottir has suhteuts galore. When she's \\orking at the top of her powers. straightfomardnw is her wav of npressinp complicated feelings.

Khen she lets her brush pass quickly over an object in a still life or the particulars of her face, she's defining the limits of what we

~IIOR-.,%ndwhen

her

color is astonishing!\- vibrant, the heautif~~lly structured compositions can seem like a \\ay of bringing order to big. amorphous emotions.

R\- giving her hest pictures such an unfussy emotional impact, Matthiasdottir sets a standitrd against \vhich I 611d it useful to measure other people's \\-orli. It i",nteresting to j uxtapore Matt hiasclottir's mm-canvases v\-ithsome of the paintings in the A1e.i Katz retrospectiveial1ed "Mex Katz Under the Stars: American landscapes, 19Sl--1395'LtIi1at \\-as at the Baltimore Museum of Art over the sumfiler and is no\\- touring. And it's also \\-orth seeing h o ~some younger realists stack up against Matthiasiiottir, such as Philip Geiger. \\-h0 has had a string of sho\vs at %tistcheff and Ct?. in New Yt~rk.

For years. realism \\as a minorit\- taste in the hnlrrican art \\-orld, and sometimes even people in the know \\ere inclinecl to keep fairly quiet. They

didn't want to deflect attmtion from abstract art, =which \\-as recognizeci the \\-orld over as a ciefining achievement of postwar Ne\v York. n d no\\. \\-hen abstract painting is often said to have run itself into the ground, there is almost a g w a e r desire to cling to an ehtahlihment genealogy that begins \\-ith Pollock and goes all the \\-a\-to Robert Ryman and Brire Marden. Yet nothing could he farther from the truth than the idea that painting \\-hat

you see is not a New York thing. Hans E-iofmann, l;\-ith \;\-t~cin~ Matthiasciottir studied after she arrived from Iceland in the early 1940s. always structured his teaching aroun~ithe experience of working from a still life or a nude. He certainly encouraged Abstract Expressionists such as Toan Mitchell to bring a stmng perceptual element into their \\-ork, and the important painters of figures, landscapes. and still fifes \;\-h0studied 'iq-ith H o h a n n inctude not only hfatthiasdottir, but also Nell Blaine and Robert I)e Niro (the father of the astor). It's some-

times forgotten that C;i;icometti's mature representational style \\as first

hewn not in Paris but in NCWYork, at the Pierre Matisse Gaflery in N4X. And it's also significant. I think, that Balthus's first museum retrospective \\-as in 1956 at the Museum of Modern r t . \\-here it ran roncurrcntly with a Pollock she%-. Nem- Ycrrkers hilve alliays had their romantically speculative s hestreak, which led them to abstract art, hut they're also p r a ~ t h t \\-h0 liese that \\-hat ycsu see is what you get. After a decacie \\-hen everybody has been looking for alternatives to the less-is-more approitch of much Nr\v York Schciol abstraction. you'd expect that attention \vould focus on all the other painting that goes on in New York. There has been some revisionist thinking, hut it hasn't really amounted to much. People gm\;\-\\-earl. of the old mvths, hut they cling to them. too, and \\hen the time comes for a change, there's a tmdency just to pile nem- mvths on top of old ones. This helps to explain \\-h?, m-ith abstract painting losing its allure. Americitn museumgciers \\-hci want to get hack to

nature have heen inclinecl to embrace the School of London, lvhich is presented as a realist alternative to Ne%-York. In 1994, Lucian Frerrd" retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum became dinner party conversation all over hfanhattan. Frei~li'shigh bohemian London, with ariStocratic latfie~ and a drag queen all undressing in the artist's barren atelier, had a hard-hitt m ciorummtary impact. n d Nrm- York succumbed. I'reuii's figure pAntings are at the Acquavella (;aller>- in Nem-York this Edl. He renders each square inch of flesh-he \\-rird mounds and ridges-and

pile, on the paint until it creates

he \vows an auiiienre that sees this nitpicky

naturalism as painterly magic. He's transformeii a rather traditional studio exercise into a high-concept postmodern game, and although the programmatic thinking makes his paintings feel airless ancl inert, there's an audience that', \villing to accept such overdetermination as a kind of meaning. I'reuii is so ariiently realistic. so illtent on pro\ing that he will not be abstract. th;tt he satisfies people's arsumption that abstraction and representation are irreconcilable absolutes. Freud i, admired for being everything that the New York Sc-hoolis not: he has stories to tell, and he dots all the i's and crosses all the t". And he's not the onl\- London artist that Nem- York finds increitsingly mg;iging; there is also heiphteneii interest in R. B. Kitaj (an m e r i c a n \vho's lived in London for decades) and reneu-ed attention paid to Francis Bacon, and a g r o ~ - i ncuriosity g about les-known figures such as i.eon Kossoff, Frank . h e r txich. ancl Rodrigo MO\-nihan.The Brits suddenly seem relevant. precisely because they're o u tside the New York loop. The M;ltthiasiiottir retmspective ought to be recognized a\ a key event in contemporar\- art. It ought to he at the Metropolitan Museum, \\here Lucian Freucl h3~1his sho\v. BUt that kvon't happen, since this artist's majorleague emotic~nalimpact is so unlike m-hat people have heen led to expect from important n e n painting, e\pecially in N e n York. Matthiasdottir doesn't care to startle us \vith the very fact of her being a realist. She insists on

an old idea of visual credibility, but she gives that approach an uncategorirable contemporary freedom, and she does so 11-ith a feeling for color and ctsnstrtlction that comes straight o u t of abstract art, She's a Neu- York School painter \\-h0 \\-ants to celebrate the overx-helminp reality of the citv; her still lifes have a Ne\v York clarity. a N m - York piice. Her work is such a thoroughgoing S\-nthe,is that it may be misunderstood as cautiously conventional. Rut if you tune into \\-hat Matthiasiiottir is doing, you may end up thinking that if this isn't part of the main*tream, then the mainstream can gt-ttt""hell.

hlex Ratr started out at mughly the same post\\-ar moment a\ Matthiasiiotc h praise tir, and there's redly no m p t e r y as ttr whj- he garnrrs so 1 ~ ~ 1more than she cioes. (Going through Katr's landscape retro,pecave, you sce a smoothly intelligent man turning the \\-hole \\-orld into an abstract painting, \\-hich can make smse to people \vho are inclinecl to read abstract painti n g landscapes ~ ~ anylvav. Katz leaves the tension het\\-ern abstract strur ture and realist imagery right there on the surhce, for all to see. If you can overlook the yawning chasm in recognition that separates Ratr from Matthiasiiottir, it's clear that thei-"c %\-orkingsome of the same terrain. Katz also wants abstract and realist impulses to flo\\- together. The difference is that he insists on making the svnthe,is look svnthetic-and

therefore hip.

Ratz ha\ al\x-;ivs ignored all the annoying detail\ and clone one-colorp e r - A v e m-ork. His preferred brand of flattened-t~ut.everything-up-front space \\-as already in place in the lanclscapes he \\;is doing in the mid-'50s. \\-hich incluclecl small colored-pitper collages a\ \\-ell as bigger oil,. A tree become, an interesting ragged-edged fcjrrn. .4nd whatever details Katz does include are treated autonomtiuslv, as if they were visual stage directions .bft?reindicating the \\-eather or the sea\on or the time of day. In 17iri-k B7~i~ils.

(1992) the all-over dark green is given a dappling of whitish strokes---

those are the leaves flickering in the \\ind. only freere-framecl. (kii dad liiilck

#%(1993) is a big yellow Rarnett Neu-man. except that Newman's black vertical stripes have been angled slightly and hung jvith a few leaves so that they're transfi~rmedinto early spring trees. Katz's bare-bones enigmatic look, w k h turns dark iitv streets and briIliant Ne\n Engl;ind mornings into Minimalist icons. seem\ e\pecially suited to our t3een-there-clone-that moment. His pitintings have this t3uilt-in cii.j:l vu. He knows that we know that abstract art elnergecf a\ artists from Monet to MonLlrian rethought the landscape, and the \v;$!- he reverseh their march toward nonobjectivity gives the pitintings a sn-;ink pop allure. His nighttime canva\e\ are .%d Reinhardts, except that the silhouette of a tree or a hank of \\-indci\vs in a loft building has suddenly appearccl. These are simple. alrnmt arithmetic propositions: nhtract impact pluh naturalistic detiiil equals Alex Katr. n d Katx, \\-h0 kno\vs that an artist ought not force his effects. brings

off the visual fvissons with casual aplomb. These are effective pictures, but the ahstrart-intc)-rc13resentatic1nequittion is statecl so starkly that a viewer can't reall>-engilge. E ~ e nthe a\\--km-ardhits are meticulouhly preplanned. I admire Katz's panache. hut these paintings don't amount to much more than ingeniously personalized \\-all decor. The cievil's bitrgain that Katr has made \vith abstract art is ea\iest to grasp

\\-hen you take a look at the \\-ork he's done \\-ith his cutouts. a rariically different nlecliunl that he dreamed up in order to create some cleft studies in do\vnto&-ncharisma. The c u tou ts-R-hich

have foc uhed on several genera-

tions of art-ancl-literature notable\. from the poet and ciance critic lidwin Denby to the pitinter I'rancesco (:lemente-are

about the fun that people

have \\-hen cutting a figure in public, and became the cutouts arc literally cut out and stood up in a gallery, the comic implicatic~nsare absc~lutelydelicious. I'm glad t o see Katz letting loose m-ith his naturalitic gifts: the cutouts tend to he suavely executed. m-ith n good deal of eiegilntly meticu-

lous detail. Yet there is a paradox built into the cutouts, because it seems that Katr only takes seriouslv the \\hole que5tion of h o n to give painted form an imposing solidiy \\hen he's gotten away from the discipline of a rectangular c-anvas-when

he's not, in other u-ords, really painting paint-

ings. Katr is a tease. He \\-ants to undermine the very illusions he's creating. I'd like t o see a Katz cutout set nest to one of the self-portraits that Matthiasdottir has done in recent years, say the Su!jlPi~rtruit~

l r k (irurn

Ailan.

Matthiasiiottir's self-portrait\ are ahou t going . -solo: she's a great-looking 130hemian lad\. \\-ho's reached old age. And \\hen she regards herself, she is every bit a\ amusing an observer of the inexpensive chic of dc~\\-nto\vnartistic circles a\ Katz \\-as n-hen he did his cutouts of the poet and dance critic l'dnrin Drnlx-, exi-ept t h t she's also painting

it

painting. f he kno~v\-\ how to

make the smallest details link up orgilnically with the bmnd compo\itional moves, and that's way , he\r)nd . Katr. This slim m-oman 11-ith the beautifully shaped head has the same kind of penetrating though guarded gaze that Katr saw- in Denby: it's the look of the ad hoc aristocrat. Kith her rammdstraight po\ture, boldly striped ,\\-eater. and bright green shoe,. she's almost an allegory of her 011-n severe hedonism. Her head. 11-ith every importiint plane in place, presides over a naturalistic essay on the proposition that less is more. And the scenes-from-everycdiiy-life props in certain other self-portraits-an

umbrella, or a pitcher on a table, or a big shaggy dc~g-suggest

the same t3;tck-to-basics spirit that \\-e knoll- from her still lifes. Matthiasdottir has a sense of humor and a smse of play. I presume that she paints her self-portraits looking in the mirror. hut interestingly she does not reprexnt herself in the act of painting. These self-portraits kvithout brush, palette, or easel are not about a painter at work but about a painter reimagined as an in~lividual\vho ran be in a painting. Fainting herself fulllength. unenculnbered by brush or easel, Matthiasdottir creates n fictic~nal 'i"~-orld that she finds livable. There's a 11-onderftllelement cif theater in these

paintings. She see, portraiture a, nssociiited m-ith the theatricality of personality. sc~mething\\-e ]\now from the Baroque ma5ters. Her affitinitv with the B a r q u e is intuirve; it comes ou t in the alrnoit sneakit? comic \\-ay that she has of presenting herself as ciirector. set ciesigner. and star all mlled into one. The self-portraits arc about Mattl~iasdottirrolnancing Matthiasdottir. And her straight-forn-ard, at3solutely unilambovant demeanor makes the egotism all the more elusive ancl interesting. Though M;ltthiasdottir's expression is invariably a little grave, these are \vonderfully happ!- paintings. She is \\-here ,be m-ants to be. She's in the painting, lookinp out at L I ~ . Solne paamitifis nmak rus believe that n person's deepest emotions are inscribecl on the &ice, if only we can rcad the signs. It's a view with \\-hich Matthiasdottir apparently does not concur, at least \\-here her own &ice is concerned. Still, she has a way of getting at pyck'logicitl truth. l\-hich has to do \\-ith she\\-ing us not \\hat she knows about herself t3ut \\-hat she e ~ a person can and ]\no%-Swe ]\no%-about her. The self-portraits s ~ g g \\-hat can't see of another person: the\: get at the fiin~iliiirfeeling of being nhsolutely in the \\-orld ancl yet not really ]\no%-nor unclerstood in the world. Matthiasdottir expresses this paradox fcjrmally. in terms of a tension het ~ - e e the n forthrightnes of her stance and the elusiveness of her face. In the paintings, it's n contra,t---a

disj unc ture-that

l\-e experience thmugh dif-

ferent kind$ of contours. different \vay5 of handling paint and color. In the tmdy everything is crisp edges. decisive plane, of color; in the &ice the contours arc often smuclged and the contrasts arc often reduced. In the hest self-portraits, the unclearness =within the clearness is true to something that ever\-body proI3ably experiences, namely the idea that a person's purely phj-sical pre\ence has a lot to tell us about the mvsteries of personality. Matthiasiiottir's bruhstmkes, broad and forthright and unsho\v\-, pull everything together. In America, m-herc \-irtnoso brush\vi>rk has been so overdone that it has become n cliche, many punctilious realists have a hard

time remembering that a painterly b r u h r t m k e isn't a cieail end but a means to an end. Scln~erealists no%-recoil from the freedom cif the brush. That is their loss: but there is also hell to pay if you get so caught up in the mystique of painterly painting that oil-on-canus turns into an artsy philosophic quagmire. Katz first came to prominence as an artist \\-h0 rejecteci pitinterly painting, hut in his big landscapes the brushstroke has returnrd---like n hanclprint of the 1950s, a jokey recollection of the davs \\-hen paint \\-as king. As for Matthiasdottir's view of the t3rushstrokc. it's poetic-ally matter-offkct. Go thmugh her retmspective and you'll see an artist who understands that the paint that reveal, can also veil, and who \v;ints to cio a bit of both. The problem is deciding \\hen to cio what, and \\-h\-.These aren't necehsarily conscious decisions. The character of an artist's b r u h n o r k ought to emerge out of the painting process itself, and there is al\v;i!-s one or another realist who is just making a name and kncnvs how to give a painterly style some tantalizing unpredictability. Philip Geiger. who is 4(F----hismost recent sl~o\%at Tatistcheff and Co. \;\-asin 1995 and another is slated h r next spring-constructs

contemporary interiors out of a \veave of jaggeci, ner-

vous strokes. Pictures that are filled with a distinctive contemporary in\tat3ilitv are the result. (;eiper$ smallish canvases are updates on the old idea of the conversation piece: a relaseci group of kimily members or close friends.

\\-h0 in these paintings are talking or having a coffee or dayiireaming. Geiger has an intelligently understateci \v;$!- of getting at some of the conlplexities of their relationships: he does it I3v keeping the painterly rhythm of his canvases open, uneven, a bit unpredictable. K h e n he leaves a Fice a little t3lurred. he's picking up an undercurrent of tension or uncertainty: he \\-on't let everything come into fcxus. and it's that not-quite-all-there aml3iguitv that holcis our attention. C;eigcr3s suburban .4merican interiors are pleasilntly hut rather sparely furnished: a couch. a table. a cie\k. a computer. nothing much on the \\-alls,

few- rugs, no curtains. These might be the homes of !-ounger middle-class people m-ho don't have the mclney for a Lot of fancy things ancl maybe don't \\-ant to be stifled l,\- possessions, any\\-ay.The expitnses of empty white wall ,upge\t that the people \\-his live here aren't dug in ti1o deeply; thev \\-ant some mol,ilitv. But those blank spaces also create a structural challenge, because (;eiger can't let them become holes in the compositions. These paintings are ahout a slightly cold domesticity, ancl in an odd \v;$!- the prairies of \\-allhoard relate to the gray walls that Matthiasdcittir leaves above her ohjects. although (;eiger has no\\-here near her gift for giving such intervals a positive fcjrce. If Geiger understands abstrac t structure-ancl to what extent he cloes-it's

I'm not sure

not in a start-ti-orn-scratc t~ surrkiitlo?a, And tm-o Pic-a\sos from 1936, BTrt~ilurrn LI

.Stlutv

I~Q and T Thp ,Mznoflrur .bft?~r~g 1115

IIi~rse,crop up more than once, as does a skeletal tigure from Picasso's 1958 F&

Oj-Icarfls.

lohnsh adn~iret-Skno\%-their art histor); and in klis recent work the!; imagine that they're seeing a repla~-of the mysterit~usprocess by lvhich a very great artist sometime\ becomes most him\elf m-hen he quotes almost line hv line from a 11-ork that he passionately admires. T h i extraordinary phenomenon cannot he m-illrii into being. yet some of our postmodern painters are so tired of the present that they 11-ouldjust as soon pretend that they're immolating themselves on the altar of the p3\t: it's the nouveau-traditional thing to do. Mean\\-hile the critics offer specific explanations for some of lohns's alleged arts of self-immol;ltion. \Ye are told, for example.

q1 Milasp f i r ~ appeared t as an that a fragmmt from Pira\so3s .\ilrm,filrir i k f i ~ ~ r11 elenlent in the Spirsarr of 1985--86 t3ecause k ~ h n s\\-as changing his acldress. That's perfectly logical, hut it saj-Snothing about the impart of the quotation in the \\-ark. K b e n Picasso salutes tngres,

he" reexperiendnp the magisterial acaile-

mician's sensuous arabesques in term\ of his 011-n feeling for line and color; each stmke is a sympathetic response. F h n s just copies elements: a few outlines here, a complete image there. He treats great paintings as an art director might. He crops and edits. cuts and pastes. His canvases are message

tx,ards, sometimes literally so. as in Rdctng Tiziragkfi (l983), in \\-hich a silk screen repmdurtion of the ,Llond

Llsil

is affiseci to a bathroom \\all by several

trornpe l'oeil bits of tape. He notes clo\vn things he likes and personalizes them \\-ith a little joke. as in a recent series of tracings clone on clear pla\tic after n reproduction of one of Ctz;mne3s Bilihurr. An): art student ought to k n m - that n tracing of

3

pitinting isn't

II

response or an interpretaticln; and

even the I3ariaist scs-change operaaon involvecl in turning one of (:4zanne9sm-omen into a man 11-ithan erection hardly registers alnid Iuhns's lackluster \\-ashes of ,epia-toned ink. ; of In the pitintings that arc gathercc1 in the final room of the s h o ~ bits Picas50 and Griineniild are combined with floor plans that are said to represent a house in \\-hich lohns lived as a child. Here he is suppo\ed to he in one of his meditative moods, a sort of fugue state in \\-hi& art history and p e r ~ m a history l begin to merge. This Inan kvhcise idea of an hcimage is to do tracings after (:i.zanne is trying to convince us that he is keeping the high art tradition alive. Ifohns's tamped-clown palette doesn't achieve the t\\-ilit poetry that he's probably after. but the gun-metal color scheme doe, put us on notice that this is sol->er11-ork.The nlort recent canvases are nleant to convey an impression of middle-aged maturitl-. lessons learned, challenges met. These high-priced grai- paintings are the art-11-orld equivalent of a very expensive gray suit. They are mgineered for importance. S o ~ n people e saj- that Ifasper Jcihns has been lnakinp an impression for so long that by no\\- he's beyond the reach of criticism. Michael Kimlnelman explaineci in his 1Vrw Yixk liwi)s review of the k ~ h n show s that he cloem't rare for a lot of the \\-ork. hut he also observed, "It's pointless to argue about Mr. Iohns's place in history: this issue \\-as settled decacles ago." By reasburing his reaclers that lohns really is an important artist. Kimmelman may intend to soften his 0%-ndiscomfort at finding himself on the \\-mng side of current taste. \Yhen Kimmelman concedes lohns his "place in history." hmvever.

he's jumping the gun. The idea than an arti\t \vho has been acclaimecl for thirty-five years is a permanent fixture reflects a shortsighted \ i e ~ of - history. lohns's long relationship \vith the Museum of Modern r t proves nothing except that he is the clowst thing to an official artist that \ve have. and that doem't prove much at all. kvhorn we count among the There are ofticial artists, such as Velrizq~~ez, irnmc)rtaLs. And their are official artists, suc h as I,el->run,'iq-ho don~inated I'rance in the second half of the seventeenth century, filling Versailles much as John!, n o n fills the Modern. m-ho hardl\- count with anybody today. Artists are htriled in one generation and hrgotten tu-o or three generations p Later. I wonder if lt3hns recalls an observation that his friend I ) ~ ~ c h a mmade in 1066: '5uCcess is just a brush fire, and one has to find n-ood to feecl it.'"

Kirk Varnedoe has thrown on lots of ivood, and the fire is burning furiously. This huge retrospective is the ultimate accolade that F h n s will receive from his contemporaries. What remains after the flame\ die down is another matter entirely. 2, 1996 I)~.E;E~~\/IRER

THE ACE OF R E C O V E R Y

The art 11-orld is in recover). The economic climate is soberly optimistic, 'iq-ith an improvecl auction situittion and a smattering of n e n galleries. But recovery means different things to ciiffcrent people. r t i s t s and dealers \vho built big reputations and fat bank accounts in the 1080s may still be trying to get over their disappointment that the boom sr-reelhed to a ha.lt \\-hen the art rnarkrt plunged in 1900. Then ngilin. if they \\-ere into the dom-nto\vn

mix of art. sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, they've probahlv considerecl the losses to heroin and AIDS and are just glad to tse alive. As for the countless artists \\-h0 felt swamped h\- the glamourmongering of the '80s and t3reathed a sigh of relief =-hen it \\;is over, they're finding that. so far as the gallery scene that they once expecteci \\-ould support them over the long term is ronrcrneci, recovery is nowhere in sight. Nan Goldin, the photographer \\-hose this-is-our-life slide sho\vs made her an East Village celel3ritv in 1981, kept her camera focused on her friends thmugh all the \\-eircleci-out aclventures and terrifyingly bad time,. and this \I-inter found herself m-ith a big Krhitne]i rctrc~spective.In the shou-k f,t_left)r catalog, each do\\-nto\\-n memory has a darkly shimmering allure. L3arr)-l Finiknev revisits the old neiphl3orhooil ancl come\ upon the entrance to the t3uildlng \\-here N;in lived. \\-hich "hegin, to resemble the entrance to a tomb." I.uc Sante observes that "\ve \\-ere living in a movie of youth in t3laik-and-11-hite that in order to he grand neeiied to be stark." Goldin uses Nen York as the setting for a portrait of the arti\t as a young hipster, ancl she c,hvic~uslvknows something about the unfocused, mood-S\\-ingingintensity of youth. That feverishnesh reintroduces a m-onderful old theme-the heartaching fervor of

iir tvt.

btjhirriu-hut

after a \\-hile you may \\-ondrr if

these kids \\-h0 are supposecil~so heacl-over-heels about art and visit museums and pin lots of art postcards to their m-alls knoll- that there's more to creativitv than letting it rip. .4lthough some artists m-ho never really cared for the Old Masters are no\\- glad to regard the museums as the places \\-here they go for their retrospectives, most painters \vho spent a lot of time in the museums in the '80s are finding that the '91)s is a decade much like an): other. The signs are not all bad, hut ho\\- you read them depends on \I-here you're cclming from. An interesting art season in a great city requires some fc3rmidahle museum shows, some rontemporar\- \\-ork \vith a magically personal aura, and

an audience that's im-olved. In Ne\n Ycxk the element are all in place, hut I \\-onder ho\\ many of the gallerygoers \vho are lvilling to take the time to see u-hat there is to see, are either open-minded enougll or tlard-nosed mough to make the mo\t of =-hat come\ their way. Ho\\ many people are reaciy for a marvelous surprise. like the small, perfectly paced retmspective csf Edt\-in Dickin\c~n(1891--1978), that mc~stpoetically m!-sterious of mc~dern American realists. at Tihor de Nagy's new space on Fifth k e n u e ! Byell,it's good to know that there's a gallery th;tt believes that some people arc ready to revisit Ilickinson. utof them, the shon- has turned into a hishiiinahle, one-world orgv. (Goldin bonds =with her subjec ts and produces some terrific photogritphs. but her attitucie to%-ardthose photographs is pious. \Vhen she gathers her \\-ork together into slide sho\v\ and hooks and exhibitions, she glorifies the imagery. she turns her friends into ~lo\vnto\vnposter kids. And \\hen the photog~tplxdeal with death. 11-r'reforced into an emc~tionalhind, heciiuse the real-life tragedy becomes the trump card that's suppored to ignite the art, and if \%-ehave rerervations jq-e can be at-cctsedcif callotrsners. n, =which involve~igenerating plots from the double meanings of carefully selected phrases. probably in*pired some of the visual double-entmdres in Brinkfield's \\-ork. lyinkfield has a passion for lvord plai- that ran o of Le\?-isCarroll ephemera, inbecome visual play; he edited t ~ collections cluding some word game, that suggeg logical pmcedures fcjr generating t Carroll's multifacetedne4s, the fact idiosyncratic sentences. He n ~ u s like that the inventor of Alicc \\;is also a mathematician, a poet, a photographer. Le\?-isC;trn,ll \\-as a I'ictorian \vho \\ore many hats, and of course parailclxical headgear is n specialty in Brinkfield's 11-ork. And ar far as cireaming up lveird images goes. Raymond Roussel is in a league of his own. There are passages in Roussel's elaborately bizarre fictions

that can almost function ar ~lescriptionsof the odciballs anci panjancirum, in Kinkfield's paintings. Here are some lines about 1.e ~2uillec.the "one-eyecl ancl repulbi~e"court jester in Lot-as Soirrs. "To exaggerate his physical gn~tesqueness."Roussel \\-rites. he "al\vays clressed in pink like the ditintiest squire. Brittv in repartee. he hid lvithin a comic sheath a good and upright heart." It's possible to image more than one of the denizens of 1Yinkfield3s canvases as relatives of the one-eyed 1,s (Juillec: there is the piilm-leaf collar in

Trrrrpllii, the

130)-

\\-ith the

four-arme~ifigure 11-iththe upide-~iokvnpot of

t u l i p in Iidl~j?rtzgBfr& un~1Bw5, the winge~iinvestigator holding the 13cakc.r in

n l u M~rmirid\ Rnrrriji.. ancl the yellow-heed gent lvith the omitholo@ral headdress in I Will

l b l ~ r u t pSlrilj Issrrht~rdrnirtrijtaj~?~~~ :My Pets' Winkfield presents his

\\-ildest imagining\ lvith an imperious austerity that echoes Roussel. Making pictures tell stories is never easy. and Brinkfield has spent the better part of t n o decacle, figuring out ho&-to turn an aura of literary kin-

In the '70s and early '80s, he tasy into an immediate v i s ~ ~ experience. al painted on paper and could never quite give hi, intricately plotted emblems a freestanding poetic ferocity. Even after he made his critical shift t o stretched canva, he was at first overly dependent on black, iIlustration-like c3utlines. He also had n tendency to depenci too much on hlnck-and-kvhite dappled effects that may have been meant to mimic photomechanical repn'duction hut did not really engage the eye. Byhenthe breakthrough finally came. in 1986 or 1987, it had to clo \\-ith taking the antinaturalistic risk of edgy c>ok of rcminiscenses of Tan~birnuttt~, a sort of kaleidoscopic collective portrait of an exotic figure \\-hslipped in and out of people's lives, sometimes living splendidly. someames barely getting by, hut alxx-ays a dramatic presence. Probahlv even closer to Brinkfielii's heart is h.j.h.Svmons. the British author, bihliophile. gourmetand magazine editor-\vho

is mostly no~vadaysremembered as the

author of Tkiiu Qsnt/;jr Ct~rai,his study of another literary eccentric. Frederick BriIliitm Rolfe. AI.&%.S>-monsmanaged to live elegantly on so little money that even his brother. Iulian Svmons, couldn't q u i t e figure out h o n it had been clone \\hen he \\rote a t3iography of his older sibling that might he called ihr

fir .l f A.

Qui~~r

Khen Brinkfield gave me a xemxeci copy of one of Julian Symons's pieces about his brother, he ciilled m\- attentic~nto a photogrilph of .%.T.A.Symc~ns

\\-h, seen in profile. looks like an extremely attractive, overgro&-n rhilci. He's smiling subtly to himself, 11-hile holding n small gla*s (it looks eighteenth-century) that c-ontainssome rare vintage or ~ieliciousi.Qn r i p t

~ Brink.

field seemed extremely fond of that photograph. and \\-hen I thought about it after\\-ards it occurred to me that the man-child's profile. the smile. and the glass are all reminiscent of elements that frequently appear in Brinkfield's paintings. That photograph of Symons mai- or may not h;tw in\pired some of Brinkfield's iconography, hut its inimitable aura of oddity and aplomb, the t\vo sensationally mixed, is something that you find in all Kinkfield" best 11-ork. Many of the figures that careen through li'inkfield's paintings might be said to be-like

I'lorine Stettheimer, Tambimuttu, and 4.T.A. S!7mon\--

aesthete* 11-ithnerves of steel. So is li'inkfield himself, m-ho has gone his own \\-ay yet managed to exert a subtle and (for N e n York) surprisingly nonaggressive hscination. In the past feb- \-ears, as the letters and journals of the N e n York School of the '60s and '70%have begun to be published. I've been

amused to find li'inkfield make n number of fleeting hut engaging appearances. His name comes up at least tv+-icein a recent selection of Tames Schuyler's correspondence. There is n 1968 letter in 11-hichSchuyler i, imagining \\-hat the poet Ron Faclgett is cioing. "An\\\-ering the phone: it is IXck (Gallup. He \\-ants to read y ~ an u item from page 41 of yesterday's

Sisltior

but

you h;tw alreaciy cut it out, altered a fen- lvords ancl sent it to Trevor Brinkfield." T\vo \-ears later, in a list of things to do. Schuvler offers these possihilities. "Go pick \\-ilii stra\\-berries?[Thmn. Take a photograph! Bleh. Type something up and send it to Trevor! (Gmorch. li'rite John?He o\\-es me a letter." The John is of course Iohn Ashhery. who. in k~sephCtlrnell's journals, brings Trevor li'inkfield along \\-hen he visits the reclusive artist in his house

on Utopia Parkwav in (lueens. " 1 1 /6/69 cerise rabbit presented to Trevor \Krinhfiel

ink in JohnAshberyk shirt-

vertically striped1.l raspberry red in the linzer tart."

I'm sure there \\-ill be more Kinkfield sighangs as more letters and memoir, are published. K h a t makes thew initial anecdotal slivers so much ~ begin to c o m p ~ \ ae portrait of the arti\t. It's a veile~1portrait fun is h o the\that. not surprisingly, resembles one of his own paintings. The clipping from the Sooner (%-hatever that is!), the unwritten letter, the n-ild stralvberries, the cerise rabbit, the pink shirt, the verticd stripes, the rarpherrv linzer tart make an exciting collage but arc difficult to explain entirely. The thrill of the juxtapositions has something to do 11-ith the puzzle pieces not quite klling into place. The que,t for \Krinkfielclcontinue,. FALL, f 997

DEATt-l A N D R E A L I S M

Realism, a clarion call of riiciical utopian empiricism for artists in the nineteenth century. suggests very different ambitions today. For Gahriel Lzicierman. whose Dirrtrv (lf Dvilth is the most exciting neu- figure compcisition to he exhibited in Ne\v York in many years. realism is melancholy and nostalgic: as he constructs n complicated illusionistic image, Laderman ialso spinning a haunted, hyperbolic mood. For Chuck (:low, \\-hose large portraits. many of art \\-orld notables, are the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. realism is a puzzle hidden in a photograph. \\-hich he grids off and elat3orates by means of painting techniques that are deliberately abstruse. I~derrnruland Close are intent about the details, but in their

very ciifferent \;I!\

they are reaching for effects that have less to d o \\-ith

clarification than with complication. They labor to create ambiguous illusions. Laclerman's figures have the doll-like mystery of Iapitnese banrilkn puppets. Close gives faces an unnervingly fractured look. I do not m-ant to create an equivrtlence betx-een the \\-csrk cif theire tm-cs men, because I like 1,acic.rman's a great deal and dern Art's agenda. 'I'he iuratixs at the Modern W e to empllasize the eccentric, go-it-alone side of Close's portraitist-in-an-;1.ge--.(Greenherg observes: "As far a\ I

knm-, not a single important painter since the end of the sixteenth century has, in either \ v ~ r k sor jq-ords, betrayed any significant interest in an)thing in Flemish painting before Rosch." n d having declared that this work is disregarded by artists, (;reenherg feels free to rule that the cietailed naturalism of Flemish painting \\as a liat3ility. It had to be counterbalanced, in Mealling and in David, by the "sheerlv pictorial po\ver color-translucent. vitreous color-is

capable of even u-hen it cioecrn? '"bold the plane."' l'rorn

there it's only a hop and a skip to Morris Louis's f1o;tting veil, of color. In the early '60%.ho\vever. no less a figure than Giarometti \\;is copying b n van Eyck's ;2/ftllz rrr Q lurblrtt and observing tha.t " b e e a tree like Mantegna and van Eyck rather than tlte Impressionists." S.i~chconcerns would not have registered on (Greenherg's radar screen. since they \\ere the concerns of a realibt, and fcjr (Greenherg n realist was alrnocrt hy definition not an important contemporary artist. I \vould say that (Gerard L);ivid and Morris Louis is a marriage made in art-theory hell. Rut once you've \\rapped your brain around that equation, you have seen ho\\ realibrn can he used to holster just about any argulnent ngaincrt realist painting, and you are ready for the cornments that the video artist RillLriol;i, \\-hose work is currently the subject of a retrospective at the li'hitney. recently made in the h u w York lir~zriMafiiirinu. "'\'an livck was an increcfihje craftsman working n-ith the most altvanced imape-making system on the planet at that time-he

\\-as uhing high-~ielini-

tion." The implication, of course, is that Viola's videos (and perhaps (:low's Polaroid camera i.Io\e-ups) are on a continuum with van Eyik's brush. Fainters \vho arc botherecl

I'iola's remark. and I think they ought to

be, u-ould do \I-ell to bring the discussion back to (;iai.ometti's interest in . kneu- better than (iiasometti u-hat being modern meant, van E ~ c kNobody and it is significant that this artist. \vhci had gone through abstraction and Surrealism and \\-as never n nit-picking realist. \\-a$$0 fascinated h\ van livck. (;iacometti sal\ that van Eyc-k's scintillating verisimilitude \\as grounded in the abstract patterning and intricate h t a s y of mecliesal art. And he must have smsed that this early Renaissance evolution \\;is a model for the t\\-entieth-century realist. \\-h0 is also huilcling on a more abstract and &inta*ticitlkind of art. The gravity of van Evck's imagery gren out of the artist's sense that realism \\-as not so much birth as rehirth----living t h i n g t3mught t3itck to life on the canvas. n d if there is a mortuary aura to realism in this century, it is because realism in the \\-ake of abstraction is al\\-al;s exhumation. Yc>u could write a whole history of death ancl realisn~in the twentieth century. It m-ould include Ralthus's

I'ritlni,

painted in the late '30s. in m-hich

\\-e see a ycjung \\-Oman reclining \\-ith her eves closed and a knife nearhj- but no \\-ound on her hod\. Sabine Reniild, in her ratalog for the Metnjpolitan's 1984 Balthus retrospective, observes that this \\-r,rnan is "'not

redy

deacl, perhaps only mommtarilv clrained of life," and in that thought is an allegory of realism in our time. The l\-ork of the English painter Stanlev Spencer, who was the subjei-t of a retrospective at the Hirshhcsrn la,t fall, is full of images of death and resurrection. liven his m m t searchingly direct nudes, landscapes. and self-portraits have a grayed-clokvn look that makes us feel that the life has gone out cif things. This troubled m o ~ l e r nreali\t tradition echoes throt~gfiCGabrieI Idaderman's Dunru

(lfDrdtil

He has filled his compcisition u-ith a marselous play of

purplish shado&-sthat are doubled and tripled into mvsterious patterns. so that beneath the dancers' feet realism seems to he clissolving into abstraction right t3efore our eves*Laderman is going he\-and realism into emblems, kinta\\-, magic. He make\ us t>elie\-ethat this is all part of the realist's territory. His theme come, out of the late Middle -4ges, ancl as you study the iconograph7- of the Lkinie of Death. you realize that some of the most hmous represcntaaons of this strange confr~sntationare also among the great monuments in the rise csf E u r v e a n naturalism. f am not sure that Idaderman \\-as &\\-;-areof all of this while he was painting, hut it hardly matters. In confronting death, he has recovered realism as a life principle. , ~ P P R I 20,1998 L

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A R O U N D

THE

M U S E U M S

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FORMAL AFRICA

Carving is mrtrrmorpt~osis.Vibrking in m-ood and stone, the great sculptors make intrilctable material pliable, the)- turn h a r d n e , ~into softness, they transfc3rm the vegetable and mineral kingdoms into animal kingdoms right '"kfrisa: The Art of a -Sin Salon-sire painting. Mir8irr

in

rh~

B7flriurrrfir(18.151, =which is in the Metropolitan's collection. has a clean-lined. otftrbalancc E-teatxtv that is far from It'coclassical conventions. There's something winningly unarmpromising ahtrut t11e n-ay C:orot goes right ahead and paints an angel hovering above n highly specific l;tnd,ciipe; this ma\- not t-te a completely satisfying picture. but it's certainly the product of an original mind. In the smaller paintings th;tt Comt began to paint practically before he unpacked his hags in Rome, his originality is unfcttered, and he brings n new kind of naturalistic inventiveness into art, Looking at the (:olosseum and the Forum and the Tiher \\-it11 the Caste1 Sant'Angelo, he sees much more in the himiliar scenes than anybody had ever seen before.

.%S

he sur-

veys the Forum, he turns the cluttered ruins into a multidimensional checkerhoard, a quirky topograph7- of volumes and vt~ids.Stancling in front of the Villa hfedici, he rhvrnes the nearby trees ancl huntain 11-ith the distant dome of Saint Peter's to create a visual spectacle that mirrors the citv's historical overlays perfectly. Khercver Comt sets up his easel in the Eternal City and the surroun~lingcountr\side. he turns the (;raeco-Roman tradition. \\-ith its strongly modeled fc)rms, into pitintings that have their o\vn \\-oniierful, something-old-sc~n~ething-new p l q of light ancl shacie. Khat's astonishing about thew pitintings is the immeciiate, peremptory impact that Corot achieves even its he ictebrares nuance, p a r d o s , and contradiction. He seems to be conveying some of the omnivorous excitement of a Flung man \\-ho3sbilling head over heels in love with the sunnv south. Yt~ucan see h()\\- really unique his achievement here is if you go to "In the Light of Italy," an exhil3ition that focuhes on the open-air pitinting clone in I t a k in the late 1700s ancl early 1800s h\ arasts from all over Europe: it c)pened at the National Gallery in l h s h i n g t o n last spring and is at the Broolclyn Muscum this winter. Organized hv RliIip Conishees, Sarah f:aunce, lererny Striik, and Peter Galashi, it's an immaculately lucid, medium-sired scholarly show. You feel the earnest ancl intrepid high spirits

of the artists from all over Europe m-ho congregated in Rome. There is much outstanding m-ork. Especially the lVelshman Thornas )ones and the Dane (:hristoffer Kilhelm Eckersberg can n-ork marvels \\-hen it ccjmes to picking some precious vignette out of the Roman spectacle. yet neither they nor any of the other artists in the she\\- ran match (:t?rot's plangent color, or his rhythmic assurilnce, or his genius for transforming visual happenfiance into fcxrnal arabesque. ()hviously the work that Corot did hack in France looks different from the Italian achievement. if for no other reason than that there arc so many differences in topography, light, and vegetaaon. Still. there's more of a

steady development through the \\-hole of his landscape p a i h n g than is sometime\ ackno\l~-ledged. It's o1~viiiusthat a m-ork such ar the I-trokvn-mbrn\\-n stuciv of njoftops done in (Irleans arounci 1830, after the first Italian trip, evinces the same eye for surprising jt~xtapa\itionsthat we knon- in the Roman \\-ork. But so too cioe, a late masterpiece that is not included in this sho\l~;Ibr Rrrdfie cnt ,Watrtp~(l868---70), in which the juxtapo\ition of treecl and bridge creittes an end-to-md interkvoven spare that's a\ poignantly specific a\ any of the vie&-sof the Roman Forum. In his bigger \vorks, Corot struggled to twcorne a generalizer. and sometimes he succeeded: but he always loved specificit\-, and the mind that brings a few tin\- figures into a Roman view in order to supge\t a social dimension is still hard nt work in 1871. m-hen Corot p a i n t the to\\-n of Douai. the corners of two loc~mingbuildings frame the foreIn ?%P Belfry. D,~rrui+ gnjund, a street full of figures and the elaborate twlfry recede into the distance, and \\-e have a view of the oriiinarv life of a French to\vn thttt's quite a\ definitive as \'ermeer's 5trui.t

in

D ~ y i Corot . is absolutely Vermeer's equal

\\-hen it come, to focusing so intently on everyday occurrences that time freezes and we slip through a trap door into eternity. The old man \\-h(> painted ilouai had lo\t none of the zividitv for detail that fills to bursting the terra-cotta-and-t,lue visions of Italy that he ciid ciecades before. He is no longer inclined to hit the accents quite so hard; it is n more experienced kind of clrarheadedne,~that you feel in his infinitely calibrated grays. Corot set out to he n Neoclassical laneiscape painter, hut almost immediately he gave the realist oil sketch an unheard-of geo~netricintricacy, and by the end of his life his close stud\- of the rain\%-eptnorthern atmo\phere had ushered in a new kind of Romantic visual poetry. In (:orot's \\-ork all fixed stylistic c;ltegories dissolve. This \\-as kiirly typical of the great arti\ts of the nineteenth century. It \\-as a dazzlingly exciting age for painting, for even as left many artists frozen in place, the the collapse of art a\ a public avo\l~-al

great minds turned cata\trophe to their a~lvantageand ruheci forniird unens un~bered. eneathMcier's L-oolfacade. Mcier has said that one of the first l->uitdings he studied in prepitring for the Getty was Tohn Soane's L)ul\\-ich Picture Gallery, csutside London: and Soane is another ila\siiist with Mannerist tendencies. Meier has learned something from the clarity of the I)ul\vich galleries. hut he doesn't create a tlo&-of spaces that has any of Stsane's loopy 6clat. The arrangement of the Getty c ~ l l e c t i ~ in n s virtu~tllyfreestanding pavilions creates n confused, stop-ancl-start museumgoing experience. Ironicitlly enough, it recalls the clisastrous 1960s design of the Los n g e l e s

n.K h a t I can offer is an alternative view, a \iew that is grounded. I twlieve. in the very t3eginnings of modern art, as \I-ell as in earlier tra~iitions,Much more than a theoretic-al argument is at stake. The experts \vho cieny the time element in art so insistently have b r i ~ q h us t to a point \\-here i o n t e m p o r a r ~painting an3 scdpture t h t reyuifes concentrated, aclventuresome attention-~7herhc-r the \%-orkis representational or abstract or some\vherc in het\%-een-is regularl~shunted to the side. if not eclipsed. If there has been one sure rule in recent years it is this: the more that an artist asks us to look at a \I-ork over a period of time, the more a v\-orkdrops beneath the raclar screens that iriticisn~has set up ttr track the contemporary scene. So far a\ I am concerned, if you are looking for an all-in-one impitct. you're missing most of the important pitinting an3 scuIl3ture that itrti\ts are doing ti~day.

Iust to make sure that there is no confusion about the kincl of experience I am defending, let's conhider \\-hat happens \\hen 11-elook at a transcendentally great work of art. The painting I have in mind is a still life by ig-time museum and gallery people \\-h0 stuff the latest verour thmitts. sion of instant unity ~10%-n Khen Fried managed to demonstrate, at least to some people's satisfacof (;reuze's paintings were protomodtion, that the campy mel~~dramatics ernist, he perfc,rmed a great ser\ice for the postmo~iernists,and it hardly nlatters \\-hether he planned this or not. If (;reuze's overcron-Jeci narratives lead us to Manet. then m-hy can't that road just keep on going all the \\-a\-to the get-it-in-an-instant (:ihachmme surkces of Cinciy Sherman's po\tmoci-

ern (GreuAan allegories?As for Rryson. he has made it possible to see Greentwrg's celel3ration of instantaneous unity as a sinister ideological plot. and \\-hat could he more politically postmodern th;tn that! []nit\- hecome, the \\-hite male artist's \\-a\-of not letting the viewers make up their 0%-nminds. K h a t is lmt, once again, is the idea of looking as an extendeci, responsive. evolving. t3;tck-and-forth interaction.

There is no m!-stery as to \\-h\-unity exerts such a pull. \Ye dci go to art for clnritv. When you talk about a painting or sculpture. you say. "No\\- it's all coming together for me," or "I see how it adds up." \Kk all hope for cohermce. Rut there arc many ways for a \vork to come together, and the rharacter of even the most seamlessly cam-incing painting or sculpture is to he found in the unique confluence of elements and forces that makes up the \\-hole. This is the important point that Meyer Schapiro made in 1966 in the essa>-"(In Perfection. (:t?herence, and []nit\- of Form and (:ontent." In that understated \\-ay of his, Schapin~chose not to place his remarks in a contemporary context, hut I do not think it \\-as an accident that the e,say appeared in the mid-'60s. \\-hen (Greenherg's idea of instantiineouh unity \\-as at its mo\t influential. Surely Schapiro is lodging a proteht against the \\hole drift {of '60s aestl~etics\\-hen he \\-rites that ""tosee the work as it is cine n ~ t ~ s t be able to shift one's attitude in p;t\sing from part to part, from one aspect to another. and to enrich the \\-hole progressively in successive perceptic~ns." Like (Greenherg. Schapiro had been f,lscinatecl

the move toward all-in-

one expression in the paintings of the .4hstract Expressionists. Rut he nevertheless insists that \\-holene,~is at hest an eluhive thing. Schapiro shrewdly p a i n t out that we sometime, experience paintings that are in a fragmentiiry state a, magnificent whoIes. He insists that certain kinds of incompleteness

or irresolution can he precisely the element that give a work its life-giving mergy. lie bids us to renlenlher that there are many, many iiifferent \\-a\-\ in \\-hich a \\-ork of art ran satisfy us. and that in order to arrive at this feeling of glorious complicittion, m-e may find ourselves approitching a work from a number of radically different ciirections. Schapiro does not ask why this kind of peremptory unity might hilve hecome filch an ilbsessiort in tbc "60s. lie cisulcl \\-ell have pointed out that the idea of unity-if

not the unity of perception. then the unit\- of action in

painting---had heen a theme among the authcirs of treatises on aesthetics since the Renaissance. n,julecl, 2 18

hlarj, 288

1Sroohlcn Zilu\eun~,220, 289

f,athnluc;rltits(Mr~net),246

1 S r o n~ Ilnrli c r w j , 70

I:dther, LQilia,280

tSruegd, i'reter, LAfi, 170

faat ~91th,3/1trrt?r 111, T"h2 (IEaltl~u\),58, 59, 68

tSr)sr>n,?;orman, 314,324, 325

f,anrldrinr, 7 h(ISrdy ~ ue), 247

' a ~ i n jules, C%dde\, 218

I Irlwrz 7;)rturi.(haurnan), 50, 56

'et-t-hetri, Ertnct,, 254

1 OdttjS, L'auI, 95

I V L I ~C,IIUVI,

tiltldiin

lk.'1,2 (7 he Xrjtigers)

(K~tal),50,121 - (23.64, 167

(:c~ctcau,jean, 251,257,2553 (:c~lln,I'aul, 262

I LYLI n 'rst jus w e ppe ( Magnrtc.), 75

(:c~lIcpcArt 4s,ocrarlt)n. 24

(:eJarlaccrn (hY), l 8

I ctlt~uw(frnsen), 88.89

(

epdtrltrs dnrt

4 urortt (I+ou"r"rt), 779

(:&xdnne, I % d , 102, 143, 147, 148,226,246, 256,276,288

I crfnpibltwwn~rth .Stitrs (ISrdquc), 248 I crfnpibltwwn~rthTitv Pt~rr~~fs C l-bper,), 298 1 onisbeer, i'hil~p,220

( ' h a p l t , Iclarc-, 24.3

1 on\tahlr, John, 84

C /tiff!! du rt~ssrq(ni'ELP , ( ht\vIri\s~ue), 251, 256, 259

I tmsfntctrun, LP>(Ltger). 287

C:I~apc.lof. die ilosary (hlatlirlrc), 250

I,arzrr~r~rC ~ r m (LGger), s 293

C:I~apmm,I)IIICI~, X2 C:I~apmm,jalie, X2 ( :f~drdrn,[rean

Rdptiste Sl;mti.tan,14 l , 246,

315 318

(:fIdracrcl, Urttcllte, 13 "C'harlle ltose," I54 'harrres 1 athecirdl, 9,234 ('haw Msnhrttt,~n( h l " ) ,273

:c~oper,i lougtas, 257, 258 (:oracle ( ;aller> (Ir,ngland), t X2 (;ornejl, joseph, 185 186 (;orot, jean Aaptt\te C:an.t~lJe,47,X4, 140, 2 14-228,256,312 I t~rpwmtii ;~IIETTLJY (john\), L46 I tnniilru Insftsljgjlrtltnz(Xfiik ttrzliJer Sri~ltrllatriln)

(haurnan), 53

C:111xranr. Rlchard, 13

I,asturnr for u I-Ierulid(t ;xis), 252 253

C:111xrco, (;rtlrgrcj de, 187- 188, 254

(:c~ttcr,Holland, 21 1-21 2

C:hrjulCan, 4ng. 235

(:c~urhcr,(;usta\ e, 8% 1 113, 140, 158, 176,

(:f~rlrtchnrch( 1 tan h\rncror), 77 (

lzvfsr s I;ntsy trrto liuu,.cltEs rrr 18~79(Fnsor), 279 280. 281

"httrcfi, Fredenc Fdtl-111, L71 I t r us ~ j( :alder). 296 (

rg {l-bper,),108

187- 188, 192,218 227

"(;rcdtn e I:rt.Jo"' ( Klee), 318 ( ; r ~ c l ~ t o Itlllcl~ael, n, l46 1 rr\p, ( l ~ r e n t ~63 n,

I rt~it"ltill 7hort1~ ('ensen), 9.3 1 r ~ t m b It., , 74

"C:rtj \cape" ((?Ylarjl~crrougi~ ( ;aller>), 172

(:unnrngham, hlerce, 264

(:la~r,jean, X1

I,up (l3ranru\r). 104

('lark, F-.)., 264, I65

(:utts, Sirnon, 182

('ltzmenre, F+rdncesztt,L36

(;U\eirer, EugPnc, 222

C Zevrzrijl I;rvrrrbilrfi '1 Life 13uhente1d), 314,

32 E

C:Ilntcln, ffill, 159 C:Iolrc, C:I~uch,t X l ~188, 195 196, t9Y

I )ahltlcrg, Erlw drd, 59 I )all, Salc ador, 158

1 l~deror,I)enli, 312, 323 Ilrsiastors rl/ tt2~ ({;O?J~), 82

lIanrp at Hratlgtt~~irl jl;Cent,ir), 291

It1 Suvero, Iclarb, 50

lIanrp ill llrrrtlz (Ldderman), 186, 189 192,

Ili5.j at

1% 199 tltjni r

o r I,lirr~isei ~ r trlrp

~ ! I PDoor

(Porter), I74

I)c>nahuciSr~srnIrk~ (NU), 157 I"i)rim~fer i,JU

S~E~L~N

I)cn e , krtIXur, 91

(Nauman), 52 Ikrnct~rsLW ti Plane ('ohn\), 146 I Jartmler, lonclr6, 10,288,292 I )a\ IJ J>Anger\, I3erre jean, 27.3 I )a! ILL< ;er'~rcf?197 I )a! id, f d ~ ~ L l ( rf.,j u l ~ ~112

fixtans, 1homd\, 28 30, 127, 152

i,c~is,Stanlc>,11- 14,2f,31,71 72 i,rilcarman, Alexander, 242 " L~ilraryt)l l3abel, I hc" ( 130rgc\),73

La~te~rman, (;abncl, t 3,25, 167, t 86 193, 1%

199

Lad! (:haycl (lr,l> C:atI%edral),177

I ngrbe, I-rnc\t t lortclart dt*,230- 231 I nncI-tiner,(:arol? n, 297 298 ""Idnd4c~pe" (l?a~ntrz~g t;cnter), 172 ""Lndsraj-rea"r4h~tritct~on"(( ;raham and Son\), 172 Lanrlsrup~illtllz tl- I ulm (L'oL~\\IIz), 277 Luoi t~ii11, 239

idreberman,Wlllxarn, 82 I tar, Serge, 252,254,262

Lrfi, 9, 16 Lrfrrh (Sm~tl.~), 101 I ~md,Id&-ciucrl~ne, 13 I ~mhourgBrother$, 170 I ~lc-trln (;enter (YY), 265

!.1p1-ri, iFllljsp~no,284 !.lp1-rmdnn, \f/alker, 65 L~JCUSSLIIMS. 182, 183

Long, Iltchdrd, 121

hlarrhel Jdcb\on r ;allery (Xl"), 17

Lopokot it, l \, drd, 261

hlrirr~n,=Igne\,73, L20

L'( lrmge, H .l'., 208

Itlart~n,joIln, t 7 1

Lt! f,lt~~rr, 7Ru ilZrdq~e),

137- 141, 176, I89

Msillof, i2nstide, 281 .V!aktrr,y /lirihtl~cluri. r h r~; p l r \ I

248 Ptztilr,

268

hlalevlrh, Xiatmmrr. 125

"%lasItSecknldnn 111 Fx11cr" (( ;uggenhcim), 152, t 53

hlalraux, 4ndub. 237

Itletcr, Rlchard, 265 274,280,281,283

hlalraux, ( : h a . 237

Itlemllng, Hans, 197

Zilanet, Ccitauelrc~,167, 216,278,288, 324

"urrmoiri.dr lu ch~rnbrcjlrzrfrr (t fbl~on),1 13

"kl~tnet,Ziloncrt, and the (idre St. I mare"

"Allemor!:

(Uarrtrndl C ;aller! ), 289 .V!atz r n u Furhirtr (1a n F? ck), 1I)'?

I ubn Art and the h$akinp of

ll\ror? " (ihlureurn Iitr Alncdn Art), 212

Msnrrgna, Andre,, 197,277

hlenil, Ijom~nlquede, 249

Mayj-rlethorpr, itohert, 25,M 1.fnp ( fohns}, 142, 140

hlenil l'oflectron (Fiou\ton), 242, 244,

hlarcfesn,ff rrcc, 43, '73, t 33

Vrnttrtrs 111s ( \ ~ c I ~ z ~ L ~2 c15z ~ ,

1.fnrrtyn j Warhc)l), 322

4 J I r ~ ~ t rkilt4nttlrpr j ( C :alder), 293

Zilar~nt:orrnty

( :I\

rc (:enter (jxi'rrght 1,

271- 272 Zilarhr, &$atthe\%,153 154 Msrlht,rotrgh r ;aller) jhl"),172 hIsrquet, i2fl>crt, 170

249 250

Mrrrnctlcli I'irc~er~p, Thr

khrld), 183

Itllerrlfi, fan-rer,225 226 Itllerrager, Annette, 160 RletropoIit~nh l u \ e ~ ~otmArt (hl"), 42, 43,,58,Q, 83, 134,

20,5,21S 218,

219,222 224,225,227,275,277,284. 285,287 2M, 289,291 293 hletrtipolrtan

(NU), 264

hllchallon, kchlllc l rna, 219 hllchelangc*lo,92, 103, 106,208, 239

Mrlk (tVaiil), 163 164 Zillliet, jedn Fr~nc;clrr, 223

Ldnil

Zillli\ l:oliiepe, 153 .b!fntduur . 1 4 r ~ t j gEIzr EItlmsu (I"lcd\\r,),

I unctrd (Hranc-~trr), 103

Ldttrm,

147

M~rti,foan, 40, 123, 196, XNI Mnhima, Yuhio, 94

17

SarrtrnaI Fndoumenr lor the Art\* 111,24,

267 SarronaI r ;aIlery ot Art (F'arhmgtttn),

hl f 1 , 299, 304,305

97, 1 19,205,220,226,22% 24 1,275,

hllrchelt, joan, 4 l , 45, 125, t 33, 172 173

289,294,293- 296, Xf l - D02

l.f,tLir.rn P~inrrrs,110, 65 h8

M I I List4 ~ ~( I condrdtt Ja b'rncj), 148, 225 ZilonJr~dn,het, 6,7,67, l 10, 1 1 1, 115, 120, 136, l "to. 188, 259,296 297,300, 302 Monet, "laucie,236,216,246,285,

289 290 "klonet and the hled~terrane~~n" (t"tcjolilr, n klu\curnj. 289 290

Natlrjnal C ;aller> of. ( Ianada ( c Ittav. a).

216 Ldttrrf~d! C;~.i;tjmp/rzr,I46

?.;anman,ISrucc., 49 57,74, 160, 192 ?won ;Tnf?~j!ldalrsi ~ f t h vL p J t EIuZ/ itf,bIj

fZt~i[j

-raketi ul kn-fnzlr fnlerzrul~(Kauman), 52

Seutra, ltlr-hard,271 Nclx,man, I{arnctt, t 25, 136

hlcirandl. ( ;rrjrpio, 175

Yrw Rrpflhlci, 261

hlcirns, Robcrt, 101

"'Nclx, Sp~rittln Ikalntlng, h"' (ltojal

Zilorn\. lVtllldn7, 178

M~~thar anif 1 hrM Qlstchclnganer), 277

hc-adem?), 107 ?.;ev. York (;IQ ISaller, 26.3 265

Zilount Meru, 232

Lrrv Kirk RCL'IV~V r t f I j i ~ k 30 ~,

Moyn~han,Ilodrrgo, 81, 1.1.1

%"\i~lt*

M unitz, tS,trry, 269,281

.%W Ktuk

Ktuk fimrs, 17,27, 14X 149,211,24 1 firnrs z.2.11rga:rn~,197

.b!~rd&rmtii Its ( ~ m S ~(Laderman), ~ ~ ~ ~ 190 i ~ > Sem York Ilntverur?, 111

hlusge d"()r\aj (l%rr\),218, 227

Nrt.ix, ald, Wllhur, 25

hlusge (;uimCt (i'ari\j, 220,235,237

Nrjlnsba, t3rcjnirIa.i a, 251

h l u ~ e u mfor hlfrrcan krr (NU), 212

Nrjlnsli.y, \ ) a s h , 251,253,255,257,262

Zilu\eun~of. (:trntemporar> Art (l,o\

" G / z u sIjct~lit~tg ~~ (Kir\tt*111)264

Anpele\), 160 Zilu\eun~of. hf4r)clern Art (%Y), 16, 17- 19,

?.;ogur-hl,Isamrt, 264,273 Xojand, (;ad), 51

28,3X, 3") 4 1, 42,45,49, 50, 1111, 104,

Soland, Kenneth, 322

133, 141, 145, 149, 152, 153, 186, 188,

Sorodom i'\, 323 Soutlz A tljrrlrirt~Fr'rrarr8lp(Naurnan), 53 Soutine, (:harm, W Silur~ntrt,J ; l f o u t ~ r((:orot), i 223 224 Spanish I'avllrcln ( l%ra),293 .$jr~"ctre dt ~ I I Iro.se, Le (Fobtne), 253

hundd, 238 5un1l'i I ) U IM111 ~ (,?\c~Iro), XMi. 307 S~1rta-t arrnan XI. 232 S~~r,,rnan, Elt\ahc.th, 70 S$\ ester, I)avxd, 8 5 86 S) nlonr,, A.j.A,, 18+ 185 S) nlonr,, juij~an,18+ 185

Spencer, Stdnle!, 198 .$jrfutrlJ r t t j (Sm~thstrn),171 S-;jhap~rpdVznr ({:alder), 301 S Z L EjTarko\ Z ~ ~ ~ ~'.rky),94 Stdnlord Ilntverr,it>,71) Starn, i loug, 3 Stdrn, zillkc, 3 Stetleirjk &$useurnj&nlrtercJanl), 82.85 Stern, jan, 211% 2116 Stein, ( .,ertrtrde, 17,260 Stein, Leo, 17 Steinb,it-h, Ilaim, 27 Stclla, Frank, t93,319,322 Stcttbcimcr, Florrnc, 184,185 Stc-tcnr, l&alfacc,1127 Slrll L$;> pith Iirilnr 71rhle clnif filur f'litth (Mattl1rarr30rttr), 131 Stocbholcit~r,jeswd, 31, 97,100 Stoker,, =Idrran,2AI Store, F-l-re(()ldenhuug), 98

162-l h3 Srnntic I I (C:alcler'), 301,307

f aa tie, I'Ix~lxp,74 f aeuber Arp, Sophrc, 120 f amhrmuttu, tX4,185

Tdplrn, Rol-rctrt,13,192 l93 Eqet (jol-rns), 145 Eqet ~plrhPIGS~~JY f'ast, (jotlns), 14Fi F-arbot\is>.Andrr~,94 95 F-ate C;nltc-rj (London), 58,50,82 F-ati~tchetf:~n~l('o. (RV), 132.130,L89 f a) low, I'aaul, 264 f ~ h ~ l ~ t c h eI'avel, v r , 1%. 263-264 f emkin, h n n , tlll Tentt~~ed~ I hr j'rnrrn), 95 Tentcfrlirn, ib kr li~cq2ur, (%ijlnr,ka) 253 T'r Arn tunjdn, Rortben, 26.3 ;Trrrlici~ 7 h (~ ~ " ~ T ~ L248 IcI~),

-f"h.:, ShlalZ "\\iot f Suvr .V!P (1161ron), L I I

Ftittrlck Kitit&, 'Glt3nntrfi(Ka t L), 135 L36

""'Tl~rnking l ' r i ~ ~'t.it,cjks t: to 't.irlIhoard\, 198tb 93'' (hlu\eum cif klodern Art), 205 7 krvtj-bix l'lrws

Mt Full (t-tohu\ar),

1h2 1horeara, I: Ienr? l Iaclc3, l h9 ""7ree A n ~ e n c ~I%arnterrW n (Frleci), 322 323 Ftir~i(;~uc(J> ((,ant,\ a), 275 Ftir~i(;~uc(J> (Croodstein), L2

7 knbp bittnrn ( l t5gc.r). 297,298 X rhor de Xag? ( ;aller> (SV), 151, t71.

174, t75

1lrpolo, (;K)\ dnnr Aartt\ra, 277 1ltfan!, 153 Tlllnn, hrcfncj. 23 firnr, LA X mmernlan, jacobo, 56

\'an I3rugpen. (:c>osjc, 98

7rmrs (Ltlndon), 83- X4

\'an l>rle\burg, I hco, 1 10

X mtercjt?, (;ar!, 2 16 21X, 222 224,227

\'an E>ck,jan, t97- 193,208

1ltldn, 86, 215, 222, 243, 277, 291, 324 Torre\ i;ari.Fa, joacjuin, 110 1ouloure I aratrei., 1 fenn, 63 ""'Trdd~tit~n and the Jndl-\lrduc~I Talent" (E11ot). 261 Trdkf, ( ieorg, 90, 93 7 vmms~i?nncrt~r~n, Ih

Yan ( ;ogh, b'rnc.cn t, 125,27X,279,2Z"i8,289

X rans kitxciat~n(%V), 193

\'cr\alllc\, 293

X rant, jeonrfcr, 281

l'r(1pprtz8 lirrds iinrt firo (1%)~nhfiejd ), I83

t zrttrrr (AalrIiu\), t 93 I~'teu1if 7;tle~Ii~ (S31 (;xei.tr), 277

l'rr~trsri r r ~P~rntitzfi(l-conarcioJa Ylncr), 106

Y~Idrc.fet>r,, ( Iarlor, 296

l'ncorrw, I,t (Xlass~nc),2.38

I"tll08t l/i)lir~, 54, 2 12 VllIa Msireii ( AdIttt), 2(34,305 Vzll~,tit (leger), 287 VloLa, tSll1, 81, 1641, L97 198 \'&nu, 232 234,238,239

FTr~lImg, Lionel, 320 Fry1ti"lr(N'mkbeld), I83 Fr11rtjq14(>du llragi~tg( FiGl~on),1 12 X rcn a, Erncsr. 53

Yarnecfoe, filrk, 39, 42, 142, 143, 149 klkzquez, 1 I ~ ~ g149,214,215 o,

f i t ! et Ilndergrt~und,L53 b'enlce 13renndle, 16, 77,XI 84. L07 i:emmeer, jan, LAfi, 18.3, 184.206.22 1,324

\'er\arc, ( ilannr. 284

\Y'lI\on, i iefen Rliranda, 13, 1% 193 \Y'lnktieId, Irevor, 13, 71,74 776, 1.57, 158, t77- 185 b'rttter Ltghr (jcnsen), 8% 89,94 Winter,, f err\. 44

Wlttenborn put>l~~herr, 38 'lfTadrnortfi =It h e n e ~ ~ (ni riarttord), 25L, 252,259,262,263 'lf'agne~lt~chdrd,251 l!talker

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