Death of Taste in Venice

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2017

Death of Taste in Venice

On the 2017 Venice Biennale and Damien Hirst’s “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.” at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice.

“Ah, Venice! A magnificent city! A city full of irresistible attraction to the well-educated, both due to its history and its present charms!” So says the boatman at the start of Aschenbach’s ill-fated sojourn to the Most Serene Republic, “almost as if he feared the passenger might waver in his determination.” With its “putrid smells,” “febrile effusions,” and “revolting sultriness,” the Venice of Thomas Mann was “part fairy tale, part tourist trap, in the putrid atmosphere of which art used to blossom luxuriously.”

A century after Death in Venice, a city that was “ailing and kept it secret because of its lucre” presents the updated symptoms of the same malaise. Ephebic boys and cholera-infected strawberries give way to poisonous floodwaters and deadly selfie sticks. Two-thirds of the historic city’s residents have left, shrinking from a population of 175,000 in 1951 to 50,000 today. Meanwhile twenty million tourists descend on the lagoon each year. Some stay in one of the city’s 2,500 hotels, others rent out a vacated palazzo. But more than two million now come by the shipload. A plague of ocean-liners settles over La Serenissima, with little hope of containment in sight. The floating condos cruise past the Bridge of Sighs by the hundreds through the summer months, disgorging five-thousand “eat-and-flee” passengers per boat, each with bagged lunches destined for the piles of refuse whirling by the Campanile and the Palazzo Ducale.

In mid-June a protest group called “No Grandi Navi” organized a local referendum to close the lagoon to cruise ships. Out of 18,000 respondents, 98.7 percent voted in the affirmative. Yet the Venice Port Authority shows little interest in passing up the “lucre” of the cruisers: the taxes and port fees are too good to ignore.

Vota Si . . . per salvare Venezia: the desperate posters were plastered across Dorsoduro, the sestiere by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection where I stayed during the 2017 Venice Biennale.1 Just across the Accademia Bridge, somewhat contained from the flurry of San Marco, the neighborhood survives like much of Venice, the aging queen of the Adriatic, with small restaurants and pensioni sprinkled between the Grand Canal and the Zattere. On the final morning in my hotel, waiting for the water taxi to Aeroporto Marco Polo, I was surprised to learn that the quiet nonna clearing the continental breakfast was in fact the inn’s proprietor, a descendant of the palazzo’s seventeenth-century owner.

There are today many noble efforts to preserve the city’s culture, not least of them Save Venice, the nonprofit dedicated to Venice’s artistic treasures, which was hosting its “Gran Gala a Venezia” the week I was there. Frederick Ilchman, a brilliant curator at mfa Boston and the group’s chairman, tells me he is organizing a year of Tintoretto exhibitions in Venice starting in fall 2018, around the five-hundredth anniversary of the cinquecento artist’s birth.

Mark Bradford, Installation shot, “Tomorrow is Another Day,” 2017. Photo: Francesco Galli, © La Biennale di Venezia

Yet among the exhortations to save Venice, the city’s declining fortunes are themselves a point of fascination. The anachronism of Venice presents, in its own way, an “advanced” city, in the sense of being well advanced towards its own demise. Venice serves as an urban memento mori and a reflection of our own cultural decline.

Such decay was the recurring theme at this year’s Biennale. The national pavilions, spread across the Giardini, the park at the eastern tip of Venice, frequently become the subject as well as the site of various displays of creative, or not so creative, destruction. “Faust,” Anne Imhof’s installation at the German Pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for best national exhibit, may have been a sleek offering over the preview days, when lithe performers slithered around with dogs beneath a glass floor in Helmut Lang–like fashion. When I saw it, the pavilion’s dirtied-up walls did little, while a pack of dobermans, caged outside and on call for the duration of the run, already seemed bored by the show.

Mark Bradford, the artist representing the United States, arrived with much anticipation—perhaps too much anticipation, as The New York Times published photographs of his installation in advance of the public opening, which Bradford blasted in a public-relations kerfuffle as “bootleg . . . no one let me have a voice.”

Anne Imhof, “Faust,” 2017. Photo: Francesco Galli, © La Biennale di Venezia

Bradford must be the Horatio Alger story of South Los Angeles, an artist who went from styling hair in his mother’s salon to exhibiting at the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. A sharp abstractionist who embeds fraught meaning and found materials in his paintings, he produced an installation in Venice called “Tomorrow is Another Day” that ultimately seems overthought and underwhelming. One part of the pavilion he covered in torn advertisements, found in his neighborhood in Los Angeles, for predatory cellphone dealers. Another room he meant as commentary on aids. Meanwhile the building itself, a 1930 Palladian-style structure by Delano & Aldrich, has been deliberately roughed up, a stand-in for Monticello and the collapsing legacy of Thomas Jefferson—a harbinger of our current wave of national iconoclasm.

Elsewhere, sculpture still shows well in the visual din of the Biennale. Phyllida Barlow’s “folly” fills the British Pavilion with an overgrowth of organic forms. Carol Bove’s sleek modernism stands smartly at the Swiss Pavilion, even without the justifying commentary around women and national identity (which somehow involves Giacometti). Meanwhile the French continue to evince more charm and confidence than their Biennial neighbors. A decade ago it was the love letters of Sophie Calle. This year, for “Studio Venezia,” Xavier Veilhan transforms France’s national pavilion into a wood-paneled music hall, with angular walls and classical instruments that recall the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters. Curated by Christian Marclay and Lionel Bovier, the pavilion hosts free performances throughout the run that enchant the remarkable interior in a work that should have been best in show.

But destruction rather than production is the Biennale’s dominant key. “Influenza: theatre of glowing darkness,” the installation by Kirstine Roepstorff, reimagines the Danish Pavilion as a verdant modernist ruin. Meanwhile Geoffrey Farmer blows the roof off the Canadian Pavilion with a malfunctioning fountain and other jeux d’eau, an installation with much humor and little subtlety.

Beyond the national pavilions, the invitational group show, usually the focus of the Biennale, with its acreage of space at the center of the Giardini and throughout the factory buildings of the Arsenale, is remarkable this year for its unremarkableness. Curated by Christine Macel of the Centre Pompidou, the show called “Viva Arte Viva” promised “a Biennale designed with artists, by artists, and for artists.” Back at the press launch in New York, the exhibit sounded like the welcome return of ars gratia artis. Yet even with 120 artists from fifty-one countries—and over a hundred of them new to the Biennale— Macel somehow managed to assemble a cross between a diffuse thesis exhibition and an academic conference with break-away sessions. Her section titles—“Pavilion of Artists and Books,” the “Pavilion of Time and Infinity”—only underscore the ponderousness of the glorified craft show.

Xavier Veilhan, Installation shot, “Studio Venezia,” 2017. Photo: Francesco Galli, © La Biennale di Venezia

Venice is a “place made sacred by buildings,” writes Roger Scruton—a wondrous man-made ecology in need of its own preservation. Many of us will lament its despoliation, but there are those who revel in its destruction. A decade ago I watched a horde of sportscar drivers revving their engines around the Piazzale Roma. Like the cruisers at the lower end of the economic spectrum, they come to Venice to get rather than give: to take home their selfies from San Marco; to take away the serenity of La Serenissima with the crack of their machines.

It must be against this background, of a death of taste in Venice, that Damien Hirst has decided to mount his comeback performance with an exhibition called “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable.”2 The show has been much derided, a £50 million flop underwritten by Hirst’s private fortune and the mega-collector François Pinault, whose “museums” now occupy two prime Venetian sites.

But in Hirst’s latest pratfall I see more than abject failure. Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Bottega Veneta, Boucheron, and Brioni are all divisions of Kering, Pinault’s luxury empire. Converse shoes, Samsonite luggage, Château Latour, the Vail Ski Resort, and Christie’s auction house are also variously under his control. And so is much of the contemporary art market. The Pinault Collection boasts of being “invested in supporting the work of contemporary artists.” Investment is right, as Hirst’s Venetian spectacle has been designed to produce a maximum of return—a billion dollars, it might be calculated, if this “museum” of Hirsts sells out.

What impresses about “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” is also what disturbs: its scale, its brazenness, its execution. Spread across two massive venues, Hirst has created, or rather had manufactured, a sumptuous suite of 189 “treasures,” supposedly salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. The exhibition begins with a mock underwater documentary of their rediscovery, perfectly executed in pbs-like tones. It continues with Demon with Bowl (Exhibition Enlargement), a sixty-foot colossus seamlessly inserted into the Palazzo Grassi’s atrium. This venue alone continues with twenty-three rooms of Hirst.

Damien Hirst, Demon with Bowl (Exhibition Enlargement), 2017, Bronze, Palazzo Grassi. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. 

The work is purported to be sculptures from antiquity, from Greek and Roman through Far Eastern and Mesoamerican. All have been covered in some kind of encrustation, with tidy presentations of coral and cockle shells. An additional carapace of explanatory text surrounds the fraud: “It seems more likely that the figure served as a guardian to the home of an elite person,” we are told about the “Ancient Mesopotamian” demon.

And on and on, carried through to the former customs house of the Punta della Dogana, with five editions for each work exquisitely manufactured out of bronze, granite, silver, or gold. Thrown in the mix are models of the purportedly wrecked ship, “The Unbelievable” (get it?), works on paper of the treasures, as well as many anachronistic salvages: Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse, a toy “Transformer” robot, portrait busts of pop singers, and several references to Hirst’s own work, including a fragmentary sculpture of the artist himself.

Damien Hirst, Sphinx, 2017, Palazzo Grassi. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

Like Jeff Koons, his American corollary, or the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, Hirst is nothing without the macroeconomics of contemporary art: the collaborations with the purveyors of luxury goods, the fetish finishes to sell the thin conceits, the consuming scale of the operations. Like the advent of cinema’s summer blockbuster, the results are all special effects with little true drama—an all-encompassing escape that becomes its own false reality. Here, in the town of Titian, among the genuine treasures of culture, Damien Hirst has furthered the decline of art into artifice with his fraudulent spectacle.

Just as Las Vegas now has a casino called The Venetian, with a pastiche of Renaissance monuments, Venice becomes a little more like Las Vegas, with its flood of modern effluvium.

1 The 2017 Venice Biennale opened on May 13 and remains on view through November 26, 2017.

2 “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” opened at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, Venice, on April 9 and remains on view through December 3, 2017.

Discovering Modernism’s Neglected Spur

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 7, 2017

Discovering Modernism’s Neglected Spur

A review of "Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through October 4, 2017. 

Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, once wrote that “those who love art or spiritual freedom cannot remain neutral… when one kind of art or another is dogmatically asserted to be the only funicular up Parnassus.”

There are, of course, many twists and turns in the history of art, yet the line that runs up Modernist Mountain has often been mapped as a single track: Impressionism, to post-Impressionism, to Cubism, on through the many pictorial innovations of the last century. In this analogy Symbolism, an idealist route of the 1890s, may be modernism’s neglected spur—and an impresario named Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918) its most colorful conductor.

“Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897,” an intoxicating exhibition now at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, re-creates the short-lived exhibition series that Péladan mounted in Paris at the height of the Symbolist moment. Organized by Guggenheim senior curator Vivien Greene, the show includes 40 works that once appeared in Péladan’s invitational exhibitions. The artists assembled, like the history of the Salons themselves, will be new to almost everyone, but these Salons were once a sensation, encapsulating the anxious mood of the fin-de-siècle and influencing the art of the 20th century.

‘The Dawn of Labor (L’aurore du travail)’ (c. 1891), by Charles Maurin PHOTO: YVES BRESSON, MUSŽE DÕART MODERNE ET CONTEMPORAIN, FRANCE

Infused with spiritualist mysticism, versed in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and set to the soundtrack of Richard Wagner, Symbolism championed art, literature and music of many styles—all art with a capital A, with fidelity to nature subordinated to the expression of the artist’s mood. In “Mystical Symbolism,” the outward appearances can seem anything but modern. Artists such as Pierre Amédée Marcel-Béronneau and Ferdinand Hodler looked past what they considered the mundane observations of the Impressionists to draw on the Old Master styles of Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Carlos Schwabe’s poster for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix (1892) PHOTO: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Péladan embodied this same rear-guard sensibility. He styled himself an Assyrian “Sar,” or king, and named his group Rose+Croix after the esoteric and arguably fictitious Rosicrucian Order of 17th-century origin. Through his Salons he sought work that illustrated dreams, allegory and myth “to restore in all its splendor the cult of the Ideal based on Tradition with Beauty as its means.” The story of Orpheus, that original tragic artist, is a recurring theme here, and maidens abound in various stages of déshabillé. The exhibition is most revelatory for the many artists, from Charles Maurin to Fernand Khnopff, Jan Toorop to Alphonse Osbert, it brings to light. The dream-like lithograph by Carlos Schwabe, commissioned to promote the first Salon, is a highlight of fin-de-siécle printmaking.

The Guggenheim exhibition hinges on the personality of Péladan, and “Mystical Symbolism” includes portraits of the artistic leader. This author, critic and Catholic occultist employed his imperious bearing and forked beard to maximum effect: Especially striking is Jean Delville’s messianic figure in choir dress and Alexandre Séon’s priestly golden profile.

Pierre Amédée Marcel-Béronneau’s ‘Orpheus in Hades (Orphée)’ (1897) PHOTO: CLAUDE ALMODOVAR/COLLECTION DU MUSEE DES BEAUX-ARTS, MARSEILLE

In her red-velvet-bound catalog, Ms. Greene explains how the Salon de la Rose+Croix “privileged a hermetic and numinous vein of Symbolism, which reigned during the 1890s when Christian and occult practices were often intertwined in a quest for mysticism undertaken by many who yearned for a renewed centrality of faith. The Salon aimed to transcend the mundane and material for a higher spiritual life—the movement’s holy grail.”

Ms. Greene’s focused and illuminating exhibition, which goes on to Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the fall, continues the New York museum’s commitment to exploring modernism’s less trodden paths. But equally important, the museum shows respect for the art and ideas on view. With deep red walls and plush blue couches, Ms. Greene and her designers have done much to establish this exhibition as a Rosicrucian-like art-filled precinct. The addition of recorded music in the galleries, normally a distraction in museum settings, here completes the transformation of the space and signals the relevance of music to Symbolist history. Ms. Greene, in fact, selected only music performed during the original Salons—most famously, a work by Erik Satie written for the Rose+Croix.

‘The Death of Orpheus (Orphée mort)’ (1893), by Jean Delville PHOTO: ROYAL MUSEUMS OF FINE ARTS, BELGIUM, BRUSSELS: J. GELEYNS-RO SCAN

And far from a dead end, the art of the Rose+Croix, and Symbolism in general, may lead more directly than one might assume into the art of the 20th century, especially in the development of pure abstraction. “The aesthetic quest of the R+C—to inspire through the new religion of art,” argues Ms. Greene, “was carried on by Vasily Kandinsky, František Kupka, and Piet Mondrian, all of whom were weaned on Symbolism and owed their theories of painting, in varying degrees, to the esoteric beliefs of Theosophy.”

So perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that the exit of “Mystical Symbolism” leads directly onto the Guggenheim’s magical Kandinskys and Mondrians hanging on the rotunda walls.

Gallery Chronicle (June 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On the 2017 Met Gala, “Frieze New York” & “TEFAF New York Spring.”

When it comes to the life of art, there may be nothing less gala than the Met Gala, or at least what this annual boondoggle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become. The scandal of this year’s iteration should serve as a sobering wake-up call for the increasingly besotted priorities of too many American museums, including our greatest institutions.

If you have not heard of the Met Gala, do not worry. You were not invited. Since 1995, on the first Monday of every May, the Metropolitan has handed its keys over to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine and the artistic director of Condé Nast. Here her purported aim has been to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute—I’m sorry, make that the “Anna Wintour Costume Center.” Her lording over the gala’s invite list has become notorious and the subject of a documentary called The First Monday in May.

Of course, the potential conflicts of interest that exist between Wintour’s commercial concerns and her museum trusteeship are blatant. The specter that she has conjured up with her gala has followed priorities far beyond fundraising and certainly beyond the realm of art. Along the way these extra-artistic interests have risen up from the Institute’s basement galleries to infect not only the museum’s spaces but also its institutional tenor, and by extension the tenor of American museums at large.

Tweet of an image from the 2017 Met Gala

Like much else in the world of art, the Met Gala and the Costume Institute itself have become unrecognizable deformations from the Institute’s founding and the event’s inception in 1946. Consider that for nearly twenty years, from 1979 to 1995, the gala was helmed by the singular society doyenne Patricia Buckley. During this time the Institute mounted exhibitions such as “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era” (1979–1980), “Victorian Dress 1837–1877” (1988–1989), and “The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire” (1989–1990). The historical programming more than fit, so to speak, the seriousness of the institution that presented it.

The Wintour era has wrought, by contrast, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” and “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Even beyond its superficial, contemporary turn, Wintour’s Costume Institute has exposed the museum to the predations of celebrity culture. Worse still, the museum as a whole, a once-protected precinct of our cultural inheritance, has learned to revel in Hollywood’s demotic attention. “The Met is a place that you consider very very correct, very formal,” the fashion editor André Leon Talley explains in the Wintour documentary. “Anna has taken that out of the mix.”

Tweet from the 2017 Met Gala by Marc Jacobs

The 2017 Met Gala became the apotheosis of this transformation. With the pop singer Katy Perry serving as the year’s honorary hostess, the hordes of bold-faced names, amply stocked with Jenners and Kardashians, marched up the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps and made a public mockery of the institution. “The celebrities were like animals . . . acting like they were at the Playboy Mansion!” one informant explained to Radar magazine. “Some didn’t even know it was a museum. They thought it was an event space with old stuff brought in to make it look like Egypt!” Many of the attendees, clearly uncertain of their surroundings, came to loiter in the museum restrooms. Here they sprawled out across the floors, spilled drinks, smoked cigarettes, and took “selfie” shots in the mirrors, which they disseminated through social media.

Some may perceive such spectacle as a tolerable distraction—even a welcome frivolity for an overly stuffy and off-putting institution. I fear the pantomime is far more anti-civilizational. It is a takeover—a commercial-grade, mass-culture affront to an institution held in disdain. Guarded by a phalanx of bodyguards, these latter-day vandals take barbarous license amidst the greatest artifacts of history. They smoke. They fornicate. They sprawl across the floors in mockery of the art around them, merely to focus on themselves. And all the while they record their debauchery on social media for millions of fanatics to emulate their cultural annihilation.

There have been many cringe-worthy moments during the reign of Thomas Campbell, the disgraced director of the Metropolitan Museum who departs this month. Perhaps the curator once dubbed “Tapestry Tom” thought he could take a major carpet ride to new money and popular adulation. Instead he opened the floodgates and drowned his institution in ridicule and debt while forsaking his scholars and curators. There should have been only one response for any proper museum steward to this year’s Met Gala: to sweep the trash out of the galleries, and to keep Wintour’s damage deposit with the suggestion never to return. Short of that, Anna Wintour’s Met Gala should be interred alongside Tom Campbell’s ignominious career.

Frieze New York. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

The sixth annual art fair known as Frieze New York opened on the same week as the Met’s inanities, but seemed a world apart.1 My first thought upon entering Frieze’s elevating, light-filled tent was how the value of seeing, as opposed to seducing, has been abdicated by many museums to be taken up by commercial galleries, which in turn increasingly coalesce around these quasi-institutional art fairs.

Six years ago I was bullish over the first stateside Frieze, a remarkable art encampment on New York’s Randall’s Island at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers by the Hell Gate to Long Island Sound. The setting alone is a stunning retreat. Of course, many of us already know this island to be that which exists beneath the roadbed of the Triborough Bridge. There was a time I played after-school sports beneath its dingy overpasses, and I attended a grungy rock festival there in 1994. But one of the surprises of Frieze is how Randall’s Island has been recently transformed into a bucolic sanctuary in the heart of the city with flowering paths and woodpeckers tapping on trees. The first year I took a ferry there. More recently I walked across a footbridge from Manhattan.

Admittedly over the past few years I grew somewhat weary of Frieze’s formula of trendy, transposed eateries and art as lifestyle retreat, mixed with some showboating and the dumbing down of the art on view. Access to Frieze has become increasingly daunting, with inscrutable online directions, unreliable transportation, and the feeling during storms that the whole operation may become a runaway bouncy castle. But this year seemed different, at least once the clouds parted, and far less frivolous—a place set apart, and well engineered, for the contemplation of art in exile.

In 2012 the architecture firm SO-IL designed the Frieze tent from pre-fabricated rental components to snake along the edge of the Harlem River overlooking Manhattan for more than a quarter mile. Made of white translucent material, supplemented by minimal artificial illumination, its 225,000 square feet are awash in natural light. The visual effects can be uncanny, cooling colors and bathing both painting and sculpture in an indirect, northern-like light.

This year many of the two-hundred-plus galleries, brought together from thirty-one countries by Frieze’s London-based curatorial team, took best advantage of these light-filled surroundings not just to give us something to look at, but also something to see, with minimal labels and misdirection. Alexander Gray Associates, with a prominent booth by the southern entrance, singled out a late geometric abstraction by the painter Jack Tworkov called Triptych (Q3-75 #1) (1975), a contemplative fugue of gridded form and spontaneous brushwork. (This Chelsea gallery, it should be noted, is currently showing a survey of the artist Betty Parsons, a central figure of twentieth-century art better known for her singular dealership of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Sculpture by Carol Bove. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

Both David Zwirner and Sculpture Center exhibited pas-de-deux sculptures by Carol Bove of scrap metals punctuated by urethane dots. The paintings of Henry Taylor were released from the circus of the Whitney Biennial to show to best effect at Blum & Poe. The Symbolist abstractions of Gabriel Lima were new to me at the Portuguese gallery Múrias Centeno. I liked the worn paint textures of Marina Rheingantz at the Brazilian gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, while the bold lines of James Nares’s abstractions at New York’s Paul Kasmin directed us to the American road. London’s October gallery testified to the modernist innovations of contemporary African art, especially Romuald Hazoumè’s Benin-style masks crafted from gasoline canisters.

There was some regrettable selfie bait, in particular Karl Holmqvist’s sign paintings at Gavin Brown’s “Enterprise” instructing fair-goers to “Hug a Hooker!” Yet these were anomalies in a fair that dedicated much of its real estate to its selection of “Spotlight” galleries exhibiting solo shows of work created exclusively in the last century, which included many of the best booths in the fair: Judith Linhares’s dreamscapes at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert, Paul Feeley’s color-forms at New York’s Garth Greenan, and, in particular, Alfred Leslie’s stark portraiture at New York’s Bruce Silverman.

TEFAF New York Spring at the Park Avenue Armory. Photo: TEFAF

A depression in interest for European antiquities may say as much about the state of the European past as it does of the European economy. Founded nearly thirty years ago in Holland, TEFAF Maastricht has long been a preeminent art fair featuring an advertised “7,000 years of art history,” but one particularly known for its selection of Old Masters and antiquities. Looking to expand from Maastricht while educating an American collecting public that may know little beyond the latest Jeff Koons, TEFAF came stateside last fall with a fair that transformed the Park Avenue Armory into an ethereal treasury of art history.

I wish I could stay so enthusiastic for tefaf’s spring edition, which returned to the Armory over “Frieze Week” to exhibit ninety-three galleries showing modern and contemporary art and design.2

Booth at TEFAF New York Spring. Photo: TEFAF

There were some highlights: the New York gallery Hans P. Kraus Jr., dealing in the “old masters of photography,” as always showed a remarkable selection of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century prints. Bernard Goldberg featured scenes by Thomas Hart Benton from his “American Historical Epic” of 1924 through 1927. David Zwirner smartly positioned Josef Albers next to the equal (if not superior) work of his wife, Anni Albers. London’s James Butterwick offered a selection of Russian and Ukrainian modernists, and Lisson featured the Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, while Bergamin & Gomide focused on South American modernism.

But overall TEFAF New York Spring was a letdown, a largely directionless retread of other modern fairs underscored by an often garish arrangement of work. Once again TEFAF included jewelers and other such retailers in the mix, which gave its fair an aura of the international departures terminal “duty free.” The selection also leaned awkwardly towards postwar European painting, and I can only gather that a memo went out suggesting exhibitors display every sliced-up Lucio Fontana canvas in inventory, rendering the fair both a whodunit slasher and a vagina monologue. Perhaps there’s a future for TEFAF New York Spring. For now I will simply look forward to the opening of TEFAF’s next revelatory fall production of Old Masters.