Gallery Chronicle (March 2022)

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2022

Gallery Chronicle

On “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s” at David Nolan Gallery, “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” at Bookstein Projects, “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” at the New York Studio School & “Drawings: Rackstraw Downes” at Betty Cuningham Gallery.

London modernism doesn’t get the same credit as its Paris or New York counterparts. That only means the work of the richly expressive painters of the London School—not just Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but also Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and R. B. Kitaj, among others—continues to surprise. “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting,” at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, provides a deep dive into the thick impasto of this British painter.1 Born in London in 1926, and focused on the lives of its working-class neighborhoods, Kossoff imparted the weight of experience in the thickness of his line and heaviness of his brush.

Leon Kossoff, Portrait of Rosalind No. 1, 1973, Oil on board, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

The exhibition of sixteen works, ranging from 1963 to 1993, is a revelation of painterly expression. English artists have never shied away from painting the gutter—sometimes from the gutter. Kossoff, who died in 2019, worked to find the beauty in the sewer. He could build up a density of oil unlike anyone else.His Seated Nude No. 1 (1963) is a swirl of flesh-colored taffy; reproductions cannot do justice to the thickness of its paint-handling. For all of its concreteness, this nude seems to liquefy upon approach into a handful of emotions.

As Kossoff moved from the 1960s into the 1970s and ’80s, he began to dig wider, darker lines back into his wet compositions. The gouges gave his paintings their necessary structure, carving in the details of his portraiture and cityscapes without limiting the freedom of his paint-handling. His two tiny self-portraits here, from 1974 and 1978, look like something you might peel off the bottom of your shoe. Meanwhile Portrait of Rosalind No. 1 (1973) and Father Asleep in Armchair (1978) come across as primitively carved relics painted in relief. As he turned to the urban topography of London’s East End, the roughness of this same approach lent itself to his paintings Demolition of YMCA Building No. 3, Spring (1971), Red Brick School Building, Winter (1982), and Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer (1992).

Leon Kossoff, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer, 1992 Oil on board, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

This must-see exhibition is timed to the release of the 640-page Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Modern Art Press and is curated by the catalogue’s editor, Andrea Rose. A West Coast version of the exhibition is now on view at California’s L.A. Louver gallery, while London’s Annely Juda Fine Art showed an iteration of the show last fall. Taken together, these initiatives should convince anyone that Kossoff has earned a place in the pantheon of modern art.

Is the School of London having a moment? With “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s,” David Nolan Gallery gives us a chance to see another artist who kept the oil burning during modernism’s Battle of Britain, when much of the art world had already surrendered to the death of painting.2

Moynihan (1910–90) was a near exact contemporary of Francis Bacon, as John Yau points out in his catalogue essay for the show. “My quarrel is not with the high regard in which Bacon is held,” Yau writes, “but with the fact that Moynihan has not yet been recognized as a major artist. Consisting of self-portraits and still lifes, Moynihan’s late paintings more than hold their own when compared to the work of artists associated with the ‘School of London.’ ”

Rodrigo Moynihan, Roman Head on Newspaper, 1986, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Rather than build up his surfaces, Moynihan plumbed the depths of his compositions. Unlike Bacon, however, his paintings were reserved, intimate, and recessional. Frequently he played with scale and framing, producing pictures in pictures. In the case of Summer Interior, his self-portrait from 1981, he depicted himself in a mirror painting a picture (which, though its back is to us, is presumably of said mirror—and the painting we are seeing now). In his still lifes, he observed shelves of objects at unusual angles. “It was especially important to me not to arrange the still life so as to form a pictorial grouping—a picture,” Moynihan said. “I wanted the objects to be found.” Here the arrangement comes from the way he framed these found objects within his canvases. Table legs get cut off, as in Roman Head on Newspaper (1986). Walls nearly evaporate, as in Sponges Near a Window (1973). Often he used round and oval canvases to complicate his compositions further, squaring the circle and circling the square. Corner Shelf (1974) features a small triangular platform hovering in nearly dematerialized space, placed just off-center in a circular frame. A suite of works on paper, of doors ajar and washes of shadow defining depth, shows how he could do much with little. Moynihan was well adept at modulating tone without turning up the volume.

If the classical artist begins with the past, taking lessons from the Old Masters to advance to a modern style, the modern artist might as well go the other way, starting with the present to approach the Old Masters. This has been the case for Paul Resika. The nonagenarian painter began his training with the modern master Hans Hofmann and has been working back through more classical styles in the eight decades since. This month, Resika’s remarkable range, talent, and self-reflection are on wide display with exhibitions spread across two venues.

Paul Resika, Self-Portrait with Rag, 2017, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects.

At Bookstein Projects, “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” brings together self-portraits he painted between the ages of eighteen and ninety-three.3 From Titian and Tintoretto to Corot and Courbet, the confluence of styles here seems to span the centuries in a time-traveler’s compendium of work. The salon-style hang mixes up the chronology of these self-portraits as well as their artistic influences. The constant is the Zelig-like artist looking back at us through the years with his infectious appetite for the history of painting—both as Renaissance man and modern master.

At the gallery of the New York Studio School, “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” presents Resika’s latest work, “derived from an obscure engraving made of a panel from an altarpiece predella (ca. 1437) by Fra Angelico.”4 Attributed to Giuseppe Camilli and Giuseppe Morghen, the small engraving is on loan from Resika’s own collection to be paired with the painter’s lush derivations, which he calls “Allegories.” The place to start, as Resika did, is with the artist’s five small study drawings from 2018. Resika breaks down the composition and figuration of the complex Renaissance scene into pencil outlines. The tiny Study #3 in particular is a delight for its simplicity of forms.

Modernism is an editing down, a distillation and concentration of color and composition. In his own modern paintings Resika draws these spirits out of that “obscure engraving” in remarkable ways. A cliffside town becomes an abstracted wave. An island becomes a sail-like triangle. Sometimes the figures in the foreground disappear completely. In one painting, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #9 (2019–21), all that remains is a dark blue rectangle in a light blue field.

Paul Resika, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #1, 2018, Oil on canvas, New York Studio School.

These allegories help us see the old engraving and feel its spiritual message in new ways. The patron of sailors and children as well as brewers, archers, pawnbrokers, and repentant thieves, San Nicola was the saint whose miracle was his generosity. His secretive acts of gift-giving evolved into our modern-day tradition of Santa Claus, the jolly old Saint Nick. In his own life, San Nicola redirected a shipment of wheat to feed a starving town. He paid for the dowries of three daughters to rescue them from prostitution. On a trip to the Holy Land he saved a ship by rebuking the waves in a storm. The story of the grain and the salvation at sea are both depicted in Fra Angelico’s painting—the second predella painting of the Perugia Triptych, now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana—and the engraving that came of it. Resika is less interested in copying the details of this engraving than in the miraculous expression it conveys. In these allegories he turns the dials, tunes into this message, and adjusts the frequencies of color and form in his own miraculous ways.

For all of the information it takes in, the work of Rackstraw Downes is more about looking out. The artist’s panoramic vision conveys extraordinary details. Yet his compositions are more about space and our place in it. “I draw, not to establish anything, but to gain acquaintance with a place,” he said in his essay “The Conceptualization of Realism” in 1978. “A drawing, for me, is like a first meeting with a person.”

Rackstraw Downes, Looking Down from the Window of a Friend’s on the Upper West Side, ca. 1975, Graphite on manilla paper. Now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

An exhibition of these drawings, pairing compositions from the 1970s and ’80s with current work, is now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery.5 Composed from direct observation rather than photographs, these drawings amplify our sense for seeing—and feeling—in space. In Looking Down from the Window of a Friend’s on the Upper West Side (ca. 1975), the sight of the apartment windows across the rooflines reminds us of our vertiginous perspective. In Drawing for a Soft Ground Etching: Scaffold Round the South Tower of the St. John the Divine (1984), the scaffold and trees of the cathedral loom over the infinite lines of Amsterdam Avenue on which we stand. In Presidio Cell Tower (2005), the hillside paths and slender tower seem like a landscape in miniature—a diorama in which to wander.

It is said that our mobility affects our sense of space. As Downes’s life turned increasingly inward in 2020, his compositions closed in. Chairs and other props now fill the voids of his studio. Even the air, seemingly so crystal clear in earlier work, becomes thick. As the pandemic has set new limits, these latest drawings by the eighty-two-year-old artist, increasingly housebound in his SoHo loft, convey the stifling sense of a new reality.

Afinal note about Fred Gutzeit, a painter who died in early January at the age of eighty-two. For over fifty years he drew the ripples of art. A retrospective last fall at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery and Center in New London, Connecticut, began with Tree, Field, and Minnows, a tranquil reflection on a pond from 1966, and followed his work through increasing reverberations and complexities, ending with abstractions such as Future Life Puzzle (2020). I first wrote about the ripple effect of Gutzeit’s compositions in his “SigNature” series, with its abstracted script refracted through psychedelic patterns, in my “Gallery chronicle” of October 2012.

Fred became a regular correspondent of mine. His interactions felt like they were part of his artistic project—a rippling out of interpersonal feeling. He devised projects to spread art by mail. His generosity also spoke of an independent spirit that reflected the hardscrabble Bowery scene in which he lived and worked. Just before his death, what proved to be his final letter to me suggested we put a show together of Bowery artists—a “democratic” show, he wrote, of “artists who have been citizens of the Bowery.” He shared a print of a Miller High Life can crushed on the pavement, which he called “my most iconic Bowery painting.” The image proved to be a memento mori—a sensibility never far from the Bowery street and Fred Gutzeit’s deep understanding of it.

1. “Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting” opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on January 13 and remains on view through March 5, 2022.

2. “Rodrigo Moynihan: The Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on January 20 and remains on view through March 5, 2022.

3. “Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946–2021” opened at Bookstein Projects, New York, on January 14 and remains on view through March 4, 2022.

4. “Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari)” opened at the gallery of the New York Studio School on January 31 and remains on view through March 6, 2022.

5. “Drawings: Rackstraw Downes” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on January 27 and remains on view through March 19, 2022.

Gallery Chronicle (October 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On “Red Grooms: Handiwork, 1955–2018,” at Marlborough Contemporary, “Rackstraw Downes: Paintings & Drawings” at Betty Cuningham Gallery, “Graham Nickson: Cumulus, Monumental Trees and Transient Skies” at the New York Studio School, & the late Richard Timperio, gallerist at the legendary Sideshow in Williamsburg.

Funny what you remember from childhood, but I will never forget an exhibition of Red Grooms I attended when I was six. The show was called “Ruckus Manhattan.” It featured a reprise of an urban diorama that Grooms and the artist Mimi Gross had first exhibited in downtown New York City in the mid-1970s. Reworked and expanded in Grooms’s studio, “Son of Ruckus Manhattan,” as this installation sponsored by Creative Time came to be known, took over a storefront at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue for a few months when I saw it in the winter of 1981–82. The cover charge was $2 for parents and $1 for me. I made sure to catch it as many times as I could.

Out of papier-mâché and other simple materials, Grooms had constructed an oversized subway car to look like some childhood dream. The walls and floors were warped, which seemed to simulate the precarious feeling of standing on a moving train. Grooms then filled the car with cartoonish figures, each one playing out some exaggerated urban story. To contemporary sensibilities, their wild physiognomies would undoubtedly cause offense—and, in fact, Grooms’s caricatures got him in trouble just a year later.

Step off the train, and “Ruckus Manhattan” presented bridges you could walk on and skewed riffs on city landmarks. This all led, as I remember it, to the back seat of an oversized checker cab. An old-fashioned meter, the kind with a metal handle, ticked off the fare at alarming speed. Then the animatronic driver swiveled his head, moved his arms, and gave his “Where to, Mac?” spiel.

Much art aspires to the carnivalesque. Grooms unabashedly created a carnival. If this was art, I wanted more of it. So I am somewhat surprised that my art life has not been filled with more Grooms. Like the Bermuda Triangle and the Paris-to-Dakar Rally, childhood preoccupations do not always translate into adulthood. But serious art has also moved away from its sojourn into Grooms’s style of low humor and immature enthusiasms, and that’s no fun.

The same avant-garde spirit that gave us Muppet theater and took an interest in childhood points of view also helped create Grooms. Born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937, Red earned his nickname when studying abstraction with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. He bounced around the Art Institute of Chicago and The New School for Social Research before starting to stage his own installations and “Happenings” at his Flatiron studio and alternative spaces in the East Village. Through these performances and his subsequent work, he pushed against the aging seriousness of Tenth Street abstraction.

Red Grooms, Shoot the Moon, 1961, Colored inks, paper movie with movie scroll, Marlborough Contemporary.

True to style, “Red Grooms: Handiwork, 1955–2018,” an expansive hundred-work survey curated by Dan Nadel now at Marlborough, Grooms’s long-time gallery, opens with a laugh.1 A monitor by the entrance plays Grooms’s Shoot the Moon (1962), a delightful low-budget film shot by Rudy Burckhardt that pays homage to George Méliès’s 1902 landmark A Trip to the Moon.

The film helps position Grooms’s paintings and sculptures—and painted sculptures—as backdrops in a lifelong Happening, one in which we play enchanted roles. Grooms has long taken the signage of the carnival midway as his point of departure. A reverence for American folk traditions runs through his work. In the current exhibition, Grooms paints a banner to encourage visitors to step right up to the show. A Popeye-like strong man, In the Navy (2001), flexes his muscles in high relief. I love Bagels and Cream Cheese (2011) and other pseudo–street advertisements, where all sense of good taste gives way to simply tasting good. There are also slick takes on matinee idols, such as Dolores del Rio and Charles Boyer (1979), and a wide manner of painting styles. Grooms’s twelve-foot-tall painting of Dave Scott, the seventh astronaut to walk on the moon, is a tour de force.

And, oh boy. If you have a funny bone, be sure not to miss the back room of the first floor gallery. From Ruckus Manhattan, 42nd Street–Porno Bookstore (1976) is the one not-safe-for-work component of the original installation that was edited out of the more family-friendly 1981 version. Here, beyond the sculpture of some loitering leatherman, past gaudy curtains, is a reminder of the old Deuce. Grooms has painted the cover of every “magazine” in the smutty racks by giving them names as only he might. I was especially struck by “Cactus Club,” purportedly featuring things one should not do with a succulent.

Upstairs, the exhibition reveals the ultimate reason why Grooms has been so appealing. He is an exquisite draftsman. Here in works on paper, which are highlighted in the exhibition’s catalogue, we can see his great enthusiasm for city life and the many people who live it.

Rackstraw Downes

Rackstraw Downes is not so much a “realist” as he is a “locationist.” Beyond his remarkable technique, which seems to capture landscape in uncanny wide-angle, “fish-eye” detail, what may be most significant is what we do not see in his work: a painter sharing a personal perspective on what is often a mundane scene—of overgrown fences, air-conditioning ductwork, or dusty riverbeds. Now at Betty Cuningham Gallery, “Rackstraw Downes: Paintings & Drawings” features eleven new paintings, and related drawings, of various perspectives observed from very specific places, including an intersection near Manhattan’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the artist’s own loft and studio.2

What unites Downes’s depictions of these anonymous places is his own particular and idiosyncratic relationship with them. There’s a lot of portraiture in these landscapes; you could never mistake one of his paintings for the work of anybody else.

Simply consider the way he constructs these scenes, which he composes on site without the aid of photography. Through several fascinating preparatory drawings on paper now at Cuningham, especially of the interchanges of the George Washington Bridge spiraling above Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, we can see Downes’s distillation of space through his evolving familiarity with place. The curve of the highway overpass comes into greater focus as he notes the subtle changes in appearance over time and season, which he marks with the hours and dates written in the margins. Unlike a snapshot, with its imperious single-point perspective, his compositions record the tracking of head and eye, mostly side to side, in the way we most naturally turn our heads in wide perspective rather than observing up and down.

Centered at a place of maximum visual interest, his compositions look for unifying forms that allow us to transit through complex spaces—ramps, fences, viaducts. The results may be unusual in the history of image-making. They nevertheless carry a familiarity in the shared way we experience space, newly observed from standing height.

In his selection of mundane locations—strange, again, as places to paint, but familiar as places we experience—Downes also shares an idiosyncratic sensibility towards landscape, and in particular the history of American landscape painting. Unlike the Hudson River School painters of beautified scenes, of a transcendent spiritualism conveyed through pristine depictions, Downes seeks out the quotidian in blemished and worked-over places.

The extremes of his anti-monumentalism can be absurd at times, wonderfully so, as in a series of paintings of Snug Harbor (not in this exhibition) that never look beyond the cramped ventilation ductwork snaking through an attic. Yet rather than lament the encroachment of man, Downes shows a reverence for the man-made and a fascination with its empirical intrigues. He labors over places that do things simply and without fanfare, such as the Sodium–Sulfur 4 Megawatt Battery System, Presidio, TX (2013) and the Vent Tower and Salt Shed (2017) along Manhattan’s West Side Highway. Rather than “landscapes,” he calls these “surroundings,” and his most recent work here features his most personal surrounds: his studio, recorded from multiple vantage points and tweaked through preparatory drawings; and an image of the Cuningham gallery itself, here presented as only Downes would choose to do it—from the narrow back-alley light shaft, stacked with air-conditioning condensers dripping onto a tiny weed growing by the drain.

Graham Nickson, Red Lightning Sunset I, 2005, Watercolor on paper, Courtesy of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation Inc.

Graham Nickson has dedicated his career to working against the grain. As a painter and watercolorist, he has sought to capture the beauty of land and sky without restraint, reveling in the gloam from points near and far. As the dean of the New York Studio School, he has challenged generations of artists to find their bliss through the craft of modern painting and sculpture. Both accomplishments are now on view in the school’s gallery in an exhibition titled “Cumulus, Monumental Trees and Transient Skies” that marks his thirtieth anniversary at the institution.3

Curated by The New Criterion’s critic Karen Wilkin and Rachel Rickert of NYSS, the show draws on the collection of the late philanthropist and New Criterion poet William Louis-Dreyfus, with forty works of clouds, trees, and skies, all clustered in series. The packed exhibition pushes Nickson’s chromatic sensibilities to the limit—at times to the point of over-amplification. The serial arrangement on one wall of fifteen watercolors of “Monumental Tree,” otherwise known as “Serena’s Tree,” presents a remarkable and united portrait of Nickson’s color range, capturing the same subject across times and seasons. A similar hang on another wall of various cloud studies fails to come together in the same way, perhaps due to the fact that the depicted locations vary.

Of course, the abundance of work speaks to the patronage of Louis-Dreyfus, a collector who quietly buoyed a generation of working artists. No gallery space could fully contain his extraordinary generosity. I hope this exhibition will encourage larger venues to try.

Richard Timperio in his gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo: Paul Behnke.

One could call Richard Timperio a gallerist, but such a term might signal a commercial interest, while Timperio had none. Last month, Timperio died at age seventy-one, leaving a hole in New York’s alternative art world that will never be filled in the way he came to occupy it. Since 2000, Timperio had run his gallery called Sideshow from the ground floor of his building on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His history of exhibitions predated the rise of the Williamsburg art scene and came to postdate its precipitous demise. He exhibited artists across generations, and his gallery became a home for many at pivotal moments in their careers, uniting the studio cultures of Soho and Tribeca with the East Village and the outer boroughs.

In this space I have written often about his shows, with standout exhibitions of Thornton Willis, James Little, Dana Gordon, Louise P. Sloane, Tom Evans, and Joan Thorn, among several others. His greatest impact may have been in his omnium gatherum surveys that opened every new year. Here the work of just about every artist you cared for found some square inch of space on the gallery wall. Timperio, a Color Field painter himself, gave these exhibitions outlaw names such as “At the Alamo” and “Sideshow Nation,” which suited his own cowboy style. I doubt much ever sold, but the exhibitions became communities unto themselves, and the openings were the most packed events in town. With a space that might have rented for a quarter-million dollars a year, Timperio could have cashed out long ago. We are fortunate he instead dedicated his life to dealing so many artists in.

1 “Red Grooms: Handiwork, 1955–2018,” opened at Marlborough Contemporary, New York, on September 6 and remains on view through October 27, 2018.

2 “Rackstraw Downes: Paintings & Drawings” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on September 5 and remains on view through October 14, 2018.

3 “Graham Nickson: Cumulus, Monumental Trees and Transient Skies” opened at the New York Studio School, New York, on September 4 and remains on view through October 21, 2018.