Summer lights

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2024

Summer Lights

On “Klimt Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” at Acquavella Galleries & “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” at Bookstein Projects, New York.

A distinguishing feature of modern art has been its pursuit of light. Of course, all of visual art is concerned with light. What modernism did was dispense with the controlled light of the salon in search of bolder and brighter sensations. Modern painters looked to reflect not merely a sense of sight but also the feeling of radiance. So they explored direct light and, in particular, summer light, chasing the sun into the countryside with their trunks of painting equipment in tow.

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was one of those painters whose compositional innovations were charged by the summer sun. A recent survey at Neue Galerie titled “Klimt Landscapes” looked not only to the verdant visions he captured in the Austrian towns alongside the Attersee between 1900 and 1916, but also to the lush creative landscape that unfurled around him in photography, jewelry, and fashion.1

Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, Oil & gold on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Today Klimt is most renowned for his “golden style.” His bejeweled portraits reached their apotheosis in such works at Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901), also known as Judith I, and The Kiss (1908–09), both in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. His Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the “lady in gold” restituted from Vienna to the subject’s Jewish heirs, now forms the heart of Neue’s permanent collection. In these works, Klimt, the son of a gold engraver, combined the decadence of precious metal with a sense for mosaic-like composition, taking inspiration from the shadowless Byzantine iconography in Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale.

Yet Klimt was more than an iconographer. He looked to move beyond these studied, labor-intensive portraits even as he relied on them to provide income for his large domestic payroll (he fathered at least six children with three mistresses while supporting multiple members of his extended family, including his widowed sister-in-law, Emilie “Midi” Flöge, a fashion designer and his muse). Klimt found relief in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria, north of Salzburg. Each summer, after 1900, he traveled there from Vienna to paint along the lake towns of the Attersee.

Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1909, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Organized by Janis Staggs, Neue’s director of curatorial and manager of publications, “Klimt Landscapes” took a welcome, wide-angle view of these creative sojourns. The exhibition brought together such masterpieces as The Park (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Kammer Castle on the Attersee I (Castle in the Lake) (1908, National Gallery Prague), and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914, Neue Galerie). The survey assembled works dating back to Klimt’s academic training and continuing on through his many experiments with optics, providing along the way several examples of jewelry by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser together with many photographic portraits of Klimt’s own projections of summer leisure.

Trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts of the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, known today as the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Klimt proved to be a precocious academic talent. The exhibition began with his figure studies of 1880 and his Two Girls with Oleander (ca. 1890–92, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), an astonishing vision of glowing Pre-Raphaelite women plucking flowers beside an egg-and-dart frieze.

Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, ca. 1890–92, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

Seeing Klimt’s command of painterly illusion makes his modernist compression, developed just a few years later, all the more remarkable. A founding member of the Vienna Secession in 1897, he joined fellow academic painters to look beyond the style of the salon. Yet for all of its innovative surface application, Klimt’s subsequent golden style owed much to academic structure. Beneath the ornament, his shimmering portraits were essentially salon paintings. Part academic, part modern, these works were dismissed by the devotees of either camp. Klimt remained largely absent, for example, from the French-focused timeline of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As such distinctions have diminished over time, however, the hybrid nature of these works has only made them more compelling. Today his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I has become known as “Austria’s Mona Lisa” and attracts commensurate crowds and Hollywood fanfare, serving as the focus of the 2015 biographical drama Woman in Gold.

The relief provided by the Attersee owed in part to the fact that Klimt had received little academic training in landscape painting, which was considered a lower genre than history painting and portraiture. This lack of schooling left Klimt free to experiment with the Stimmungsimpressionismus, or “atmospheric impressions,” that he felt during his Sommerfrische, “summer holidays.” Unlike his studied portraits, Klimt painted his landscapes without preparatory sketches. The unidealized composition of this “vacation work” helps underscore the leisure of their creation. Klimt viewed his landscape painting as a segment of his daily therapy. A letter from August 1902 outlines his summer workout routine:

Early in the morning, about 6 . . . I get up—if the weather’s good I go to the nearby wood—I’m painting a small beech wood there (if the sun’s shining) . . . that takes me to 8, then comes breakfast, then a swim in the lake, carefully of course—then I paint a little, perhaps a view of the lake by sunlight, or if the weather’s dull a landscape from my window—sometimes I drop this morning painting and study my Japanese books . . . Then comes midday, after lunch I sleep a little or read, and before or after tea another swim . . . After tea I’m painting again . . . . Every now and then I fit a bit of rowing into the day’s program in order to limber up.

A proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Klimt saw himself as a piece of that “total work of art.” In the summer he dressed the part by dispensing with the cummerbund and donning a blue, caftan-style painter’s smock. (Early Christmas shoppers, take note: Neue’s gift shop features an “exact replica” of this full length indigo linen smock with “hand-embroidered white epaulets and front pocket.”) Klimt appears in repeated photographs around the Attersee in this getup, walking on docks and strolling on trails, even as the figures around him didn’t always get the caftan memo, appearing in more standard summer outfits.

Beech Forest in Autumn, 1898. Photo: Hugo Henneberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

One revelation of this survey was the extent to which photography influenced and shaped Klimt’s own artistic landscape. “It would be difficult to overestimate the sizable impact of photography on Klimt’s development as a landscape painter,” writes Staggs in the exhibition’s catalogue. The Austrian Camera Club of Amateur Photographers, later known as the Vienna Camera Club, was established in 1887. Klimt surrounded himself with photographers such as Moriz Nähr, Heinrich Böhler, and Emma Bacher-Teschner, and he regularly posed as their subject. Klimt developed his own unusual, square landscape format largely under the influence of their often-square images. He also used telescopes and photographic aids to help compose his paintings, flattening his landscapes and even drawing on the patterns of photographic emulsion. Just compare Hugo Henneberg’s photograph Birch Forest in Autumn (1898, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) with Klimt’s Beech Forest I of circa 1902 (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden), or Heinrich Kuehn’s Meadow with Trees (1897, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna) with Klimt’s Pear Tree (Pear Trees) (1903, Harvard Art Museums). Klimt painted his landscapes in the style of this early photography.

Gustav Klimt, Beech Forest I, 1902, Oil on canvas, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

The remarkable set of Autochrome Lumière color photographs that Friedrich G. “Fritz” Walker took of Emilie Flöge and Klimt, in the garden of Villa Paulick in September of 1913, then brought the exhibition full circle. Early photography, in particular color photography, was especially light-intensive and relied on the same summer sun as did Klimt. Here in colorful costumes he and Flöge appear as both subjects and objects—flattened into their own lush landscapes in these photographic “drawings with light.” From “lady in gold,” we end with artists in green.

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.2

Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles), ca. 1985, Watercolor on paper, Collection of Matt and Maria Bult.

Painted with a sugary impasto, this masterly work can seem fresh and ready to melt in the summer sun. Thiebaud was the American Giorgio Morandi for his uncanny ability to transform paint into the subjects he depicted. In part this is due to the halation effects along his edges, as shadows are broken into lines and fields of blue and red that become delicate frosting for his forms, as seen in such works as Strawberry Cone (1969) and Two Tulip Sundaes (2010) and even such portraits as Betty Jean (ca. 1965). Thiebaud was particularly attuned to the textures of his media. His thirst-quenching Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles) (ca. 1985) would only work as a watercolor on paper. His Cheese Display (1969) feels milky-smooth, while his Beach Gathering (2000–15) appears encrusted with sand. Due to this innate sense for intimism, I find his portraits and still lifes work better than his landscapes. Thiebaud was at his best when subject and painting could melt into one.

The paintings in “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” on view last month at Bookstein Projects, spanned a remarkable eighty years.3 A suite of bold new work, of celestial bodies pared down to brushstroke, color, and form, all painted in Resika’s ninety-fifth year, was connected to Moonlight, a small landscape executed in 1943–44, when the artist was just sixteen years old. Beyond the official show, the gallery’s office also featured an extra work from the artist’s collection: Panorama of the Hudson (The Mermaid and the Factory) (1948), a wild composition of bridges, train tracks, and the ghost-like rollercoaster of the long-departed Palisades Amusement Park—painted at a time when the teenage artist could catch a ferry there just across town from his Central
Harlem studio.

Paul Resika, Moonlight, 1943–44, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects, New York.

The brightness and compositions may have varied, but everywhere a minimum of line defined depth in what were otherwise blind, blinding, and turbulent sights. Illuminated across time, the full assembly revealed a consistency of vision and a connected sense for the bare essentials. Revisiting the illusion of light in paint, Resika in his latest work has doubled down on the experimental quality of what can be done with a minimum of means. In several canvases, a simple dash, placed just right, becomes a horizon line reflecting the luminous spheres above. These orbs, all of slightly different values, meanwhile appear to fill the canvases with various shades of glowing color. “Marcel Breuer told me never to paint a green picture,” Resika explained to me when I ran into him at the gallery. So he did just that. This painter, who has been bucking convention for eighty years, remains a guiding light for the daring possibilities of oil on canvas.

Paul Resika, End of the Day #12, Oil on canvas, 2023, Bookstein Projects, New York.

1. “Klimt Landscapes” was on view at Neue Galerie, New York, from February 15 through May 6, 2024. 

2. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” opened at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on April 26 and remains on view through June 14, 2024. 

3. “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” was on view at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 31, 2024. 

Gallery Chronicle (April 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On “Stephen Shore” at the Museum of Modern Art, “California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn | Wayne Thiebaud” at Acquavella Galleries, and “Sean Scully: Wall of Light” at Mnuchin Gallery.

In the mid-1970s, Hilton Kramer took note of an inflection point in art, with painting and sculpture on the one side and photography on the other: “At a moment in our cultural life when the imperatives of formalism seem to be on the wane in the discussion, if not in the actual practice, of painting and sculpture, a vigorous restatement of the formalist position has come from a surprising quarter—from the world of photography.”

The development was curious, even “rich in irony,” as Hilton observed. Formalism, the belief that the ultimate subject of art is art itself, would seem to go against the very nature of photography. After all, photography, more than any other artistic medium, needs an exterior, something “out there” to reflect the photons that pass through its lenses and mirrors to be imprinted in recorded light. Such directness, this facility for reportage, is for many the promise of photographic technology.

Yet photography is also an art, even an alchemy, with a process of creation that is as magical and strange as oil on canvas. Since its invention, photography’s seeming simplification, which has placed point-and-shoots and now digital optics in the hands of the world, has only masked its increasing complexity.

Flush with an emerging confidence in their medium, photographers such as Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, wrote Hilton, found ways to turn the lens on these complexities: “The kind of campaign that was once waged, and waged successfully, for abstract painting is now being waged for ‘abstract’ photography.”

For the current generation, no one has faced the challenge of creating a photography of itself quite like Stephen Shore. This photographer who came of age in the 1970s, and has tracked the medium’s radical evolution to the present day, is now the subject of an extensive and enthralling survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.1

Stephen Shore, Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974, 1974, Chromogenic color print, the Museum of Modern Art.

Stephen Shore is a textbook photographer. Which is to say, his photographs could illustrate a textbook on the medium of photography. Born in New York in 1947, his earliest work was in the darkroom, at the far end of the photographic process, developing his family’s Hawkeye Brownie negatives when he was six. He sold his first photograph to moma when he was fourteen, and had his first survey show at the Metropolitan Museum in his early twenties. Carried by a youthful curiosity and an autodidact’s sensibility, through an extensive body of work Shore has illuminated the wondrous “how” a picture is made as much as the “what” being taken.

A photographic journeyman, Shore has traveled through the widest range of camera technology, from a children’s Mick-A-Matic through a Rollei 35mm, an Arca Swiss 8-by-10, and an iPhone 5s, with stopovers at a Stereo Realist (for color 3-Dphotographs), a Grafted Crown Graphic 4-by-5, a Deardorff 8-by-10, and any number of Leicas, Nikons, Canons, Olympuses, and Hasselblads. “I’m not interested in developing a style and playing it to death,” he says. “I’ll change the medium, or I’ll go to a different camera, just to be confronted with new problems or new possibilities.”

Yet far from settling into an arid academicism, Shore has used these technological changes to look for the essence of just what photography can record. This is the takeaway of “Stephen Shore,” organized by moma’s chief curator of photography, Quentin Bajac, along with Kristen Gaylord. Working with a point-and-shoot Rollei 35mm, with its unusual bottom-mounted flash that flattens depth into layers of relief, Shore looked to the patterns of everyday materials in his early 1970s series “American Surfaces”—such as in the mesmerizing wallpaper and water fountain of Rolla, Missouri, July 1972. Working a few years later with an Arca Swiss 8-by-10—something that resembles a nineteenth-century box camera but takes a photograph of intense detail—he moved from surface to depth. Through photographs such as Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974, he made haunting images that function more like dioramas, with space you can enter into, without any particular point of focus.

Through his finely tuned sensibility for light, color, and framing, processed through various photographic equipment, Shore has captured the vibrations in visual experience—in particular, American visual experience. Through these photographs of the ordinary, he elevates life to the extraordinary, using new technology to valorize the commonplace and the everyday.

His photographic journey, which he connects to visual archeology, has taken him into the Holy Land and the humble homes of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. And the exhibition “Stephen Shore” is far from the final statement on Stephen Shore. Through daily Instagram posts, he now perpetuates a five-decade-long project by sending his latest quotidian moments into the luminous digital cloud.

Installation view, “California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn | Wayne Thiebaud” at Acquavella Galleries.

Two years ago, an exhibition pairing the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Matisse, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, became the must-see show of the season. I hopped the last train to Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station on its final weekend and was not disappointed: in a masterly way, Diebenkorn inhabited the lines and colors of Matisse’s Parisian visions to create his California abstractions.

Last month, at New York’s Acquavella Galleries, Diebenkorn was paired with another master: the nonagenarian Wayne Thiebaud.2 Best known for ice-creamy still-lifes, Thiebaud has long applied a sweetened palette to his own landscapes of California. On view at Acquavella, these confections were paired with the famous “Berkeley” and “Ocean Park” series of Diebenkorn, Thiebaud’s friend and influence, who died in 1993.

Thiebaud met Diebenkorn, two years his junior, in 1964 as they were each preparing etchings with the printmaker Kathan Brown for Crown Point Press. Diebenkorn was a leading light of the Bay Area Figurative School, switching from abstraction to figuration in a cross-border move he made more than once throughout his varied career. Thiebaud was likewise known for his now-iconic still lifes that combine the buttery textures of Giorgio Morandi with a dusting of his own confectioner’s sugar—cakes and cookies illuminated in the post-war glow of American neon. Both were consummate painters who rose above labels and movements, whether it be Ab Ex or Pop.

As with Diebenkorn and Matisse, the revelation of “California Landscapes” was how the dialogue between Diebenkorn and Thiebaud evolved through decades of engagement. And again, as with Diebenkorn and Matisse, this is a conversation that only became understandable once their works were paired together by an intelligent curator, in this case Acquavella’s Emily Crowley.

The wet, muddy sediment of Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #21 (1954) flows through the swollen river of Thiebaud’s Brown River(2002). The prismatic light of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #40 (1971) shines through the faceted angles of Thiebaud’s Green River Lands (1998). A shared palette and sense for composition combine in their approaches to the open landscapes of the American West, which they each show from multiple elevated and often aerial perspectives.

Thiebaud has been painting landscapes since the 1970s. The early examples at Acquavella, such as Ripley Ridge (1977) and Urban Freeways (1979), seemed most indebted to his own still lifes with their diminutive reductions of space. What changed for Thiebaud in his landscapes of the 1990s and 2000s was the incorporation of Diebenkorn’s sense for structure, with angled rays acting as both abstract lines of force and illusionistic lines of sight.

Such structure has become even more crystalline in Thiebaud’s approach to landscape in the current decade. Now ninety-seven years old, Thiebaud is a living legend of American painting. He is also painting some of the most powerful and distilled compositions of his astonishing career. Mountain Split (2011–17) cracks his canvas right in two, while Blue Mountain Bluffs (2017) depicts the fertile steppes at the end of the earth, or, at least, at the edge of California. These paintings to Diebenkorn’s landscapes to Matisse’s compositions are but a step, or two, away.

Sean Scully, Night, 2003, Oil on linen, Mnuchin Gallery.

Sean Scully is that rara avis: the abstract painter who has flown to the heights of the vaulted empyrean of the contemporary art market. Just why may have less to do with form and more to do with the formulations of the marketplace, which favors steady output and the repetition of set compositions. Serial work removes the issue of uniqueness and its requisite connoisseurship, and therefore creates more reliable price points in the tracking of works of art as tradable commodities. Ergo: the market’s favor for Josef Albers, and for Sol LeWitt . . . and for Sean Scully.

Yet such commercial interest does not necessarily diminish the critical relevance of an artist or a particular body of work, and Sean Scully is, indeed, a fine painter. Born in Dublin in 1945, educated in England, Scully rejected the histrionics of British painting for the post-minimal abstraction of 1970s New York. Through Minimalist seriality combined with an expressionistic touch, Scully paints block-like compositions that recall the dry stone walls of the Aran Islands. Much like those mortarless walls of fieldstone, the details are in the edges, with glimmers of color and light often peeking around the stony forms.

Two exhibitions now on view allow a closer look at the melancholy beauty of these compositions at different scales. Through April 14, New York’s Mnuchin Gallery is showing several large paintings, along with smaller watercolors and pastels, from Scully’s “Wall of Light” series. Meanwhile, through May 28, the Edward Hopper House—the childhood home of the famous American painter in Nyack, New York, which now hosts contemporary programs in dialogue with its historic setting—is showing the more intimate work of Scully’s “Doric” series.3

Whether inspired by the stones of Ireland, or of Mayan ruins, or of ancient Greece (as Scully has variously claimed), all of these paintings are opus quadratum laid by the same painterly hand. What change are the colors, and the moods, of the final compositions, which can shimmer in reflected light, as in Desire or Desired (2007), or obscure a light beyond, as in Night (2003).

What connects them all is the mystery of what they refuse to show: rather than the windows of traditional illusionistic art, these paintings are walls, built up and bricking over an unknown distance beyond. The blocks may be lush passages of wet-on-wet brushwork, but their surfaces conceal rather than reveal the compositions’ greater meaning. The exhibition at Mnuchin, elegantly curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam, even includes a selection of Scully’s own photographs of Aran walls, connecting his abstract paintings to one of their source forms.

At his studio in Tappan—a former television broadcast facility that is a stone’s throw from the Hopper House in Nyack—Scully keeps another source: a work on paper from the gray middle period of Philip Guston. Following the lush abstractions of the 1950s, the 1960s were a decade of fog for Guston. In the 1970s the fog lifted to reveal the didactic figuration of hobnailed boots and Klan hoods. The revelation proved to be a sensation. Still, I have long felt that Guston’s more interesting paintings were those middle, foggy ones, which maintained their mysteries.

Scully undoubtedly shares a similar affinity. Depths are often best when left hidden.

1 “Stephen Shore” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on November 19, 2017 and remains on view through May 28, 2018.

2 “California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn | Wayne Thiebaud” was on view at Acquavella Galleries, New York, from February 1 through March 16, 2018.

3 “Sean Scully: Wall of Light” opened at Mnuchin Gallery, New York, on February 28 and remains on view through April 24, 2018. “Sean Scully: No Words” opened at the Edward Hopper House, Nyack, on March 9 and remains on view through May 27, 2018.