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 (June 2018)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2018

Gallery Chronicle

On “The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters” at Robert Simon Fine Art, “Paul Resika: Geometry and the Sea” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects and Bookstein Projects, “Marc de Montebello: Recent Work” at W. M. Brady & Co., “Sculpture 56” at 56 Bogart Street & “LES YES!” at The Storefront Project.

Stoked from dying embers, painting’s classical revival—a rediscovery and return to traditional technique—has been burning underground for decades. Last month the new masters emerged to exhibit with the old in “The Unbroken Line,” at Robert Simon Fine Art, on New York’s Upper East Side.1

One of our best Old Master dealers, Robert Simon has a history of rediscovering lost masterpieces—he’s the one who owned and helped re-identify the Salvator Mundi as a painting by Leonardo. Now working with the teachers and students of the Grand Central Atelier, the classical art school in Long Island City founded by the painter Jacob Collins, he helps us discover the next master painters. “The Unbroken Line” exhibits a selection of Old Master work alongside paintings by Collins and his current and former students, the best of whom have gone on to become the faculty of his growing school.

When it comes to revivals, living matter does not necessarily come to life from dead tissue. The thesis of “The Unbroken Line” is that a knowledge of classical painting, as it was once taught in the academies and practiced in the salons, never fully died out in the style wars of the last century. It was preserved by a handful of painters—and in the masterly work that, at least for now, continues to hang on the walls of our museums, and in galleries such as Simon’s own.

The revelation of “The Unbroken Line” is that this must be true. Or, at least, it has become true as a new generation of painters, many of them only in their thirties, breathe new life into a reviving practice. It would be a challenge for anyone to go through Simon’s survey of forty-eight works and distinguish, with total accuracy, which are from the seventeenth century and which are from the twenty-first. This is in part due to the freshness and depth of Simon’s own collection of Old Master paintings and drawings. A Performance from the Commedia dell’Arte set in a Piazza, by Gherardo Poli (b. 1676), can hang naturally alongside the wonderful drawing of Santa Maria Maggiore, by Anthony Baus (b. 1981), with an archaic street scene fancifully interposed with someone walking a bicycle.

Will St. John, untitled, 2018, Oil on linen, Robert Simon Fine Art.

It is inspiring, and eye-opening, to see still lifes by Sebastian Stoskopff (b. 1597) and Joris van Son (b. 1623) living next to ones by Justin Wood (b. 1982). Portrait of a Young Man, by Simon Vouet (b. 1590), and Christ Blessing, by Vittore Carpaccio (b. ca. 1465–70), settle down inconspicuously among portraits by Collins himself (b. 1964)—one of which, called David, Collins touched up just days before the opening. Emotive figures by Rachel Li (b. 1995) and Will St. John (b. 1980) give the side-eye to a Portrait of a Boy from the Bolognese School of the seventeenth century. (I understand that St. John gave his painting a final coat of varnish once on the wall, in what Simon says was his first literal vernissage.)

Delicate portraits by Colleen Barry (b. 1981) convey a Flemish intimacy. A self-portrait by Edward Minoff (b. 1972), an accomplished painter of seascapes, radiates the classical profile of a Renaissance medallion. Just steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this exhibition has introduced a new field of collectors and curators to a generation of young painters; the great Frederick Ilchman, a curator at the mfa Boston and a savior of Venetian art, was on his way up just as I was heading down. The work, old and new, comprises two sides of the same coin. Robert Simon has done a good turn by bringing them both into more common currency.

Now entering his ninetieth year, the latitudinal painter Paul Resika has sailed the seven seas of artistic influence. More than sixty years ago, he embarked from the New York School and his apprenticeship with Hans Hofmann for a rendezvous with the Old Masters, on to the distant shores of De Chirico, Carrà, Sironi, and points unknown. With his latest exhibition, “Geometry and the Sea,” spread across two New York galleries last month—Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, on the Lower East Side; and Bookstein Projects, now on East Sixty-sixth Street—Resika brought home his many far-flung discoveries in angular, poetic compositions, where paint serves as both water and light.2

At Bookstein’s new uptown location, the open gallery room invited comparison of these connected compositions, all from the past three years. Among the circles and triangles, the sea and the sky, Resika finds a great range of feeling in shapes and tone. Rose Dawn (2017) crackles in a morning sun. Red Dunes, Green Sea (2016–17) bakes in a sun-scorched afternoon glow relieved by the sea water pooling into a triangle below. The yellow sun of The White Sky (2017) breaks through a damp mist, while Red Sun (De Chirico) (2017), with its vertical symmetries, conveys the meridian sun with a nod to the surrealist master. Meanwhile, Blue Night (2017) turns day to night with the coolness of moon-shade, as pyramidal forms grow ever taller in the dream-lit air.

Paul Resika, Blue Night, 2017, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects.

In his intimate downtown space, Steven Harvey looked to the poetry of Resika’s mysterious forms and their spare surroundings. A Quiet Romance (2017) features a circle and a shell in conversation over a field of blue. The White Moon(2017), Celadon Sea (2017), and Blue (2017) convey Resika’s interest in sensuous, mottled color. In a gallery filled with natural light—as it must be, for Resika’s colors—the illumination from the storefront window highlighted the textures of Resika’s layered surfaces. These latest paintings are often painted over older work, and the pentimenti add to the mystery of the compositions. Self-Portrait with Rag (2017) depicts Resika emerging from the color-rich mist. The great painter looks out as both an abstract vision and a concrete form.

Marc de Montebello may have a recognizable surname. Yet his descent from Jean Lannes, the First Duke of Montebello, the famous marshal of the Napoleonic Wars, should not be held against his own successes. Last month, at W. M. Brady & Co., de Montebello showed the achievement of his recent work—landscapes of diverse locations with a unifying interest in surface and depth.3

Using planes of color, de Montebello carves out sculptural space. The approach is spare and often intriguingly minimal. While certain works experiment with fog, de Montebello flourishes in the bright light of day, with direct sunlight sharpening his shapes in reflection. A room of intimate works, some of casein or oil on paper, brought to mind the spare vision of Louisa Matthíasdóttir, where a field of green might be punctuated by a mere dot of red.

Marc de Montebello, View of Jodhpur, 2015, Oil on canvas, W. M. Brady & Co.

Two large canvases reveled in the rooftop geometries of Jodhpur, the “blue city” of Rajasthan, dominated by its fifteenth-century Mehrangarh fort. Yet the chromatic values of these paintings were so varied, and the effects of light so wide-ranging, that they might be mistaken for two different views—especially as they were wisely divided between the two main gallery rooms.

In the familiar light of Los Angeles, where de Montebello keeps his studio, he seems most at ease. Here he finds interest in simple rear-window walls and a series of seascapes—which is his most daring—conveying an infinity of depth with a minimum of surface detail.

The dozen or so galleries of 56 Bogart Street, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, have arguably evolved into the single best concentration of artistic venues anywhere in New York. No doubt this is due to the galleries’ proximity to one another —and their separation from everything else. In the late nineteenth century, the economist Alfred Marshall described certain places as “having ideas in the air,” where knowledge “spills over” from one person to the other. The central corridor of this one building, packed with serious galleries and the people who create them, has become the Main Street of New York’s alternative art scene.

Julia Kunin, Green Bismuth Head, 2013, Ceramic, Honey Ramka.

Spread over six weeks, these gallerists came together to organize “Sculpture 56,” their first building-wide exhibition, with eleven venues showing various takes on contemporary sculpture.4 Highlights of this exhibition included a bespoke stack of Jersey barriers in “Noah Loesberg: Remote Barrier Storage,” at Robert Henry Contemporary (the co-director Henry Chung was an architect of the exhibition series). I also enjoyed the many examples of contemporary ceramics at Honey Ramka, where Julia Kunin’s unsettling Green Bismuth Head (2013)was my best in show. At Slag Contemporary, Dumitru Gorzo piled old two-by-fours like matchsticks into square towers. Their natural precariousness said more to me than the scumbles of paint added to their surfaces—I wonder if a more minimalist application would have had greater effect. Meanwhile Tom Butter, at Studio 10, constructed an eleven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture, where a mechanized spool of foam cord unwound from a lattice tower onto a pile on the floor. For all the elegance of its construction, I doubt the resulting forms quite justified the elaborate setup.

Spread over two floors at 56 Bogart Street, the dense, multi-gallery exhibition, much of it showing work at a high level, commanded attention. I hope it hints at collaborations to come.

Meryl Meisler,Mr. Katz was mugged by two kids who found him dozing in front of his TV in his living room,  1978, Photograph, the Storefront Project.

The photographer Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City in the mid-1970s. Surrounded by decadence and decay, she looked for the humanizing touch in the wreckage, the sleaze, and the schmaltz of the struggling city. Through a 1978 ceta Artist grant to photograph Jewish life for the American Jewish Congress, she turned her lens on the Lower East Side. Continuing our rediscovery of Meisler’s rich body of work, these photographs are the subject of “les yes!,” an exhibition at The Storefront Project, a gallery on Orchard Street at the heart of a neighborhood that has transformed in the four decades since Meisler captured it in black and white.5

Meisler has an eye for character. In her photographs, often shot in fifty millimeter with heavy flash, great expressions come into bloom for her welcoming lens. Bright-faced rabbis, soda jerks, and garmentos pop out of their darkened shuls, diners, and apparel stores. There are a few striking images of degradation —a drunk lying across the bleak median of Photographing on the Bowery (1977), with a second figure snapping away from the side of this captivatingly framed image. Yet, mostly, Meisler looks for the life of the street and those struggling to keep living in it. In particular she finds Morris Katz, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Grand Street,” who appears in several images. Looking out from two black eyes, Katz describes “how he was mugged by two kids who found him dozing in front of his TV in his living room,” as one of the images is titled. Resolute and resigned, he does not let his cigar drop from his mouth or his bow tie come undone. The old neighborhood is in decline. He was there to see it through. Thankfully, in the dying light of the late 1970s, Meisler was there as well to find what could be preserved.

1 “The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters” opened at Robert Simon Fine Art, New York, on May 11 and remains on view through June 1, 2018.

2 “Paul Resika: Geometry and the Sea” was on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 20 and at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 19 through May 26, 2018.

3 “Marc de Montebello: Recent Work” was on view at W. M. Brady & Co., New York, from May 9 through May 24, 2018.

4 “Sculpture 56” was on view at 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, from April 13 through May 27, 2018.

5 “les yes!” opened at The Storefront Project, New York, on May 3 and remains on view through June 3, 2018.