'Comeback Kid'

ART & ANTIQUES
December 2007

Comeback Kid

The return of Thornton Willis reflects the enduring legacy of abstract painting.

by James Panero

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” However in the past few years, a painter by the name of Thornton Willis, born in 1936, has re-emerged from near-obscurity. Almost 40 years after his New York debut, and after a brief shot at fame in the 1970s as a post-Minimalist, Willis is now creating some of the boldest work of his life, with critically acclaimed back-to-back New York solo shows, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea and Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. In an era defined by market trends, Willis is that uncompromising artist who still manages to rise above public taste.

“I was always an abstract painter,” he recently told me. “I’ve always done what feels right.” Willis is one of my favorite artists to visit in the studio. I spoke with him in his unadorned SoHo loft, among canvases propped against the walls, in the same neighborhood where he has lived and painted since the late 1960s. Here Willis is an original artist-resident, someone who has painted his way through the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial wasteland to multi-million-dollar residential enclave.

“I hardly think when I paint; I’m feeling,” says Willis. Seeing abstract art for the first time in the 1950s, he continues, “was like a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. A boom! Something fundamental to the human condition. I didn’t know what painting was before that. Seeing that work was the epiphany that brought me to painting. I’ve been chasing that ever since.”

Willis’s chase began in Pensacola, Florida. His family roots go back to rural Virginia and Georgia. His father was a Church of Christ minister, an evangelical who established congregations throughout the South. When his mother fell ill, Willis went to live with his grandparents. He was 7. “I always liked to draw. When I was 4 years old, my dad used to sit me on his lap and read the Sunday comics to me. They were in color. I was fascinated with the boxes, the color.”

Willis began in architecture school at Auburn University in Alabama. There he caught two traveling exhibitions: One featured the students of Hans Hofmann, the legendary painter and teacher of the Abstract Expressionists, and the other was a show of New York School painters brought by the American Federation of Arts. “Seeing those paintings spoke to me. It hit me on the head,” Willis recalls. He decided to become a painter, transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi to pursue abstract painting under the G.I. Bill. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study with Melville Price, an abstract artist from the 10th Street years who died in 1970 at the age of 49. In a recent interview with myartspace.com, Willis said, “From Mel I learned that the idea was to ‘live the work.’ To ‘be in’ the painting and to see the work as an extension of one’s self.” The life of the artist does not always fit into one’s assumptions about art history. By the time Willis arrived at abstract painting, Pop Art and Minimalism were in their heyday. “I see myself as having rejected those two possibilities,” he says. “Minimalism was reductive. I could not work that way. I need to act out on a painting. I need to work through accident.”

Willis moved to New York in 1967, a time when painters were starting to challenge the confines of Minimal art and experiment again with improvisation. “It was when Brice Marden and Richard Serra and Bob Ryman and Sean Scully began,” he recalls. “Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark and Lynda Benglis were finding new ways of making art: Serra tossing lead into the corners; or Saret working with chicken wire. It was sometimes referred to as the ‘fold and pleat’ movement. My work was taking the same cues.”

In the 1970s and early ’80s, through experiments with lines and voids, Willis developed a signature style that brought him international attention. He called it “the wedge.” Predicated on the relationship between figure and ground, a tension that Willis built up in his edging and color choice, these haunting images could resemble a curtain or a mountain peak, a threshold or a monolith. Wedges such as “Bisby” (1977) found an eager market. Collectors and dealers ranging from Larry Gagosian to Charles Saatchi to Sidney Janis to Jackie Onassis (who called Willis “Maestro”) scrambled to the studio and galleries to buy them.

At the time, Serra advised, “Just keep doing the same thing, Thornton. Just keep doing the same thing,” Willis recalls. But at the height of his fame, Willis felt he had exhausted his motif. He abandoned the wedge. He gave up figure-ground paintings. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, he in fact gave up painting entirely.

When Willis returned to painting in the late 1980s, his market had moved on. But Willis brought with him a new focus on Cubism and new interests. “I was reading about quantum physics, how everything is absolutely saturated with matter. With the figure-ground paintings there was the idea of negative-positive space. But in quantum physics I realized that everything is filled. There is no such thing as negative space. This influenced my own thinking about painted space. My paintings became areas of energy bouncing off each other. Cubism seemed to have that in it already.” Triangles and facets filled his canvases. Work such as “Gray Harmony” (1993) featured regimented designs of quiet beauty. Then came 9/11, and that changed everything. “The first plane went right over our house. I said, ‘That plane was really low.’ I listened. Kept listening. Then I heard something go ‘snap’ and I went to the fire escape. All day, refugees were streaming up the street. People crying. People covered in soot and ash. I went out onto the street and watched the towers come down.”

In shock, Willis did not work for six weeks. Then one morning he got on the other side of it. “I just started to draw,” he says. In three hours, he created his first painting after the attacks: In “Cubist Painting for Vered” (2001), a work dedicated to his wife, Willis did away with measured construction. “I realized the world was taking a major change, with more uncertainty.” Drips ran down the front; the painting wept.

A new urgency now fills his compositions, a tension between the structures of Cubism and the gestures of Abstract Expressionism. He says he struggles with these recent paintings. Edgy, bending and sticking out into our space, they are animated by a career in abstraction. The art critic for The New Republic, Jed Perl, has called them “wonderfully persuasive” and suggestive of “an emotional terrain at once rambunctious and saturnine ... Although Willis was always a powerful painter, he seems to me to be a far more inviting artist now.”

The life of Thornton Willis is a testament to the fact that an artist at any age, in any style, can produce remarkable work. He has been chasing abstraction for 40 years, and now, once again, the art world is starting to chase him.

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'

THE NEW YORK SUN

'The Picture of Lucian Freud'
BY JAMES PANERO
November 7, 2007

Isn't it ironic that postwar art has traded one Freud for another. The very influence that Sigmund once exerted in the 1950s, his grandson Lucian, now in his mid-80s, might claim today. John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, Tracy Emin: All are among the younger artists who look to Lucian's analysis of the body just as many Abstract Expressionists once drew on Sigmund's dissection of the mind.

In his new monograph on the artist, "Lucian Freud" (Rizzoli, 488 pages, $135), billed by the publisher as the most comprehensive survey of Lucian to date, William Feaver writes, "There's an easy assumption that, metaphorically speaking if not by actual bequest, Lu the Painter inherited the couch of his renowned grandfather." An easy assumption, yes, but an overworked one. Mr. Feaver, a British art critic and painter who has organized several Freud exhibitions, fortunately knows better than to spend much time on the Sigmund-Lucian comparison. Instead, his book hints at more interesting terrain. Although it is not an argument made explicitly in the book (a somewhat tongue-tied, soft appreciation), Mr. Feaver offers up nearly 400 reproductions, four interviews with the artist, and an introductory essay that suggests a different conclusion: The secret of Lucian's success may not be his Sigmundness. It may instead be his Englishness.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1922, Lucian escaped with his family to England in 1933. He did not look back. He never dilated on the Jewish identity that first sent him abroad — "Being Jewish?" Mr. Freud remarked to Leigh Bowery, the corpulent performance artist who became one of his favorite subjects, "I never think about it, yet it's a part of me" — he gave up on Germany — "Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been" — and, finally, he wanted little to do with Sigmund: "I think [psychoanalysis is] unsuited to the lifespan," he told Mr. Feaver, somewhat elliptically. "I feel very guarded about it but I'm fairly ignorant about it."

What replaced all this was an adopted national canon. Sure, boiling things down to national style may be reductive, but Mr. Freud clearly set about performing that reduction himself. The process began in boarding school, where Lucian worked to rid himself of Teutonic mannerisms. "When I came to England first I could only do German Gothic handwriting," says Mr. Freud. Mr. Feaver continues: "The spikiness lapsed and he developed a rounded, laboured, but not inelegant script of his own, each word treated as a novelty, written as though drawn."

The same transition can be seen through his early artwork. Despite little formal training, Lucian displayed an immense talent for draftsmanship. Although less well known than his paintings, his etchings remain a high point of his oeuvre (a subject that will be examined in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art starting in December). Ink drawings, such as "Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit" (1943), likewise became crystalline interpretations of the visible world.

Yet his paintings through the 1940s still shout "Weimar." The bug-eyed portraits of the period, though accomplished, betray an expressionist manner. Mr. Feaver writes how this led to the "assumption (he took it as an accusation) that he was a Germanic sort of artist, carrying on willy-nilly in prewar, pre-Hitler, 'Neue Sachlichkeit' style."

Well, up to a point, he was. In the mid-1950s, however, the manner matured. Suddenly we see the signature style, the splotchy red-yellow-green brushwork that he would apply, for the rest of his career, to his analysis of human flesh.

The 19th-century British painter Benjamin Haydon once remarked:

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things . . . yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed.

The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

If Mr. Freud was not born with English sensibility, he developed one in paint. And he found ready success in the "honesty" of these fleshy facts. It comes as no surprise that one of Mr. Feaver's interviews with Mr. Freud concerns Lucian's appreciation of John Constable. This interest began when Mr. Freud was "living in Dedham, in the Constable country. I'd seen the little painting of the tree trunk, close-up, in the V&A, and I thought what a good idea." Mr. Freud continues: "I mean, this is so English isn't it?"

But of course, beyond the interest in fact, Mr. Freud's most famous paintings are English for more tabloid reasons, too. Oscar Wilde once said, "The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral." As is underscored by Mr. Feaver's book, Mr. Freud's shortcoming is that he can abandon English fact for mere English sensationalism.

In 1964, Mr. Freud was dismissed from a teaching job for assigning his students to paint naked self-portraits that would be "something really shameless, you know." Thereafter, the subject in his own work became evermore shameless and grotesque. Enter Leigh Bowery and "Big Sue," Mr. Freud's obese painter's models. Enter taboo. For one painting he positioned his half-naked, pre-pubescent daughter Isobel on the floor beside a houseplant ("Large Interior, Paddington," 1968-69). He also featured a man, the photographer David Dawson, breastfeeding a baby as Francis Wyndham reads Flaubert's letters ("Large Interior, Notting Hill," 1998).

The slow rise of British art, which tracked the demise of the New York School and the dying influence of the French avant-garde, has privileged Mr. Freud as the embodiment of English style. Unfortunately, he inhabits the best and worst attributes of what England can offer up in paint. His champions point to John Constable. But Mr. Freud is rather more Dorian Gray.

'Art's New Financial Landscape'

ART AND ANTIQUES
November, 2007

Critic’s Notebook: Art’s New Financial Landscape
by James Panero

A frequent response to the sticker shock of postwar and contemporary art is to claim that the market is inflated, that we are experiencing a bubble. But does this term, usually reserved for stock and real estate prices, apply? The art market exhibits few if any of the traditional indicators of speculation or other instabilities in pricing. Unlike real estate, most art is purchased with cash in hand. There are no sub-prime mortgages propping up the purchasing of art, no unstable supports to come crashing down in periods of price correction. One explanation of the rise of art prices might be found in the rapid growth of global wealth, and this liquidity shows no sign of drying up. Art may simply be a luxury good with limited supply and growing demand.

But market skeptics are really saying something more. Underlying their concerns is the sense that art is suffering from a bubble in taste. It is difficult not to feel that disproportionate amounts of money are being lavished on certain artists, but does this necessarily mean that the market is overdue for some kind of aesthetic correction? Perhaps the art world has simply become more tasteless and will stay that way.

It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but even as art prices have risen across the board, they have not risen in equal measure to one another. Postwar and contemporary art has come to occupy a place in the market that never existed for it in the past, while prices for French, Italian, and other European art from the 16th through mid-19th centuries have experienced little uplift. Everywhere we can see the evidence of this sea change, from the very introduction of contemporary art auctions to the rise of the international contemporary art fair to the so-called deaccessioning of museum collections to fund contemporary acquisitions. Of course, older does not always equal better, but as the dealer Richard L. Feigen recently wondered in The Art Newspaper, should a Damien Hirst sculpture really carry a price tag comparable to that of the Halifax Titian, one of the world’s last Titian portraits in private hands (and still on the market)?

Maybe contemporary collectors just don’t realize how far their money will go in the arts of earlier periods. Lawrence Salander of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries has bet the bank that he can educate them. This fall and winter, in cooperation with the London dealer Clovis Whitfield, Salander is mounting an ambitious exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, including works by El Greco, Parmigianino, and Pontormo, with price tags that are a fraction of what you’ll pay for a Warhol. To top it off, Salander will feature the first work identified as a Caravaggio for public sale in the United States in several decades. (In 2001, Sotheby’s sold the work as "Circle of Caravaggio" and still disputes the claim.) The price point of this work, titled "Apollo the Lute Player," will be determined by the high water marks recently set by Hirst, say sources close to the gallery. Should Hirst be in the same league as a Caravaggio, even a disputed one?
 
A correction in price, predicated on a correction in taste, assumes that the collectors of art still care about the standards of the past. In the end, in areas where art price cannot be traditionally explained, and where there seems to be no end in sight to the sticker shock, one begins to think that there are other factors at work. Art has always been a valuable commodity, but only in the last decade or two has it come to be perceived as an investment-grade asset, with rates of return in certain cases equaling or exceeding those of more standard financial markets. Now, while art continues to function as a luxury good, a sign of social status and even as a source of personal delight and aesthetic fulfillment, the top buyers are leading us into a new world that transcends aesthetic concerns. What comes after modernism? The answer is not postmodernism. It may be closer to moneyism.

While postwar art has been swept up in this new phenomenon, at the forefront of the movement are contemporary artists who know how to fashion work for the buying public. Remember Jeff Koons, the 1980s art star and original Wall Street dandy who has been doing career maintenance ever since his market tanked in the last recession? He’s back in the headlines. A work called "Blue Diamond," a 7-foot-wide sculpture of monumental jewelry that Koons designed in polished steel in 2005 and 2006, is going up for auction at Christie’s in November with an estimated price of $12 million. If it sells, the sculpture will far surpass Koons’ previous auction record set in 1991, when his "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" sold for $5.6 million.

This is taxi fare when compared to the new Koons on the block, Damien Hirst. While the medium of his art may be dead animals, formaldehyde, diamonds and skulls, the subject of his work is the art market itself, and his work’s suitability as an asset. The artist’s admirers regard his financial success as part of a sophisticated commentary on the art market, but I think it is the other way around. Hirst’s commentary on the market is really a means of achieving financial success. This summer, as we all now know, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull sculpture, "For the Love of God," was reportedly sold to an anonymous group of investors, according to Hirst spokesmen, for the asking price of $100 million, topping off $260 million in sales for his White Cube Gallery show. Notice that word choice of "investors" rather than "collectors."Truly, it is the investors who are deciding the future of postwar and contemporary art. Consider the hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen. In a rare interview in 2006, this media-shy recluse lamented to The Wall Street Journal, "It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over, and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself." It should be safe to assume that a hedge fund manager with a winning market track record lasting a quarter of a century is not in the business of losing money. Through his collection of art, variously reported to be worth between $300 million and $700 million and amassed over little more than five years, Cohen may have discovered work that gives him pleasure, but he has also found a way to diversity his portfolio. In 2004, Cohen purchased Hirst’s pickled shark, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1991), from Charles Saatchi, Hirst’s Maecenas, for what was then considered an outrageous price, $8 million (see more on Hirst’s shark in News, page 34 of this issue). But he still does not want to take it home. Instead, Cohen has convinced the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to display his purchase on loan for a set period of three years. Cohen’s investment benefits from the museum’s formidable aura, while the museum looks to hook a future patron.
 
When our nation’s finest museums are reduced to banks for an investor’s appreciating assets, the art world is suddenly far beyond the purview of critics. To really know what the future of art will bring, you’ll have to ask the investors.