Gallery Chronicle (June 2009)

Gabrielle Evertz, Four Reds + blue green © Gabrielle Evertz

THE NEW CRITERION
June 2009

Gallery Chronicle

by James Panero

On Op Art, Gabriele Evertz at Metaphor Gallery, James Little at June Kelly Gallery & Nicolas Carone at Lohin Geduld Gallery.

The excellent optical painters working today are the survivors of a peculiar history. Back in the mid-1960s, the hard-edged abstraction that arrived under the banner of Op Art turned into a bad trip for high modernism. No other art movement blew up and burned out quite so spectacularly.

In 1965 William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art organized a blockbuster exhibition of Op Art called “The Responsive Eye.” The artists in this show dispensed with the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. They largely did away with the naturalism of oil on canvas. Drawing on the intensity of new acrylic paints, they used contrasting lines and complementary colors to accentuate the biomechanics of perception. The results were immediate. Although grounded in over a century of study, the flickering, throbbing, pulsating works on view required little explanation. The show set attendance records. It was a sensation—and a problem. Up against 1960s popular culture, optical art came to be appreciated for its sociological relevance rather than its formal innovation. Its designs were exploited for commercial and cultural ends.

The optical artists in the MOMA show had deep roots in the history of modern art and science. This ancestry could be traced back to Goethe’s Theory of Colors of 1810. Here Goethe first took note of the chromatic dissidence of light-dark interaction—the colors that can be observed along the lines separating white and black. Goethe also investigated the volatility of complementary (opposite) colors as arranged on a color wheel—red against green, yellow against violet, and so forth. The Divisionism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, based on the research of Michel Eugène Chevreul, further advanced perceptual theory. Twentieth-century Constructivism connected the visual absolutes of geometric abstraction with Socialist idealism, which went on to inform the aesthetics of the Bauhaus.

Among the artists in “The Responsive Eye” was Josef Albers, a Bauhaus colleague of Johannes Itten and a patriarch of color theory who influenced a generation of artists at Black Mountain College and Yale University. Victor Vasarely came through Alexander Bortnyik’s studio, the Budapest center for the Bauhaus. Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, one-time roommates at Yale, were Albers’s former students and also included in the show.

Yet just as the optical art of Russian Constructivism was appropriated (and later discarded) by Socialism, Op Art suffered a similar fate in the hands of 1960s pop culture. Serious painting was degraded into a mere fashion phenomenon. Time magazine coined the term Op Art in 1964. The facile alignment of perceptual art and Pop Art, which had infiltrated public consciousness at the start of the decade, gave optical abstraction an undeserved superficial gloss.

Bridget Riley, perhaps the most recognizable artist in the 1965 exhibition for her swirling black-and-white compositions, first noticed something wrong on her taxi ride from the airport to the MOMA opening. There in the shop windows off Madison Avenue, printed on the clothing designs, were her paintings. How the images from a yet-to-open art exhibition ended up on the ready-to-wear lines of Seventh Avenue can be attributed to Larry Aldrich, an art collector and dress manufacturer. With the acquiescence of Seitz, Aldrich purchased Op works before the show and created fabric designs for his Young Elegante line of clothing. Through his distribution of these textile patterns, which also included works by Stanczak, Vasarely, and Anuszkiewicz, Op motifs ended up on everything from lamps and upholstery to maternity wear and girdles. There was even Op cosmetics. Sears carried Op wallpaper. Pfizer used Op imagery on the packaging of its antivertigo medication.

Riley eventually sued for copyright infringement. Yet nothing could stop the transformation of Op from serious art into faddish design. The opening party for “The Responsive Eye,” heavily photographed and filmed (the young Brian de Palma made a documentary of it), featured women with beehive haircuts and Op clothing head-to-toe. Life magazine published a fashion spread of Op apparel photographed in MOMA’s own galleries. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily also covered the fashion extensively. As Riley noted in 1965, “‘The Responsive Eye’ was a serious exhibition but its qualities were obscured by an explosion of commercialism, band-wagoning and hysterical sensationalism.”

Art critics generally dismissed optical art. Barbara Rose in Artforum called it “mindless.” Clement Greenberg labeled it “novelty art.” Reviewing the MOMA exhibition in The New York Times, however, John Canaday praised Op’s mass appeal: “This is a very satisfying thing for a public that has been puzzled and offended by a long series of modern isms. Optical art has a combination of virtues new to modern art: it fascinates, even if for different reasons, both the esthete and the layman.”

In the later 1960s, the popular appreciation of Op affected the art a second time, as mod fashion gave way to psychedelic drugs. Commercialism had already damaged Op by the time of the MOMA show. Now acid kitsch brought it to a new low. In a survey of Op Art at the Columbus Museum in Ohio in 2007, the libertarian art critic Dave Hickey took note of this secondary appropriation by linking the art movement to drug use and sexual liberation: “What the special effects of optical art do, specifically, is introduce us to that ‘stranger [to ourselves].’ … It replaces the elite, intellectual pleasure of ‘getting it’ with the egalitarian fun-house pleasure of disorientation, of trying to understand something that you cannot.”

From international socialism to slimming fashions to acid trips, the aggressive sensuality and easy reproducibility of perceptual art proved to be its undoing. By the end of the 1960s, Op Art seemed over. Minimal sculptors like Tony Smith adopted the hard edges of perceptual painting for machined materials. Process artists like Thornton Willis restored the Ab-Ex brushstroke to painting while still investigating the perceptual ambiguities of complementary colors.

Yet Op Art never really went away as it was reabsorbed into general abstract practice. Generations of artists continued to investigate abstraction’s optical possibilities. Today the abstract painter Gabriele Evertz, who recently ended a group show at Metaphor Gallery in Brooklyn, draws a conscious connection with her Op Art forebears.[1] Evertz is an intense colorist who constructs her work out of precise vertical lines. A former student and now professor at Hunter College, Evertz is among the current generation of artists known as the Hunter Color School, initiated by E. C. Goossen in the 1960s.

Evertz tempers her optical effects with a more traditional interest in the overall mood of color. Reds, blues, and yellows alternately predominate on her canvases. Evertz also goes beyond the interference test-patterns of 1960s Op for more subtle modulations of tint, angle, and line. Colors leach and glow, but in beautiful rather than simply disorienting ways. Evertz gives perceptual art a new confidence in control and variation.

The abstract artist James Little is a painter for whom the term hard-edged is a gross injustice. His latest work is now on view at June Kelly Gallery.[2] While Little constructs his compositions in sharp angles and straight lines, his silk-like treatment of surface is uniquely his own. Little has developed his own encaustic medium, which he applies at high temperature in over twenty coats. With gestural brushwork, unlike his Op Art predecessors, Little is not easily duplicated.

For his earlier work, Little combed his shiny surfaces in rich layers of brushwork. At this latest show, he smooths out a more matte medium like the icing on a cake. The tone is softer than in previous iterations. Sharp punctuations have given way to a more even rhythm. Triangles have been compressed into more vertical arrangements. I miss some of the brushy surface, as well as the aggression of Little’s former primary palette. But the overall effect remains supremely assured. Work such as When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008) is particularly engaging and deeply enigmatic—a feeling you would never experience in work concerned with optics alone.

Today the power of paint, on full display in optical art, comes as a welcome tonic to a period in art dominated by Pop and Dada sculpture. Next up: Tim Bavington, a Hickey protegé born in 1966, whose chromatic work draws on Gene Davis. Bavington will be featured in his third solo exhibition at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery in September.

Finally, a note about time, and an artist who bends it. Born in Little Italy, New York, in 1917, Nicolas Carone is a second-generation Ab-Ex painter who studied with Hans Hofmann, knew Frank Sinatra, and introduced Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Rauschenberg to the Stable Gallery, where he once worked. For twenty-five years, beginning in 1964, Carone taught at the New York Studio School. He later established his own painting school in Italy. Yet from 1962 to 1999, Carone largely kept his own developing art from public view. Now in his nineties, he is back with extraordinary fresh, youthful work. Mixed in with examples from the 1950s, Carone’s latest work is now on view at Lohin Geduld Gallery.[3]

A one-time representational painter, Carone is imbued with the history of classical art. In his sculpture, a few examples of which are on display in this show, he takes Italian stones and carves them into lost relics, bits of travertine figures rubbed and worn as though excavated from the bottom of the Tiber. The tactile crudity calls to mind the late sculptures of Elie Nadelman. Carone’s paintings similarly alternate between figural composition and abstract design, where the human form emerges and disappears from view. The best work here is almost entirely abstract. Carone’s line dips and curves without embellishment, carving out hints of the figure and moving with its own energy across the surface. Where Carone has rubbed out some areas of pigment, the line appears to dive beneath the picture plane. Ranging from classical painting to de Kooning, Carone’s diverse artistic influences emerge and disappear from view just like the figures in his compositions.

At Lohin Geduld there is the sense of encountering an emerging Abstract Expressionist artist for the first time. Like his lost Roman statues, his Old Master compositions, and his abstract designs, Carone is an anachronism and a thoroughly contemporary artist all over again.

Notes
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1. “Color Exchange: Berlin–New York” was on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, New York from March 27 through April 26, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “James Little: De-Classified” opened at June Kelly Gallery, New York, on May 7 and remains on view through June 9, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. “Nicolas Carone: Abstraction/Figuration: Works on Paper” opened at Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, on April 30 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.

Beyond hard-edged

James Little, When Aaron Tied Ruth (2008), Oil and wax on canvas, 72 ½ x 94 inches

James writes:

In May 2005 I wrote about an exhibition that stopped me in my tracks. The show was called “Raising the Bar” at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Queens, with paintings by Thornton Willis and James Little.

Stop the presses! Hold that headline! Run a retraction! All of two pages ago I doubted whether painting would ever be “back.” But yes, Virginia. Painting is Back. At the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, “Thornton Willis and James Little: Raising the Bar” has become the sleeper hit of the season, with a run extended now into May. I caught these two painterly statesmen just hours before deadline. With richly brushed surfaces of oils and wax, James Little proves that not all hard edge is created equal: the vibrating colors and racing lines of Exit Strategy (2004) dazzle the eye. Thornton Willis, meanwhile, has worked through Minimalism and Cubism since the 1970s to arrive at a totemic synthetic of modern painting. Dog Fight (2002), my favorite piece of the show, even evinces Beckmann. Willis builds up heaping layers of Cubist castoffs, drafting marks, and colored planes. Little lures us in with sensuous surfaces of silk and quicksand, and colors as sharp as needles. The two play perfectly together—a double-stroke engine in paint and a humming dynamo of potential.

Readers of this space will be aware of my continued interest in Willis, who recently finished a second solo show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. Now James Little is back with his own solo exhibition at June Kelley gallery in Soho. I went to the opening last night and will have more to say about it in my next gallery chronicle. Little’s treatment of surface is unique. He builds up his painting surfaces with twenty coats of encaustic, a combination of pigment and wax that he formulates and brushes on at high temperature. No mere masking-tape hard-edger, Little needs to be seen in person. His exhibition will be on view through June 7.

Gallery chronicle (May 2009)

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) © P.A.R. Photo by Marc Domage

THE NEW CRITERION
MAY 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

Stop the presses: the Gagosian Gallery has put on the best gallery show of the season, maybe the year. How could it be that this gallery, which for years epitomized the overindulgences of contemporary art, has mounted “Picasso: Mosqueteros”?[1] I shall discuss this momentarily. But first the show. This large exhibition in Chelsea of the paintings and prints of late Picasso is breathtaking. The Picasso biographer John Richardson has selected and arranged the work in the gallery himself. Many of the best paintings come from the collection of Picasso’s heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The gallery has published a sumptuous catalogue with an extensive essay by Richardson on Picasso’s last years at his country estate of Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, on the French Riviera. (This being Gagosian, there is also a daft essay by the contemporary-art bogeyman Jeff Koons.) For those of us eagerly awaiting the final fourth volume of the Life of Picasso from the eighty-five-year-old Richardson, the catalogue is a tempting treat. But the show itself is the real feast. Here Richardson makes the case for the value of the last years of the artist’s life. As Picasso entered his tenth decade (he died in 1973 at the age of 91), he went into overdrive. His high-performance output “constituted a Great Late Phase,” according to Richardson, “one in which he felt free to do whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted, regardless of correctness, political, social, or artistic.”

The press has been gushing over the show—and rightly so. It has been twenty-five years since the last (and the first) exhibition of the late paintings of Picasso came to New York. Enough time has passed that it is easy to forget we had many of the same discussions on the revelations of late Picasso a quarter of a century ago. Late Picasso is forever being rediscovered.

The 1984 Guggenheim show, organized by Gret Schiff and originally booked for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, almost never saw the light of day. There was limited interest in the subject. A 1973 exhibition on late Picasso at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon was a summer flop. Robert Hughes called it “more process than product.” He also slammed the show with a one-line dismissal: “Picasso appeared to have spent his dotage at a costume party in a whorehouse.” The 1980s gave late Picasso a warmer welcome. During his lifetime, people had been “incinerated in the furnace of Picasso’s psyche,” as Richardson describes it. A decade after his death, the feminist reaction to the superman artist, following the 1964 publication of Françoise Gilot’s tell-all book Life with Picasso, had dissipated. Tastes were also changing. The bloom was off the rose of high abstraction. Picasso always “loathed” abstraction, according to Richardson. “He never painted an abstract painting and he wanted to make his painting even more representative.” By the 1980s the manic representational brushwork of Picasso’s fast and furious final years came to be seen as the harbinger of neo-expressionism.

In March 1984, Jed Perl wrote a definitive essay on the subject of late Picasso in these pages, titled “Picasso’s finale.” “In the 1950s,” he wrote, “Picasso seemed an old hedonist fading away in the glare of the Mediterranean sun. The work of the last five years reveals a very different man: the wisest bacchant of them all.” Hughes remained circumspect: “No exhibition in memory has been so full of eyes (or of anuses and genitals, his other fetish objects)… . Picasso’s last decade contains little that can compare with his work in the 30 years after 1907, when his transformation not only of modernist style but of the very possibilities of painting was so vast in scope, deep in feeling and authoritative in its intensity.” Both critics came to agree with André Malraux’s understanding of the artist in Picasso’s Mask (the title of Malraux’s 1974 book). “I must absolutely find the mask,” Picasso told Malraux.

The raffish cast of characters in Picasso’s final paintings represents the artist’s masked personae, avatars of his artistic ego and totems against death, a fifty-two-painting deck of death cards shuffled through the history of art. With his voluminous output, Picasso tried to deal every possible hand to the hangman. He was “so frightened of death—you could never mention his will to him,” says Richardson. Following surgery in the spring of 1966, Picasso never took a day off from painting, drawing, or printmaking. He constructed two additional studios at Notre-Dame-de-Vie to accommodate his production. In the last three years of his life alone, Picasso may have painted up to four hundred paintings. Richardson has discovered that around his ninetieth birthday Picasso painted six huge paintings in less than one week. The final years represented “an amazing burst of volcanic energy. He wanted to somehow assimilate the whole Western figurative tradition and Picassify it.”

The great relief comes from how Picasso chose to Picassify his own late work. Picasso’s bull-and-anus motif had grown tedious. His over-sexualization of the visual world had become a cartoon-like cliché, one urinal scrawl after another. The parade of battered wives in his portraits was also growing dreary, as Picasso himself came to recognize. Today’s blond beauty, everyone knew, would become tomorrow’s succubus, a vagina-dentata gorgon forever gnawing at Picasso’s pathetically vulnerable Andalusian arch masculinity. His daughter Paloma once remarked that “people were happy to be consumed by him. They thought it was a privilege.” Maybe so, but it grew increasingly unappetizing to watch Picasso consume his cannibalistic meals. He was that child-Titan forever licking his chops and showing his plate cleaned of limbs and noses.

The final years took a different turn. As Picasso became more housebound in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, he introduced new and various forms of visual stimulation. He projected Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, featuring the Amsterdam musketeers (the “Mosqueteros” of the Gagosian title), on his studio wall. He was a movie buff. He watched television. Picasso turned his attention away from reality, his personal sexual reality, reality as filtered through cubism and expressionism, and focused on these new influences. Rather than devour the lives around him, he began to chew on the more palatable (palettable?) legacies of Rembrandt, Velásquez, Goya, El Greco, and van Gogh.

Kenneth Clark has described a major artist like Picasso, burning through his final stage, as someone who paints in an “unholy rage.” On the surface, Picasso appeared to do just that. His furious production at Gagosian seems simply mad. But the show ends up oddly apollonian. Picasso was attempting to scare off death while at the same time diligently preparing the decor for his own pharaonic tomb. Compared to his earlier work, there is less visceral rage in these final paintings and more consistent energy. The Gagosian paintings are mainly enormous playing-card portraits of kings, jacks, and jokers popping up in a roll call of stock art-historical characters. The show is an Old Master museum hall perceived through Picasso-colored glasses.

“How could these unashamedly outrageous paintings,” Richardson asks, “with their farcical irony, their caricatural baroquerie, their glut of genitals, their science-fiction time warp and subversive black comedy, be reconciled to the accepted precepts of art history?” The answer is that these conservative paintings are pure art history, a survey course by the aging don offered up in titles like the Dutch-figured Tête d’homme du 17^ème siècle de face (1967).

The show begins with Femme assise dans un fauteuil (1962). This turns out to be a straight portrait of Picasso’s mistress Jacqueline, the only one of its kind in the show. It is the earliest and most real work on view—different in a different way from the rest of the paintings. (The remaining exhibition is different in much the same way.) Portrait de l’homme à l’épée et à la fleur (1969) is a later standout, an interpretation of a Velásquez dwarf-portrait but here masked and wearing a flower in his hair (which Richardson believes to be a reference to hippie fashion).

Now for a word about the venue. Look closely at the provenance of one of the paintings and you will notice that Homme à la pipe (1968) is on loan from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection. These are the same Cohens who put Damien Hirst’s shark in the Metropolitan Museum. They are collectors who have themselves become poster children for the overinflation of interest in terrible contemporary work. Their guide on this journey has been the gallery owner Larry Gagosian. In his catalogue essay, Gagosian writes, “The opportunity to present Picasso’s work in a contemporary gallery such as ours epitomizes just how relevant and thought-provoking his work continues to be today.” With seven high-profile galleries around the globe, Gagosian has an imperial understanding of promising markets, and he knows how to occupy them. He has applied his Midas touch to some of the most undeserving artists of our times. Late Picasso, far from undeserving, fits his bill of sale as well. The late period offers up a clutch of available work of similar quality by a name-brand artist, allowing for an inflation of comparable prices. So long as this translates into scholarly exhibitions free of charge, more power to him.

Finally, a word about an upcoming show in Connecticut.[2] The classical realist Edward Minoff has done for the seascape what Jacob Collins has accomplished with the figure. A former graffiti artist and professional cartoonist who has dedicated his life to classical art after meeting Collins in the late 1990s, Minoff has become a master of the breaking wave and an authority on the rolling surf. In his paintings, green translucent waves perfectly curl up in arcs and dips and ripples. Minoff grew up observing the beach at Fire Island, Long Island and continues to make his studies there: topographical studies of water and wind, color studies of misty sunlight at dawn, compositional studies of ideal moments of flood. He never works from photographs, one of the precepts of Collins’s schools and something that separates the work from photo-realism.

Until now Minoff has worked small, perfecting his seascapes over five years in jewel-like horizontal compositions. Starting last October, Minoff determined to take on a more epic seascape composition in the manner of Collins’s “Eastholm Project,” which I wrote about in June 2008. Along with several smaller paintings, including some poetic moonscapes, Minoff will be unveiling his eight-foot-wide painting, Waves, at Cavalier Galleries in Greenwich this month. I recently paid a studio visit to see Minoff apply the finishing touches. With his growing ambition and focused talent, Minoff is an artist to watch and enjoy.

Notes
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1. “Picasso: Mosqueteros” opened at Gagosian Gallery, West 21st Street, New York, on March 26 and remains on view through June 6, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. “Edward Minoff” will be on view at Cavalier Galleries, Greenwich, Connecticut, from May 14 through May 28, 2009. Go back to the text.