Barnes storming

James writes:

In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Lance Esplund has written a passionate critique of the Barnes Foundation's planned move to downtown Philadelphia. For its analysis of the Barnes collection alone, the article is extraordinary. The full essay can be found here.

The sad story of the Barnes is one The New Criterion has been covering for years. With the publication of Esplund's essay, I thought this would be an appropriate time to bring them together in one place. In a 1991 Note & Comment, "The Outlook for the Barnes Foundation," we looked at the institution's poor financial outlook and the museum/school's effort to sell paintings. In "Betraying a legacy: the case of the Barnes Foundation," Roger Kimball called out the Foundation's fundraising effort, which involved shipping the collection around the world, in violation of the Barnes trust. Then in 1996, there was the alarming case of the foundation's black director bringing charges of racial bias against the town commissioners of Merion, Pennsylvania. And finally in 2005, in "The Barnes Foundation, RIP," we lamented the foundation's decision to relocate to Philadelphia.

Is the Barnes move a done deal? At this point, probably so. Esplund has written a definitive essay on what we are about to lose.

Gallery Chronicle (May 2010)

Joe Zucker Amy Hewes (1976), copyright: Joe Zucker, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

THE NEW CRTIERION
May 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Joe Zucker” at Mary Boone Gallery, “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art & “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” at Alexandre Gallery & “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” at Storefront, Brooklyn.

Joe Zucker was born in 1941 to a Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side, at a time when the Irish and Italian gangs of the area sparred over territories embroiled in black migration and white flight. He got out through varsity basketball and found a moment of jock glory on the squad at Miami University in Ohio. Yet Zucker also happened to be blessed with one of the more interesting minds in American art. This complicated his athletic career and his artistic one as well. Zucker has long been out of step with the dullness that has come to dominate contemporary artistic production.

In 1961, Zucker gave up playing basketball and returned to Chicago to enroll at the Art Institute, where he had been drawing in his spare time since the age of five. His teachers were thinking Braque and the School of Paris. Zucker was more interested in potboilers and the narrative art of Thomas Hart Benton. He passed through the Institute’s bachelor’s and master’s programs, and followed this up with a teaching stint in Minnesota. He arrived in New York in 1968, one of modern art’s more fruitful moments, when the avant-garde had just passed through the rabbit hole of minimalism and was beginning to re-embrace the craft and process of painting.

At the time, modernism’s recursive instinct seems to have reached its end-game. Minimalist art and sculpture had folded form back on itself to an infinite and emptying degree. Like other artists of his generation, Zucker used minimalist logic to structure his artistic practice, but he sought to expand this logic to maximal effect.

“You can be tempted into reducing and reducing to the point of emptiness, simply repeating terms dictated by the perimeter of the paint,” Zucker noted in an interview. “I wanted to breach the perimeter and get into the very substance of the painting. I saw that as a way of evading the self-defeating outcome implicit in the reductive logic of modernism.” By infusing his work with narrative and humor, Zucker charted out a singular artistic path.

From his graduate-school days, the subject of the painter’s canvas has been one of Zucker’s recurring interests. It was the material of oil, after all, that received the lion’s share of attention by the Abstract Expressionists. Taking a cue from the revival in weaving and craft-based art, Zucker turned this relationship around and moved the canvas to the foreground, from surface to subject matter. An early series of Zucker’s work consists of abstract weavings of colored strips, recalling the warp and weft of a painting’s canvas.

In the 1970s, Zucker developed work based on the “history of cotton,” which he first showed at New York’s Bykert Gallery, run by Klaus Kertess and Jeff Byers. A one-time assistant from the Bykert Gallery has now brought five of these large works back together for an important show. The fact that this assistant has become the mega-dealer Mary Boone may indicate her turn from the over-hyped painters of the 1980s to overlooked artists like Zucker, who came of age a decade before.[1]

Or maybe Boone is now turning to Zucker because this work from the 1970s appears to be the most politically charged of his career, and somehow relevant and palatable. On their face, these large canvases depict various sepia-toned scenes of the antebellum South: a paddle boat in Amy Hewes (1976); slaves and an overseer in Brick-Top, The Field Hand, and Lucretia Borgia (1976); bales of cotton stacked and hauled in Reconstruction (1976) and Paying Off Old Debts (1975); and the neoclassical facade of Old Cabell Hall in University of Virginia Law School (1976). Yet the layers of representation in Zucker’s cotton constructions complicate this single reading.

Zucker built his paintings through a self-invented process where craft, image, and logic came together in one worked-out puzzle. After dipping cotton in pigmented Rhoplex, a thick acrylic binder, Zucker applied the balls to canvas. The effect recalls pointillist brushstrokes frozen in high relief. By forming an image of its agricultural origin, the painting’s canvas becomes both medium and content, a work depicting its own history of production as much as the American past.

Just as minimalist logic can be air tight, even airless, Zucker’s systems risk closing up through their own hermetic seals. Zucker’s more recent work has consisted of drawings of container ships and pirates, constructed in various ways from rolls of canvas and paper, some illustrated, some literal, and all in need of unpacking. Zucker’s history of modernism has become Roger Fry by way of the Jolly Roger—a picture plane shot through with cannon balls.

The 1970s series stays more accessible by tapping into a main current of the evocative American narrative, when cotton was king. The rigor of Zucker’s flights of logic can still astonish. The craft that went into these works is remarkable to behold. Boone has done us a service by bringing together these history paintings that are a part of history, at a time when museums remain oblivious to the most important paintings of the living past.

Since Elie Nadelman first rubbed down the surface of his vernacular sculptures, modern artists have understood how the quality of an object changes through handling and care. Nicholas Carone has long been carving sculptures that resemble classical fragments, ones that could have spent some time at the bottom of Lago Maggiore. Such works have a sense of their own history sculpted right into them. The sculptures of Bruce Gagnier, whose art was recently on view at Lori Bookstein, show a similar physiognomy of neglect, maybe this time of self-neglect.

Some of Gagnier’s statues, like Seaman (the drowned sculpture) (2009), seem to have attracted barnacles while ingesting some brine. With mottled, raisin-like skin and distended bellies, other figures appear almost pickled, tipsy, as though their more uninhibited selves are showing through their classical skins. Gagnier molds each of his figures in hydrocal, a plaster-like medium, then applies a finish of pigment and wax. The unique surface treatment leaves the work with a worn, marble-like sheen.

Granted, these sculptures can be more than a little creepy. I am not sure I would want to share a studio apartment with one of the life-sized works—but I wouldn’t mind a visit. Odd figures have tales to tell.

The painter Shirley Jaffe is eighty-six-years young and has been a fixture in Paris for over half a century, yet the work of this native New Yorker can still be new to the American public. So much the better for us, as we get to discover her again and again. Following its exhibit at The Art Show earlier this year, Tibor de Nagy last month launched its third exhibition of Jaffe’s work with a survey from the last thirty years.[2]

Jaffe has led a career in reverse. The oldest work in the show, the hard-edged arrangement of The Gray Center (1969), is a mature construction of color planes and gentle surfaces. Jaffe’s more recent work, by contrast, shouts youthful indiscretion. In Hop and Skip (1987), Jaffe tossed those earlier, mature color planes sky-high and captured them mid-flight. Hard-edged confetti now spirals and twists against a white background.

The more the paintings open up, the more energy Jaffe manages to contain in them, even when hints of bricks and roofline pop through, as in the “New York Collage” series of 2009. The result, a mix of hard-edged color theory and expressionist line, has a comic boldness that seems both of the moment and for the ages, fresh and timeless.

For the past several years, Alexandre Gallery has been regularly showing Lois Dodd’s gem-like scenes of Maine, often oil on masonite measuring at most two feet square. This past month, Alexandre brought together a selection of Dodd’s older work matched with two recent cityscapes of the same scene painting over forty-years on.[3]

When Dodd first painted the city view from her studio window in the 1960s, she brought a hard-edged sensibility for structure and line to the urban scene. The highlight of this period on view at Alexandre was Men’s Shelter, April (1968). In this large oil on canvas, an ordinary back window opens to a geometry of rooflines, colors, and shadows, which come together like an abstract jigsaw puzzle. Planes of color edge up against each other and seem to pulsate from their edges.

Over several images, Dodd depicted the same scene at different times of day and different seasons. In another series from the same period, she captured the garden view from her apartment in April, October, and a foggy day in February.

When Dodd returned to this same “Second Street” view from her window many years later, she brought her growing lyrical sensibility. In the two works from 2009, hard edges gives way to color and fullness, as though the urban landscape has entered full bloom.

I wrote about the painter Deborah Brown three months ago in my survey of Bushwick and its new Storefront gallery. Brown’s urban skyscape was the show-stopper of this gallery’s inaugural group exhibition. Now a solo show of her recent work is on view in this vital little space.

Unlike many of her Bushwick colleagues, Brown arrived in this neighborhood as an established mid-career artist, but she quickly tapped into the community’s youthful, shared experience. Her lush representational work, which regularly shows at Lesley Heller Gallery in Manhattan, has often depicts flora and fauna. In Bushwick, Brown found an urban contrast in industrial ruin and natural growth.

In “The Bushwick Paintings,” her latest series, an accretion of vines and wires, flowers and fences vies against a background of factory towers and enveloping skies. The images glow through scrims of pigment, which bathe the atmosphere in vibrant reds and greens. Brown finds renewal out of the blight of a ruined landscape. Her vision, which comes out of Romantic sensibility, reflects the spirit of this rough landscape and the artists who now share it.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Joe Zucker” was on view at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, from March 25 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
2. “Bruce Gagnier: Incarnate” was on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
3. “Shirley Jaffe: Selected Paintings, 1969–2009” was on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, from March 11 through April 24, 2010. Go back to the text.
4. “Lois Dodd: Second Street Paintings” was on view at Alexandre Gallery, New York, from March 31 through May 1, 2010. Go back to the text.
5. “Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings” opened at Storefront, Brooklyn, on April 2 and remains on view through May 16, 2010. Go back to the text.

The Jacob Collins Interview

 

James writes:

He’s a figurehead of Classical Realism, a painter with anticipated exhibitions at Adelson Galleries, and the dean of his own art schools. He’s also the very accommodating subject of my September 2006 article in TNC called ’The new old school.’ Here is an interview I conducted with Collins in late Summer 2006 in anticipation of my article.

James Panero: What do you call your style of painting?

Collins: I would say Traditional Realist. That refers to the period that begins in the end of the Renaissance and goes to the end of the academic period. Or maybe Classical Realist, which is an interesting label that was coined about thirty-five years ago. It’s a useful word because it’s a paradox historically. The classicists and the realists were very opposed to one another 150 years ago. But the two of them could have constituted the heart of the dialectical mode in traditional painting, especially in pre-modern painting. So I think Classical Realist works. In fact, the Classical Tradition may be as good as a label as any.

JP: In part you are following in the tradition of the French academy.

C: Absolutely. The influence is very strong. I have a lot of respect for French academic painting. One of the arguments that I make is even if 19th century French painting is not a perfect example of Classical painting, it is at least the most recent case of it; it’s where Classical painting was before the great tradition began to fall apart. It’s something we can connect to most easily because it’s not very far away temporally; it’s only a teacher’s teacher’s teacher, and then we’re right back into the nineteenth century. So the message of French art and the ideas underlying their message are part of the cultural memory.

JP: And at the same time, you’re not a history painter. You’re empirical, in the model of Thomas Eakins.

C: That American tradition is a very strong influence on me. Eakins, the Hudson river painters; then the American painters who came after this: the Luminist painters, and the Tonalists—these art forms are both empirical and aesthetic and not narrative at all. I think there is something very American about that.

JP: Do you see what you’re doing then as more American, or rather, as following in the French model. How do you position your art in terms of national style?

C: Well for one thing, it’s a very American phenomenon. There are schools of traditional painting in Europe, but Americans are running most of them. I think this has to do with the fact that after the war, New York City took over the world as the center of art. Maybe in some ways, the Americans feel confident, or are less worried about falling behind in the art scene; maybe the Europeans are still trying to catch up. Personally, I think its time to move forward, and I don’t see post-war modernism and post-modernism as moving forward. I’m very happy to move on.

JP: How does your art relate to the tradition of modernism: specifically, what you saw growing up in New York? Does your art relate at all to postmodernism?

C: On some levels, I’m sympathetic with parts of the modern program, especially when you compare it to postmodernism. I’m very fond of the modernists’ idea of the art object as a powerful thing: that art is transformative to both the artist and the viewer, that art experiences could cause emotion. One of the negative things about postmodernism is that it’s just smart-ass, and that’s not something I’m interested in. It’s not overtly, or purely political, but it makes a smart political stance that’s not about the intrinsic quality of the art.

I think that’s one of the ways in which you can trace the history of postmodernism—that is to say, in terms of the sacrifices it made in the quality of the art work. I believe in a traditionalist approach to art. Even the modernists valued the art object in itself. One of the misfortunes with postmodernism is a loss of qualitative value.

So I grew up with those influences and with the idea of art being magical, or artists having some mysterious talents. I love that idea—belief in the art object, in itself—the aesthetic of the thing—even after so much was desecrated and people stopped caring about the art object. And certainly in the 1950s the New York artists cherished the idea of the art object, which was the influence of an earlier period.

JP: Realism has come to be associated, in the modernist view at least, with kitsch, or low art illustration. It’s not tough minded. Have you encountered such reaction to your work?

C: I encountered that, though I had some very wonderful instructors who would have called themselves modernists. One of the things I noticed when I was an art student was that a lot of artists or young art students were made to feel very culturally insecure—even in a socially or socio-economically way. In light of this, they tried to pursue a kind of art, like modernism, that seemed to push forward.

Traditional art was, essentially, the art of provincials or hicks, not intellectual or significant. I heard a lot of that and I had trouble with it, but it didn’t effect me very much. I guess I was confident that I was trying to become an traditional artist, despite the mainstream view of traditional art. And also, I didn’t feel like I was anybody’s intellectual inferior because of the fact that I wanted to draw and paint classical art.

JP: How did your history studies at Columbia university relate to your aesthetic development?

C: I was already committed from an early age, 14 or 15, to doing exactly what I’ve always been doing: art. But when I went to Columbia, I didn’t know about other people who were interested in traditional art like me. Later on, I found a lot of wonderful people who were. When I considered going to an art school for college, I didn’t really know, but my assumption was that they would be running either a modernist program, or an illustration program; something in me didn’t really want to do either of those.

So I studied history, but I wasn’t a deeply committed historian.

JP: You found your direction before your college years.

C: Right, though college probably influenced more than I’d like to admit. But I wanted to do art and I had already done a couple of things that got me very excited about doing art—some art programs in my summers off from college. I also took time off in the middle of college to go to Europe.

JP: At what age did you start to paint in the manner that you paint now?

C: It was basically what I was trying to do in high school. I wasn’t good at it, but I was trying to do it. I spent an awful lot of time copying. I copied, as a kid in my room, artists like Michelangelo, and others. I gradually got better, and I had teachers when I was young who were good, so I received good direction. It was right after college, in the very late 1980s, that I started to meet up with other artists. That’s when I started to discover that they, too, were doing this kind of art that related to the traditional art forms.

JP: Why is the nude so central in your form of Classical art?

C: I think the nude is central because it is at the core of the Classical tradition. In this regard, the Humanist tradition and the Classical tradition go together. When you go to 5th century Greece, you see the beginning of Classical Humanism. The human figure in the aesthetic center. That’s the crucible of it all, and even the architects I know will say that the architecture back then is Humanist Classicism. The Renaissance was the original return to the Classical Tradition. The renaissance artists focused on the human figure—and since there is now a return to Classical Humanism, the nude is naturally central.

One of the definitions of art is ‘us representing ourselves,’ and in a broader sense that’s what’s happening in art right now. That’s what you know about painting when you look at Egyptian art; they’re representing themselves. When you think about Renaissance painting, they’re representing their values and their proportions, from the way they dress, to the way they hold their head, to the way they look with their eyes; it’s who they are, it’s who they wish they were. And as we are now engaged in another form of this tradition, we try to find something in the art, maybe some kind of picture of ourselves.

JP: Is there something about our culture today that would necessitate your kind of investigation?

C: I’m not sure that I have a coherent philosophy that could address that question. But it seems that, in the twentieth century, a lot of energy went into dismantling traditional art forms. I don’t particularly love that. Whether it was good or bad, this spirit has definitely wound down. So much of the energy of Modernism came from the electricity of breaking the pieces of the art object apart. I’m certainly not claiming that there are no pieces, but that now, in Traditionalism, it’s about putting the pieces back together.

JP: Are you part of a movement?

C: I would say yes, When I was a kid, I felt like I was isolated in my pursuit of traditional art forms; and this despite the fact that I am a social person and I do love the idea of sharing and doing things together. There’s a certain amount of regret that I experienced when I was launching into a career where I was pretty isolated: I was doing Traditional art in the 1980s, not postmodern art with references to the past. I really wanted to make a claim, and gradually, one by one, I found other people who were interested in the same thing—in the beginning I was quite amazed and excited to find another person who also wanted to draw a figure with a coherent structure, or to learn how to put together a painting with paint and glaze. It was all a total mystery when I started. Little by little, I started randomly bumping into other people, and there was no planning in it at all—especially when I began teaching, I started finding people in very mysterious ways: people popped up and showed up at the door. I was very inspired. I found that I was meeting a whole lot of people who had the same strong desire for Traditionalism as me.

JP: Why did you found two new schools of art? Why teach and paint; why not just paint?

When I was a kid, I looked at art and I recognized that all of the artists that were really great came out of dense little worlds of artists. They all evolved in and thrived in communities where there were piles and piles of artists who often all lived within blocks of each other. And this is true for the Spanish school, for those in Rome, in Paris, in Amsterdam, and in the New York of 1880s. I realized that all the artists I really loved were friends with other people who were important in the art world. I recognized that I wasn’t going to be who I really wanted to be without help—and I was really ambitious, I wanted to be a great artist. I just looked at it historically and empirically and realized it wasn’t going to happen all by myself. Nobody gets it all by themselves. That inspired me to a great extent to start building the community that I wished I had been born into. I knew I needed to be among like-minded peers; to share and compete, to take turns raising the bar. I came across some artists with similar goals, but I didn’t find that energy we associate with the historical schools. So I started teaching and trying to build a scene. I felt like I was young enough, I was in my 20s, to be a student in my school as well as the teacher. If I was going to inherit the place in the art scene that I wanted, I should be starting at it myself by teaching. It’s not just like I have been teaching other people, these really gifted artists have taught me as much as I have given them.

Right now, there are people in my studio who are really gifted and hard working and are trying to be better than me. I don’t want to be left behind by this truck; I keep on getting pushed along by it. In the other schools of this larger world, I see how it happens from the outside. A lot of people have the insight to develop skills and techniques—they’re all drafting off of each other.

JP: How has the public reception been for Realist art?

C: It’s very interesting, I didn’t expect there to be very much public reception to it, and gradually all the little pieces are starting to come together; more artists keep showing up, training each other, inspiring each other to get better; more galleries start catching on and wanting to be involved; more collectors start to be curious about it, and the more collectors there are, the more respect the artists get.

For quite a while when I was starting out, most of the market in New York was for Modern art. The market for Classically oriented Realism was out of town—and it was mostly in galleries out in California and around the middle of the country. In New York, there seemed to be an anti-Traditionalism with respect to art. Part of Modernism, from the beginning, has been anti-traditionalist; in fact one of its defining factors. Because New York was historically coming out of a commitment to modernism, it was hard for New York galleries to come around and embrace really traditional art. But now it’s changing, it’s changing fast. The galleries are really recognizing the passions of the artists and the interests of the collectors.

JP: What are some of the gallery names where we might be able to see this art?

C: One of the galleries is a gallery I’m with: Hirschl and Adler. It’s exciting that they’ve made a commitment in the last 5 or 10 years to get behind this kind of art, which is important because they’re a blue-chip gallery.

The John Pence Gallery shows this kind of art, you see it at Forum Gallery, Eleanor Ettinger, Arcadia, and Spanierman. More and more galleries of all different types are showing and selling the artists that have been moving in this direction.

There’s a lot of Realism at the Chelsea galleries too, but most of it verges on Post-Modernism because the art seems be to kidding; it does not have the desire to be serious. Its not making a go at the Classical tradition.

JP: So if you were to make a sales pitch for your new school, would you tell artists that you could be a success by pursuing traditional art?

C: I’ve been interviewing students for years. The one thing that I tell them is that it’s crazy. They’re often very capable and talented people who could do all kinds of other things, and they would be guaranteed success, and would be able to make mortgage payments and raise a family, so they should probably not do traditional art. But if they are going to do it—and this is not one hundred percent true, but it’s mostly true—the people who get really good at it, do well and sell their work. It’s not some sort of art world crapshoot where you have to have an angle and know the right people, though there is some of that. There are people who get spectacularly good at painting too; these are the people who are subtle and aesthetic and somehow manage to speak in their own voice. Traditional art has worked, and so far it’s been working, and it may be that fashion dumps us off to die, but there’s a growing response for the works to get better. It feels like Traditional Realism is a little more on solid ground these days.