Gallery Chronicle (September 2015)

Stanley Whitney, james brown sacrifice to apollo (2008), Oil on linen, 72 × 72 in. Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2015

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange” at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Stanley Whitney is a painter of color, a double identity that has long complicated his role in the story of art. As an abstract colorist, Whitney has drawn from an array of influences to arrive at a signature style of stacked square fields interwoven with rhythm, a synesthetic syncopation of visible music. As a black painter born in Philadelphia in 1946, one who places aesthetic above sociological concerns, Whitney has never fit within the assumptions of what an artist of his identity is supposed to do or be. “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” a must-see exhibition of his recent work now at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Lauren Haynes, helps to right this wrong.1 It also reminds us of the joys and sorrows, the feeling for art that has been missed, and the many artists who, for too long, have been marginalized, sidelined, and left out of view because of the politics of identity.

Whitney’s enigmatic paintings do not answer questions. Instead they question answers. As Whitney explains in his catalogue interview with Lowery Stokes Sims: “The thing about reading abstract art is that you have to be open, you have to bring a lot to it. You have to be willing to admit you don’t know.” In the loft-like main gallery of the Studio Museum, his work absorbs easy assumptions and returns a complexity of emotions.

Whitney explores these feelings through a similar but not serial framework. His structure can call to mind Josef Albers, who had been a teacher of deep influence at Yale University, where Whitney earned his MFA in 1972. Like Albers, Whitney also composes his color in blocks, mostly large and square, but next to rather than on top of one another, with softer edges and with fields of various transparencies that can at times reveal their brushwork and the colors beneath, while others float fully on the surface.

Whitney’s blocks rest on strips of color that divide his canvases vertically into shelves of varying height, often compressing in size the lower he goes, as though pushed down by the weight of the blocks above. Whitney explains how these divisions in part emerged from a stay in Rome, when he visited the Etruscan museum in Volterra: “I saw how they just had everything stacked up—all these funeral urns just stacked up, and I said, ‘You know, Stanley, you’re going to stack the color and let the magic be in the color.’ ” A series of small untitled black gouaches on paper, included in the Studio Museum exhibition, isolate these divisions.

Just as his compositions are pressed top to bottom, Whitney’s colors also squeeze side to side, distilled through another set of untitled gouache studies on paper that get cut down to square when translated to canvas. “Right now I’m looking at a lot of Paolo Veronese’s painting and it’s funny because when I look at his paintings, I think about weight,” he explains. “I think about transitions. I think about the color. I think about how well he draws. I think about how something sits, how something touches.”

Like the best studio painters who came of age in the post-minimalist scene of the 1970s, Whitney has a keen sense for what edges of color can do: whether colors lay on top of one another, or push and pull, or rub together with an energized friction. He also considers how colors balance together, weaving edges to help counteract a single sense of front and back, figure and ground, dominance and recession. “I worry more that my work has good transitions and that there’s a lot to look at and that you can get in and out of the spaces,” he says. “In other words, if you fall in love with that blue, your eye can get out of that blue and move to the red or the pink. I think more about transitions that way.”

Whitney explains how his sense for composition emerged from another Italian. Through Giorgio Morandi, he says, “I got more into an architectural kind of space. . . . I liked how quiet they were.” For this abstract painter, the buttercream softness of Morandi’s paint handling comes off as a more direct relation than the overt gestures of Abstract Expressionism: “The gesture is in the paint itself, like laying the paint down—whether it’s thick or thin.” Further influences include Velázquez (“the way he touches the canvas”), Hans Hofmann (“he opened a lot of doors for people”), even Egyptian art: “I realized I could put forms, colors and marks together and still have a lot of air. The space was still there. This was important because I thought previously that if I put colors or forms next to each other that I would lose the space. Then I realized that the space is in the color, not around the color.” Whitney’s color fields weave together like the warp and weft of textiles. Quilting traditions, such as the folk quilts of Gee’s Bend, the site of a former cotton plantation in Alabama, find another resonance in his work: “To me color is all about being tactile, so definitely it’s about textiles. . . . I feel like I’m from there.”

Beyond these examples, Whitney’s greatest influence, as with most abstractionists, has been Cézanne, whom he calls a “revelation.” Like Cézanne, Whitney weaves his colorful compositions into synthetic wholes that shake apart as much as they come together. They vibrate and sing with a synesthetic soul that goes to the heart of modernist abstraction and that has always been rooted in music. Cézanne, explains Whitney, “used color in terms of music. I felt his color had great rhythm. I was thinking of Charlie Parker. It was then that I could see that what you bring to the paintings is your culture. There is something about my work in terms of the rhythm it has—a kind of polyrhythm.”

Several of the titles of the large paintings on display, one up to eight-feet square, allude to music and stimulate these aural-visual associations. The painting james brown sacrifice to apollo (2008), with its yellows, oranges, and reds, feels like the lights of a hot stage bursting with music and motion.My Tina Turner (2013), with its blocks full of pink, conveys a more feminine lead. Dance the Orange (2013), the title of another painting as well as the exhibition itself, comes from Rilke’s Sonnets of Orpheus, which include the synesthetic exhortation to “Dance the flavor of this fruit as we experience it!/ Make of the orange a dance.”

Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2014), Black gouache on Fabriano paper, 11 × 15 in., Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York 

The attraction of Whitney’s work is undeniable, exhibiting a seriousness of purpose and a mastery of form that have come out of a lifetime of studying, feeling, and experimenting with paint on canvas. “I became interested in abstraction by the openness of it all. I saw endless possibilities,” he says. Yet despite its endless possibilities, his work has been far less known and shown than it deserves, living mainly through the work of his students at the Tyler School of Art. Part of this reflects the general resistance that all abstract painters now face from a museum establishment that largely insists on tapping the superficial veins of art rather than mining the deeper riches that the market chooses to ignore. “To be a signature abstract painter in the twenty-first century is a really odd thing,” Whitney admits.

Still, it must be said that abstract artists who are black now find themselves in a particularly odd isolation: in a world that claims to embrace the voice of black artists, their art is at odds with what an overwhelmingly white art establishment believes the voice of black artists should be. “I don’t think there’s anything more complicated than the subject of black artists and abstract art,” says Lowery Stokes Sims at the start of her interview with Whitney. “There is always this idea that it’s not connected to the black experience.”

Singular black artists have long been out of step with what is supposed to be “black art” and the culture and institutions that promote it. During the Harlem Renaissance, Romare Bearden wrote vociferously against the identity of a black arts movement and the bad results of good intentions behind those promoting it. “There are quite a few foundations that sponsor exhibitions of Negro artists,” he wrote in “The Negro Artist and Modern Art.” “However praiseworthy may have been the spirit of the founder the effect upon the Negro artist has been disastrous,” he continued, singling out the poor quality of exhibitions of black artists produced by the Harmon Foundation. “Its attitude from the beginning has been of a coddling and patronizing nature.” In “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Bearden expanded this critique and wrote against painting what others might expect of him: “It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda, [but] to paint the life of my people as I know it.”

Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2014) Gouache on paper, 21 7/8 × 30 3/8 in., Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York

For many black painters, a turn to abstraction, away from overt statements of race, paralleled the rejection that white painters expressed against the realist demands of the Left. “Proletariat art is poor art for poor people,” declared Arshile Gorky to Willem de Kooning at the height of the WPA and amidst the prerequisites of the American Scene. Likewise Norman Lewis, perhaps our most overlooked abstractionist, defiantly rejected what he considered to be hopeless racial themes for the transcendence of paint on canvas. Considering he died in 1979, it is astonishing to realize that Lewis is only now receiving a major museum treatment with “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis,” opening this November at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an institution that more often than not proves the exception to the rule in the art world.

Last year, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston similarly broke ranks from the party line with a two-part exhibition called “Black in the Abstract” organized by the senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who set out to show the “abstract practices of black artists as a continuous trajectory as opposed to an anomaly or a phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time.” This exhibition, along with the tireless advocacy of galleries such as June Kelly and Michael Rosenfeld, among others, has attempted to turn the tide by exhibiting the earlier generation of black abstract artists, such as Charles Alston, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Hale Woodruff, alongside the more recent work of McArthur Binion, Frank Bowling, Edward Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, James Little, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, William T. Williams, and Jack Whitten, on through their many descendants.

Yet the marginalization of these artists has by and large only intensified as Black Power and white mandates have come together to promote a narrowing sensibility for racial identity. Stanley Whitney recalls a time back in Kansas when the Black Panthers questioned him for painting abstract. “Those were hard times because I really wanted to paint,” he remembers. Similarly we now see institutions such as the Whitney Museum, purportedly dedicated to American art, promoting artists with cartoonish appeals to identity politics while excluding modern masters like Lewis. This not only does a disservice to art history. It is also grounded in an assumption that black artists have nothing to say beyond addressing their superficial racial identity. It implies that transcendence from one’s immediate circumstances is the prerogative of white artists alone. It says that the work of black artists cannot be imbued with multiple levels of meaning (as in the case of Whitney, who it should be noted is not in the Whitney).

The brilliance of Stanley Whitney is his ability to capture life not in black and white but in full color: “I realized that color was the subject in and of itself.”

1 “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange” opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, on July 16 and remains on view through October 25, 2015.

This Week: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans (all photographs by James Panero)

James writes: 

With the reopening of the High Bridge, now is a great time to explore the beauty of the Bronx. You heard right. The Bronx contains some of the most picturesque, historic, yet overlooked sites in New York. One day recently I biked across High Bride and north up University Avenue through Morris Heights to the the nearly forgotten architectural wonders of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library, both designed at the turn of the last century by Stanford White, located at Hall of Fame Terrace and Sedgwick Avenue. 

Atop a promontory overlooking the Harlem River, here was once the site of the uptown campus of New York University. When a financially distressed NYU consolidated in downtown Manhattan in 1973, Bronx Community College took over the campus and stewardship of these two architectural landmarks.   

 The Hall of Fame was the idea of Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University from 1891 to 1910. He saw to the construction of a 630-foot curving open air colonnade lined by the bronze bust of its honorees, organized among American statesmen, soldiers, jurists, and writers, with identifying statements from each included on commemorative plaques beneath them.

Inspired by "Ruhmes Halle," built near Munich by the King of Bavaria, in addition to Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon in Paris, this was America's original "Hall of Fame" and the one that led to the many others around the country in sports and entertainment.

 Ninety-eight busts are included in the Hall of Fame, with 102 Americans elected to receive the honor since 1900. Unfortunately inadequate funds have prevented the creation of busts for honorees Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. Meanwhile the election of new honorees has ceased while any available resources now attend to the upkeep and maintenance of the existing statues and architecture.    

 

The portrait busts are among the best collection of statuary in the country, with sculpture by Daniel Chester French, James Earl Fraser, Frederick MacMonnies, and others. 

The Hall of Fame was designed to wrap around the back of the original campus buildings, with Stanford White's Gould Memorial Library at the center, and the name of the former owners inscribed above.  

Bronze doors now lead onto a rickety revolving door and stairwell.

 A coffered ceiling above the stairwell only somewhat prepares you for what's inside. 

 

The celestial dome in the heart of the building, thankfully preserved and recently restored, offers a stunning final stop for any visit to this forgotten architectural wonder of the Bronx. 

Noguchi

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 28, 2015

Noguchi
by James Panero

A review of LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, by Hayden Herrera, Illustrated. 575 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.

The art of biography is not unlike the creation of sculpture. Out of a raw material of artifact and anecdote must emerge the semblance of living form. There may be no one right way to animate such matter. Certainly, there are plenty of wrongs: from hazy abstraction to overwrought realism, from misapplied attention to mannered application. Whatever the approach, however, the spirit of the subject must somehow guide the telling. For Isamu Noguchi, the great border-crossing sculptor of the last century, the art came, he said, from tapping into “the materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity — not what might be imposed but something closer to its being.” The genius of “Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi” is how its author, Hayden Herrera, inhabits the sculpturing hand of its subject. Rather than focus on the surface, Herrera gets “beneath the skin,” as Noguchi would say, to the “brilliance of matter.”

In Herrera’s elegant account, the “stone” of Noguchi’s “art and life” is left quiet enough for us to hear. Distracting ­voices, whether they be the author’s or those of Noguchi’s many friends, lovers and critics, are kept to a minimum. The story that emerges is therefore not unlike one of Noguchi’s gardens, or his playground designs, or his dance sets. Space and spareness balance matter and articulation. “An important element in both Japanese stroll gardens and Noguchi’s sets was the experience of the body moving through space,” Herrera writes. Arranged along the path of Herrera’s chronology, Noguchi’s words and deeds similarly convey their affinities without overly determining one step to the next. “If sculpture is the rock,” Noguchi once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” Both artist and author leave room for us to drift around and listen.

The writer of biographies of Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, two artists who make intimate appearances in this latest work, Herrera understands creative people. In Noguchi she follows a life that rarely departs from the realm of artistic mythology. Noguchi’s Japanese father, Yone, was a rising poet living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He met Isamu’s American mother, Leonie Gil­mour, through a classified ad he took out for freelance editorial work in 1901. Following their brief affair, he returned to Japan. Yone bequeathed his name and poetic sensitivities to his son but withheld just about any other consideration one might expect. “He appears to have had little regret at leaving the six-months-pregnant Leonie behind,” Herrera writes.

Because of his father’s fame, Isamu’s birth in 1904 elicited a newspaper headline in Los Angeles, where Leonie came to live in a tent town: “Yone Noguchi’s Babe Pride of Hospital. White Wife of Author Presents Husband With Son.” The remarkable article foretold much of what Isamu would contend with in life: his estranged father, his Japanese and white-American backgrounds, and the public recognition he would attain by giving form to mixed identities. This forming took shape as a continuous process over Noguchi’s long creative life, beginning with himself. ­“After all, for one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain,” Noguchi said in 1988, the year of his death. “It’s only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all.”

Noguchi’s mother became the sculptor’s “strongest influence.” Far more than his father, it was his mother, a fascinating and tragic figure, who haunted Noguchi’s expression, and she likewise haunts the ­pages of Herrera’s biography. “I think I’m the product of my mother’s imagination,” he once said. Leonie was a graduate of what became known as the Ethical Culture School, which stressed both “manual and academic training.” She followed this with a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College and studies at the Sorbonne. “She kept hoping I would eventually become an artist,” Noguchi said. She got her wish — but, dying of pneumonia in 1933 at age 59, never saw his artistic promise fulfilled.

In his formative years, as his mother attempted to reconnect with his father, Noguchi lived for a decade in Japan. Here he became “knowledgeable in the ways of nature” with “respect for materials and how things are made.” Leonie read Greek mythology to Noguchi while encouraging him to “learn how to build a Japanese house.” Then in 1918, she sent her 13-year-old son on his own back to America to study at a progressive hands-on school in Indiana. From then on, fortune and talent saw this self-described “waif” through artistic and spiritual mentorships that included studying Italian sculpture-casting at a school on Tompkins Square Park in New York and interning with Gutzon Borglum, the future creator of Mount Rushmore (who told Noguchi he would never be a sculptor). In Paris, an apprenticeship in the studio of Constantin Brancusi, a “laboratory for distilling basic shapes,” gave Noguchi his modernist bequest, to which he added a traditional Japanese sense for the “value of nonassertiveness.”

Just about every famous and interesting person of the 20th century seems to have crossed Noguchi’s globe-spanning path. Perhaps most significant was the futurist Buckminster Fuller, whom Noguchi called a “messiah of ideas.” At only two points did Noguchi’s associations touch down to earth. Patriotically American, denouncing the militancy of his father’s Japan, Noguchi voluntarily locked himself in a Japanese internment camp during the war. For a brief moment some years earlier, he also studied pre-med at Columbia University — news that his mother “hotly denounced.” She wanted her son to “be your own god and your own star.”

It was Brancusi who taught Noguchi “you’re as good as you ever will be at the moment. That which you do is the thing.” Noguchi could be as artistically astonishing in his portrait busts of the 1920s and ’30s, where innovative materials reflect the nature of his sitters, as in his enigmatic stone abstractions of later life. Just as he crossed borders, he crossed disciplines to work with others. Some of his greatest output came from these collaborations: dance sets for Martha Graham; garden designs with architects; his coffee table for Herman Miller; and his Akari light sculptures, the paper lanterns now universally copied, which came to overshadow his other work. Herrera’s book also tells how some of Noguchi’s most startling concepts were never completed: Robert Moses killed an innovative playground design for the United Nations; Thomas Hoving prevented another destined for Riverside Park. One hopes this last design, a collaboration with Louis I. Kahn, might still someday be ­realized, as we’ve seen with Kahn’s posthumous Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island.

Rather than for a particular body of work, Noguchi said he hoped to be remembered for contributing “something to an awareness of living.” As a “magnificent gift to the people of New York,” Herrera writes, 30 years ago the artist created the Noguchi Museum out of his studio in Long Island City. To this legacy of awareness we can now add the present biography. Walking in his museum garden with his friend Dore Ashton, Noguchi once said, “I have come to no conclusions, no beginnings, no endings.” With minimal intervention, Herrera helps all of us walk beside this “nomad” who “sought and found, by making sculpture, a way to embed himself in the earth, in nature, in the world.”